7- H4H News: How is Waking Up Both Pleasant and Painful?

Synopsis: Hope for Humanity News is a series of three to five-minute weekly podcasts designed to educate, inspire, and comfort listeners during these challenging, but hopeful times. 

Hi everyone! Welcome to Hope for Humanity News! I’m Reverend Joan Kistler.

Last week, we talked about how we know we are waking up and suggested that the experience of waking up can be both pleasant and painful.

How can it be both?

As I said in a previous video, the ego is the cause of all suffering. That’s because it constantly talks to us up in our heads, telling us all about what’s wrong with us, what’s wrong with others, and what’s wrong with life in general. It conjures up solutions to its fake problems and then uses fear to motivate us to act out its solutions.

Unless we’re running from a saber-toothed tiger, doing anything out of fear doesn’t work out well. It only creates more problems for the ego to solve. This is how the ego keeps us engaged with it, which is the only thing that makes it seem real. So, the less we listen to the ego and obey its commands, the less we will suffer, and the more we will experience freedom and joy. That’s what’s pleasant.

What’s painful is that we have to face that thing, and that requires being totally honest with ourselves. The ego creates and feeds off of negative emotions, so any pain within us has to be rooted out and released: all those stories about the wrongs we’ve done and the wrongs we’ve suffered. We need to make room in our being for love, peace, and joy. Love, peace, and joy can’t abide where there is bitterness, hostility, and misery.

This can seem like a never-ending process. Just when we thought we dealt with something, it says, “Hello there! I’m back!” It’s like peeling away the layers of an onion; we’re simply releasing the pain on deeper and deeper levels. We might need professional help to face certain pain, so we shouldn’t hesitate to seek help if we need it.

This process is all about stripping away all the layers of our human conditioning, so that we can return our awareness to Essence and be free to live our lives in ways that are most meaningful to us: to dance to the beat of the desires and dreams of our hearts instead of marching to the beat of the dictatorial drum of that voice in our heads.

When we wake up, we might also have to deal with the pain of loss.

Tune in next week.