Groundhog Day

Remember the movie Groundhog Day? If you didn’t see it, I highly recommend it. It was an awesome example of what happens when we wake up and recognize the big patterns of our life. In the film, the protagonist is forced to encounter a difficult day over and over until he surrenders into dealing with it directly. Here’s the pattern all humans have been living, reduced to its essences:

  1. Feeling pain and limits
  2. Desire to avoid the discomfort
  3. Denial of pain through resistance, numbing out, fixing, staying in our head, or keeping busy… or searching for happiness, light, or bliss
  4. Experiencing temporary or partial success in that quest
  5. Feeling the pain and disappointment that follows the temporary success
  6. Recognize the pattern? If no, go to 2, rinse and repeat. If yes, congratulations! Go to 7.
  7. Reversal: You discover a willingness to allow discomfort and to feel it directly
  8. You discover that directly encountering pain is less painful than avoiding pain
  9. You awaken into ALL of life; pain and pleasure both

Steps one through six tend to repeat in vicious cycles for lifetimes until the meta-pattern is grokked and you are able to progress to step seven. By the time you arrive at the Reversal, there’s a lot of dizziness to let go of from all that spinning. The pattern of resisting pain over and over and over has built up a lot of calcified habits in your system, along with an unbelievable amount of stress. So to permit the recognition of the pattern is also to permit a recognition of the pain that was underlying it all. And not just the existential pain, but also the phenomenal pain born of years of running away. This is why consciously choosing the Reversal is a heroic passage.

Once you have made the choice to face the whole truth of your reality, things being to shift. You see how you used to run, but now you choose to stay. You feel the pain of staying and you deepen. As you deepen, you drop into yourself, which is the same as the universe.

© 2019 Ted Strauss


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© 2021 tedstrauss
Empowering your awakening.