Inner-Conflict and Embracing Growth (4/4)

I want to acknowledge that many of us are faced with some dreadful and horrible inner-conflicts. But I can also assure you that the more you can welcome them with a mindset of curiosity, the better. It’s an opportunity to grow and to choose. Every choice is an exercise of your free will and it contributes to your personal expansion. When done with awareness, it clarifies your values, desires, and preferences. This process helps you better understand who you are as an individual - the point of perspective you are here (in this life) to explore.

1. Choosing growth, the path to liberation and wholeness.

There is a space beyond inner conflict—a space that transcends all boundaries and limitations. If you are on a spiritual path, you’ve likely experienced moments where you feel free from all inner conflicts. These are times when you detach from a part of yourself and realize that a perceived problem no longer exists. However, you eventually return to a denser, more familiar feeling as that unresolved part of you resurfaces in your consciousness.

Many people use spirituality to bypass and avoid those heavier emotions. But this creates an inner conflict of its own: wanting to feel good versus the part of you that doesn’t. You cannot feel complete if you are rejecting any part of yourself in the pursuit of wholeness. As long as you’re playing this win-lose game with yourself (which is really a lose-lose), those unresolved parts will continue to hold you back.

Imagine you’re on a sailboat, wanting to sail forward. You open the sails, and the wind pulls you, but the anchor is stuck at the bottom of the ocean. The journey becomes a struggle, and you barely move. Or picture yourself in a car, stepping on the accelerator while pulling the handbrake. As the car malfunctions, you ignore the problem and press harder on the gas. In both examples, it’s clear that you wouldn’t even open the sails without first unsticking the anchor, and you certainly wouldn’t press the gas pedal without releasing the handbrake. But when it comes to our internal reality and inner conflicts, we don’t follow this logic. I believe this is because we either don’t know how to resolve them, or we’re unaware that we even can.

The more you embrace and own your conditional self—your desires, preferences, boundaries, and needs—and resolve your inner conflicts, the more you open yourself to consistently experiencing your limitless nature. If you seek deeper consciousness, unconditional love, and liberation from suffering, don’t bypass your conditional self, your suffering, or what remains unresolved. Embrace, explore, and resolve it. This will allow you to fully inhabit your individual, temporal self while staying connected to your transcendent nature.

The shadow side of this mindset is withholding love and pleasure from yourself until you reach perfection. But this approach doesn’t work because you are always growing, and there is no final destination. You can’t move forward without love. So, avoid withholding love from yourself or others until something is “fixed,” because it’s love that creates the very resolution you seek. Unconditional love and bliss aren’t just rewards at the end of the journey—they’re essential along the way. You deserve and need them as you grow.

2. Sacrificing your personal truth for societal values

I understand that there are incredibly difficult choices to make, and that’s why some people spend their entire lives in misalignment and suffering.

For example, imagine the immense pressure, anxiety, and fear experienced by a gay man born into a deeply conservative ‘Christian’ family. The core of his identity is in direct conflict with his sexual orientation and expression.

It’s understandable that some people choose a life of suffering and disconnection from their bodies and personal truth because what they’re up against is terrifying. It requires a deep questioning of the judgments, beliefs, and values they cling to for a sense of safety, compounded by a childhood that instilled a deep-seated fear of their own emotions, as well as the fear of holding different values or questioning the values of their caretakers.

However, I would argue that nothing in existence justifies the choice of suppressing oneself. Self-suppression denies our sovereignty and divinity—it is, in essence, a form of hell. It is the source of mental illness, emotional conflict, and physical disease.

3. Tension Between Desire and Resistance: the necessary pressure to resolve inner-conflict.

Desire acts as a gravitational force between you and what you want. When you desire something, you begin to pull it toward you, and simultaneously, that which you desire starts pulling you closer. Imagine a rope connecting you to what you want, tightening and drawing you together. Now, imagine that an inner conflict is creating resistance to this force of your desire. The result is pressure, discomfort, and misalignment. If unaddressed, this tension grows, eventually leading to real problems in your life—accidents, illnesses, failed relationships, and intense emotional and mental suffering. The rope between you and your desire becomes unbearably taut, but you're stuck—energetically, it’s like you're being crushed.

This dynamic is also playing out on a global scale, explaining why the world feels so surreal, full of conflict and suffering. It’s the result of unresolved inner conflict—resistance on both an individual and collective level.

This discomfort and pressure are designed to help you see your reality. When you desire something that you are also resisting, you may start to feel uncomfortable sensations in your body, signaling that your thoughts are not aligned with your true self. If left unaddressed, these sensations become increasingly prominent until they can no longer be ignored. In some cases, this is a quick process, while in others, it may take much longer. Some people become seriously ill after only slight misalignments, while others can spend decades bypassing and neglecting the signs of their disconnection from themselves.

This phenomenon is known as the “law of mirroring,” commonly referred to as the “law of attraction.” It is designed to help you stay away from what is not aligned with you, much like how riversides guide the river along its path, preventing it from straying too far, even when the current is strong. However, the utility of this law is questionable. While opting into a dimension with these laws contributes to the intensity of our experiences by creating significant contrasts, it also contributes to getting stuck in negative experiences (what we don’t want) instead of easily guiding us toward what we desire.