Why Can't I Heal?

by Ross Bishop

No one likes emotional pain, and yet we all have it. Some of us carry around a lot of it. We all want to heal; yet doing that seems almost beyond our reach. We try and try and sometimes it doesn't seem as though we are accomplishing very much. We look for answers in the stars, get advice from psychics, do the I-Ching and consult all manner of oracles. We look to God for help, and feel frustrated and abandoned when our pain and problems continue. Interestingly, we persistently refuse to do the one thing that would make a real difference.

What is it that keeps you from being at peace? What stifles your passion and keeps you from being the person you could be? Yes, life can be unfair and your partner can be a jerk, but those aren't the things that really hold you back, are they?

When push comes to shove, you get scared. You've been hurt and you're afraid to be hurt again. You shut down, close off and pull back from life. This isn't about sexual or racial discrimination or being smart enough or the hundred other things you blame your failures on. They can be factors, but they are not causal. The bottom line is that you fear that when you are tested, you won't measure up. It has felt that way in the past, so it's better to hide in obscurity than to risk being found out and rejected.

I'm not here to give you another pep talk about overcoming your fears or self-doubts. That stuff doesn't really work anyway. What we have to look at is the conflict between the deeper truth that you know - that you really are a beautiful, wonderful, special person, and the manifested fears that dominate your life. This conflict is the reason that life and healing can be so difficult.

You come to the table sincerely wanting to heal your pain, while at the same time, another part of you holds powerful negative beliefs about yourself. It's like a two-headed monster pulling in opposite directions. You want peace, you want to heal, and this other part of you is so convinced that this is not possible that it finds ways to sabotage everything you try to do. It's not being contrary, it sincerely believes that it must keep you safe by protecting you from certain condemnation. I love Bartholomew's line that, "If you had a friend who said the kind of things you say to yourself, you'd get another friend!"

This all becomes more complicated because we have free will. Having free will means that if we are going to change our beliefs, we must be the ones who decide. No one else can do it for us. Essentially, you look to God and plead, "Please help me to heal." And God looks down and says, "How? You won't let me!" And so long as you hold beliefs that you are unlovable and unworthy, you're not going to get very far in your healing. And God cannot do much about it (at least directly - more about this later). To do so would violate free will.

So, God cannot help you until you decide to accept His love. And unfortunately we humans can be pretty stubborn. This is not a small matter. Many people force themselves to endure extraordinary pain and suffering before they give up their ego-based beliefs and surrender to His love. When people come to me for healing it is because they are desperate, beaten down and frustrated. If they felt that their old way of doing things could still work, they wouldn't be asking for my help. Sometimes people come wanting a miracle so that they can avoid their pain, not have to change and go on with life, but it doesn't work that way. Saving them would be about the worst thing I could do for them. That's why God doesn't do it either.

We see this pattern very clearly with alcohol and drug addiction. Addicts begin to destroy their lives and create a lot of pain for themselves and the people around them. Hopefully at some point they realize that something is very wrong. They (usually with the help of loved ones and friends) put themselves into a rehab program, and then they very frequently relapse. Why? Because they have stopped using, but they have not dealt with the deeper pain that caused them to abuse in the first place. It is only (in most cases) the second collapse that makes them realize that they are going to have to reach much deeper if they are going to deal with what's actually driving them. Then real healing can take place.

Unfortunately, our society really gets in the way of people's innate healing processes. One of the great foundations of Western civilization has been our attitude toward overcoming obstacles, no matter how difficult. We have tamed rivers, conquered diseases and walked on the moon. We have built great cities in hostile deserts and harnessed the vast power of nuclear energy. We can do almost anything we choose.

Our Roman ancestors gave us the motto, carpe diem, which translates to "seize the day," and it expresses our attitude toward taking control of life. We seek to conquer nature so that we can control our fate. All you need do is reach out and seize life by the throat and bend it to your will. It's only a matter of desire and determination. If it is not happening, either you are not doing it right, you're not trying hard enough or something else is wrong with you. Right? Well, not exactly.

That's the funny thing about life. Whenever you act in contravention to the Universal, something always comes through the cracks to upset the furniture. Feudalism didn't work, slavery didn't work, monarchy didn't work, religion didn't work, colonialism didn't work, fascism didn't work and materialistic capitalism is next. People oppressed by these social structures will always create conflict with it. As has been said, "Those who you keep down will eventually drag you down."

One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. What the establishment calls terrorism, repressed people will see as patriotic heroism. Whatever you call it, it keeps tripping up and undermining the establishment.

The thing is, regardless of what you would like to have happen, the you that you see in the mirror does not control your life. The Universe (another you) does. You may want to be the captain of your ship, but the fundamental trajectory of your life is controlled by a process far greater than your worldly desires. And that is a very difficult concept for some Westerners to swallow.

We have created a culture that in some very important ways runs almost completely counter to the Universal. As an example, "success" in the West means checking your humanity at the door. Al Davis crystallized this philosophy with his slogan "Win baby, win" for his Oakland Raider football team. Unspoken in his words are, "at any cost." The great football deity, Vince Lombardi preached, "Winning isn't everything. It's the only thing."

The shadow side of this version of achievement is that when people "fail," the emotional burden placed upon them can be very heavy. If you don't climb to the top of the heap, or if you don't want that kind of success, you are just not as good as the other guys. We build shame and feelings of inadequacy into the process as negative motivators.

We have always known that the captains of industry could be heartless and that politicians were corrupt. We leave the idea of compassion to our spiritual teachers and healers. It seems that in this society one can have truth or power, but not both. However, this is mostly because what we call power is not true power. It is intimidation and manipulation, and these qualities are incompatible with truth.

People of real power - the Lincoln's, Gandhi's, Martin Luther King's and Mother Theresa's of the world, achieved real success by touching the fundamental humanity in people's hearts. Bill Gates, Ken Lay, Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft and most of corporate America cannot do that. They have bought into another belief system built on false power, manipulation and a "win at any cost" mentality. These people have turned away from the basic reason we have come to earth. They worship "false gods" as it were, as compensation for the truth that they have forsaken. We came to earth to learn to listen to our hearts - the very thing that Western scientific society strives so very hard to deny.

What is shaping and controlling your life is the degree to which you love yourself, or your relationship with God (which are the same thing). You are not in control of that process. A much larger force, we could call it "love of self," is shaping and guiding the events of your life. You have influence on that path, which I will talk about later, but you do not determine it. And, as loving and wonderful as the place of self love can be, we fear it.

I want to tell you about one of my favorite cartoons. The setting is the foyer of a lecture hall with doors opening to 2 different lectures. At the first door there is a large line of people waiting expectantly with pens and notebooks in hand. There is no one at the second door. The sign over the first lecture hall reads, "Lecture about God." The sign over the [empty] second door, simply reads, "God."

We can chuckle at the cartoon, but it illustrates the fundamental dilemma that we all face in reconnecting with our God-consciousness. It's easy to read books and learn to meditate and go to workshops about spiritual growth, but actually facing God is a significantly different matter. It forces us out of the protection of our intellect into what feels like the less secure realm of feelings and emotions. Unfortunately, this is what life on earth is ultimately about. A matter at which, by the way, we have done rather poorly.

It's pretty incredible if you think about it. If you were to add up the hours spent and the energy expended over these thousands of years in prayer, doing ceremony, going to church and reading holy writings like the Bible, Buddha's Sutras or the Bhagavad-Gita, etc., all over the world, by a hundred generations, the total expenditure of human time and energy has been simply astronomical. All the effort that has been expended toward spiritual development - to reach enlightenment, or personal peace, or God awareness, or whatever you want to call it, could have built thousands of great cities, but what have we gotten for it?

It wasn't a waste of time. There have been notable and laudable achievements. Feudalism is gone, slavery is uncommon and many people around the planet live in relative freedom today. But ethnic and racial conflict and strife are frequent. We still let people starve and die from easily preventable diseases. Half the world's population doesn't have clean drinking water, decent sanitation, etc., etc. So we have a long way to go in terms of learning to love each other, and to that end, I think one has to question whether we've been really getting our time and money's worth from our spiritual endeavors.

Fundamentalists will tell us that we have been impeded toward enlightenment because of our personal weaknesses and sinful behavior, but I do not think that is the case. That is a setup to create guilt and shame and to make people dependent upon fundamentalist religion for salvation. As an aside, the more I learn about these fundamentalist beliefs, the more difficult it is for me to see these people as Christian. It's like a Middle Eastern terrorist wrapping him or herself in the cloak of Islam. No matter what you wrap it in, a fish still smells like a fish.

Certainly we have a ways to go in our development, and lord knows, we make our share of mistakes, but the vast majority of people all around the planet are good, well meaning, caring, loving, decent souls. It has always been that way, and yet real connection with our God-selves eludes us. I have said before in these writings that when you find something massively "out of kilter" in human society, you need to look for deeper and more significant explanations, and that is certainly true in this case.

The simple answer is that the game of life has been rigged. For thousands of years during The Age of Karma, your chances of making a really meaningful God-connection have been virtually nil. Profound spiritual development has been designed out of the process, while the desire for enlightenment has not. The resulting inevitable frustration was intended. Christ came to us with a message of love and compassion, knowing full well that we would not be able to go there. He lovingly set us up.

There are two basic reasons for this. Imagine humankind as a giant spring. The more you wind it up, the more power it has to do work. Over thousands of years of failure in making a meaningful God connection, we have built up a powerful inner frustration. We have looked again and again for salvation, and He hasn't been there (so we thought). We have internalized the resulting feelings of abandonment as personal unworthiness.

These feelings and our eons-old frustration with God, hold enormous potential energy. They are an enormous spring; all wound up and ready to erupt. That frustration will provide the energy for a monumental and unprecedented transformation of human consciousness.

As I work with groups I ask people about their relationship with God. I also ask them how worthy they feel. The results are surprising. What are the odds that you could take room after room of hundreds and hundreds of people and have almost every person tell you that they felt unworthy? I have had that experience repeated many, many times. When we find a substantial anomaly in the human experience, we are obliged to look for deeper explanations. It is my judgment that around the world, humankind's giant spring is becoming explosively loaded.

I said that there were two reasons for the separation from the God experience. The first involves the creation of potential energy as we have discussed. The second has to do with ownership.

How different does it feel for you to work for and earn something than to have it handed to you? Certainly gifts are nice, but when you have paid with something through your hard work and effort, it takes on a much greater significance. To strengthen that concept even further, it is when you have lost something that you really come to appreciate it. Read the accounts of how near-death experiences massively change people's appreciation for life. And, the further out you go, the greater the appreciation you feel for what you have had.

So what does all this have to do with God? Well, how separated do you feel from the God-consciousness right now? How alone and unloved and unlovable do you feel at your core? How deeply do the feelings of unworthiness cut into your gut? When you come back to the God-space, your feelings of separation will foster an appreciation of that space simply not possible in any other way. And the pain that you have experienced along the way will energize your process. And from where you are probably sitting at the moment, the process can seem unfair, arbitrary and perhaps even cruel. I assure you that it is not. It is our resistance to opening our hearts that causes us pain and makes the process difficult.

What you need in order to grow and develop has been determined, and you are going to experience what you need, regardless of how you feel about it. And because much of what you need to learn puts you up against your fears and anxieties, I can assure you that you are not going to like it.

The good news is that the rules are changing and that you are going to come home. We have entered an age with somewhat different rules from those of the past. This age, which will be known as The Age of Awakening, will be a 50-year period of unprecedented transformation in human consciousness.

So where does that leave you? Probably confused, frustrated and maybe a little bit scared. The bleed-through of your past life experiences during The Age of Karma has probably left a pretty sour taste in your mouth when it comes to your relationship with God. It strongly influences your present-day beliefs and attitudes.

So this grand process is going to affect all of humanity and you will be swept up in it. Are you powerless to affect the outcome? The answer is yes and no. You are not going to be able to stand in front of the parade with a flag and affect the course of the great ship of life. Humankind is on its path, and the collective agendas of 6 billion other people will determine where we go.

Now, does that mean that you should just sit on the couch, turn on Oprah and wait for enlightenment? No. Life does not work that way. There is a very important related issue, which you do control. You may not be able to direct your life, but you do decide how you will respond to what happens. I will repeat: the quality of your life experience is largely determined not by what happens, but by how you respond to it. Whether you look at life from an individual or a societal perspective, there is only one process occurring. You are being asked to learn to love. To love others for certain, but most importantly, to learn to love yourself. The more we do that, the easier life becomes. Life does not change; we change how we relate to it.

Here's the secret: as you become more loving and compassionate, you affect what happens to you because the Universe "backs off." The Universe is here to teach you to love, and as you begin to get the lesson and live more in harmony with life, you don't need more "training."

The goal is to learn to live in harmony with the Universal Principle to LOVE EVERYTHING. Good, bad, scary, sweet, disruptive or harmonious, your goal is to learn to love the process. You don't have to like what is happening, but if you work at it, you can come to see and appreciate the powerful opportunity for change contained in even the most difficult and trying of circumstances.

So that's the goal. In concept, loving yourself is simple, but as you know, doing it can be difficult. And, that "difficulty" encompasses the challenge laid before you in completing what you came here to do. Most people are able to love to a point. Deciding that they deserve to be loved and unconditionally opening their hearts presents significant difficulty. I have written about learning to love yourself in several of these articles and the subject is addressed at length in my new book Truth.

Ok, so what do you do? Even if you accept that everything I have said so far is correct, you are still stuck with the person you see in the mirror every morning. That person gets scared, angry, judgmental and occasionally downright petty. What can you do to help that person to heal?

Start by practicing loving other people. Make it a conscious effort, 24 hours a day. Start with loving the people you know that you do not have major issues with. Note that I said love, not like. You may disagree with another person's choices, but you can still love them for who they are. Practice opening your heart to them and work to keep it open. Watch to see if your attitude changes when their behavior changes, especially if they change their behavior toward you.

When you feel as though you have begun to love the people you know, then practice loving strangers, like the guy in the other car, the person ahead of you in line or the clerk at the store. Again, you won't always like what they do, but love who they are. This can be easier with strangers because they are safer. After all, you don't know them and they don't know you. Remember, this is about changing what goes on inside you.

Then when you are ready, work on learning to love the people who push your buttons, who you have issues with, who aggravate you or that you simply dislike. In order to do that, it helps to separate behavior from issues. If you were to see someone walking naked down the street for example, you could have any number of reactions ranging from curiosity to amusement. You might not like what they were doing, but you would be largely uninvolved in the occurrence. If you told a friend about the incident it would be from a place of curiosity or perhaps humor, even shock or surprise. You would not be involved in what had happened.

If on the other hand, you had issues about your own sexuality, the naked person's behavior might cause any number of more intense reactions. Seeing their uninhibited sexuality might drive you to become incensed and berate them or even throw stones, for example. If you told someone about what had happened, it might be with moral indignation. Emotionally you would have become very involved in the naked person's behavior, and that is the difference. This is where we often get into trouble in relationship. We condemn the other for their "nakedness," while failing or refusing to recognize that our emotional involvement is far deeper than that of the casual, uninvolved observer.

Once you have begun to recognize your own involvement in the creation of an issue, then try to look past the issue to see, to truly see, the other person. Nine times out of ten you will find a scared, fearful, alone, hurt person on the other side of this issue. If you can grasp that, you can better respond to what is really going on instead of the stuff you usually squabble over. They will probably still be difficult to deal with; so don't set yourself up to get run over. But, this is not about them. You will feel better about yourself for dealing with the situation this way.

In order to move toward your own healing you must learn to love everything. Love them for their willingness to participate - even in a "negative" way - toward making you aware of your resistance to loving unconditionally. Also, if you wish, thank them for helping with the growth and development of our species.

And, if you cannot do any of that, then fake it. That's right, cheat. If you do this earnestly, even though you do not believe it, you will find that you naturally begin to migrate to a better space. So, even if you fake it, you'll actually begin to feel better, and that will reinforce doing it even more.

If you can't fake it, you will want to look more deeply into the issue you are confronting. Do the shamanic journey process to identify the fear that is being triggered and work with the old fear and pain that you are carrying. This is a place where good professional help can be beneficial.

Then after all that, go into the bathroom, look into the mirror and start to work on loving yourself.

Ross Bishop is a natural shaman with a remarkable gift for helping people heal their fears and anxieties. He brings to that task a profound insight of the human condition. Ross has been teaching and practicing for 25 years, formerly in Santa Fe and presently in Virginia. He has authored three books on healing: Healing The Shadow, one of the mainstay books of modern shamanism, Truth, released in 2004, and Journey to Enlightenment, released in 2008. He has modified the ancient shamanic healing journey process to fit the needs of contemporary people and has released a CD of that process “The Shamanic Journey,” available from his web site. He writes a great deal about the human condition and his books and articles can be found on his web site: www.rossbishop.com.

Why is Life so Difficult?

by Ross Bishop

I do not have to describe your place of personal darkness. You know only too well the feeling of that dark place and the influence it can have over you. Whether formed by a powerful trauma or simply the painful struggle of growing up, your "shadow" as shamans call it, has the power to seriously disrupt your life.

Allow me to explain. First, we must consider the one basic principle that guides human existence on earth. Everything that happens here revolves around this principle. It is the reason you are here. This principle is expressed through a simple question, "Do you love yourself?" The extent to which you do not determines - and this is very important to the experiences you will need in order to: 1. Call your attention to your lack of love for yourself, and 2. Give you the opportunity to change.

Everything that has ever happened to you, every moment, every occurrence, is because of those two points. Thatâs right, I'll say it again: everything, every event, every occurrence, every moment of your life, is guided and directed by the degree to which you do or do not love yourself.

Take some time and think about the various events of your life from this perspective and you will see what I mean. The problem is that we get all caught up in the smoke generated by our life experiences and lose sight of the "fire" that's creating the "problem" in the first place.

Consider where you spend your time and energy. Most likely you go from problem, to problem, to problem, with little time or energy to do much else. Your cup is undoubtedly full to overflowing. There is an old cliché: "When youâre up to your neck in alligators, it is difficult to remember that your original task was to drain the swamp." However, this is only partly true.

It is true that when all you can do is to work on immediate problems, it is very difficult to search for deeper explanations. But, it isn't just about time and energy. It is also about focus. Dealing with daily problems necessitates an external focus. You know how it goes: your relationship is rocky, the kids are causing problems, work isn't going well, etc., and as a result, your time and energy are spent plugging the holes in your external life (the surface manifestations).

We stop here because we really donât want to go deeper. We don't understand what is going on, and going into the shadow can feel pretty scary. I want to help you understand the deeper process that is at work so that it won't seem quite so mysterious.

Also, the spiritual institutions of the time had become incredibly corrupt. They had totally lost touch with the needs of the people. As science and commerce threatened their dominance over society, the various faiths tightened their control, creating forms of religious rigidity (the Inquisition, Puritanism) previously unknown except in cult situations. This rigidity ultimately alienated the populace and hastened the demise of these fundamentalist faiths.

The first thing to understand is that this is not a new issue. You have been wrestling with these dynamics for centuries. In fact, these unresolved past life dynamics are what have shaped the events and circumstances of your present life. In the past, you always ended up on the short end of the stick, so it is understandable that you don't want to look deeper. The important thing to remember is that you have been repeatedly pushed someplace you haven't wanted to go. You have resisted, the Universe has persisted, and as a result, things have gone badly and you have felt a lot of pain. If I say to you, "Love yourself" what comes up? You probably canât exactly put your finger on it, but I'll bet that you can feel some sort of resistance.

Every experience you have ever had, in this life or a past one, involves some aspect of the Universe urging you to love yourself - every experience. So, I am going to ask you to hold on to Principle #1:

"This is happening because I need to learn to love myself."

And remember, we are talking about every situation. How do you know? Simple: because you get hooked. If you didnât get hooked, it would be just another experience. We get all caught up in the external event, but what is really important is that the Universe is trying to wake you up to the fact that in this kind of situation, you do not love yourself.

This opens the door for Principle #2:

"Take your focus off the other person."

It means no longer persecuting them for wronging you or hurting you. And when you take your focus off them, you stop being victimized by them. Now, you are not going to like what they did, and this is important. It may have even seemed cruel or hurtful, and you won't like it. But you deal with that part. You donât ignore it, you deal with it. But deal with it with compassion and then let go.

Seeing the situation as a learning allows you to remain focused on what is really happening. This brings us to Principle #3:

"Deal with the real problem, not what's on the table."

Most of the time people do not speak their real truth. Maybe they were scared, and all the stuff they said to you was garbage, but when you are focused on your emotions and your feelings of being hurt, it is very difficult to see the other person.

Our focus is usually on the smoke instead of the fire. We rarely look at what is really going on. And if you focus on the smoke, you will miss the real problem. If what is on the surface is not the real issue, as is the case much of the time, you're going to get hopelessly mired trying to address a bunch of non-issues.

No one likes confrontation. We do it because we feel that we must. When you realize that and start to focus on whatâs really happening, it dramatically alters your response to others and then you can get on to some real problem solving.

When your insides get tugged on by life, the tugging isn't coming from the outside. It may feel like it, but it's not. It is a product of you not loving yourself. Let's take an example: somebody calls you stupid. Now, if someone called Albert Einstein stupid, I'm sure he would have given them a curious look. Why? Because Einstein had to know that he was a pretty smart person. Calling him stupid wasn't going to register on his "This is a true statement meter."

You, on the other hand, are probably not Einstein. You've been called stupid in the past and it hurt. So, if someone calls you stupid, or ugly, or insensitive, etc. today, it will register somewhere on your "Maybe it's true meter." Note that what they say is far less important than the fact that you are being criticized.

A condemnation coming from an outside source replays your old wounding process. What is important is that you validate it and let it in. That is what makes the difference. It is you who chooses to accept what is said. Therefore the pain that you feel is really a self-inflicted wound. So, this brings us to Principle #4 to log away in your Important Thoughts mental card file:

IF YOU DIDN'T ALREADY BELIEVE IT, IT WOULDN'T MATTER.

Consider this difference: a friend comes to you and lovingly says, "You know, I could have heard you a lot easier if you had . . . "What happens? You listen. Even if you ultimately do not agree with them, or, you don't like hearing it, you'll think about their suggestion. Notice how in this instance, even though you may be uncomfortable, the focus remains on the message. You probably will not feel the necessity to defend. What's the difference? You felt safe enough to listen. And that is one of the important secrets of life. The reason that life is sometimes so difficult is because we resist. If you can put these principles into practice, you will find that life will get a lot easier.

Ross Bishop is a natural shaman with a remarkable gift for helping people heal their fears and anxieties. He brings to that task a profound insight of the human condition. Ross has been teaching and practicing for 25 years, formerly in Santa Fe and presently in Virginia. He has authored three books on healing: Healing The Shadow, one of the mainstay books of modern shamanism, Truth, released in 2004, and Journey to Enlightenment, released in 2008. He has modified the ancient shamanic healing journey process to fit the needs of contemporary people and has released a CD of that process “The Shamanic Journey,” available from his web site. He writes a great deal about the human condition and his books and articles can be found on his web site: http://www.rossbishop.com/