Dear Soul Arcanum:
I thought I had attained a certain degree of spiritual awareness, but lately I find myself feeling very unevolved. Instead of feeling kind, patient and compassionate, I feel like everything upsets me these days. In particular, people are so disappointing! Every time I turn around I feel like someone I love and trust is betraying me or disappointing me by acting selfish or dishonest, and it makes me really angry because I would never behave like that. How in the world do I keep manifesting this? One upset after another has left me really dispirited. I used to be spiritual and loving all the time – do you think I’m regressing?
– A.
Dear A.: You are definitely not alone in feeling this way. One of the hardest things for me to make peace with is being disappointed by people I love and want to believe in. When someone I really care about does something selfish or hurtful, or keeps lying even though I’m begging them to be honest with me, I can go into a major tailspin myself.
Here’s why so-called spiritual folks struggle with this issue so much: The more we try to embody our spiritual natures, the less we act from our egos. This means at some point, we do become quite different from most people. Where most live from their egos with occasional flashes of divine wisdom and compassion, someone who has long been devoted to spiritual growth tends be centered in their higher self with occasional fits of ego.
If we strive to be extraordinary people but assume the rest of the world will be just like us, we will naturally get discouraged. Life is a journey of spiritual growth, and none of us are enlightened yet. If we expect people to act like wise, compassionate sages, we’re setting ourselves up for disappointment.
It helps me to remember that even the most spiritual beings to ever walk the planet had to deal with the same sort of disappointment. The story of Jesus offers us a great example, for He was betrayed by one of his closest friends (Judas), who sold Him out for cash! Then at the hour of His greatest need, the other apostles all abandoned Him. I figure if Jesus can be betrayed like this, none of us are immune.
It’s also quite normal for life to begin throwing us curve balls if we’ve been batting a thousand for a while. This means if we’ve got a nice, smooth vibe going, inevitably something will happen that stretches our capacity for patience and tolerance. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t learn and grow anymore.
It’s like mastering algebra and then moving on to geometry and feeling lost again. If we stayed in algebra forever, life would seem pretty easy, but it would also get boring and we’d never learn anything new. Whether we like it or not, we can’t keep repeating the same lessons over and over again – we have to move on.
One of the first things you need to realize is that it is not “unspiritual” to get angry. I think being spiritual is simply the habit of self-examination combined with the sincere desire to be a good person. The harder you are on yourself about feeling angry, the more likely you will be to deny or repress your feelings, which is the source of all sorts of problems. What you’re working on at this point in your spiritual journey is making peace with your shadow nature.
If you try to never get angry in the first place, you’ll run up against some powerful biology. Whenever we feel threatened emotionally, our bodies respond as they do when we feel threatened physically. We are WIRED to get angry when something threatens our happiness, and it can take days for the adrenaline that was released when we got angry to go back to normal levels. I find this interesting because it’s hard to stay angry for more than a few days – eventually, we let it go.
Most people are denying, avoiding or repressing all sorts of negative emotions. This is why millions of people are taking anti-depressants, and why so many are addicted to things like drugs, alcohol, food, etc. They’re all trying to avoid emotional pain.
When we work to become more conscious of what’s happening within us, it can seem like we’re suddenly flooded with intense negative feelings. (After all, we generally don’t repress positive emotions). It’s therefore common for negative emotions to bubble over when we’re moving into a new level of conscious awareness or a new level of personal healing, and it may indeed seem like we’re regressing at that point.
One of the greatest pay-offs of spiritual growth is the freedom to choose how we will respond to our experience. When we allow others to upset or anger us, we give our power away. When we center ourselves i n our own divine power within, we can choose how we feel regardless of what is happening in our outer experience. So as spiritual seekers, our goal is not to be rid of anger but to consciously choose what we do with that energy. We must learn how to transmute it into something higher like positive change, new wisdom and understanding, or a greater capacity for forgiveness and unconditional love.
While it’s healthy to acknowledge and process our feelings, I’m not a big fan of primal scream therapy or similar ideas, because when we practice anger, we just get better at it. When we send rage out to the Universe, we get rage back. While it’s healthier to let our anger out than to stuff it down, it’s even better to work with that energy consciously and let it fuel positive change. Properly channeled, anger can be transmuted into powerful motivation and creativity.
What works best for me is to simply cultivate what I want instead of anger. So when I’m feeling angry, I might read a spiritual book, take a walk in nature or do some yoga. Other great tools for transmuting anger into new power and healing include vigorous exercise, art therapy, hypnotherapy, meditation, energy healing, spiritual counseling, and the use of divination tools like runes and tarot to sort out the deeper spiritual truths in upsetting situations.
In terms of the law of attraction, the only way to break free of a cycle of upset and disappointment is to choose to stop getting upset over things that would normally upset you. If you truly believe yourself to be a good person who deserves to be treated better than you’re being treated, you have to begin to treat yourself better first. By allowing people who don’t share your values to disrupt your happiness, you aren’t treating yourself well, and when you don’t treat yourself very well, your vibration drops and other people begin to treat you badly too.
To manifest more uplifting relationships, you have to stop allowing anyone to bring you down. You have to be your own best friend – not the friend who is always late, forgets your birthday, and never really listens to you – the best friend you would LIKE to have.
As you do this, you will begin to meet new people. This is no accident. When you become happier, you attract people of a higher vibration. If you begin to love yourself well by choosing to be happy, one of two things will happen: everyone who doesn’t or can’t love you similarly will fade out of your experience, or you’ll bring out something better in the folks who remain.
– Soul Arcanum