When do you help others and when do you help yourself? | Andrea de Michaelis – Creating my own reality, one thought at a time

How often do you think that the ones who give advice would be better off taking it themselves? That’s the dilemma, isn’t it? When we are going through our own personal growth process, our own transformation, ascension, dark night of the soul, illumination, that’s when we begin to seriously seek answers. While we’re still the unformed chunk of coal, we don’t yet understand that the insights that come to us are meant for US — not for anyone around us. Most often, the human mind/ego that likes to think itself separate and apart from others is in charge. To those newly upon the Path, the mind makes you think that you and you alone are going through this, that you and you alone are receiving information and guidance from a higher source, and that you and you alone are the messenger sent to save everyone around you, maybe the world.

When I first began to get the huge rush of serious guidance from within, I filled notebooks with volumes that I just “knew was meant for everyone. I just have to get this information out there!” I immediately began teaching and counseling. While I know some benefited from what I had to say, the point is my mind had rushed me into sharing it prematurely; before I’d fully understood it myself. It was easier to talk about it than contemplate it.

When I was teaching and counseling, I’d spent all my time thinking of what “my students” needed to hear from me. With all my attention outside myself, I had no time to properly absorb the teachings I was so quick to give out. That’s what the mind does, it keeps us thinking, keeps us talking, keeps us looking for someone to interact with. As we begin to spiritually awaken and evolve in consciousness, it’s helpful to have someone who’s been there and done that to make suggestions as to what may be most helpful in our journey: what might save us time, unnecessary emotional pain and karmic backlash.

Too often it’s the blind leading the blind, and we get entangled in the illusions of the astral world. We feel a spiritual longing, so we begin to attend classes and co-counsel with each other. Or we begin writing our book and spend more hours studying and editing and in endless discussion groups than we do contemplating the guidance that comes from within. We feel compelled to constantly edit and refine the words of what we’ve written, but too often it is the critical mind that never wants to be done with “doing,” because then it’s no longer in charge. Busy work is always easier than inner contemplation. When we’re ready, we realize what we’re doing, we stop the busy work, we get quiet and alone and we go within.

I was blessed to find a friend in Frank Maiello, a brother a little higher upon the Path than I, who helped mentor me as I awakened and learned. He saved me many stumbles and falls upon the way. Twenty years later a friend would give me high praise, “How blessed I was to find you. Who so effortlessly showed me who I was and made me see through the lies I’d been told and began to believe myself. Thank you.”