Our lives are like rivers of energy flowing through space.
Individual consciousness flowing through cosmic consciousness.
Many teachings use a river as an analogy and suggest we release our attachments and go with the flow. It’s a useful analogy except our rivers have been diverted, channelized, dammed and split. We are seldom travelling down our authentic flow-way.
Before and after we are born we inherit our parent’s unresolved issues and trauma, and this shapes the initial course, flow and challenges of our lives.
In the early years of life the risks of drama and trauma are high. These events are like avalanches into our rivers causing constrictions and pushing us off course. Some events are like rocks dropped on us with a lot of splash over.
A big boulder of trauma dropped in the middle of our river can cause our flow to separate, never to fully come back together – creating schizophrenia, dissociation, PTSD or other disorders. Soul loss.
School (especially private school) pulls us into their narrow canals and we change our course to try to fit in, be like other kids, and succeed.
Training, especially military training, postgraduate training, or apprenticeship create another set of canals that we must flow through in order to succeed.
Corporate, government, professional, or blue collar life is just as constricting. We sacrifice our river’s course and do as we are told for the pay check and the identity of “I’m a ______”.
Likewise, relationships, family, community and religious groups all pull us toward them. We want to belong and so we change the course of who we are and how we flow.
We develop protective and defensive ways of being to cope with life’s “slings and arrows”. These further constrict, limit, or channelize our river’s flow.
More soul loss.
We try to get out of one set of canals only to drain into another.
We search for a spiritual teacher only to be pulled into their channel.
We wonder why life is so hard and realize we are trying to make our river flow uphill.
We work diligently to manifest our dreams only to find they aren’t what we really want, because we aren’t who we really are.
Our beliefs aren’t our own, our self image is distorted, and our soul is fragmented.
We find ourselves flowing along in a meaningless river, wondering how we got there, and blaming fate, the gods or karma.
And to make matters worse, the last thing our society wants is free flowing, conscious, authentic individuals.
Despite the madness of living in our crazy chaotic world, we are unique soul manifestations of consciousness, with wonderful creative potential.
To manifest this potential we need to know who we are. In other words, get our river flowing on its authentic course.
We need to wade or swim back upstream and repair the banks; get some big rocks and dense, invasive weed patches out of the channel; and break free of the diversion systems, old canals and defensive backwaters that we are stuck in.
The transformation to authenticity is the retrieval of our soul.
Free flowing.