#36 - Easily Our World's Greatest Challenge

By KC Johnson

What do we fear most?

Likely, it’s not war, though that is a significant challenge. It’s not alien invasions, loss of a friend or a place to live, among the many other major events we get to face. These are huge issues that will certainly disrupt our life and cause us pain and suffering.

What I’m talking about is our deep down fear to examine our frailties, to feel criticism either from our own inner voices or from other people, to feel exposed, vulnerable, incomplete, and most of all to feel unlovable and unloved.

Developing a healthy sense of self requires making determined efforts to release the fears held by our Inner Child and its many micro-selves. We accumulated our fears, mostly during early childhood, and we can release them in adulthood. As long as we attempt to change, change will start to happen.

Don’t build a wall around your suffering. It may devour you from the inside.

Frida Kahlo

I had created walls around my little boy inner self protecting him from harm, and all that it did was close doors to healing and reaching out to the love others offered me. How different my life could have been if I had shared a give and take of emotional needs with others. That can be the benefit of creating a healthy emotional community for ourselves, finding healing through connections with others. Whether that community be one person or ten people, if they really care enough to listen to each other, then deep inner healing can take place.

Why is this so significant for the world? In order for us to build healthy, caring, loving, supportive, and compassionate communities for ourselves we need to engage honestly about what we need, want, and lack within us. Is our community reflecting healthy answers to poverty, health care, housing needs, safe streets, and addressing the needs of all at-risk peoples? Do our communities respect individual rights, freedom for expression and identities, diverse ideas, and compassionate solutions? Do our communities allow us to feel safe and accepted? Is there a reasonable balance between various community needs?

Most of our communities cannot answer yes to any of these questions!

Our countries and communities reflect our personal emotional growth and maturity. If we hold on to our inner walls of fear and judgment, then we will build outer walls against those who remind us of the inner work we are avoiding. We have to do the inner work first, it can’t happen any other way.

The ability to change, to give and take lovingly, means letting go of our need to judge ourselves, then we can stop judging others. Without a majority of our citizens accomplishing this, no matter the country, no matter the leadership, no matter the challenges, we will be unable to stop the slow evolution towards the more autocratic, selfish, dumbed-down belief systems that destroy people’s ability to understand and manage themselves and to live happier lives.

“Why is it so difficult to explore our fears?”

And the corollary question is, “What can we do early in our lives to overcome the fearful emotions that hold us back from seeing the beauty life has to offer us?”

These aren’t idle musings. Every decision we make is filtered through our fearful micro-voice lenses composed from the fearful and traumatic experiences our early Inner Child endured. Our Inner Child tasks these micro-voices with protecting it from perceived threats to help it feel safer.

This then becomes the distorting filters we see the world through, and our child does not easily let go of its judgmental ‘security blanket’ protector micro-voices.

Ask ten people to witness an emotionally charged event and their descriptions will all be quite different. They are not watching with ‘true eyes’ but instead seeing the event through their individual, unique micro-voice selves filters. And we have multiple micro-voices each representing an area that our Inner Child wants protection with and each has its own sets of filters even further complicating and interpreting the events being observed.

I’m proposing that it is possible to let go of enough of our emotional fears that are wrapped around our many inner voices to begin seeing the world through eyes not burdened with emotions and distorted by excessive inner self needs.

Not only is it possible to do so, but I believe that it is our true purpose in life - to learn to love every moment without judgment, without fear.

That is the intention our soul presents us with, to continuously experience lessons designed to teach us this fundamental truth - love every moment. The side benefit of these life discoveries is that this becomes the path for discovering genuine happiness.

“The Butterfly Effect” says one small change in thought leads us into whole new directions. --term coined in 1960s by Edward Lorenz at MIT

We can start this process for self-discovery making very small changes. Just asking questions, reading from the many thousands of books written over the centuries about universal truths starts the process for self-change. Meditating, writing and talking with others and sharing these truths will direct us down a different path. We will only seek directions that we most need to pursue at the moment. That is the intentionality of our soul, to help us make the personal discoveries that lead to greater awareness and growth.

In my case, some of the questions I continually asked myself did not get answered for many years later. I was overlooking my need to get ready for the answers. I had to discover other truths about myself first, ‘I couldn’t handle the truth’ until I grew enough so that I could. In hindsight, I can now appreciate why it took so long to get answers. I had to get enough of the jigsaw puzzle pieces in place to see the answers.

But my sense is that none of us really need to seek the answers outside of ourselves, we have the perfect guru within us at all times - our deep inner voice.

That is the voice of our soul guiding every one of us at any moment when we are willing to listen. It’s like we have this huge database of all universal truths at our fingertips, yet since we don’t trust our ability to access this most spiritual of inner information sources, we go searching in far-off lands for answers we already have access to.

We will discover new ideas every time we seek our own answers, and we will change just a little bit. Our thoughts then lead to new questions and our life begins to slowly change direction. This can be a challenging pursuit as we unravel our early child fears, but it is a pursuit that makes us stronger, more aware of our potentials, and more loving of the life happening around us.

Very different opportunities are presented to us to learn from as we make different decisions both for ourselves and for all of our communities we live within. We literally change the world by just listening to our soul’s suggestions for self-discovery. - kc