Move from Me to We
The focus on healing me
Within spiritual communities there is a large focus on healing. Healing all of your traumas/wounds, diving into your darkness and increasing your relational transparency. While all of these things are valid and necessary in order to see and become aware of yourself, they also keep you contained within your personal healing journey. They focus on me, me, me without leaving room for much else.
There is absolutely a rhythm on most people’s journey where these aspects need to be addressed and given the attention they deserve, as otherwise more inclusive states of being cannot be held or sustained, however I see many people get stuck here. Spirituality has become defined by some as “I dove into more of my darkness and have more wounds so I’m more evolved aka better than you”. This can be tricky to see as it is often an unconscious theme, and unfortunately it keeps you focused on yourself and how healed you are or aren’t becoming.
3 basic rhythms in moving from Me to We:
- Discover. This is the rhythm of personal healing. You become aware of your patterns and how you do you. How you’ve avoided pain and learned to protect/guard yourself throughout your life. You move from hiding out in fear, lacking worth and value, to declaring your are actually a somebody.
- Transform. This is the rhythm of developing a self, a person, a somebody. You feel empowered, worthy, begin to make your own rules for life. You create, make changes and essentially “conquer your world”. No one can mess with you here as you are in full charge of your life.
- Awaken. This is the rhythm of no longer being a self. You realize that your empowered self, though great, is not all there is. You begin to “lose” or relinquish your sense of personhood along with the self importance and significance that comes with it. Your “identity” becomes more of beingness, light and love. You simply exist and not as a separate being, but as all there is.
Next level spirituality
Focus on healing we
Becoming aware of yourself, your patterns, developing a personhood or identity is a vital part of the journey, but it doesn’t end there. Many people in spiritual communities are stuck in the Discover rhythm. They also have a sense of the Awaken rhythm, but because they haven’t developed a self they have nothing to relinquish at the end of Transform and end up feeling unworthy to Awaken and know themselves as God, which keeps them feeling like they have nothing to offer, something to prove, or that they are not that almighty and powerful. They don’t realize their contribution to/as the larger and thus go back to focusing on healing their personal wounds (as this is where they get their significance), to become more “whole” instead of seeing how they can contribute and be in service at the collective level, creating massive influence and change.
Next level spirituality requires that we massively up level ourselves. That we get beyond our personal healing journey of focusing on our wounds/traumas, reclaim our worth and value, in order to truly surrender our self so that we can know more of who and what we really are. Thus God/life/universal intelligence can work through us, as us, to create the most awesome world together as the one being we are.
From here we can heal We. Entire systems and structures can shift overnight as being the collective is much more powerful than our personal, will self. It requires we be willing to relinquish our personal agendas, our self-importance, including what we think our super important purpose is, for something we may not even know yet. Letting go of what we think we know, trusting, and not drawing conclusions about what things mean are the beginning elements to becoming universal intelligence in action and healing the world.
Dr. Amanda Hessel, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado