Outside the Bubble/Dissolution of the Bubble Wall

For the last few years I've been exiting and eventually re-entering a bubble (travelling/working, more or less).  The re-entry has often been difficult, becoming re-accustomed to the ways of the world, the working life, the 'everyday' and all that.  For a time, I wondered whether it would get any easier - which it did - and whether it would be an ongoing pattern or if things as a whole would change.  What I mean by this is, I wondered whether I would just get used to the swapping back and forth, or whether it would actually evolve into something new.  I've always learnt the most when I'm either travelling or studying (both more or less outside of the bubble); and each time I re-enter, I find my path more and more clear (though part of that involves changing my lifestyle, my mode of being, and so forth).  This always felt good; a progression of sorts, but not to anything in particular.  More an organic growth into new ways of being happier, more flowing and clear in my creativity, more sincere, humble, heartfelt, loving - basically allowing the truth/my truth to come through by searching for and figuring out the twitches and knots, slowly kneading them out through discovering and learning new ways to approach it all.  Even realising that these things were ostensibly possible was a grand breakthrough for me: Wow, I can actively create energy, change energy, harness new energy, be powerful, share my heart directly.  The list goes on and on, and for these teachings and the experiences behind them, I am and always will be eternally grateful, as I am for this life too.

At first, leaving a bubble is quite confronting, unsettling and even a ghastly challenge at times.  Christ, you think.  I'm outside of the fucking bubble!  You might be working a nine-to-five job that occupies the majority of your time, mind and life, and leaving that fixed routine, that sufficiently pre-determined weekly cycle, for the occasional holiday can bring about a surprisingly dreadful feeling of confrontation.  Many of us probably even know people who are really quite put out by suddenly having the entirety of their time free (time off), or perhaps more aptly, time away from the loop.  I once had a job where the full-timers would amass 'banked hours', so instead of overtime pay they received these hours as accumulated holiday time.  Many of them never took the time off though; though we're either too busy with life, or too comfortable with the work-a-day routine.  Interestingly, the company I was working for would often have to force time off in order to organise rosters and to avoid having too many employees with large amounts of time off accumulated.

I found that after few years of working/travelling and with some work I got used to alternating between what seemed like - and were experienced as - very different worlds.  If you exit regularly - even, say, a couple of times over a few years - you can get used to going back in, and then out, and then back in again, in a more comfortable way.  It still jars the being somewhat, but you do become slightly accustomed to the change, and if you're on any kind of personal journey, the world you return to changes quite a lot each time you go back.  Subtle and long-term transformations begin to re-colour everything; and this, I think, is related to the bubble wall, it's thinning out and finally, for some, it's complete dissolution.

So, leaving as the hero does, adventuring and then returning each time with a new boon - this seemed to be a nice little stepping-stone to whatever lies beyond this manifestation of consciousness.  Sure, the worlds were very different, and still are, superficially; but I love things about them both (inside and outside the bubble, metaphorically putting it) because for me they were always quite intimately connected, even if they did seem to be apart.

One day, during a long stint overseas, I began feeling the dissolution of the bubble wall.  I like to play with these concepts, so don't let the name I've used confuse you; but also, don't let its playfulness detract from what is behind it.  In a wider sense, there is no bubble, no walls and no separate worlds, but in a more particular sense (to this individual journey) the two had always been experienced as quite distant from one another.  Often you hear people, from many and probably most walks of life, talk about the peaks and the troughs of life; always there will be ups and downs, they say.  This is a strong concept, made even more powerful by the immense truth behind it, evident in the natural rhythms of things.  But also quite often I see this truth used to normalise; to justify one's existence in all facets.  How easy is it to say to yourself, Yeah things aren't so great, but that's normal, right?  Working day to day, accepting your lifestyle as it is in a way that is disempowered and stagnating.   See, this truth is strong because it is undeniable.  It becomes (or can become), really, a game of words.  If I say this is just the way it is, then that really covers all bases and the result will be a kind of inertia.  Logically, nothing more need be said; and in an oppositional dialogue, which many dialogues manifest as, this is a logical dead end.  I think, however - and have found from my experiences in this life - that this is really denying oneself a fair deal.  Really, that metaphorical bubble can, evidently, be dissolved; you can actually be much happier than you might think.  It has to do with the social structures of the mind, our conditioning and so forth.  If you don't think, know or feel that positive change can come, or if you think that everything going on is just part of that natural up and down rhythm, then I think a happier life becomes theoretically out of reach, and thus the changes necessary to support a happier life are left marginalised.  In this paradigm, or lifestyle, or whatever you would like to call it, you are left limited in a way that disallows many forms of actually natural growth.  One is left disempowered, driven exclusively by external forces and unliberated from anything malignant, either from their past or present, as well as anything that continues to accumulate in the continuing day-to-day cycle. 

So what does it mean to say that the bubble wall can be dissolved, or is in the process of dissolving?  Well, I can only tell my story as it was experienced, though I think that in this life we all understand and feel common ground; we are very much capable of experiencing similar things, feeling similar intuitions and recognising patterns and forms.  The latter we can share, though not the individual experience thereof.  Obviously, one's own journey is just that, as it is experienced, but this should not disallow the recognition of these really quite helpful similarities.  From birth we learn from one another, through copying and interpreting and re-creation.  Unfortunately, as we grow and become societal adults full of planted conceptions, the idea that we have common experience, that it is not only okay to learn from one another, but actually quite natural and extremely helpful - this idea becomes foggy and unpalatable; for complex reasons, we feel we need to 'go it alone' and to seek help is seen as weak.  So, the dissolution of the bubble wall, I think and feel quite strongly, is not out of reach for anyone.  You do not need to stay where you are, keep doing the things you are doing, in a way that defines them as the only way for you, or a natural way.

Being away from home for so long, I began to feel links falling away, much more powerfully than they had before and in a distinctly different way.  I'd felt a sense of this before, but of course my rational mind, my societal being and all that comes with it, sort of said, Well no, this is different from that and those are two separate paths.  You have to go back and slog it out the way you always have in order to 'achieve' or 'earn' a break from it, which in my case had always been a break in order to go and learn, to discover and grow and see what else I actually am capable of.  And, apparently, I am capable of pretty much all of the things my heart had always told me I was capable of.  Not only in a spiritual growth sense, but in a 'what I can do in the world sense.

Of course!  I thought.  Why would these feelings and this way of being not be something that I can just be.  More happy, more creative, more in touch with my own natural rhythms, the rhythms around me, my relationships.  What bubble?  There's no 'there' and 'here'; this is actually it, and if I want to be this way, I reflected, then there is absolutely nothing stopping me.  There is so much on the table in this life, but many of us have been swayed away from the table; instead, we eat the same meals, don't think all that much about other ones, and forget that through a different diet we can be, think and feel completely differently to what we are accustomed to.  And there are deeper truths within us, both personally and collectively - even cosmically. I no longer feel such a sense of being 'away' from anything, or separate from some home I might hav.  Energetically, that's always there; and more excitingly, there are many different homes we all have, all around the world, all around the cities we live, all over our spaces of experience.  As the saying goes, Home is where the heart is; and the Heart of the World beats all over, and always within us.

The sense of guilt that comes with breaking away is not something to be taken lightly; and by this, I do not mean strictly physically moving away from something.  That is, it isn't simply overcome, most of us having been trained from childhood to see things as however it was we were trained to see them as.  Usually, it involves a sense of having to do something to achieve something else; pressure to be a certain way in order to 'have security' (which is living fuelled by fear, which most of our parents accepted as simply the way things go); of obligation to others around us, to be a certain way; basically to survive and to fit in in a way that allowed for a steady comfort zone, in which even the natural suffering and anxieties of life were essentially tabooed away, left to fester and manifest in ugly ways.  But perhaps more importantly, we have come to forget ourselves in a sense; we do not allow ourselves to see what's on the table, what's on offer, what we resonate with from a wider perspective.  This is not a conscious process, nor is there anyone to blame - these things are actually inhibiting, vibrating at a lower frequency (though they do serve as clues for us to find and work with, in order to overcome).  Leaving these concepts behind is a key to allowing for any type of bubble wall to dissolve, be it between you and your parents, you and your goals, or deciding what you want to make for dinner without worrying about it going wrong.

For me, this experience of dissolution feels like a great gift - essentially, it isn't the gift of dissolution, it's the gift that life actually is, which has been sort of covered up by all these walls and networks of boundaries that have come to be around us.  A gift that is, in many forms, available to anyone.  In a revelatory sense, it's the realisation that there need not be bubbles, heres and theres.  The feelings you get in touch with that create ease and happiness, motivation, inspiration - whatever it is that drives you - these are fountains of golden nectar for your being.  Try - and there are many sources for help regarding this - to understand that you can change your thoughts, how you think about things - it is not at all fixed in areas that may matter most; you are not bound to anything; you do not owe anyone anything (that is, in an obligatory way that disallows your own growth and happiness); your heart speaks loudly, so when you hear it or see it, pay it the attention it deserves - it is a key given to you by your own infinite wisdom, perhaps from another time or dimension; naturally, you grow - even physically - and this natural rhythm applies to all aspects of your being (basically, it wants to grow and due to the present state of the world and things, it can be convinced not to; but this is not you; many of the things you think are yours have been handed down to you - it is up to you whether you actually want to keep them or not, and this is linked to a more intrinsic notion of 'responsibility').  Again, the list goes on, but the gist hopefully remains.

Perhaps one more key to all this is understanding that we are also trained to make excuses in order not to grow.  A kind of self-sabotage, whereby we neglect this growth in favour of comfort, also because we are afraid to enter new areas and confront not only new things, but old ones that we do not know exist, or, if we do, have much difficulty overcoming and letting go of.  This requires the kind of love that we give to animals and children - unconditional.  Fully accepting.  Do not be disillusioned by the seemingly negative aspects of all this.  As a human, you know how to love very well; in fact, you're a natural at it.  Like anything weighed down, things can be slow, especially to begin with - but despite this, you do not need to believe that you can overcome this in order to grow; you need not hold on to any belief.  Rather, instead of gaining something, the idea is to let go of the weight in order to allow for your true feelings and being to come through; and when they do, a new journey begins, with many challenges and many boons.  Many of the bubbles burst and you can do anything that you're passionate about, without that negative voice in your head telling you all these things that are not actually to do with your DNA, your spirit, your soul.

Doubt riddles only the conditioned mind.  Humbleness and acceptance lead you down the yellow brick road, to where you can see it's all a show, a drama we're playing out.  From there, anything can begin to grow.

We're the authors of both our drama, as well as this drama.