How Fully Will You Participate?

The “12 Stages of Healing” are really 12 varying degrees of participation in the wholeness and oneness that we really are. We are all one. We are all connected. We are all powerful beyond measure, and we all have a responsibility to use that power to deepen our connection and experience in community.

Community is a harmonious, cohesive, interactive and connected whole which is the result of a coming together of numerous individual parts, each contributing its unique gift to the successful and integrated functioning of the whole.

Our community is simply the people within the arena in which we choose to play. Donald Epstein calls it your “Circle of We”. Who is included? You get to decide. A“Circle of Me” would refer to all your cells, tissues and organs working in harmony to provide your system with physical health and well-being. This could further contribute to your emotional and mental well-being. As the level of your wholeness increases, you may find that you need to be in relationship with another person to further experience yourself. At this point your community extends to a “Circle of We” which could be an intimate relationship or an experience of family. The circle then continues to expand as you decide to participate in greater and greater levels of community.

As our awareness expands in the upper Stages of Healing, we become conscious of the fact that there is a “Life Force” energy that is in us and in all things. Because we recognize that we are that energy and that it is the same energy in all things, when we truly embody the consciousness of the Universal Spirit Energy in the latter stages of Awaken, we feel our oneness with all. In Stage 10, the awareness is of the ascent, merging with our wholeness and a dissolution of our sense of separateness. In Stage 11, we live with the realization that the merging we experienced in Stage 10 will always be with us in our life on Earth. It is our responsibility to share this energy with others through giving and receiving love. We now know we have gifts to give and that we must give them regardless of whether we know what they are or not.

When we reach Stage 12, we really live in the dance between our oneness with all and our uniqueness. We know that what we bring to the world is necessary for all others and that is why we must give. We also know that all others have gifts for us and that we must receive others and their actions as gifts. Indeed, the true gift is in being able to go to a level of depth at which we can find the gift. This means releasing an old story and allowing a new one to emerge. It involves the replacing of a pattern of behaviour with a new one. The ultimate result is a new level of depth, connection and harmonious resonance within the community.

While we may not always be inclined to receive others and their actions favourably, with Stage 12 consciousness we know that this simply is showing us a place within ourselves where we have lost connection. We also know that the oneness and the giving and receiving is a karmic law of the universe. We simply cannot fight it and win. We will therefore, and possible reluctantly, go back into Stage 1 to discover where we have lost connection with ourselves in order to be able to reconnect. But unlike our first experience in understanding Stage 1, this is now done with a willingness to have a greater connection with the community of which we are a part. We know that when we cannot participate fully within, we cannot participate fully outside ourselves.

Stage 12 is the culmination of our experiencing and then re-experiencing all the 12 Stages of Healing at ever deeper and deeper levels of connection. As our desire for greater connection in community expands, we continue to revisit earlier stages to bring more of ourselves into the wholeness. Consequently, our “Circle of We” and our responsibility to it expands as well. As we surrender to the fact that we simply choose our degree of participation, we understand that not participating simply causes us pain. And why fight it?