Validation

Greetings all,

I hope you had a productive week.  This was my first week back at the gym since recuperating from a cold.  It's also been a week of meetings and plans being laid.  Despite the up in the air feeling that has prevailed for the past two months I may start to nail some things down...for now.

 Two weeks ago I had the benefit of working with a friend whose skills I respect highly.  I've been doing a lot of personal work to remove blocks and internal struggles within myself the past year or so. What they saw in my energy field this time took them by surprise, a hidden attachment and a broken place in my energetic structure.  They'd never been aware of it before and yet it had been there for years.  So he gave me some information and then trusted that I could get rid of it on my own.  I was excited to get started and went home that night to journey to my teacher.  Well the work was done by a master teacher during a shamanic journey.  I felt a huge surge of heat and energy as I popped in and out of consciousness during the shamanic trance.  I went to bed and the next morning when I awoke I was exhausted.  It felt like I hadn't slept in days.  This was the day I had planned to start back swimming, but the idea evaporated.  I went to teach my class then came home and fell into nap for most of the afternoon. The following day I woke up still tired but not quite as worn out.  Still I had a day of teaching, clients, and ceremonies.  After my last client of the day I passed out in my chair at my office.

Now my friend had told me that it could take some time for the energetic structure to heal and that I could be tired while it was repairing itself.  One of the other side effects I experienced is that I was even more sensitive to energy and people than normal.  When I went into teach the first day after the work I was bombarded by the cacophony of people as I entered the gym.  All of this was very noticeable to me, but what struck me even more was I had a desperate need for feedback.  I wanted to make sure that I had handled the issue right.  Even though I didn't do the work a guide did it, I wanted validation that what I had sensed and received was accurate.  Now there is nothing wrong with seeking validation and confirmation of psychic information, particularly as you are learning to sense and interpret what it is you are seeing/feeling/hearing.  However, the genesis of this particular problem had come about because I had stopped trusting my own senses and started relying on others.

Years ago I was involved in a group of people that were working on growing their psychic and energetic abilities.  From early on one of the members cast me as the person in the group with no particular talent.  They even joked about it, but it was one of those jokes that cut.  I would sense things that they'd do and then they would deny it.  They eventually wore down my self esteem and awareness until I became extremely vulnerable and basically couldn't trust my own eyes (or at least my third eye).  Keep in mind that up until this time I had considered myself fairly psychically gifted.  I had read for people since I was 14 and so I had more than a decade of experience with psychic phenomena at the time.  So although I knew I wasn't the most gifted reader in the whole world, I was fairly confident in my ability.  That was over though, now I was being gaslighted constantly.  Although I eventually escaped from that group with my life, the scars it left took years to heal.

Flash back to this past week.  This process of healing was continuing and I was excited about it, and even wanted to talk to other healers in my sphere about it, but above all else a big portion of me was desperate for validation.  I was about to ask for it when something clicked into my head, "Wait a minute that's how all this got started."  I realized as much as I craved that validation I must not ask for it.  I needed to trust my own intuition and guidance otherwise the healing would never really be complete.  So this has left me both frustrated and hopeful.  Frustrated in that I really want external validation.  Hopeful in that if I live a bit with this discomfort a deeper pattern can be transmuted within myself.

We all seek external validation.  It's like hard wired into our egos.  The problem is that there will never be enough praise and support.  Even if we are constantly showered we will continue to need more and more.  This becomes even more problematic if we have created our identity externally.  Unfortunately most of us have, it's part of our culture and the trend is accelerating.  The dark side of social media is the empty feeling we sometimes have that we didn't get enough likes, that our vacation photos aren't as good as our friends' pictures, that we just aren't as successful or happy as those around us.  The truth is though, that most of us have that the core of doubt about who we are, and so we are constantly seeking others to tell us who and what we are.  We try buying our identity with wardrobes, cars, houses, vacations, and electronic toys.  We seek accolades and applause from our peer groups.  We worry constantly what others are thinking about us, completely unaware that most of them are worried about the exact same thing.  The need for external validation is a black hole that will never be filled.  The only thing that can calm it is an internal knowing of who we are, and that takes some discomfort to experience.  We have to unplug from that external source and tap in to the source within ourselves.  We know who we are, we've just forgotten.

So why am I telling you this?  Well you're pretty awesome, but you won't believe me if I tell you that, or if you do that will fade quickly back into your base state of self doubt.  No one can tell you who you are.  They can reflect back what you are putting out, and the more they know themselves the clearer and more coherent that reflection will be.  However until you decide to trust yourself, your feelings, your abilities, and your dreams you won't see that reflection.  I'm not saying that you don't deserve to hear what a good job you're doing, we all need encouragement from time to time.  Especially when we have fallen down into one of life's challenges.  What we do most of the time though is jump from one ego fix to another, just like a heroin junkie.  The only difference is we're not injecting a drug, we're injecting people's opinion of ourselves.  Here's a hint most people's opinion about you is completely wrong.  They just don't have enough data.  Why would they know more about you than you do?  You spend every minute of every day with yourself.  So this week unless you absolutely need an opinion or approval for a work project don't ask for someone else to validate you or what you do.  Try it for a week.  See how deep the addiction runs.  Just become aware, I'd say let me know how you do, but I won't be giving you my feedback either.

Peace and Blessings,
Thomas Mooneagle