The Deletion...

THIS VIDEO CONTAINS RELAXING BACKGROUND MUSIC THAT WILL CONTINUE FOR SEVERAL MINUTES AFTER THE NARRATION COMPLETES. FEEL FREE TO USE THIS EXTRA TIME TO QUIETLY REFLECT. DO NOT DRIVE OR OPERATE MACHINERY DURING THIS VIDEO/AUDIO.

Four years ago I ran a coaching program called Into the Unknown. It was a chance for me to share something with the world that had been immensely valuable to me to see: that not only was it okay to not know, but that it was in fact a place of power and potential. You could call this space the seat of a Higher Self which, unlike the ego, is unrestricted by the noise of our societal conditioning. It seems to be connected to a much higher intelligence than our intellect and unlike the busy-ness of an overthinking mind, its nature is quiet and peaceful. When we allow ourselves to sit in the space of the unknown without resistance, it is capable of channelling intelligent energy from a formless "no-thing" into intuitive nudges we can follow that become the infinite "something's" that make up our shared reality and the form of our world.

I had seen first hand how getting out of the way of the noise of my head had allowed this deeper intelligence to bring healing to my body from a chronic health condition that I had suffered from for 7 years. As my understanding of this space grew, it enabled me to stop trying to figure life out so much. Partly this was because I saw that this space before my thinking was the place of peace that we all seek externally in our goals and our strivings. It's actually within us. So we don't need to try so hard to simply have a sense of wellbeing. But it was also because I saw that following the nudges from this sense of deep Knowing could easily help me to live my life, just simply by following the breadcrumbs that it served up in front of me in each and every present moment.

But as I reflect back I see now that I didn't live completely in the Unknown. I lived from it. There were things that I thought I knew, which didn't seem to exist in the realm of the unknown, which provided some boundaries, or scaffolding, for helping me to understand, and make sense of, what I thought was important in the world. Some examples:

I thought I knew who I was in the world and what I represented
I thought I knew what was important
I had interests and things I cared about that looked like they would never change
I thought I knew I wanted to grow a business
I thought it was important for me to help people
I didn't realise this until it fell away, but there was a part of me that clearly wanted people to look up to me.

The nudges that I got from the unknown appeared, it seemed, to help me do well with these things - much better than my noisy insecure thinking mind had ever done.

To put it another way, I had learned to navigate what I thought was the known from the intelligence of the nudges that came to me from the unknown. It left me feeling very confident in many ways as I began to see that something within me was very capable of allowing me to do well within the structures of the society that we have become accustomed to living within, but without all the stress and overthinking which had previously made me sick.

But it began to change...

2020 was a pinnacle year for many of us. I had always had a questioning and curious mentality, and don't like to blindly accept what I am told. I learned years ago to look for myself and it was what I had learned from that curiosity that often helped me to help my coaching clients. I would challenge their perceptions of what was true from the perspective of seeing alternative truths that I had garnered from my own insights and explorations. The sharing of these perspectives would help to open people's minds and enable them to see new possibilities.

But the events of that year kicked this side of me into a much higher gear. As the amount of advice, directives, and general noise about what we should and shouldn't do increased, externally, in the world, I found myself in a state of questioning literally everything I was told. I believe this served as a kickstart for me to go into a deeper level of awakening, and I know many others who feel, and have experienced, the same.

During this period, I explored many different perspectives both from mainstream and alternative media hoping to come to some firm conclusions and reach some answers about what was actually 'true'. I did sessions with some of my old mentors and some new ones also. But the more and more I explored, the less concrete answers I found and the more questions were left. That's not to say I did not find 'answers'. But many were not answers I would stake my life on. Many seemed to be based on opinion, conjecture and things I couldn't verify. Others seemed to be factual, but I found it hard to conclude if those facts were 'good' or 'bad'. On more than one occasion, in fact, I would find out a piece of information that seemed factual, and then make a conclusion about it that seemed to be 'bad', only to later find out another piece of information that made it seem 'good'. How much more information existed that could cause me to bounce between opinions, Lord only knows. The rabbit hole seemingly just kept getting deeper. The only thing I could objectively say about any of it was that the world appeared to be much stranger than I had thought, and I didn't really 'KNOW' for sure what was really 'true'. This is one of the reasons I have never shared the results of some of these more recent explorations. The experience though, if nothing else, has left me far more open minded than ever.

But there was also another interesting dynamic. Speaking to some of my old mentors had so much less of an impact on me than previously. I think this might be because they weren't questioning some of the things that I was. They would still point me to what I had seen about the power of the unknown. But I couldn't hear it from them somehow. I think I needed to know that those same insights that I had already seen held steady in the face of what I had been questioning. The fact that many of my old mentors weren't questioning those things shut me down. Their words and pointing, whilst well meaning and heartfelt as always, felt a little theoretical in the context of what I was exploring. It was like the difference between someone sharing something that they had learned from a book, but not lived themselves, versus hearing the same thing from the author of the book who had actually lived through the experience they had written about.

After a while this process of seeking became overwhelming and I began to feel like ALL external sources, mainstream, alternative and working with coaches (old or new) - even previously helpful ones - were just turning into 'noise'. I just needed to turn off all the seeking.

Moreover I had been changed from this process. What I thought I knew about pretty much everything in life had come up for scrutiny and much less than ever looked 'solid'. In addition, the process of searching for 'truth' had not replaced these formally solid looking ideas about life with anything more solid either. It was like I had entered a 'washing machine' which was systematically deleting everything from my being that had ever looked solid, with few exceptions. One mentor I spoke to some years ago had called this experience a 'template wipe'. This felt true...

I still found myself following the nudges which came to me from the unknown, but with one big difference. I was no longer able to make sense of those nudges. I couldn't relate what I was doing in terms of whether they had meaning or not. There was no sense, for example, of:

Building a business
Achieiving goals
or whether I was doing things that I thought were valuable or not.

In fact, I had no idea how I felt or what I thought about any of these things anymore.

The experience stretched to other things in my life also. Hobbies, interests and other things that I would do for entertainment seemed to lose their shine. Relationships seemingly dropped away. Often there was no argument or reason that seemed to predicate these relationship changes either. It was simply like the relationship had disappeared.

I was now firmly in the unknown. The scaffolding around my being which allowed me to make sense of the world was being systematically deconstructed.

This was not easy, even though I had already seen something of the power and intelligence that resided in the unknown. At times I have felt grief, sadness and even some anxiety as the expanse of my being was exposed as the scaffolding of my conditioned self was removed. I'd be lying if I said I had always handled this gracefully. I haven't, especially the changes in relationships. All I can say, is thank goodness I had had some insight into the safety and transience of these experiences and the power of our internal navigation system, otherwise I would have felt completely lost. But as I have lived through it over the last 3 years, my sense of the power of that inner 'Knowing' has grown ever stronger:

I still am functioning.
I still am living
I still pay the bills
I still seem to function within my little family unit
I am not aware of doing things that others, or even my old self, might have termed bad or harmful and my overall outlook is still to be of service (even though there is a big question mark around what this service actually looks like).

If people were to spectate on my life I suspect they might think I do actually have a sense of meaning and purpose in what I do. Sometimes I actually do, but a lot of time these days it doesn't actually doesn't feel that way. I'm not sure that's a problem either. It's more of an observation. I really see that feeling a sense of purpose comes from relating what we do to what we 'think' we should be doing. When those two are aligned we feel purposeful. When they aren't we don't. But it doesn't actually mean that we aren't 'on purpose' in any objective sense when we don't feel that way. The mind is just a commentator making up ideas that create our moment to moment experience of life, but realising it's comments are not actual 'data' about me or the value of my life has been incredibly helpful in allowing me to relax into whatever I am doing, with so much less judgement and a lot more presence. So I often don't feel terribly purposeful right now, but that's simply because I don't really have any solid ideas of what matters in my mind to relate to actions that I am taking on a day to day basis. Those ideas have been 'deleted'. There's just more trust and faith that what I am moved to do is for the highest and best, even if my mind cannot see how. This article is one such example. I have no idea if it will be published, who will read it or where it will go. That's just not up to me. I briefly got frustrated with that and actually stopped writing it at one point. Then I came back to it when I realised I didn't need to know any more information about what I was doing with it other that just trusting the breadcrumb that right now has told me to write it. The rest, and what happens when it's finished (assuming it get's finished!) is not up to me.

As I come to the final part of this blog, it becomes clear to me one of the reasons why I needed to step back from coaching others, at least for a while. I have always done my best to share what I absolutely 'Knew' to be true with anyone I worked with. People have an ability to intuitively know when someone is sharing something that they don't really see or when they are not being entirely genuine. They will either fight back against your sharing, fail to be impacted or won't engage in the first place. What I have been through over the last few years has served as a 'deepening'. The insights I have had are not new to me. I still see that underneath it all we have a fundamental wellbeing on a Spiritual level. Our peace is always close by. I still see that there is a Knowing that comes from a Higher Intelligence, or Self, within us. But I needed to really 'SEE' that deeper for myself amongst a backdrop of much greater uncertainty and an apparent removal of constructs from my mind about who I thought I was, before I 'came out' again. There's more to say about coaching, but that will come in another blog.

I am aware that there will likely be a lot of people who read this blog who have no idea what I am talking about and / or who cannot relate to what I am sharing. From what I can see humanity is in the midst of an awakening that is affecting us all at different rates and in different ways. This deletion process that I, and others that I know, are experiencing is a part of that and it looks to me like it's a transitionary phase that we go through akin to the shedding of an old skin. That's not to say that there is any better or worst place to be in that process or that there is any judgement, at least from me, if you aren't aware of being in that process. In fact, it looks to me to be by some kind of intelligent design that it's occurring in waves for different people. Given the amount of change that I have gone through over the last few years, and how at times it seems to have stopped me in my tracks, it seems to me that if we all went through it at the same time the result would be chaos!

If you are someone reading this who has resonated with what I have shared, then my hope is that you can feel 'seen' and know that you are not alone. I get the sense that I will be producing some resources to support you during this process. For what it's worth, I feel like we just have to roll with this process right now, and the more we can come alive to our sense of inner Knowing, be with our experience without resistance, and really open up to the possibility that there is intelligence at work here, the easier it will be and the more we will find our way through.

If you haven't resonated with what I have shared, but made it to the end of the blog, then thank you at least for reading this! I hope at least you can feel that I am doing my best to genuinely share an experience that has been extremely real for me over the last few years, even if there's no resonance with your own path right now. I also hope that the spirit of that sincerity will touch you if nothing else.

More to come!!

With lots of love,

john x

Credits:

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬
Free Motion Graphics
Video used: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cbn-GeFPvEs

YouTube Channel:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPkWoUv-d9qJve_KO37syng 

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

Music Credit - https://www.youtube.com/@NatureHealingSociety