Last year, a spiritual teacher prompted me to do the exercise: “How do I stay separate?” It was a fascinating experience for me because I had never considered what it meant to be separate or what effect staying separate might have on my life. Today, the exercise popped into my head again, and I thought it would make for an interesting post.
How I stay separate:
- I try to appear like I have my life together
- I judge others (”They are better than me”, “They aren’t as spiritual as I am”, “They don’t eat organic food and thus clearly care less about their bodies that I do about mine” etc.)
- I observe others without opening myself up right away
- I decide that I don’t want to be friends with certain people.
- At school I stuck mainly to myself, convinced that I don’t need to make friends because no one was “on my level”.
The list could go on. One thing that my teacher pointed out after the exercise is how similar staying separate is to arrogance. Arrogance is the ego’s way of keeping a person separate, be it spiritual arrogance, intelligence arrogance or fill-in-the-blank arrogance, it is giving yourself permission to judge someone esles process so that you don’t have to see that we are all the same ore more precisely, so that you don’t have to see that you are the same as the person you are judging. The same works within the self: if you are constantly judging yourself as less than others, you are staying separate from yourself!
So, this week I havne’t written a post. I have thought about writing a post, I have started posts and deleted them, in fact, I have a post draft sitting there, unsent, because I couldn’t seem to get my ideas clearly lined up. I also avoided connecting with my reiki group - everyone else seemed to be having these amazing experiences after the training, and I couldn’t even bring myself to try reiki on my own.
Why did I spend my week like this? The truth is, I don’t want others to think I’m not clever or to see that my thoughts don’t come out clearly right away. I don’t want others to know that it takes me a lot of hands on experience to learn something and I especially don’t want others to judge me or disagree with what I write.
In my opinion, a perfect example of both staying separate from myself and from others! Its an interesting complex that I think a lot of people have developed, so here’s my ten cents: look for when you are being separate, and possibly arrogant then, open up a little, maybe share something with someone you feel you can trust (or you could blog to the entire internet population!). Within the self is a little bit more tricky. What I have found works is to look at that thing you judge and find the positive polarity of it. In my case: I dont’ want others to not like what I have to say, which means that I care about what I write and I don’t want to have something I care about rejected. However, if I never share it, no one else will ever have the chance to relate to what I think, bad or good and honestly, that’s worse than someone not agreeing with what I write.
Thanks to my ego, for without it there would be no need for this earth school.