In Unspoken Words - Christmas Lessons from the Spiritual Path
Life is too short to hold on to resentment and anger from the past. As I sit with family around the Christmas period, observing body language and sensing unspoken words between those that are spoken, I am reminded of the importance of creative expression as a means of letting go, and of the role that Nature has played in my own journey towards healing and wholeness.
Without my own creative practice of photography and writing, I don’t know where I would be right now. It has become the greatest form of therapy for me over the past seven years. I have emptied my mind and bled my heart out onto the pages since I began working on myself in 2018, and transmuted a lot of pain into beauty whilst out walking across the ancient landscape of Wales on the hunt for photographs and truth.
The most painful thing about the spiritual journey is growing apart from those that were once so close to you. What is even more painful is becoming aware of so much that is around you, but being utterly helpless because you understand that peoples’ journey is their own and it isn’t for a person to try to control or change anyone, or to make another see what they perceive that the other is, perhaps, blind to.
My ego desperately wants to shake those people that I love so dearly; to ‘awaken’ them, to shine a light in the areas that I perceive to be their own blind spots, to point out where they might be unconscious, to express the truth of what I can’t help but observe. Many people, however, do not want to know the truth. The truth hurts, but it is, as I have learnt so far, also what sets a person free.
The key lesson throughout these challenging and difficult times is to keep on freeing myself by continuing to walk with one of my eyes turned inwards; to be receptive to the lessons that my encounters with those that have known the many versions of me might be trying to teach me about myself.
Most of our problems are created or intensified when we are so busy looking towards the outer world, trying to blame, identify, fix, change and control things outside of us, that we forget that everything outside is a reflection of what is going on within.
My own interactions and encounters in the outer world this Christmas are simply pointing me towards telling the truth to myself — the truth of where ego remains and I am, perhaps, still non-acceptant of loved ones and their own unique healing journey and where I struggle to be completely open and truly vulnerable with those people closest to me.
What I am grateful to be reminded of, as I sense the bitterness of words and feel the anger and resentment that these are loaded with as they make their way across the dinner table, is the importance of creativity and Nature as I continue my own journey towards healing. I cannot instill my own beliefs onto those people that I sense are still holding on to anger. I cannot make them change or ‘see the light’. I cannot tell them that photography and writing will also do for them what it has done for me. All that I can do is look within and reflect upon my own healing journey to better understand myself, which, I have come to learn all the more, is all that there is. Our relationships with other people are a mirror of our relationship to ourselves, and there is no clearer mirror than the one that is held by our immediate family.
I am grateful to have seen myself more clearly in many mirrors this Christmas. The light of awareness has been cast across the areas where I still struggle to regulate my own emotions and hold my presence with those people and situations that challenge me the most. Despite how far I have come, it is a beautiful reminder that the journey towards healing never ends.