What looks Like a Duck and Quacks Like a Duck Isn’t Always a Duck.
There’s been a disturbing buzz in the spiritual healing community lately. Disturbing because so many of us appear to be experiencing sensations that have one thing in common: High levels of discomfort. While one friend has interpreted it as the effect of Mars retrograde (which, thank goodness, has shifted), an energy that tends to increase the likelihood of controversy, intellectual skirmishes, and rude arguments, another has been interpreting her over-the-top feels as a personal affront: Her very own Imposter Syndrome. “Am I good enough? Who am I to say I can help others? What do I know that’s any different? How much ego is involved in my work?” The voice that undermines her efforts even as you tell yourself how important it is to step forward into vulnerability to level up.
Together, my friend and I took a closer look.
It turns out that when we put the energy of her Imposter Syndrome “on the couch” for some good old-fashioned Couch Talk, all it was really feeling was the frustration of not having reached its goal yet of working in an office outside the home where she’d be free to spread out, grow her business, and reach more souls in need of healing. This was no imposter! This energy was not one of fear and lack of self-esteem but of my friend’s Future Self, reminding her of her strength, power, and readiness masquerading as the energy of “not good enough.
”Misinterpreting energy is one of the most common traits of being human. In other words, what looks like a duck and quacks like a duck is often not a duck at all, even if it has practiced and loudly proclaims that quack to convincing perfection. It’s a case of what we don’t know that can keep us stuck—stuck in a place where we keep using the same words to describe the conditions in which we find ourselves, even though they aren’t helping to guide us out of the muck.
When I talk about “down-to-earth” spirituality as the foundation for a Celestial Life, I’m making a statement about what I feel is the importance of being able to apply new ways of thinking to old beliefs and new ways of being and feeling too old ways of navigating through the world. This includes using words differently to describe what happens as energetic experiences rather than ones that use the tried-and-true labels we’re used to.
It’s an approach that opens the door for a different kind of self-exploration, one that asks you to hit the pause button and refresh each page of your life. Recently I joined a guided meditation that focused on the way waves of the ocean ebb and flow. We were asked to be the wave and focus our attention on the pause that occurs at the moment the wave shifts direction…in essence, to feel the pause, be the pause, and reside in the pause. It’s the space between the physical in and the physical out-breath, the space where your mind takes a breath that frees it to expand through thoughtless awareness.
By the end of that mediation, all I wanted to do was live in that pause, in that deeply peaceful nothingness.
“Hitting the pause button” invites us to open to new sensations, which invites us to see the world through different eyes and consider new ways to express and describe that world. While calling something good or bad—passing judgment on it—can be expedient, once we choose to
experience our experiences energetically, we no longer feel the need to label them as good or bad.
Our experiences are only as good as the descriptors we give them. If I say that someone annoyed me at the market, in one fell swoop, I have named, qualified, and designated an emotional response to that experience. The very use of the word “annoyed” takes me to a place that assures my reaction, which can be anything from minor frustration to a major triggering.
Returning for a moment the discussion I had with my friend about how, as healers, we are collectively experiencing similar energies, let’s see how we can apply such an approach for a potentially different outcome.
While it’s perfectly natural to look for reasons that we feel a certain way, attributing emotions to occurrences in our external world can be dangerous because it leads us around by an emotional leash without a way to disengage. Can a dog remove its own leash? We are like that dog, tied forever by our emotional necks, waiting for someone or something to come along and remove the ties that bind us. We say we want to be in control of our lives, but really all we really want is to find reasons for feeling the way we feel. Finding reasons ultimately translates into rationalizing, which ultimately translates into victimization. Find enough reasons to feel the way you feel, and it’s easy to stay exactly where you are.
I am not saying that emotions are not valid, valuable, or important to self-awareness, growth, and introspection because they are. What I am saying is that emotions are only the tip of the iceberg.
Let’s say you are waiting for a phone call that doesn’t come. Do you feel frustration, anger, or annoyance? Any of those emotions would certainly be reasonable. Yet what we can choose to do instead is take it up a level into a higher vibration to look at not only the frequency of the energy of the “missed” phone call but also the frequency of our response. If I were to put the energy of that missed call on the coach for a chat, here’s what I might come up with.
ENERGY OF THE MISSED CALL (MC): “I am your missed call, Heidi. I’m sitting here feeling like I one-upped you because you’ve been sitting around waiting for me, and I didn’t pick up the phone. I get a kick out of watching you get all revved up, being all emo and thirsty while you try to act as if you don’t care. Did you forget I have nothing to do with your emotional state? That all you need to do is stay in your own alignment?”
ME: “I didn’t forget, but I’m still peeved. Why would you want to ‘one-up’ me, anyway?”
MC: “Because I want to put you in your place, remind you that you are not in charge.”
ME: “Oh, so this is a reminder that I am not in control?”
MC: “Exactly. But also that you don’t need to be. How could you possibly be in control of whether or not someone calls you? You can’t. In the end, the only thing you need to pay attention to is feeling good—whatever is happening. Creating drama around the fact that I did not call is unnecessary…unless that’s what you want.”
ME: “I guess I was kind of looking for a little drama…maybe because I was feeling bored at the moment. Um, I guess the frustration and anger had nothing to do with you after all.”MC: “Duh.”
So you see, in this fictitious example, I had absolutely no idea what my supposed Missed Call could possibly have to say to me or that it would remind me that boredom can lead to the production of drama. What I can tell you is that the next time I find myself reacting, I’m definitely going to take a step back into a pause and then forward into the present to unveil the true nature of the energetic components. Now THAT’S what I call a light bulb moment in Down-to-Earth Spirituality.
By Heidi Connolly
