When Healing Perpetuates Deficiency.
(When inquiry becomes self improvement)
It seems working on one's triggers is a new thing. It seems everyone is doing it or talking about it: “Resolving our conditioning. Working on our traumas, deprogramming ourselves, working through our triggers etc”
Although this is a wonderful thing to do, and I am all for it, what I'm seeing more and more is that this whole idea of working on your traumas is actually causing people to have a really unhealthy and dysfunctional relationship to themselves, and to those parts of themselves that are just simply needing attention.
What happens is the separate self hears these ideas of resolving triggers, resolving our traumas etc. and then turns itself into a project. It then starts to adopt an extremely unhealthy desire to continuously rearrange itself. To resolve itself fully. This perhaps can lead to being one of the greatest blocks to unconditionally loving ones self, and others.
This is like being on a treadmill, or in a hamster wheel. There will never be a point where the mind is totally satisfied with it self. Attempting to end the personal will with a decision that is centred in the personal will is like trying to put out fire with fire.
This model of thinking and having a relationship with ones self where the self becomes a project to work perpetuates the sense of deficiency. We strive for self improvement and resolution of the parts of ourselves (the traumas, the unworthiness, the shame, the triggers etc) we feel are unworthy, or that we are told are unworthy. This is a never ending endeavour...
Instead of realising our innate wholeness, we get stuck attempting to find freedom within captivity. Attempting to find wholeness by rearranging things within the fragmentation. Believing that when we free up enough conditioning, we will be free. This is a misunderstanding.
I'm not saying working on our triggers is a bad thing. It's a wonderful thing to do. To see our deficiency. To feel things as they come. To take responsibility for our internal world and begin to clean out our past. But if we think this is something we “should” be doing, or something we “need” to be doing to get somewhere else then we are perpetuating the very fragmentation, the very deficiency and the very suffering we are attempting to resolve.
To say I need to work on my stuff already implies I believe I am deficient.
To say someone else needs to look at something or work on their stuff implies we believe they are deficient.
This can be so subtle, and we can be perpetuating the belief in deficiency without even knowing it.
We can turn ourselves into projects, we can turn our children into projects, we can turn our partners into projects in the name of unconditional love, this is an act of cruelty. We do this because of an unconscious misunderstanding about our very nature, and the very nature of all things.
When deficiency is seen from the point of view of Wholeness and Unity, the belief in deficiency collapses. There was never anything that needed fixing. It was a misconception that was fueled by the attempt to resolve it.
Deficiency is a belief. It is not an actual thing. I often remind myself that if I am perceiving anything other than the Devine nature of things, then I am misperceiving.
Matt Nettleton