The Child with Tarnished Bronze Skin Part 3

Why am I here?  What’s my purpose in life? How can I serve in this world as a spiritual being? Where can I find these answers?

These and other questions like this have formed the foundation for the reason why I continue to Practice and work to peel back these onion layers that have formed “Joe.” Because all of the answers are within, right? For sure. There are those that can help me: my Teachers, Guides, Totems, others I come across, and etc. But really whether or not I find answers and how I interpret those answers subjectively is up to me. Whether or not I even want to face the hard facts about myself, is a choice I need to make and preferably sooner rather than later. So, I’m here, sitting at my desk, writing you all, the Universe, the Community, and I’m hoping as I write that I will find some answer or key that will peel back the layers a little more.

Recently, a reoccurring theme has occurred in my subjective reality, and this theme has to do with personas. When I was a young child (pre-10 years old), everyone called me Joey. At about 11 years of age I went to live with my Great Aunt and Uncle in Boston, MA due to an abusive and neglectful family situation in Florida. I decided that the place I moved to was a place no one knew me so it was time to create a new Me. This new Me would go by Joe and not Joey. So, I took this Joey person, this child who got taken advantage of and abused, and I formed a hard and living shell around him. As I grew into my awkward teen years, this hard shell grew stronger, tighter, more defined, and covered me entirely. Joe was defensive, over-reacted, and felt no pain in fights. He was smart but rebellious. He got good grades but accumulated hundreds of hours of detention per year. I didn’t see a problem with it at the time; it was a relief not to feel the fear directly. I didn’t see how the trail back to Joey was overgrown with brambles. I made it nearly impossible to get back and honestly, I wonder how I even rediscovered the trail, but I did.

It wasn’t without help either. It started with a simple yearning about 15 years ago and culminated with a simple exercise that Joseph gave me. I didn’t know what I was looking at when I saw Joey again for the first time in years, neglected, scared, and in desperate need of love. But over the past several months I’ve learned by making the choice to Practice and now I am almost ready to move on (without having to be dragged kicking and screaming to where I want to be).

It is not uncommon for people like me, who have experienced emotional trauma in their childhood, to create coping and defense mechanisms like mine. I call them dark personas (this is my term and has nothing to do with good or evil as you will see below). We see them every day in one form or another. Every time we let fear take the steering wheel of our lives and rage, we are perpetuating a cycle of abuse and culture of fear that begins – and ends – with the individual.  For the longest time, this dark persona has defended me and it behaves in a way that is no longer acceptable to me. We all have a choice, but the real question is: what do we do with these dark personas when we wake up from the nightmare and realize we don’t need them to defend us anymore? I’ll tell you what I am doing/have done with mine.

Exercise: Thanks to Joseph for this: I breath and center and find where the physical manifestation of the dark persona resides. For me, the physical manifestation is a sickness (Crohn’s disease) and a blockage that sits in my heart and stops the flow of energy through my body. I try to stay away from terms like Chakra usually, not because I’m opposed, rather it’s because I want to be as honest as possible when describing how I feel and what I think during an exercise. Once I am fully centered and I am practicing my Sanchin breathing exercises, I feel the melancholy that is my blockage, that is my dark persona at rest, and I embrace it. I tell it everything will be ok, that I know longer need its assistance, and I place it in my mind in a physical place of honor in my room. I let it know that if I need it, I know where it is, and vice versa.

The first time I did this, I felt the energy begin to flow all the way down into my groin area, into my root, and I knew I had begun something that will change my life. Over the past 8 months, I have worked so hard to grow and to awaken, and I feel my life slowly coming into place in a way that I never thought possible. I am finding answers where I didn’t think I would them initially. In the first of these 3 posts I said that I spent years looking for answers outward. In the second of the posts, I spoke about a family curse, negative life energy (via negativa), and my determination not to pass that on to my children. This post is about healing, and it’s about finding the edge of my comfort zone, coming face to face with my fears on the other side, and putting one foot over the threshold.