The Way Out is Through

Transcript

This is how your life is already wonderful.

Lets talk about the way out is through. Maybe you have heard me say a few times that one important aspect of being happy is learning how to be unhappy. If you can learn to navigate unhappiness, all the various forms of unhappiness like dread, terror, fear, discomfort, sadness, anger, despair, jealousy and insecurity.

Just plain unhappiness.

If you can figure out how to deal with these things in the right way, how to think correctly and how to discern and how to take right action in these circumstances with these feelings then you can find your way back to baseline, back to joy. Back to happiness and peace, back to hope and faith.

Sometimes we need to go through these things. As Cat Bonandin mentioned to us in one interview “You have to feel it to heal it.”

It does sound a little catchy, a little like can it be that simple?

Its not that simple but that is the principle. If we avoid our negative emotions, our adverse emotions that aren’t exactly negative. If we avoid then we run the risk of spiritual bypassing and that way these emotions just get pushed down, brushed to the side and they start to emerge in other ways.

You might even imagine a person who negates so much, denies so much his own emotions that they start to arise within their dreams, within their waking life he is quite zombified perhaps or kind of numb to his own emotions and yes they start to come out in dreams and maybe even night terrors.

In Lucid Dreaming plain and simple and Robert Waggoners other book, the other one on lucid dreaming he talks about this principle where if you find something in a nightmare, maybe you come across a witch or a monster or some great height or something that terrifies you, you with practice can develop the power to ask “What do you represent, why are you here, what is your message for me?”

It is true that every monster in life and in dreams has a message for us. Every perceived threat to our existence is a messenger.

Waggoner even describes these experiences where some aspect of our consciousness that appears to us in a dream when we begin to ask these questions we might move forward and embrace the monster and we notice it becomes a part of us.

So many times we are denying part of ourselves. The thing that we deny must be part of ourselves, it can be no other. That’s part of the reason why we hate other people because we see ourselves reflected in them. When we move forward to embrace them we can accept those parts of ourselves and then we can learn to love those parts of ourselves.

Even the depression, even the sadness, even the anger.

Even those parts of ourselves we dread to think might be parts of us, we can learn to love them and when we move along that path and stride through that dark tunnel that we fear so much that we might not come out the other side, we almost always do and on the other side is much brighter than we could have anticipated because all of those places that had been trapped under shadows are now illuminated.

So move through, embrace, love more and we will find a way to happiness. The way out is through.