Freedom fighters: taking back your power

Sometimes "growing up" spiritually is akin to integrating psychologically or healing emotionally. It is the primeval human condition, that ancient reach for our full humanity, that calls us on the journey out of the darkness of denial and unconscious behavior  into the light of awareness, consciousness, free will and a choice to love. It is the way to empowerment, out of control, into autonomy, freedom and authentic human beinghood.

Pretty heady language, I admit.  It's no wonder that for those who have looked to God for help in their pain, found help and found valuable potent language that has an efficacious ability to speak directly to the soul and call her to step up and stand up and take back her power from all the sucky, vampirish fear mongers that plaque our world today.  

For those of us who recognize this journey, we embrace the light/dark language of the Gospel.  It really speaks to us parabolically and iconically.  

So, as children of the light, we are always being called out of darkness - not just out of a spiritual lack of full awareness as much as the whole quagmire of control, manipulation, deception and game-playing people who are not strong enough or evolved enough to stand up in their own power and have the courage to ask for what they want/need.  Rather, they cower and manipulate for it. Their cowardice masquerades as power, the wrong kind of power, and they attempt to frustrate and confuse those who are still on the way to self individuation, personal empowerment - those who have wrestled with the tiger and now ride her.

Until we have awakened to this struggle - this wrestling with Jacob's proverbial angel - we cannot triumph in this struggle between darkness and light, between victim and predator, between weakness and rage, between love and control. In that state of being controlled, which we all are until we ride the tiger, we are reactive rather than proactive.  In that state of being controlled, either by a system of religious belief, the teachings of unloving parents, our own internalized unhealed fear, or a tyrannical political regime, we are not free.  In that state, we are not self determining.  Rather, we are puppets doing someone else's bidding, or worse, we're slaves.

Once I had a vision of an Alice-in-Wonderland kind of tunnel.  At the bottom was all the cares of the world, the intensity of life here on Earth with all its worries, fears, insecurities, cruelty and pursuit of material abundance and personal pleasures.  I looked up and saw a warm radiant brightness at the top of the tunnel.  As I started to climb up towards it, I realized that there were tree roots that stuck out into the tunnel shaft that seemed to draw my attention away from the light at the top and preoccupied me.  Oddly, though, the brightness and warmth at the top seemed to have a kind of magnetism that continued to call me upward.

But, each of those roots that caught my attention were things I felt I really wanted.  They could be objects of desire, a relationship, a personal need to succeed, meet my parents' expectations of me, fit in, be popular, liked, etc.  In that vision I saw myself really struggling with each of them in an effort to release myself from the temptation they were to me and the resultant delay on my journey into the warmth of the light above.

I thought about those temptations and their incredible power to appeal, confuse and delay me on my journey.

Those temptations are side trips away from very real internally rooted fears.  Unless we take them seriously, they will hold us back.  Recognizing what the fear is and then embracing it with all the love we have in us, even asking the Lord of the the light to help us, is the only way to move through those obstacles to greater personal power, and real birth into our full humanity and full self determination.

No one ever said life would be easy.  We work at it everyday with all our will power, intelligence and with a courage and fullness of heart.  At first pain is the enemy, that emotional heartbreaking pain, then pain is the symptom of the problem.  Then pain is our friend, a guide to where the fear root is.  There is no point in avoiding the pain, drinking or drugging it away.  That is only a long arduous detour away from our destiny, away from the light of full humanity.  Wisdom was always promised to those who would call on God for it.  

In my own growing pains, I called on God for wisdom and for help.  And God provided a wonderfully wise sister, an equally wise and compassionate best friend and other precious loving people who seemed to just call or write and drop by just when I needed them most.  And, then, the conversation grew, manifesting a greater power in us through its ability to heal us, mature us, empower us and bring us closer to our destiny to be Children of God.  

I think this is the whole point of life.  We're not here to make money, have a family, populate the Earth.  We're here to evolve our souls and become lovers in the fullest and greatest meaning of that word.  We're here to be lovers, freedom fighters of the soul.