Letting go of the prejudices we hold against others who represent beliefs so extremely different from ours is very difficult. It may be one of the most difficult of tasks we are asked to complete in this time as it involves reconciling differences among most of the individuals in our life— even the ones we consider as being in our “circle.”
We have become very involved emotionally, with our friends, our co-workers, our family members and the political pundits on TV. It is a time of extreme emotions. How do we navigate these turbulent waters as we meander into holiday celebrations that may not seem like celebrations at all?
We can first and foremost accept all that is: all the hatred, all the incursions into criminal territory, all the greed and intolerance that dominates today’s conversations and our own emotional lives. It all has purpose. We may not know exactly what that purpose is or what is intended, but it surely marks a roadmap to what is to become. We as humans cannot possibly know what that is, but we each have a role in it. Some of us will be fighters, moving back the pendulum. Others of us will be conscientious objectors, praying for our highest good. And others will be the disrupters, entitled to bring about transformation. Each of us has a path on which we walk, experiencing our lives as our soul dictates. We move at our soul’s urging, whether seen by others as good or bad. The trick is seeing each other as a soul, not as our representation as a human being. What we present to others is a prop, a device to incite emotional reactions, which serve us to grow as souls. I say this from what I’ve personally experienced reconciling differences between myself and those whom I love.
On my first day of class with a new teacher in the realm of metaphysics, we sat around a long table introducing ourselves. The woman seated next to me was large, physically and energetically and very outspoken. I took an immediate dislike to her, as she was everything I was not. In particular, she wore a huge heart-shaped crystal around her neck that beamed hard, piercing energy, I thought, aimed at me. My energy was low and thinly veiled so her crystal bothered me to no end. At the break I asked her to take the crystal off. She refused. I moved across the table to get away from her and her crystal. I thought I was safe until the teacher paired me up with her in an exercise in which she told us to ascend up to the second soul chakra and link with each other there. I looked up into her face with trepidation, resigned to doing the exercise but fearful. She looked back at me with skepticism.
We went up. Without any warning I suddenly knew her; I couldn’t explain how or why, but I immediately started weeping uncontrollably, loving her. She reacted the same way. We were both weeping and hugging each other telling each other how much we loved each other. When we came back down we were both transformed. We saw each other completely differently from that moment on.
How can we explain such divergent and extreme world-views? We all experience life in our own personal way, based on our soul age, the accumulation of emotional experiences over repeating lifetimes and current life soul urges. As such, we are not all the same when we come here to this earthly dimension, but we are all the same when we consider our origins—the beginning of us, our God-essence. I am not advocating for indifference. I am advocating for compassion for the struggle we are in with our personal relationships, our mental and physical health, our job and wealth prospects, our very understanding of the world. Struggle is a necessary element for clarification and reconciliation. We have to see the differences to tease out the understanding.
But what of this process of struggle that we are in? What silver lining is there to reach for at a time when we are bumping into our friends and relatives at holiday gatherings that are ripe for discussions or comments that ignite our survival instincts? If we were to ascend up to the second soul chakra as I did with my classmate we would recognize the soul that we agreed to be with in this life and we would cry at the moment of recognition because we would love them. We would instantly know that they are here also, in school, to learn their lessons and face their challenges and grow as a soul a little bit more. Their understanding of the world on the ground is different from yours because their lessons are different from yours. If you can, appreciate that fact, and that you’ve been thrown together to learn something, something important. We learn about ourselves through our emotions and the reconciling of those emotions.
This holiday season may be highly charged emotionally. Try not to succumb to the misery of differences, of conversations that make us build up walls of prejudice. To tweak a saying that has long been put forth to calm our nerves before speaking in front of an audience, that we should imagine everybody naked—I say, to overcome your ire over onerous or inflammatory comments made by friends or relatives, imagine them transformed into a ball of light in the ether, a brilliant, beautiful, amorphous ray of sunshine, and you’ll feel better. You might even cry with joy.
Annette Goggio, MPH, EEMCP, holds graduate and undergraduate degrees in the health sciences and is the author of Healing: A Conversation. Her practice in energy medicine is based on the teaching of Dixie Yeterian, renowned clairvoyant and healer, and Donna Eden of Eden Energy Medicine. To learn more please visit: aquantummoment.com.
