The Responsibility of Awakening...

Sep 9

8 min read

It is not always easy to see something differently than the people around us.

There are moments along this journey when something simply changes. An old fear no longer has the same power. A belief we carried for years suddenly falls away. Something we once desperately needed to control no longer seems worth holding onto.

We begin to recognize a Divine order beneath circumstances that once looked only like chaos.

Sometimes these changes happen slowly, almost imperceptibly. Other times something inside us breaks open and there is simply no returning to who we were before.

We may still live in the same house, go to the same job, sit across the table from the same people, and move through the same world, but we are no longer experiencing any of it in quite the same way.

That can be exhilarating. It can also be incredibly lonely.

Because naturally, when we experience something that profound, we want the people we Love to experience it too.

We want to reach back and say, Come here. Look at this. You don't have to be afraid anymore. There is something on the other side of what you are holding.

We want them to see what we see. And that is where one of the great lessons of Awakening begins.

There Is No Finish Line.

There was a time when I thought of Awakening almost like a finish line. Some arrived earlier. Others were still running the course, navigating obstacles I had already passed. There could even be a loneliness in standing there wondering why others couldn't see what had become so clear to me.

I don't see it that way anymore.

There is no finish line. There are no winners, and there are no sleepers. There are only Souls remembering in their own time.

That distinction matters. Calling another person asleep can quietly become another form of separation. It places us on one side and them on another. Awake and asleep. Conscious and unconscious. Evolved and unevolved. Eventually, we can recreate the very separation we claim Awakening has taught us to transcend.

The person beside us may not recognize something we have come to understand, while simultaneously seeing something about themselves, about Love, about forgiveness, about courage, or about this existence that we haven't even begun to comprehend.

Someone may be spiritually perceptive and still struggle deeply with compassion. Another may never use the word Spirit and yet live every day with extraordinary kindness, generosity, and Grace. Someone may understand energy, synchronicity, and consciousness while still carrying wounds they haven't been willing to face.

We are complicated Beings.

Awakening isn't a ladder. There is no higher rung from which we get to look down and declare ourselves more evolved. It is an unfolding, and perhaps the responsibility that comes with Awakening is not to awaken anyone else.

It is to remain Awake ourselves.

When Growth Becomes Lonely

This is where the romantic idea of Awakening meets reality. Growth can change relationships.

When we stop participating in an old pattern, the people who participated in that pattern with us may not understand. When we stop responding to fear the way we once did, someone may interpret our calm as indifference. When we establish a boundary where there was never one before, the person who benefited from our lack of boundaries may not celebrate our Growth.

Sometimes people who knew an earlier version of us will continue speaking to that version long after we have begun becoming someone else.

And that hurts.

There is a particular loneliness in realizing that something which has transformed us cannot simply be explained to another person. We can describe the experience. We can tell the story. We can share what we learned. But we cannot transfer the knowing.

They have to discover their own.

This is especially difficult when the person is someone we deeply Love. We can see their fear. We can see the walls they have built. Sometimes we can even recognize the path because we once walked it ourselves.

Everything inside us wants to help.

So, we explain more. We give more. We rescue. We convince. We soften the Truth. We make ourselves smaller so someone else doesn't feel uncomfortable standing beside us. Sometimes we even step backward into an old version of ourselves because remaining where we have grown feels too lonely.

But eventually we discover something difficult:

We cannot Love someone into their Awakening by doing their Awakening for them.

Love Does Not Drag.

This may be one of the hardest lessons for those of us who naturally want to help others.

There is a difference between offering someone a hand and needing them to take it. There is a difference between sharing our Light and trying to shine it into someone's eyes. There is a difference between compassion and rescue.

Love respects Choice.

That means sometimes Love stands beside someone while they make a decision we would not make. Sometimes Love watches someone repeat a lesson we desperately wish they could avoid. Sometimes Love says, I am here, without saying, I will carry this for you.

And sometimes Love requires a boundary.

We can Love someone and refuse to participate in their fear. We can Love someone and say no. We can Love someone and walk away from a harmful dynamic. We can Love someone without surrendering our Peace to prove the depth of our compassion.

Love does not drag or chase. Love does not diminish itself to be accepted, and Love does not require us to abandon ourselves in order to prove that it exists.

Love illuminates.

It offers another possibility simply by existing.

Maybe our greatest influence upon another person's journey will never come from the words we say. Maybe it comes from watching us live through something that once would have destroyed us and seeing that somehow, we remained standing.

Maybe they see us forgive without becoming weak. Set a boundary without becoming cruel. Lose something without losing ourselves. Change direction without calling the previous road a failure. Walk into uncertainty without demanding guarantees from the Universe.

Perhaps this is how Light actually spreads.

Not through convincing, but through embodiment.

What It Means to Go First.

Perhaps this is what being a forerunner actually means.

Not being ahead, but being willing to go first.

Being willing to put down the armor first. To forgive first. To stop competing first. To question an old belief first. To choose compassion instead of judgment first.

Sometimes going first means being the person who says, This ends with me.

A family pattern. A resentment carried for decades. A belief about who we are supposed to be. A wound passed from one generation to another.

Sometimes going first means admitting we were wrong. Sometimes it means finally saying what is True. Sometimes it means leaving something we have outgrown even when we don't yet know what will replace it.

And sometimes going first means trusting Spirit when there is absolutely no evidence yet that everything is going to be okay.

That may be one of the most authentic expressions of Faith.

Not certainty. Movement without certainty.

There are moments when something deep inside simply whispers, You cannot go backward from here.

So, we step.

We don't know whether anyone will follow. We don't even know exactly where we are going. But we step anyway.

There is another part of Awakening we don't talk about enough.

Remembering who we are once is not the difficult part. Remembering when life becomes difficult is.

It is easy to speak about Trust when everything is working. It is easy to believe in Abundance when there is plenty. It is easy to talk about Divine Timing when events are unfolding according to our preferred schedule.

The practice begins when they aren't.

When someone chooses fear, it is easy to become afraid with them. When someone builds a wall, our instinct may be to build one of our own. When anger is directed toward us, anger begins looking remarkably reasonable in response.

The energy around us can be powerful.

This doesn't mean we have failed spiritually. It means we are human Beings having a human experience.

Awakening doesn't remove our humanity. It deepens our relationship with it.

We will still become frightened. We will still become angry. We will still occasionally react from wounds we thought we had healed years ago.

There will be days when all of our Spiritual Wisdom seems to have taken the afternoon off.

The difference may simply be that we recognize it sooner.

We remember.

We return to our center. We listen again. We remember the Vision, the Mission, and the Love. And when we lose our way, as we inevitably will, we simply remember again.

Perhaps Awakening is not a permanent state of enlightenment at all. Maybe it is remembering more quickly each time we forget.

The deeper we travel into ourselves, the less armor seems necessary.

That can feel frightening.

We spent years learning how to protect ourselves. We built identities, defenses, explanations, and walls. Some of them were necessary. They helped us survive experiences we didn't yet have the tools to navigate.

We don't need to hate those old defenses. We can thank them.

But we may not need to live inside them forever.

There is tremendous Strength in being able to stand before another Human Being without needing to pretend we are invulnerable. To say,

This hurt me. To say, I don't know. To say, I Love you. To say, I was wrong. To say, I need help.

Vulnerability is not weakness. It is what becomes possible when we no longer need fear to protect our identity.

Perhaps that is why Awakening sometimes feels like becoming more sensitive rather than less. We feel more because we are no longer numbing everything that frightened us.

The goal was never to become untouchable.

The goal was to become Whole.

Their Journey Belongs to the Divine Too

Eventually we arrive at a difficult surrender.

Other people's journeys are not ours to control.

That doesn't mean becoming passive. It doesn't mean withholding our Truth or hiding what we have discovered. We speak. We share. We teach when invited. We offer our hand.

But we stop needing someone else to take it.

Their journey belongs to the Divine just as ours does.

There is tremendous Freedom in that realization. We do not have to save everyone. We do not have to convince everyone. We don't even have to be understood by everyone.

And perhaps most importantly, we stop measuring the effectiveness of our Light by someone else's response to it.

A seed does not become meaningless because it didn't sprout the day it was planted.

Something we say today may make no difference whatsoever today. Years from now, in a moment we will never witness, it may suddenly make perfect sense.

We don't get to choose the timing.

We simply plant with Love and release the outcome.

Our responsibility is to remember who we are when the world around us gives us a thousand reasons to forget.

Remember that beneath the fear, we are still Love. Beneath the noise, Spirit is still speaking. Beneath the apparent chaos, something greater may still be unfolding.

Remember that our worth was never dependent upon whether anyone recognized our Light.

Because ultimately, it was never between us and them. It has always been between us and the Divine.

I do not belong to another person's expectations of me. I do not belong to my titles, my accomplishments, my failures, or even the person I used to be. Those are experiences I have had. They are not the totality of what I AM.

I belong to the Divine.

I belong beneath these Stars, among the Mountains and Valleys, beside the Rivers and Oceans, among the Animals and Trees. I belong in the Silence and in the noise, in the Becoming and in the Remembering. I belong to this strange, beautiful experience of being human while carrying something Eternal inside me.

I belong here. And so do you.

Maybe that is the final illusion Awakening asks us to release: the belief that we were ever separate in the first place.

We were never separated from the Love we have spent lifetimes searching for. We were created from it, surrounded by it, and carry it within us.

Perhaps Awakening was never about becoming something greater at all.

Perhaps it has always been about Remembering what we already are.