The Frost before the Buds of Growth
My life has taken me into a wintering period that I did not think was possible for a person like me. I grew up being taught that once you become an adult, you will rest only after you are old and retired. However, my childhood was one where ‘childhood’ was viewed as a preparatory stage for maximizing success in adulthood. There was ideally no time wasted that could instead be applied to honing academic and professional skills that could one day lead to a career that would feed me for life. Any childhood leisure, like a young girl’s sleepover, was an indulgence that I was grateful to experience.
Throughout my adulthood, I have wanted to prove that I am a worker. That I am tough. That I am enduring. That I am not like other people who will give up when things get hard. I was readily willing to accept my childhood teachings that the ages 24-65 would be one long, exhausting, uphill battle. Game on.
Naturally, this is how one reaches burnout. I don’t think my elders and Asian community ever thought that the work I would be doing entailed healing the many emotional wounds of our community members across time and space. Now that is how one reaches burnout.
I found myself wishing for a sabbatical. Somatically, I certainly didn’t know what a sabbatical was or what it would look like. All I knew was that I was tired, but I didn’t know how to stop working. The linear scarcity mindset thinking of the Asian collective thought field was so pervasive, with compounding evidence that all my Asian ancestors (and every other Asian person I knew) had to suffer and grind in order to even have food and shelter. There was nothing else.
Despite all that, Source Consciousness heard the yearning in my heart. It heard the cries of my heart to lay my head down and experience rest in a way I never had the privilege to before. It felt all my repeated loops of suffering, and most importantly, it sensed that I was willing to experience what was needed in the process of bringing about something Different.
In the space of Now, my life looks very different. I have rested more this year than I can ever consciously remember. For once, I have encountered a greater ratio of people that are delighted to share presence with me to the people who wish to scorn me yet extract something out of me. I have enough material abundance to take care of myself, and yet I am not overworked.
However, in this process, I have also lost so much. I have been asked (forced?) to give sacrifices to the altar. I have sacrificed my blood ties to a family-of-origin who discard me in the trace moments where it doesn’t seem that I can be of material use to them. I have sacrificed the egoic illusion of having the external approval of success which didn’t serve to truly nurture or strengthen my True Self. I have and still am in the process of sacrificing my masking mechanisms that allowed me to walk through the 3D secular world in a camouflaged way, so I could look “normal”. When in actuality, the Full Me receives and feels the indescribable richness of the spiritual realm that only waits with patience for humanity to remember.
This is the original maze. The incarnational maze. We all get set up with these trick mirrors that bring illusions and the side doors that lead us for another detour. My maze was believing that all I could ever be, all I could ever hope for, was to be accepted amongst my Asian family and community. Wandering in the maze, I was willing to give up my body, my soul, and my dreams to feel what I thought was ‘Love’.
You don’t leave the maze by running around and trying to find the exit door. You leave by seeing your True Soul and by feeling your heart. When you, despite what horrors your maze is showing you, know without a doubt that you are more than what the trick mirrors show you, you begin to say “I deserve more than this, I deserve Love. Hell, I am Love.”
Source Consciousness and my Spirit Guides look softly upon me from my imagined Above. They say gently, “Oh look, she made it out of there. We always knew she would.” They could not give me a heads up on the alchemical winter I was about to face, because I had no cognitive concept of what was in store. I was not able to listen. It is with Love, that they initiated me, blindfold on, into the next phase of awakening. Because they knew I would love it, even when I felt like I was losing everything.
And even though I do not know what the next day or the next week will bring, I am learning to trust what I cannot see more and more. Thank you.
