The Path of Essence and the Paths of Distraction
There are only two types of interests you focus on in life: those derived from your core Essence, and those that are ‘Distractions’.
Essence are your truest Soul desires. These transpire to you as some form of interests, passions, goals, objectives, ideals. If your Essence is being a violin player, you’re following your Essence by studying violin, practice it, and end up playing violin for a living. You will not be following your Essence if you open a restaurant or you work in insurance.
You have no power over your Essence. You are who/what you are. You can only discover it, become aware of it, and align with it — or not.
Distractions
Distractions are all other things that aren’t your Essence. The hallmark of ‘Distractions’ is that there’s a large degree of anxiety, tension, expectation, in achieving objectives and goals; but when a goal is finally achieved, it doesn’t provide a truly satisfying answer. Instead, the sense of achievement quickly fades and you are left wanting the next thing. In their own way they are addictive, as you cannot live without this sense of anxiety for the next big, ‘better’ thing. Distractions never truly provide an answer, and they make you eternally go around in circles.
Distractions are akin to the illusion of the “barber’s pole”, or the “Sheperd’s Tone”. A Sheperd’s Tone is when you repeat a sequence of sound notes that rise within the same octave, and the progression gives the illusion that the sound is continually ascending in pitch — but it’s always the same sounds.
A typical Distraction could be the stereotypical ‘futile’ greed for the next big house, car, boat, etc. But it might not be so clear. They can also be things you value dearly, that are extremely important to you. They can even be things that are usually perceived as ‘honorable’, ‘useful’, or ‘good’.
A client of mine stated she had an intense desire to travel to a foreign country and establish her activity there; but after having a reading (which didn’t address this explicitly) she observed that this personal interest faded, and no longer had such a strong pull over her. The reading had cleansed the energetic reasons from her past, and offered clarity as to what made her be interested in that life choice. It became more clear to her what paths she really wanted to take.
‘Distractions’ can be extremely difficult to distinguish from the true calling of the Soul, because they are highly emotionally charged. To attempt to make this distinction is a lengthy process, a lifelong one, not an instant ‘abracadabra’ moment.
When you experience very difficult and challenging moments in life — particularly in a spiritual journey or after a spiritual awakening — in reality the ideals, objectives, and constructs you hold on to very tightly, are being taken away from you. This is one way Spirit has to deconstruct the elements that shouldn’t really be part of your Now. This is why it’s a destructive process.
Another way to aid making such distinctions is by inner self-analysis, being on the spiritual journey in general, and healing and energy work, the category in which I’d place my readings. Your intention to seek your Essence will bring to you the tools to make this distinction yourself.
Types of Personal Progress
By living in alignment with your Soul’s desires, you progress ‘vertically’ in spiritual growth, i.e. you come closer to your own Soul. This is because by seeking to align with your Essence, you are ‘seeking your Soul’.
Making choices that align with the Distractions makes you have a more ‘horizontal’ progression. You learn your lessons “the hard way”, going around in circles, from one illusion to the next, until you eventually realize that Distractions, while “fun” in a sense, also caused a lot of pain and suffering, and never truly lead you anywhere. They filled the “gap” without truly closing it. They weren’t the answer.
“Horizontal”, “vertical” are subjective perspectives. All Souls at its core nature are of equal standing. But spiritual evolution does follow a progression, one which all individuals go through and strive for, no matter what. It’s how it works.
Your spiritual growth is always a mix of these two kinds of choices, that lead in two distinct paths: the path of Essence, and the many paths of Distractions. In life you always have free choice, without judgement, to pursue any of them. Those are the rules of the game.
But eventually there comes a time in your journey when you become aware of the ultimately meaningless nature of Distractions, and you commit to completely discard them and live solely for the choices of your Essence.
Because they keep you bounded to your past, Distractions arekarmic. They stem from things that were left unfinished, ended poorly, and/or caused pain and trauma, in this life and in past ones. They are ‘distractions’ because they keep you from living by what your Soul wants to do now. Instead you behave as a perpetual continuation of your past — also known as the ‘karmic wheel’.
By committing to your Essence, the karmic elements start losing momentum, fading away, releasing you more and more to be free, now.
You cannot fix situations from the past. Attempting to do so always creates new unbalanced situations in the future — more karma. ‘My parents didn’t gave me enough X, so I wish to have children of my own to offer them X”. Except that by behaving from this mindset, the X will also cause some sort of unbalance to his/her children, who in turn will want to offer Y to their own children, and so on.
This reasoning never ends. The truly ‘perfect’ situation is an illusion. Attempting to compensate for the past will only generate more karma in the future, more situations, more attachments. Situations are not meant to be compensated, but to be healed and end in closure, permanently – not acted upon from the un-healed, un-clarified state.
The karmic wheel only halts by you actively not offering any momentum to it. In this case, it would be experiencing parenthood if it was something you wished from your Essence, and not experiencing it otherwise. The parental unbalance from your upbringing would have to be healed, in order for it not to affect your judgement in your present moment.
Alignment With Your Essence
Exploring life in the ‘horizontal’ manner is the default mode for human operation. You avidly seek an end goal because subconsciously you feel it will bring you conceptual ‘happiness’ when you get it — without even realizing what it is you are seeking.
You passionately seek, because all Souls seek the Light. On this journey each individual is stumbling along, attempting to find his way in the ‘maze’, by trial-and-error, by his choices. No choice or stance that you can ever make lies outside of this journey. Until ultimately, hopefully, he realizes that the true answer, what he really wanted to do all along, was to return back home: to reconnect with his Soul.
The illusory way to seek, is going after the Distractions. But if it’s a Distraction, the feeling of happiness when you get it is ephemeral; and if you can’t get it, or are unable to, you’ll have an immense reaction of frustration, of failure, because your “happiness” depended on that goal. What you really want to do, is to follow your Essence, because that’s where the Light really is.
The process of aligning with your Essence is not about ‘abstinence’ of anything. It’s not about external rules, isolation, starvation, punishment, etc. It’s not about giving up on pleasurable experience, excitement, joy.
It’s solely about rejecting what within you is out of balance, and seeking only that which is meaningful for your Soul growth. It’s about achieving a balance between enjoying what life has to offer, while staying true to your Essence without compromising it. The means by which you achieve this are entirely up to you.
Only the Essence is ‘truthful’ for the purposes of your growth. Only such path has real, satisfying answers to you, because they relate to your Soul desires. Whatever you seek is always answerable by your Essence, which can and should be followed blindly. This is why there are no ‘rights’ or ‘wrongs’ for your choices in an absolute sense.
Aligning with your Essence is the only right or wrong you need.
