“…the more we awaken, the more we become aware of the pain and darkness that we have carefully buried within our psyche.
When the light of our awareness illuminates the pain, everything we have built around it in order to protect ourselves from it begins to fall apart. And often, frightened, we turn away from it…
All of us have felt our leg “fall asleep.” It goes numb, but when the circulation starts again and it begins to “wake up” — oh! it is quite unpleasant, isn’t it? Spiritual awakening can be similar to this. When your awareness is asleep, you are unconscious and numb. You do not feel much, you do not hear much, you do not see much. But when you begin to awaken, the “tingling” starts. Long-suppressed pain, emotions, and thoughts rise to the surface of your conscious mind.
The good news is that you have a choice.
You can choose to resist this process of psychic detoxification and continue, through effort, to bury the pain. Or you can choose willingly to face the trials — and the rewards — of this psychic journey into the depths of your being…
When your leg wakes up from numbness, it is painful, but you know it will pass. The more you relax and allow the sensation to pass through you, the faster it subsides. The same applies to the pain that arises with spiritual growth. You must allow it to pass.
Resistance is not only futile; it also pours “oil on the fire.”…”
Michael Tamura, You Are the Answer, pp. 99–100
I chose to share this quote from Michael Tamura’s beautiful book because I was deeply touched by the metaphor he uses to describe the processes of spiritual awakening.
What I know from my own experience is that before I began to ask myself whether we have a soul or not, what the meaning of life is, and other questions that turn our gaze inward and lead us to seek ourselves along paths that reach all the way into eternity… before I began this inward search, I was exactly like that — hypnotized by the automatism of my conditioned reactions and following the mass model of behavior to a greater or lesser extent, “without question.”
That is why the phrase “numbness of consciousness” feels very accurate for describing my former self, which I later outgrew. In order to come out of this numbness, the inner observer must awaken — and it awakens only through pain. At this moment, as Tamura writes, we have a choice: we can continue to bury our head in the sand, or we can choose to stay in contact with the truth.
This is why I am sharing the quote above — to remind of this choice.
Kameliya Hadzhiyska
Note: The quotations are translated from Bulgarian and are not presented as verbatim citations.
