“You either walk inside your story and own it, or you stand outside your story and hustle for your worthiness.” -Brené Brown

Worthiness is hustled because you become disconnected from your worth when your story isn’t owned by you. The hustle happens within even though our worth neither increases nor decreases because it’s fixed in state since we are born with it. When our story isn’t owned our worthiness isn’t felt hence the internal  hustle for it and it isn’t felt because it’s blocked by shame. What does not owning your story mean? I am not referring to denial or delusion which is some of the ways people refuse to own their story. I am referring to not going within enough and thus missing the root of a matter that has hurt you.

What he/she they or society did is 10% of the story the other 90% is how it made you truly feel. That raw feeling inside that wants to address the kind of untruths about your self that you may even intellectually recognise for what it is, but for the life in you can’t fathom why its poison effects you still. Your story is your vulnerability. Owning that is how breakthroughs happen.

A breakthrough I believe is something that creeps up on you. It isn’t like a shift, a shift is part of a process, where in order for you to proceed on your journey its needed as fuel.  I feel a shift can be sensed and felt as it happens but a breakthrough you can’t. A shift is like a green light telling you to cross over to another side where the grass is green and the sky is bright. It’s a change in perception and a new found perspective about yourself and about life.

A breakthrough is a culimination of a matter that yesterday was hurting you and today you’ve realised you’ve gone passed its pain and entered a state of true inner peace. A breakthrough is the realisation that the hook that aligned you with the negative emotions of grief, sorrow, anger, shame and resentment that you felt has been removed, has been healed. Most mistake a shift for a breakthrough.

Breakthroughs are the true blessings in healing, it’s the ease after the hardship. It isn’t indifference to what happened it’s transcendence over it. For example you have alchemised the energy of pain into direction, grief into gaining your self, sorrow into self compassion. Anger into values that gave birth to solid boundaries. Shame into self empathy that made you switch lanes from that hazardous route shame set you upon most of your life. As for resentment? I believe it’s transmuted into wisdom the kind that ensures you do not end up making a u-turn back there, back where? To the places and things and people that didn’t honour your soul. To the energetic fields you entered unconsciously because you were separated and therefore neglectful of your own soul.

When you are in a healthy state of being i.e connected to yourself with no unconcious programmings sabotaging your flow. The past serves to reasonably inform the present. When you are not in such a state the past serves to hijack the present.

Why is the past informing the present so beneficial? Because life is continuous, it goes on and so situations that mirror or reflect matters, pertaining to what led to your spiritual growth in the first place do rear its head again in subtle ways.  These matters are opportunities to practice what you’ve learnt. To make your new substance part of your subconscious flow. The past can help with this as it contains intimate details of all the lessons you learnt, all the discoveries you made. The growths that occurred through the pain you chose to feel, heal and release.

As you go forward in life be grateful for the hooks Allah removed and continues to. Be grateful for his infinite wisdom and his grace that guided you to see, understand and recieve clarity about the things, that had he not guided you about, would have left you lost and stuck on a hamsters wheel.

You can only connect the dots when you look back and that is because the past is informing your present, your intuition is confirming and you are listening.  As new doors open, you find new truths that are gifts meant to carry you through to the next phase of your journey to self actualise. A phase of maturity, empowerment, deeper self love and acceptance.

Healing is a process that is deeply intimate and important. It can not occur with out self honesty, resilience and patience. As you venture out you will feel lighter because the old baggage is gone. When you feel heavy because of a new load (because life is continuous and there is so much more to learn) then it can be appreciated  and understood that the past informing the present is actually a present from Allah.  It’s a reminder of the things you found on the paths you took that facilitated your growth, your healing. Reminders benefit the faithful. 

I’ve learnt that there is no wrong path, for all paths traversed happened in order to teach something, reveal something. To add a layer of something needed, to you. Or to peel back a layer of something no longer required from you.

When the process of healing is bypassed in any way, the past pops up through memories that cause suffering through shame. That is how it hijacks the present.

“When we own our own stories, we avoid being trapped as characters in the stories someone else is telling.” -Brené Brown, Rising Strong

We also avoid being trapped in the stories we tell ourselves. The kind of stories that block you from receiving your own love and the love of those who love you. Because that’s how shame operates, like shaytan eating your food because you didn’t say bismillah and then wondering why you don’t feel that full. You are robbed and unaware of how  because you can’t see it externally nor can you compute it mentally as it happens.

When you own your story your character in that shame inducing story dies in your mind because it is in your mind that it is kept alive in the first place. When you own it, it becomes like that character in a tv series who exited in season 4.

Where did they end up? In the absence of shame they ended up with self empathy. They stopped defacing their soul. They own their intentions and their actions that they felt ashamed of because of how it was received or treated. Self empathy reminds them the shame narrative they attributed to their story is an illusion. Self empathy reminds them what was true from them, and how that is the only thing that matters. Only when you own your story do you get to transmute shame into empathy and compassion that leads to clarity and understanding. The soul structure intends to be built upon iron not straws.

The hooks fall off with the shame lensed glasses you took off. The past informs the present so they do not come back on.