The Bare Naked Truth of Life Thus Far

First and foremost: I would not be able to do this if it were not for the numerous transformations from spiritual causes that I have undergone. The most important transformation of all is that I have been humbled by the truth.

This year is coming to an end and thinking about the culmination of yet another year of my life has summonsed me to take an introspective and bird’s eye view of myself and my historic life.

As a child, I was a naughty girl. I had a bad attitude deserving of many a punishment. I was cheeky, outspoken, instinctual, impulsive, brash, and boisterous. I was every mother’s nightmare, including my own. I was a problematic child with deep-seated silly problems such as jealousy, anger, and pride (which later developed into arrogance and hypocrisy). As I grew up, I became worse by the year because I felt misunderstood. The people who I cared about most in the world were the same people who misunderstood me to the severest degree. This was my perspective and based on this I became impossible to deal with, at least with my own family. To the rest of the world, I was considered outgoing, fun, enthusiastic, but still boisterous.

One of my biggest problems growing up was coming to terms with my own qualities that resembled my father’s. I refused to accept that I was anything like him. I feared my father and also struggled to like and respect him as a person (there were reasons for this; it was not arbitrary). I accepted him as my father but that was something I could not dispute.

It was during my university years that I started to gain awareness of my actions, albeit in small doses. These were the years where I started to understand how my words and actions affected others, even where my intentions were honest. What stunted my growth was my inability to come to terms with this problem. I would live in denial of my obvious problems, believing my true self to be the self the world sees and ignoring the person I was around my family. However, even though I chose to ignore it, often those problems surfaced and made a big scene in a small room. My coping mechanism for dealing with this when it happened was to bury myself in work. Even to this day, I still do this. Nevertheless, I wanted to understand who I was without delving into my shadow aspects.

The one trait that seems to have remained in place from childhood up to this very second in that I often feel misunderstood, and as a result, I feel the need to defend myself because I feel many people (especially my family) attack me.

More often than not, I react as opposed to respond. Strangely enough, even when I want to gain awareness of this problem, I encounter numerous obstacles like procrastination or neglectful thought. I cannot seem to go deep enough, on my own, to understand the root cause(s). What I end up doing is focusing on the qualities that I have managed to attain through self-enlightenment, for example, my compassion and patience have both increased significantly, at least towards the world and I suppose myself.

Again, the problem lies in trying to go where it hurts the most: my family. I have a very rocky relationship with both my mother and brother. My relationship with my father is on the rise but nothing deep enough to consider significant. I struggle with trust issues still, both with my friends and my family, which limits the amount of effort that I put into working on my issues with them. I trust the world around me more than I trust those I care about the most, which is strange in itself. I trust the unknown more than I do the known.

I am writing this entry because it has finally occurred to me that I am on the brink of losing my mother and brother and any hopes of establishing a close relationship with them. Realising this, I almost burst into tears. In the past, when I hit rock bottom, I experienced suicidal tendencies and (lucky for me) I was able to relieve them through writing in my journal and pouring my heart into it. These days, I have not felt suicidal tendencies but I still feel lost.

Somehow, I need to crumble this wall of doubt and denial. These are the two obstacles preventing me from seeing a way out of this problem and fixing my mess. Perhaps it will take a past-life regression or a meditation of some sort. Whatever it is, I need to get there quickly.

I have already begun working on the most important issues in my life but I have ironically neglected the one area of my life that should have been my first project. That, on its own, frightened me.

In Buddhism, it is believed that our mind is the maker of all our madness. The mind is the impenetrable fortress which needs to be conquered. The methods used to teach us to control the mind start at the root and heal on the way up. Buddha believed that we suffer from three root delusions: anger, ignorance, and impatience. All three of them cause every problem that we experience; the degree in terms of which they affect each of us differs according to our individual circumstances. Buddha also believed that escaping these delusions takes three virtues: love or compassion, mindfulness and patience.

There are so many things that I have been praying for and trying, on my own, to understand such as why it is that I act the way I do with my mother, brother and father, yet portray this beautiful masterpiece to the rest of the world. It is hellishly hypocritical of me. I wish I could say the things I need to say to my mother without having them misinterpreted by her.

What Buddhism also teaches us is that we cannot control or predict how another person may interpret what we do or say. The best we can do is act and speak with kindness.

Perhaps this is the wisdom applicable here. Except that is often what I do even before being “attacked”. I will never know until I am able to take the problem apart in piecemeal fashion.

The message I want to leave you with, the reader, is that I encourage and challenge you to become honestly, brutally, and thoroughly introspective with yourself. Not only is the experience rewarding and humbling, but, in some respects, it also teaches you where your real source of happiness lies and that is Within. It teaches you how to manage the world in which you live and control the mind you have been given. What you must realise, which is something I have realised, is that if you embark upon this journey with your mind and eyes open, then you must finish it with your mind and eyes open. The journey is more important than the destination.

With love and kind blessings,

 Aleisha