On True Change

by DavidIStone | Sep 23, 2019 | Articles

You do things until you don’t.

It really is that simple.

There are many many ways to kid yourself that you’re changing when in fact you aren’t.

Cognitive dissonance is so powerful that it can make you think one thing when you’re in fact doing the opposite – just like the smoker who declares they have given up, only to light up a cigarette in the next breath.

You may even find yourself on an expansive course to raise your vibration, become successful, learn to channel or augment your personal effectiveness, only to discover in the weeks or months that follow you end up doing the exact opposite and shrinking back to your default settings.

So how is it, that for most of us, no matter how hard we try, we only ever manage to rearrange the furniture on the decks of our inner Titanic as it lurches perilously towards the iceberg, when we know full well what’s coming?

Why is it that our addictions persist, or mutate into other forms of unhealthy co-dependency that on first appearance feel as hot and horny as make up sex, only to descend into yet another relationship horror show?

Why is digging down, getting into and removing these persistent issues at their origin so evasive?

It’s largely to do with the following foundational principles;

1. Understanding how your painbody ‘has’ you (“The Matrix Has YOU” – Morpheus in the film, The Matrix)
2. Clearing out your fragmented identities, trauma loops, ancestral and karmic limiting programming and mastering your painbody
3. Connecting with, embodying and engaging your Higher Self
4. Connecting to Pure Source to build momentum as the aware and embodied presence of your Higher Self
5. Creating life affirming habits and patterns that support, nourish and sustain you from the inside out

Your painbody would have you seduce yourself to continue doing those things that feel good but which betray you, hurt you and undermine your highest good until you get sick, others get sick of you or you just get plain sick of listening to yourself.

Even then, if your conditioning has a sufficiently strong hold over you and your will compromised, you may still go round in circles, riding roughshod over these subtle warning signs and even claim to have awakened when the opposite is true. Your health and your life may even start to go down the plug hole, whilst you proclaim that everything is in full bloom.

That’s how incredibly masterful, Machiavellian, skilled and scheming your painbody is.

It can even draw you into believing that seemingly synchronicitous and profound coincidences are sparkly new growth opportunities, when in actual fact, they lull you back into the same old energy sucking downward spirals that have possibly enslaved your forebears for generations without even having the faintest idea that you’re up to your eyeballs in some previous ancestor’s funk!

Your painbody is capable of waging an Orwellian campaign of spin and subterfuge, so sophisticated that you even champion it and become a spokesperson on its behalf to your nearest and dearest. There are a plethora of ingenious traps that lead many to remain in the dark whilst thinking they’re in the light.

One of the painbody’s favourite tricks is to induce you to jump on the personal growth bandwagon of saccharin blanket platitudes such as “accept your own and other’s faults no matter what”, “embrace all people without ‘judgement’ as we are all One (love)” and “maintain an aura of love & light no matter what”. These one size fits all bullshit mantras tie you up in knots through false light teachings at the expense of maintaining healthy boundaries and individuation. They lead you towards enabling narcissistic individuals and toxic situations, that cause you to denigrate, compromise and betray your authentic self.

The painbody gains by undermining your essence self and entrenching itself into your autonomous nervous system. As it merges with you, it can overpower your essence self, and imposter as you, so that you become intoxicated by these ‘honey’ traps and fall into a soup of dysfunctional habits and relationships that at first glance feel connecting, supportive and nourishing but are more akin to the temporary highs you get from a fat and sugar enriched Happy Meal. The painbody distorts and miscalibrates your nervous system settings and leads you to move towards self-destructive patterns and instant gratification that distracts you from experiencing your own nourishing connection to your true inner Source.

Becoming autonomous and empowered is the anti-thesis of the painbody as it would diminish its influence and cause it to shrink. The problem is that developing a connection with Pure Source takes work and can be arduous as it requires a consistent and committed approach.

What the painbody specialises in is tricking you into becoming covertly co-dependent for externalised soothing, gratification and approval whilst having you believe such self-betrayal is akin to walking the path of ascension or becoming super ‘spiritual’. Such is the power of this magnetism that others in your circle will acknowledge your growing power as a paragon of new age virtues and a bearer of the ‘light’.

The bottom line is that those nagging feelings that you are somehow betraying yourself simply won’t go away.  

These quiet whispers that something remains amiss may be temporarily overridden, but no sooner has the high of latest Happy Meal meal high worn off, those nagging anxieties transfer into another addiction or affliction that requires yet another solution, thus distracting you further with a slight of hand that extends the endless gravy train of things to improve or even accept about yourself when really you need to start lopping off those toxic fragments of self that simply don’t serve you.

The fact is that the painbody can never be healed no matter which spiritual practices you keep, what clothes you wear or diet you go on. This is its game plan. To keep you stuck in appearances, superficialdom and embracing a syrupy self-acceptance that betrays healthy boundaries and self-respect and instead drives you onwards, endlessly attempting to become some externalised ideal of a mythical ascended character.

If you enable your painbody  to maintain its position as the driver of your life, you will forever be on the hamster wheel of personal growth and emotional process, chasing your tail until you have either exhausted yourself or built a false self so sophisticated that you yourself believe you have awakened.

It’s even more enticing if you’ve entered into the allure of a collusive ‘group-think’ of fellow conspirators, sharing in your mutual pain, shame and recovery stories. These traps temporarily delay the symptoms of facing up to your responsibilities through a shared acceptance that soothes, transcends and somehow makes it all feel better… for a while. This is why workshops and encounter groups can be so addictive. The effects soon wear off because the painbody is never far away, merging with the group self that loves sharing and self disclosure, thus opening the doors for yet more distortions to seduce you into delaying the inevitable moment when you come face to face with the shame of such self deceit and the whole rickety tower of a super spiritualised façade comes crashing down. 

Arnold Beisser noticed this phenomenon amongst his gestalt psychotherapy clients who were often involved in the Human Potential and Peace & Love movements of the 1960s. He coined this painful moment of awakening as “The Paradoxical Theory of Change”. Change would mysteriously come about when the earnest seeker finally got so sick of their own neurotic bullshit and their pretences collapsed and they finally realised they couldn’t take any more self-deceit, at last seeing through the machinations of the painbody.

A holding to account ensued by raising the moment to moment consciousness via embodied awareness and immediacy of presence. The painbody can not hold on when focus is brought to bear on the present moment and attention is concentrated in the body and the breath. In these moments it loosens its grip long enough for the lustre of false light to fade and the heavens come crashing down.

This change theory sets out the paradoxical understanding that you will not change until you actively take it upon yourself to do so by stopping putting your agency on ALL sources outside yourself – it concludes that that you are ultimately responsible for your life, your perceptions, your triggers, your choices and EVEN your symptoms and no outside force can ultimately save you.

It is this turning point of radical and embodied self-responsibility where such reclaimed presence can bring about a self-realisation that begins to liberate you from the shackles placed on your perception by your painbody. No amount of externalising your power will ever bring you closer to your own sovereign re-empowerment and thus freedom. 

Nothing outside yourself, not even a billion dollars, the dream relationship, a yummy community of belonging or successful career can assuage you of the consequences of taking full responsibility for your life and the choices you make in each moment.

It sometimes takes a lightning bolt from the heavens to breakthrough the smog of so many accustomed ways of misperceiving, that can only hit home when someone is actually in there, inhabiting the body with conscious and purposeful presence and awareness of the patterns that are running the show.

Just as in the film The Matrix, the majority of people are programmed through trauma, family, social, religious and new age conditioning to keep themselves stuck or enmeshed in that same looping programming whether it be ancestral, karmic or situational until they start to wake up and notice just how restricting, pain inducing and suffocating their current life choices have been in spite of the seeming comfort and ease they remained entranced in.

The one thing that most new age approaches have in common, that inadvertently enables the painbody to maintain its ascendency, is the tendency to disrupt a person’s ability to embody by disassociating them from the here and now, thus further disengaging their presence from their body.

The ironic twist is that most meditation techniques take the person’s awareness out of their body and inhibit their proprioceptive senses through seeking to soothe them from feeling the pained, traumatised and fragmented aspects of the psyche and smooth over these profoundly damaged aspects of the self through disassociation.

This repeated avoidance not only disassociates the person from their core wounds, but also layers over the original traumas and ancestral patterns with a buffering, which induces them into believing they have resolved their core issues when in fact all they have done is buried them and fragmented themselves even more.  Such healing approaches create temporary get-around that act as a cement that forces the root patterns to disappear even deeper into the recesses of the unconscious.

Calling in deities, Extra-Terrestrial intelligences and the multiplicity of emerging goddesses more often than not invites in quite powerful malevolent entities as well as mischievous lower astral ancestral energies that can even start to possess the person, especially if there is a tendency to enact ritualised pseudo shamanic ceremonies and use plant medicines.

This subterfuge consigns the person to delude and distance themselves even further from getting to the origin of their issues and clearing them out and instead indenture them deeper with all sorts of astral nasties that are empowered to take over the healing process.

Quite often a person thinks they may be going through a healing crisis when in fact their body has become so absented of their own presence, that it becomes a free house of the soul as the invading presences take over and begins feasting on and eroding the sovereignty of the person and their ownership of their own soul. This can often trigger the Higher Self to create a sequence of catastrophic circumstances to shock the person into waking the FU@K UP and snapping out of such potential soul loss.

As we have seen, seemingly positive choices can be dressed up and cleverly bypassed so you end up drinking the Coolaid and tricking yourself into thinking you’re making changes when in fact you’re giving your power away to forces outside yourself and moving further and further away from your very own presence. 

Embodying and drawing in your Higher Self rather than any other deities, entities or powers has a profound effect that enables you to be penetrated so deeply by the frequencies of pure Source that you can finally begin to undo the miscalibrated mechanisms of perception that run your life and any other interferences that you have inadvertently invited in to intrude upon your inner space.

When certain thresholds have been crossed and enough has been deemed enough, your soul leads you towards a life changing choice – to embrace your Higher Self and your sovereign connection to Pure Source as the only power in your life and presence in your body. Once you embark on this trajectory, your draw the sword of power from its scabbard and enable a cleansing power to be forged in the fires of your soul to cut away all the dross. You start to hone in and become guided by the compass of your Higher Self.

It takes an immense amount of courage to push this purgative change into motion, sometimes facing up to a painful and ego diminishing detox period, rather than the avoidant conditioning of bypassing yourself with aggrandising, buffering and yet more spiritual fluff.  

Whilst much healing potential may be afforded from group healing rituals and the like, no external ‘groupthink’ wisdom can ever replace your own innate capacity for self-actualisation and the healing connection brought about through embodying, attuning to your Higher Self and noticing your patterns of consciousness.

If you’re bypassing this through the soothing collusion of being in the same boat with your fellow travellers, then you’re actually not only delaying your awakening but also setting your threshold at the lowest common denominator shared amongst the group and mistaking this thought form as your God / Higher Self.

When a person is willing to become accountable, embrace their smallness and then notice how they “do” life and make changes accordingly, the universe will always reciprocate with opportunities to evolve and grow.

For embodying your own Higher Self is the only force strong enough to shatter the illusions and misperceptions of your egoic Selfhood.  Only your Higher Self has the power to halt the hijacking of the throne of your sovereignty and call an end to the painbody from joyriding in the driving seat of your life.

As you wake up to old programmes that blinkered you, each new choice you take, will liberate your soul and recalibrate your awareness. You will feel more present and embodied, as the path to wholeness & self-respect opens inside you.

At first it may look like the opposite. Some of the most painful things you thought you had dealt with may arise – this time from their roots where you may have previously glossed over them. Nothing excavates your soul quite like your Higher Self. It wants to clean out every fibre of the trauma and the distortions that enshroud it, even if it means tearing up a few daisies.

As you remain embodied, breathing through moments like this, you will come to trust in your relationship with Source, where the false dawns peel away and any burdensome and unresolved emotional and karmic patterns dissolve. Learning to trust in your own Higher presence orchestrates an alchemical process of purging and cleansing that in turn assists you to anchor your Higher Self into your body. Your Higher Self is inherently imbued with health, abundance, wellbeing and joy so that your life will then start to draw like vibrations to you, once you have anchored it in and can embody it consistently without checking out. 

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