Cleaning up our personal messes

Many of us have started to repeat the collective beliefs that “The world is on fire,” or “We’ve left it too late,” and while there are very real and immediate challenges at hand, with much that needs to be done, our approach with Artemes is a very practical one. We each work towards clearing up our individual patterns and programs that are keeping us locked in old ways of thinking and behaving, while simultaneously picking an area—whether it’s social, political or environmental—that we feel most aligned with, and bringing forward our efforts to create change.

In this five part blog series we take a practical overview of the different types of messes we have collectively created. The intention is touch on the surface of the interconnectedness of the issues we collectively face.

WE BEGIN WITH OUR PERSONAL MESSES

We begin by looking within at our own personal mess before we start looking outwards. This is because we want to make our contribution to humanity from beyond our fears, programs, and reactions—from a place where we are level-headed, conscious, and awake. If we don’t make this switch first, we operate from within the collective soup of catastrophic thinking, where we worry that the human race, or the earth, is not going to make it, and we act out of survival rather than in awareness.

When we are operating from survival, we are much more likely to go into the attack and defend mindset. Yet when we operate from a more conscious state, we look at the world and the people in it, with a greater sense of unity, compassion, and understanding. When we meet the challenges of the world from this place, it is less out of fear of a catastrophic future and more because we want to create a fairer, more connected, and compassionate world.

When it comes to clearing up our personal mess, many spiritual paths stop there—and stay there. If we are not careful, we get stuck in a never-ending loop of sorting out our own challenges. In the Artemes System, the point of sorting out our personal mess is so that we can have not only an incredible connected life, but that we can also go on to do something useful for others with that life. Whether you dedicate yourself to transforming social or political issues, deeply caring for others, or impacting the environment, once you have begun to work with your personal mess, you can have more impact in the world.

Our personal mess is something we’ve learned and built up over time. For most of us, it started when we were children. Modern psychology often points to our parents, blaming them for what we’ve become, but they themselves were operating from the same cycle of pain that was passed onto them, and that they passed onto us. Just as their own parents did to them, our parents gave off an energy that was reflected within us. If there is nervousness, hunger, or anxiety in our mother’s eyes, we will reflect this in our internal space. If our father connects to us with anger or with pain, so too do we learn to operate from that which we have been taught. We learn to feel the emotions that our parents are experiencing, and although it is often not their intention, we become a product of our upbringing as a result.

One of the first layers of the shell of our world that we need to begin to crack is the layer of who we believe we are, based on all the limitations that we learned before. For today, perhaps you can consider what personal messes you might want to start to clean up.

Next week we dive into the social messes we must clean up in order to move forward.

Photo by Jonatan Pie