Quote Originally Posted by wstein
I want to encourage both (all) of you. I definitely took my own path, in my own time, and unfortunately on my own. I desperately wanted a companion or two along the way.
I (and others here) try to offer assistance to others on the same quest, hoping that their journey be less of a struggle than my own. Don't get me wrong, its still a struggle, your struggle, but friends can make it easier.
After struggling alone, I don't always remember to ask for assistance on those occasions where it might be available.
I can definitely relate to this. This has been a huge dilemma on my own path, and I think I'm finally getting close to making peace with it. For years anything like help, assistance, guidance or commpanionship were foreign concepts ("having people around" is not the same thing as I'm sure anyone in this situation would agree)... and then one day I hit on some sort of magic combination, and it gradually started showing up. Now I'm trying to reverse-engineer exactly what happened so I can offer others something they can hopefully use to reduce the pain and struggle this issue can present, even retroactively.

Just yesterday I was a bit irritated by a popular "self help" type I have friended on Facebook, who posted the statement "If you're having trouble with a certain problem, perhaps your challenge is to stop thinking like a loner and learn to recruit help."

Granted I'm no longer "thinking like a loner" much these days but when I was actually IN that situation, you may as well have said "stop doing the only thing you have any frame of reference for, within OR without, and recruit something that isn't there and never has been." So, the part of me that is STILL there, resented hearing what came off as a smug proclamation from someone who has either never truly been that cut off from help and companionship, or has repressed the part of himself who is.

Then the same guy said "To go from independence to interdependence, set some goals that are too big to achieve solo." At one time that sounded like a great idea; call the universe's bluff, and make a leap of faith. So I tried it -- promptly splatted on the concrete where the safety net was supposed to be -- and spiraled even further into loner-hood while having to focus even more on myself to heal those injuries.

The other "easy answer" I explored was this concept of changing your beliefs to change your experience. So I held different beliefs, got super-optimistic, told myself that help and companionship was there, I just couldn't see it, etc etc... and not much changed. I didn't know it at the time, but the problem ran much deeper.

To cut to the point, things have gotten increasingly better on this front over the past two years as I've explored the theme of love, what it is, how to access it and what to do with it, figured out how my energy body and chakras are actually supposed to work, and removed everything not consistent with that.

But as I've discovered even more recently (as in, yesterday), even those distortions were symptoms of an even deeper, fundamental core issue -- the conditioned need for approval. Thing is, this got even more tricky... because I recognized early on that needing approval wasn't in my best interest, and thus thought I was "over" it.

The wrench was that a need for approval is actually a masked desire for love -- which is freely and unconditionally available since we're basically swimming in a field of it that underlies and permeates all. Ideally, you detach from the addiction to approval and "plug in" to the field of love, through your heart chakra. If at that time your heart chakra is as FUBAR as mine was, then good luck with that.

So while I thought I was detaching from seeking approval as a core motivation, and took love for granted... what actually happened was that I rejected all forms of approval, i.e. shoved the desire for it into my subconscious where it continued playing out in a variety of ways I was unaware of. It usually played out in a dysfunctional love-hate sort of way, where I'd create situations unconsciously hoping for approval to show up, and approval never got the memo; meanwhile I was unknowingly cut off from the ability to process love as well.

Ironically I'm pretty sure it was my ego that kept me going long enough to get to this point -- and that's part of why I'm defensive of the idea that the ego is not the problem; the wacky ideas it tends to absorb, are. At one point after the latest and most harsh approval-related let-down I'd experienced until that point, I said "this is it; something needs to change, drastically, now, or I'm DONE, because this whole human thing is NOT working." I let out a sort of internal primal scream that sent my energy blasting out in all directions. This was of course a completely selfish, egoic, manipulative, controlling, "brute force" way to frame and approach the situation. But... it worked. Gehenna got in contact for the first time within three days, and that was the beginning of a complete change in direction that ended up resolving this whole issue for both of us.

In any case my current perceptions on this are:

Approval is not "bad" anymore than the ego is, but we create conflict by trying to substitute one thing for another; in this case, approval for love.

Love and approval are both tools, but the natural order of things is for approval to be one of the physical manifestations of love given and received. To seek approval for its own sake is just another attempt to control the behavior of others. Rejecting approval, or love, only masks the need under layers of self-deception; it doesn't alleviate it.

*wanders off to ponder s'more*