“How can we practice not yelling when we’re angry if there’s no one around to push our buttons?”
~~from Ruling Your World by Sakyong Mipham
I remember listening to an Abraham Hicks clip on YouTube a few years ago where they said that your Inner Being might sometimes steer you towards unwanted. This really bothered me and made me a bit angry, actually. I remember thinking, “What’s the point of doing all of this inner work and raising my vibration if I’m still going to have to deal with unwanted? I thought I was working towards creating my own reality!”
But I’ve come to see this from a different perspective. Your Inner Being and the Universe won’t randomly throw completely pointless negative events in your path just for giggles. Everything in our experience is there to help us learn and expand. Everything is here to help us reach new heights.
We all have limiting beliefs that we aren’t aware of. How would we be able to eventually release negativity and limits from our lives if we remained unaware of them? How would we appreciate our progress if we didn’t have an opportunity to see just how much we’ve changed by noting how we now react in a completely different way to something that used to infuriate/frighten/irritate/depress/bore us before.
A fairly recent experience I had of this was with spiders. I used to be really, really afraid of spiders. No well-meaning assurances of, “You’re bigger than it is” and the like from others did any good. If there was a spider anywhere in the room, I remained fixated on it until it was dead.
But doing work and growing in other areas eventually brought me to the place where I no longer wanted to kill them. However, I was still afraid of them. During this phase I mostly stopped killing spiders, but I remained hyper alert to where they were in the room. The one exception to this were the ones in my bedroom. I couldn’t bear the thought of going to sleep with a spider on my ceiling. Who knew what it would do in the dead of night?
Eventually, I got to the point where I didn’t want to kill those ones either, and decided to do some work on the matter. My goal was to no longer be afraid of spiders. So, I sat down, put on some lovely music, and contemplated. I got to a better feeling place and thought, “Yes! I’ve done it. My silly spider fear is no more.”
I went an unusually long time without seeing any spiders, which I took as a good sign. But then, bam! A spider. I was immediately scared and then disappointed because I had thought that I wasn’t scared of spiders anymore. I was determined, however, to at least not kill it. I found a piece of paper and after nearly 10 minutes of me coaxing it on to the paper, taking a few steps, screaming and dropping the paper when the spider moved, retrieving the paper, and once again coaxing the spider back on, I got it outside and firmly closed the door behind it.
I felt like a spiritual failure. Where did I go wrong? Was I not focused enough during the contemplation? Did I not choose the right meditation music? I was a bit down, but then it occurred to me that this was actually a good thing. Sure I was still scared, but not nearly as scared as I used to be. I never would have put my hand that close to a spider before unless I was holding something to crush it with. And I certainly wouldn’t have deliberately stayed close to one for several minutes in an attempt to spare it’s life.
Since then I’ve done more digging around in my fears and gotten even better with them, to the point where I’ve been able to go to sleep with one on the ceiling of my bedroom. I even find one species of spider kind of cute. I call them Springers. 🙂
If I had never seen a spider again after that initial meditation I would have gone on thinking that I had no issues in an area where I clearly still had issues. And even though the catalyst for me examining my fears were harmless little creatures, once I did some digging, I discovered that the root cause of my spider fear was a negative belief that was manifesting in other areas of my life as well.
That first spider event wasn’t wanted, but it was one of the least unpleasant ways to draw my attention to a belief that was affecting multiple ares of my life.