#56
August 30, 2010
I made a grammatical faux pas in Tenacity Notes #54 (I used effect when I should have used affect.) Thanks to those of you who wrote to me about it. I’m glad you did. Let me tell you why I am grateful.
You may remember that I was going to keep an Impeccability Journal in order to notice ways that I was being less than impeccable in my life. This is one for the journal. At the time I wrote that issue, I knew my use of effect was probably wrong, but I leapt over that knowing. It’s a tendency I have, to know something and then, quicker than a flash, to not notice that I know it. If you hadn’t written to me about my mistake, I may well have let it slide — I may well have allowed it to remain unresolved.
At the risk of having another long issue, another long issue that could be much longer, let me describe what this looks like on an energy level.
When I know something and I refuse to acknowledge my knowing, I create an unresolved situation. I dare say that all of us have many unresolved situations in our day to day life — interactions that do not to come to completion. More often than not, unresolved interactions include another person or people. In this example, I created an unresolved situation with just myself.
Okay, that was the introduction. Here’s the guts.
Every time any interaction goes unresolved, some energetic part of me remains there in that time — it remains there but it also stays connected to me. If you could look at me energetically, you would see thousands, maybe millions, of threads of energy reaching back from me to the pieces of me that remained behind in unresolved experiences. And so it is with you.
Added all together, that’s a fair bit of my energy that I don’t have access to in present time. I don’t have access to it because it has stayed in the time and place where it became unresolved.
It is the nature of unresolved energy to seek resolution. It seeks resolution by creating a disturbance. Such as making a grammatical error in public! Unresolved energy seeks resolution, and will always seek resolution, ad infinitum. A truism: Every disturbance in your life is an opportunity to retrieve an aspect of your own energy. Every disturbance in your life, no matter how obviously at fault the other person is, is first and foremost a message to you from you, a message from a part left behind.
If I pick up the thread of this particular unresolved situation, which I’ll call not acknowledging my knowing, I can follow it back to an earlier act of “not acknowledging,” and an earlier one, and an earlier one, and so on, until I come to the initial act of not acknowledging. With this one thread, there are very likely hundreds of instances — hundreds of pieces of me left in the past.
It’s a safe bet that my initial act of “not acknowledging” was done in an attempt to feel safe. In other words, my tendency to not acknowledge my knowing is a way of being defended. This is just one way that our defenses block our flow of joy — by limiting our access to our own energy.
This is why I suggest that we need to “resolve our history.” When we do, when we resolve situations that have gone unresolved, the piece of self that remained there is released and comes to present time. Then I have more of me available for living now, I have more possibility for joy, I am more able to live an impeccable life.