It’s easy to get caught up in seemingly important material, physical, and other labels because it’s the nature of everyone in society to judge based on those labels.
The real, spiritual you is not your race, personality, gender, age, religion, sexual orientation, height, weight, muscles, legs, breasts, biceps, butt, hair, lack of hair, beautiful or not face, fit or not body, net worth, car, friends, lover, family, city, state, country, clothes, home, pets, toys, habits or addictions, illness, or political affiliation.
Some of these things may enhance the real you, yet excessive focus on many of them can interfere with your true essence. Much of how people identify themselves is far from who they really are on a soul level.
If you find yourself predominantly identifying with one or more of these mundane classifications, you may be straying too far from your authentic self.
Who are you really?
Your soul, including your spiritual history, makes you who you are and we believe you arrived on this planet knowing, subconsciously, all of it. You can remember some of it if you choose, and those memories may help you more easily fulfill your life purposes for this lifetime and deal with the challenges on your path. Past life regression, meditation, comprehensive astrology and numerology, and other tools can help reveal your genuine nature.
Earthbound Personality vs. Spiritual Essence
In addition to numerous mundane incarnations, we believe we have been spiritual aspirants (of various faiths) and metaphysical teachers in many lifetimes and have returned, in part, to do more of the same.
Even though we are responsible, disciplined, work hard, take a very practical approach to life, and are far from being New Age cosmonauts, our mother resists our career paths.
She has told us she wishes we’d never read Shirley Maclaine’s book, “Out on a Limb,” when we were in our early teens. Even though the book was only one of many that helped remind us of who we are and started us on this path again, she blames Shirley for our metaphysical interests and chooses to avoid trying to understand or believe in them.
It’s like a young musician being influenced by multitudes of successful artists in his early years, and having his intolerant mother blame his career path on David Bowie. If her son had only never been exposed to David Bowie, he would be the lawyer or doctor she always wanted, instead of the successful musician, doing what he loves.
Years ago, we took it personally that our mother chose to have a highly skeptical and judgmental attitude about our beliefs and careers. Then one day we did a series of past life regressions about the subject. What we perceived astounded us and caused us to appreciate and love her all the more and even be grateful for her position.
We saw her being terribly traumatized in lifetimes where she witnessed us being persecuted for our beliefs, and lifetimes in which she was persecuted, in part, for her non-traditional spiritual convictions and society believing her to have witch-like psychic powers (she has a lot of psychic talent now, which she denies).
We also had a glimpse of our mother, or the soul of our mother, on the other side, giving us a knowing look and smile. We instantly and intuitively knew that her soul agreed to have a negative position (as our mother) towards our metaphysical interests. This served to help fortify our convictions and belief in ourselves in the face of opposition.
The opposition also came from friends, other family members, and coworkers, especially early on. Now we realize that the resistance was part of the plan and even relates, to some degree, to our own essence: our objective is to identify and share the truth as we interpret it–if we are rejected by some (even family and friends) for simply occasionally being vocal about our view on the spiritual side of life, then so be it. We accept and detach from those who shun us; it’s part of our spiritual agreement and we embrace it.
The lesson? Try not to take it personally when people don’t express their nature beyond the mundane, or acknowledge or accept the spiritual, inner-self you express to the world. It’s just their earthbound personality and they may be serving you perfectly.
Copyright © 2011 Stephen Petullo, Scott Petullo