The Truth About Spiritual Ascension That No One Talks About
Spiritual Ascension: Not All Love And Light
The term ascension has a distinctively positive connotation, and rightfully so.
The process of ascension draws us closer to our authentic selves, a state where our soul’s essence and our soul’s gifts are integrated into our physical bodies and expressed into this physical world.
While we like to focus on the enlightened ascension end game, I very rarely see anyone discussing the process through which it is achieved.
The process of ascension brings us into a relationship with our shadow material and brings all kinds of uncomfortable feelings to the surface.
I want to talk about the term ascension, and more importantly the parts of ascension I do not hear people talking about.
Next, I will describe the process of ascension, explore the concepts of the pain body and the shadow self, and explain how they relate to the process of ascension.
Finally, I will end by giving you some advice on dealing with the the dark stuff that come up in the process of being drawn toward your authentic self.
What Is Ascension?
I recently had a realization about the work I am doing.
There is this way in which we are being drawn inexorably towards our authentic selves.
When we achieve our authentic selves, we have to become fully integrated with our darker side–our shadow.
Not until we’ve integrated our shadow can we embody our soul’s essence and share our soul’s gifts with the world.
Essentially that process is ascension.
Here’s a video I made about spiritual ascension:
Here’s a podcast version you can listen to or look for the BioSoul Integration Podcast where ever you listen to your podcasts:
I usually see the word ascension thrown around in New Agey circles.
There’s nothing wrong with New Age movement, but it does have a certain flavor to it.
What I mean by that is there is a lot of talking about the bliss of achieving ascension and the psychic gifts we will all develop when we do, but a lot less talking about what has to happen to get there.
The love and light version of ascension is nice, but it is just a concept and is not grounded in reality.
When people talk about ascension in the “New Agey” way, it tends to sound like it will be all rainbows and unicorns and we will all be floating around in the lotus pose in a state of bliss all the time.
The truth is a little more complicated and a little less comfortable.
There are two sides to the coin and we have to integrate both sides.
We have to come into a relationship with the dark stuff.
We have to integrate the shadow self.
We have to feel through our pain body.
In the process of our ascension, we will experience a lot of uncomfortable feelings.
Parts of our life may fall apart in the process.
The survival senses of self we have built or adopted along the way might fall apart and force us to feel our way through a painful reality on the way to our authentic selves.
The Pain Body
Here’s a video I made on the pain body:
The pain body was a term I first heard while reading Eckhart Tolle’s books The Power of Now and A New Earth.
According to Tolle, the pain body is an entity that lives inside all of us and feeds off pain and suffering.
The pain body is always at work in our subconscious, running our lives without us even realizing it.
While we may not notice it, our pain body affects our thoughts, our relationships, our behaviors, and our emotions.
When we bring awareness to the sensations in our bodies, especially unpleasant ones like grief, fear, or neediness, we are focusing on the present.
When we find ourselves avoiding certain people or situations because they bring up uncomfortable feelings, that is the pain body at work.
The pain body can also show up as health issues we feel in our body, or emotional and behavioral problems, like addictions.
The pain body also feeds off of these same behaviors.
Our pain body is something we pick up and develop from our surroundings, like our parents or the culture we were raised in.
Fortunately, there is a way to begin healing the pain body.
According to Tolle, the most powerful thing you can do for your life is to commit to letting at least part of your attention rest on the sensations in your body at all times.
This was an idea I read in one of his books that was transformational for me personally and lead me down the road of mindfulness meditation.
Every second we are focusing on the physical sensations in our body, we are living in the present moment.
The pain body is maintained by thoughts about the future or hte past and thus can’t survive in the present moment.
If you find yourself struggling as you work through your pain body on the way to ascension, focusing on sensations in your body is the key.
Descending Before Ascension
Here’s a video I made on shadow work:
Our “shadow self” is another term related to ascension.
As we are drawn toward our authentic self, we will also be drawn toward our shadow self or shadow material.
The term shadow self was coined by the psychologist Carl Jung.
The shadow self is used to refer to the repressed parts of ourselves that we learned to push away and hide as we went through life.
In the process of integrating your soul’s essence and your soul’s gifts, your shadow self will naturally be brought to the surface of your consciousness, a process known as shadow work.
Before we can achieve ascension, we have to come into a relationship with the dark stuff inside us.
In order to get to all the rainbows and unicorns and bliss, we have to go through some hard stuff first.
I always think of a particular story when it comes to describing this process.
I was raised in a conservative, Christian household and attended a private Lutheran grade school where we studied the Bible daily and memorized large chunks of it.
What I remember is that after Jesus’ death on the cross, he DESCENDED into hell.
After three days he ASCENDED into heaven.
What I was taught from a Christian perspective is that Jesus descended into hell in order to declare his victory of sin and Satan.
I kind of doubt that is what actually happened.
I think he descended into hell in order to have a direct experience and a felt sense of the root of all depravity, darkness, pain and suffering.
In descending to hell and completely feeling all of that pain and suffering, he was able to transmute a huge chunk of it for all of humanity.
It wasn’t until after he’d transmuted the world’s shadow material that he then rose from the dead and ascended into heaven.
We also have to descend into our shadow material and feel all of the discomfort that comes with it before we are ready to ascend.
How To Work Through Our Shadow Material
My work at the BioSoul Integration Center is to help my clients lubricate and smooth out the natural discomfort that inevitably arises through the process of ascension.
The big tool for handling the hard feelings that come up as we are drawn toward our ascension is to bring our attention to the uncomfortable stuff we would usually turn away from.
Generally we can’t trust our thoughts.
The pain body hijacks our minds and uses our thoughts to create more negative feelings which it uses to feed itself.
Instead bring your attention and presence to the sensations in your body.
Next, welcome those sensations into the heart or reach toward them with the heart.
By bringing the heart online and seeing our pain through the lens of our heart, the heart can help transmute it into something more productive as we descend.
To read more about how to harness the hearts healing power, check out my previous blog post about “The Power of Presence to Heal Pain.“
Feeling the hard stuff is an integral part of ascension.
Putting It All Together
To recap, ascension is the process of us being drawn toward our authentic selves.
When we are our authentic selves, our soul’s essence, and our soul’s gifts have been fully integrated into our bodies.
In the process of achieving our authentic selves, we have to descend into our pain body and our soul’s shadow material and embody them.
Not to be a downer, but the fact of the matter is that you cannot achieve ascension without discomfort.
When you refuse to come into a relationship with the shadow material and chose to hover above it instead, it is called a spiritual bypass.
If we can bring presence to our shadow material we will come out the other side and ascension will be more complete.
Take The Next Step
My book, If It Didn’t Hurt: How To Resolve Your Pain And Discover Your Life Purpose is the ultimate guide to embodying your pain’s wisdom and integrating your soul’s essence.
Click the link to buy it and/or read the first chapter of my book for FREE!
If you have any questions or comments please leave them in the comment section below.
I look forward to helping you express more life,
Jay
About the Author Dr. Jay Uecker
Dr. Jay is the founder and owner of BioSoul Integration Center in Louisville, Colorado. He’s a chiropractor, a hands-on healer, an in-person and online soul integration coach and the author of If It Didn't Hurt: How To Resolve Your Pain And Discover Your Life Purpose. For two decades Dr. Jay has been helping people navigate their healing journeys. Over the course of that time he’s worked intimately with thousands of people. Those who are most drawn to Dr. Jay's work are those who are seeking to integrate and embody their soul's essence and their soul's gifts so they can share them with others. Life will keep nudging us in that direction, anyway. BioSoul Integration helps to speed up the process and smooth out the rough spots created by the innocent and unconscious resistance that lives in our primal brain and nervous system. Click the link to get your Personalized BioSoul Integration Guide.
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