Aloha and Good Morning Everyone,

 

 Stuckness. I found some this morning I’d forgotten about and left on a shelf in the closet. It’s not a large shelf, yet somehow I managed to stuff all kinds of stuckness upon it rather than carry them around with me in my pocket. You might call that denial – but not me. I call it efficient emotional mismanagement, but I don’t call it that very loudly.

 

 

Stuckness is an interesting thing – almost an old, familiar friend since we become so accustomed to it hanging around. It’s an annoying jingle you can’t help but hum in the grocery line or in the distraction of commuter traffic. What is stuckness really?

 

At one level perhaps, stuckness happens when we revisit copies of our consciousness long left behind when the rest of us haltingly managed to climb another step on evolution’s ladder, to transition into another level of soul growth. Perhaps the hurt that peeled off this little piece of soul happened when we were only two and felt scared when the babysitter left us alone in the car while she ran into the post office. Perhaps we were six and our unquestioning innocence was shattered when our father snuck into our bedroom late one night and whispered: “Be a good girl and don’t tell mommy…”  Or maybe we were twelve and someone we trusted and cared about said something cruel and discounting, but we loved them, so if they said it – it must be true.

 

 Remember, each growth level contains its own unique set of cognitive skills, needs, motivations and desires that must be met before it becomes possible to transition to the next level. If trauma peels away a layer of consciousness, that copy remains stuck within its own level, retaining that set of needs and desires, retaining that level’s unique worldview. A soul part peeled off at the age of two will act completely different from a soul part peeled off at six.

 

 If the trauma creating a soul part was severe enough, this shift of consciousness creates a black-out, disconcerting periods of lost time. Most of us are spared disassociations that debilitating, so we mostly fail to notice the shift and thus fail to notice that operational control (not to mention the behavioral motivation behind our feelings and actions) has popped into a copy. Think of it as a piece of our operating system the I.T. guy overlooked when he upgraded the rest of our software. This forgotten fragment still tries to run its code even though it tends to crash the rest of the program.

 

 When life triggers us, our consciousness shifts into the copy that most closely resembles the original event the trigger reminds us of: assuming its needs, desires and worldview; alas, most of the time when this shift transpires we don’t know it.  To realize such a transition has occurred would require that a piece of self-awareness remain in both the copy of consciousness currently in control and the soul piece our consciousness shifted away from. This bi-location of awareness is possible. It’s a process of being able to witness our own emotional and rational landscapes taking place without getting hooked into them. It’s a bridge between the copies of our consciousness, our soul parts. I believe the ability to witness is one of our soul’s primary evolutionary growth steps.

 

 So what does all this mean? For me, it creates awareness, an understanding that allows a gentle, growing sense of self-acceptance and self-love. It fosters an acceptance of all my soul parts, of all the copies of consciousness that sometimes celebrate or sometimes sabotage my well-being and peace of mind, both the shinning pieces that I’m proud of and the lurkers in my inner shadow places. Simple acceptance is a powerful place to be. If a lack of acceptance, inner criticism, forms the chains that shackle our souls and create our sense of stuckness, then acceptance is our shinning emancipation.

 

 Remember, negativity is an emotion, energy not unlike an infectious disease, that creates more and more of itself in everyone it touches. A friend told me he was standing in line at the store with his beautiful wife of seven years. The grumpy, old man who waited on him asked: “Are you with her?” My friend smiled and nodded yes. “I bet you wish you weren’t” The grump replied.  A man just behind them joined in with his own marital complaints, as if his failure to make it work reflected a certain universal stinkiness. Negativity reinforces itself, causing us to constantly recreate the circumstances we complain about.

 

 Which brings us back to stuckness.

 

 It’s okay to be where we are. Really. Yet, it occurs to me that some of the things we struggle with would disappear if we could reintegrate these left behind soul parts, if we could gently nudge them along the ladder, so that they have a chance to “catch up,” to get the necessary update to their software. My older, less evolved soul parts do the best they can, when my consciousness shifts into them. Yet they lack the tools and wisdom I’ve gained from my struggles on evolution’s ladder. A certain situation tends to trigger a certain response. This response is reinforced by the chemistry of emotion. Re-enact it often enough and the action accrues its own inherent momentum, a well-worn path that leads straight back to the copy of consciousness that first faced something similar while yet lacking the tools to deal with it. It occurs to me that much of my stuckness happens from habit rather than necessity.  Habit I know how to deal with. Practice: Awareness and Practice.

 

 Perhaps one step in the process of embracing the left-behind blob of soul consciousness and allowing these soul parts to reintegrate and evolve up could be as simple as cultivating the ability to witness our own behavior. Witnessing creates an awareness of when our behavior or our feelings are out of proportion to current events (a sure sign that we’ve switched to an older copy of consciousness.) Such awareness creates an opportunity to step back, take a breath, and do things differently and better. Likewise, such awareness gives us an opportunity to deeply listen to the needs of our soul. Taking a breath and stepping back allow operational control to return to more evolved soul parts, which relieves the less educated “mini-me” of the pressure of trying to deal with that kind of thing – over and over. This seems like a great kindness to do for your self! What a great idea, we can let the part of our soul best suited to a task actually do it, so that it can be done quickly and efficiently and then all of us can get back to being lazy again. What a grand plan.

 

 So for today, may I, and all my soul blobs be joyful, basking in the light of simple acceptance from which flows true love of self and others. For today, may you and all your soul blobs be joyful. Really, my blobs aren’t so bad and neither are yours!

 

May your  Magnificent Moments Multiply!

 

Love and Aloha to all,    Holman

Contents © 2008 by  Holman R. Meyerhoffer, LMT—Project Transformation