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Do you remember this little piece from the film The Matrix?
“You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe, whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”
This red pill/blue pill metaphor was popularized in The Matrix.
To take the red pill means to open your eyes to the truth; to see what’s really there and to see how deep the rabbit hole really goes. I believe we need to take the red pill (lots of them) if we want to improve our quality of life here on planet Earth.
Now that we’re in the fresh energy that is 2019, I’d love to suggest a journey that involves an earthly version of the red pill, which might look something like this:
1 – Maximum cultivation of self-awareness
By self-awareness I mean awareness that is not one-sided, or that only focuses on being in bliss and floating in love and light 24/7. This kind of awareness brings in all the thick heavy sludge of human existence and experience, along with the love and light when need be. Put another way, no spiritual bypassing allowed.
2 – Waking up our biological instincts and being biologically embodied
This means actually living in our physical body, feeling it and learning how to be with and process the entire spectrum of our emotions and the charge they might bring to us: the anger, the joy, the relief, the aggression, the grief – all of it. It also means doing what is necessary to be with and feel our physical sensations (pains, aches, tensions) rather than just cover them up, or give them a quick fix. It means actually getting to the root of the trouble.
3 – Full on empathy for all creatures, great and small
This should be a given, and shouldn’t require any formal explanation, but I believe we still have a long way to go when it comes to this.
4 – Processing our crap
The research is out. It is now well documented that past adverse experiences and traumas, when not processed and dealt with on a somatic-emotional level will cause internal toxicity and illness in our body. All this stored up junk that we call accumulated and chronic stress, makes our insides toxic. This indirectly (or directly depending on how you look at it) contributes toxicity to our world and to our environment.
(IMPORTANT SIDE NOTE: Processing our crap doesn’t mean having to forgive and confront those who have hurt us because some things, I believe, are not forgivable. And it doesn’t mean we have to make amends and drive ourselves crazy trying to create healthy relationships with the very environments (family systems etc.) that inserted that crap into us in the first place. But it does mean learning to release and integrate the out-of-sync parts of ourselves that keep us stuck and sick and not living up to our full capacity and potential.)
Take the red pill. Our world needs it right now. I think The Matrix was ahead of its time, but it’s timely right now.
C’mon take the red pill,
Irene.
PS I’ll finish with a classic line from the movie, spoken by Morpheus:
“I can only show you the door, you have to walk through it.”
Download my new piece of writing and let’s see how far down the rabbit hole we can go!
