Traps Along the Spiritual Path
by Dr. Jeff Alexander

It was September 14, 1974, and I stood on the front lawn with my suit case in front of the house I grew up in. It was a sunny California Sunday morning and I was 24 years old. My father came out to give me a good-bye hug before I headed back to Southern California.

Now, I need to explain something about my dad. Every Sunday for as long as I can remember, he would put on his favorite pair of  pajamas. Every square inch of material exhibited paintings of hunters with rifles posed at pheasants in flight against a blue sky.  Why my dad loved these pajamas, I never knew, because he didn’t even hunt. This went on year after year, and as a small boy I was always embarrassed to have friends over on Sunday. He wore them all day, even to the dinner table. That was just how things were.
 
I had just gotten married the night before and as I was leaving the house, he came out one more time to say good-bye. It was Sunday, so he kept the tradition going with his uniform of the day. I was minutes from a clean get-away. There he stood on our front lawn for the whole world to see in those wild pajamas.
 
Wrapping his arms around me, he whispered in my ear, “Have a great honeymoon. I am so happy for you.” People were already strolling down the sidewalk after Sunday service from the church across the street. His good-bye hug was longer than usual that morning and I became aware that there were several people staring in our direction. I returned the hug whispering, “Thanks Dad for everything - I love you too.”
 
Twenty-four hours later, I was walking down the beach at Santa Catalina Island off the coast of Long Beach, California. A beautiful day, I had just completed my first year of dental school, and everything was perfect.  Off in the distance I saw a woman police officer that looked rather out of place walking down the beach toward me. She was wearing a blue uniform walking amongst bathing-suited tourists throwing Frisbees and playing in the waves.  She was going from person to person as if she was looking for someone. I got an ill feeling in my stomach and my heart sank. I knew she was looking for me.

My body became numb and I could hear the small voice in my head say, “Please just keep walking. Just pass me by.” When she finally got a few feet away her eyes connected to mine. She immediately marched straight to me. My breath stopped. I knew something was wrong. “ Are you Jeff Alexander? Please call home. Your father is critically ill!” Those words still echo in my memory to this day.

This could not be happening. I am on my honeymoon. I immediately caught the first jet back home. Reaching my apartment I grabbed the phone and called home.  My younger sister answered. A long silence – with hesitation she said, “Dad had a heart attack last night. Jeff, daddy died.” My knees buckled and I sunk to the kitchen floor. He was 49 years old.

The rest of the week was a surrealistic movie that manifested as a dream state between emotion and devastating lapses of realization that he is gone forever! I had great difficulty with the forever part. Caring for my mother who became ill verging on shock kept my sister and I from fully taking in what happened.

One minute I was on a beautiful island beach and within hours, I found myself in a very small room that displayed at least nine different models of coffins. I still had my bathing suit on under my jeans. Choosing a coffin for my father was not something I was prepared to take on when I got up this morning.  The mortician rested his hand on a bronze casket suggesting, “I really think your father would be pleased with this model, it is so elegant” I wanted to hit him.

Caring for my mother was now number one on the list. There were hard moments where I realized I could not turn back the clock and have another go at him on that front lawn. But you see, in this reality, forever is forever!

And on that day, my life changed forever.  This was the turning point. The awakening moment exploded before me. This was to be the first step on my Spiritual path.  I once read that despair is often the prerequisite of Spiritual realization. This was definitely true in my case.  The only problem is that most of us are not aware that we have begun the journey.  It can take a dramatic event that shakes one to the core. This was the critical turning point experience that woke me up from the long sleep of normal consciousness.

I was well on my way of mastering the world of normal consciousness. I was taught to accept my limitations. It was normal to strive for comfort, acquiring and accumulating material goals like a college degree, money and a good job. These are the prizes that represent a successful life. And now, I began to question everything.

For most of us who have embarked on the normal road emptiness begins to grow within. This emptiness is a signal for Spirit to enter. This anxiety is not bad. It is has been incorporated in your DNA to feel emptiness when you are looking in the wrong direction. It stimulates the next step, which is an urge to fill it. And the only way you can fill this void is to explore outside your intellectual understanding. You must start to ask questions that cannot be answered from the data you accumulated from your normal training. The questions come from your Spirit and you must seek the answers by exploring areas outside of your known comfort zone.  At 24 years old, I did not know any of this and was completely unaware of everything I just wrote here.

Forced confrontations, trauma, near death, illness or great loss will shake up your system by which you measure your world. These experiences will make you look at your current model of reality with new eyes. You begin to question it. For some, the urgency to fill this anxiety motivates them to go deeper down an empty path of getting more of what they don’t need. They believe that by feeding the ego’s desire to acquire more, the emptiness will be filled. It only gets worse. Spiritual thirst will never be quenched by material gluttony.

 Whether early or later down the path, they eventually realize that more of the same will not feed a hungry soul. Seeking more material gain, more money, more education, a soul mate, more, more and more will eventually drive you in circles like a frantic dog chasing its ego tail.

Questioning your current reality can be the first step on the Spiritual path. And the moment one takes their first step on this path, they soon discover ego traps lurk around every corner. There are traps that can snare you along this path. If you get caught in a trap, it can be painful and the reaction often is to pull away and go backward into normal consciousness. Traps are not meant to stop you. Who lays these traps? It is the ego. But as I have explained before, the ego is not a thing or a noun. It is a process. So when I speak of traps along the Spiritual path, think of them as resting points that make you question your journey. Think of them as pit stops that allow you to stop for a moment and validate your journey. This way, a trap will not be something that can stop you, but rather catapult you forward.

With this being said, the first trap along the Spiritual path is to change your interpretation of concept of trap. No one is trapping you. No one wants to delay or stop your journey. The residue and hangover from past habits can create an energetic pit stop.  Like an eddy in a river flowing down stream, a whirlpool of past habits can cause your raft to pause for a moment and make you go in circles. Consider this a resting place or a pause along the path.

If you really trust Spirit then understand that your Spirit has allowed these sacred traps to be placed strategically along your path. When you push yourself out of the trap and swim out of the eddy of energetic stagnancy, you become validated and stronger to continue your quest. Though it may appear you are not making progress along your journey, consider that each test along the way strengthens your Spiritual endurance and the pace quickens once you free yourself. My recommendation is to welcome everything along this path. Be excited when noticing you are caught. Once you have been awakened and take the first step, normal consciousness is over – forever.

The pain of ignorance I experienced along the first part of my life while struggling my way through these traps is shared with you to encourage that even in dark awareness, one will eventually find their way. My ego reacted to my painful event by bringing forward past regrets and guilt. This introduced fear and worry of the future. The ego does not like risk. To avoid risks you will minimize your options for life experiences. This is one of the first traps. It will literally take the event(s) that jump started your Spiritual quest and misinterpret it. It will tell you to avoid any emotional situations that could cause pain. And yet, the opposite is true. To charge into those areas you are afraid to explore can be the keys that begin to unlock the prison.

If you withdraw from negative emotional events, you will cut yourself off from joyful ones. The ego uses fear to blind you from the truth. The fear of taking action is one of the greatest traps along the Spiritual path. To not act when one is afraid can have serious side affects. It will delay your journey and keep you stuck. Mind thoughts that dwell on painful past experiences will create painful fears and worries about the future. This introduces possibilities of failure along the path. You begin to judge yourself.

You start to measure your progress on the Spiritual path as either succeeding or failing. It invites you to play the “becoming game.” This says that Spiritual enlightenment is in the future. You will have to earn and learn your way out of here in order to get there! This notion makes the trip hard and minimizes joy. 

There is no failing. Once on the path, you have succeeded. You cannot become unaware. You may get momentarily distracted and captured by ego temptations, but the pain of ignorance will soon jolt you back on course. Once born into human form, you cannot get unborn. The same is true once your Spiritual journey has begun.

Here are some insights that may help you if you find yourself judging your journey and wondering if you are failing.

Your body cannot distinguish between thoughts stimulated by external events and those thoughts that come from the creations of the ego. Creations of the ego are false events. These are like movies you make up that are fabricated usually from fear-based energy. The feeling associated with worry comes from reacting to thoughts about future events. If they are painful, then fear must be present. Feelings of guilt come from reacting to thoughts about past events that say you did it wrong and could have done it better. There is judgment present. Both cause suffering.

You feel pain because you are judging yourself and creating something fearful. You are reacting to the process of thinking you are engaged in. You are literally experiencing your body which uses the language of feelings to convey a message to you. It is attempting to tell you that the way you are thinking is unloving and not in alignment with your Spirit.

When feeling the pain of contraction in your body as you think of past or future events stop and notice what you are doing. You are not reacting to the event! You can’t react to the actual event because it is not even happening. The only thing that is happening is the thinking process in your head that is creating a movie of the past or the future. You are reacting to a movie in your head. That is what you are feeling. Once you know that you are doing this, you see that you are hooked in a trap. And once you notice you have allowed yourself to be trapped, you start to look for the way out. The way out will eventually present itself. All you have to do is follow your heart and ask Spirit to direct you. Courage is the willingness to take action, once you see the way out. The first step out of the trap is to notice how you are thinking. This makes you aware and allows you to take responsibility for the whole thing.

We have all “stuck our foot in our mouth” wishing we would have paused a moment longer to access our words and actions before acting.  The first step is to feel the feeling and resist the temptation to act.  The pain of unconscious reaction will make it worse if you act and do not check in with your heart first. The way out of the trap is to distance your self from the process. This gives you room to observe your self. Say “I am feeling the contraction of pain in my body because of the way I am thinking.” This is what the Buddha meant by practicing detachment. You cannot be lured into a trap if you see it coming. To be awakened means you can see and become aware of those processes that can snare you. It means that you are at choice. It means you have a ticket out of the trap when you find yourself in one. 

Another trap along the Spiritual path is the misperception of fear and confrontational experiences. You will get confronted. And you must confront those situations of your life that you have been avoiding. Get used to it. No one graduates from the Spiritual journey without mastering confrontation.

If you think that it is beneath God to use fear to wake you up, then think again. Fear can be a typhoon that sweeps you off your feet and grabs your attention forcing you to confront your life. Great change often comes from those confrontations that shake us to the core. They may happen in our external world, like my father’s death, but the real battle took place within me years after. The greatest warrior challenge is always within.

I began to question my life. This was not easy. Especially after spending eight years in an educational institution pursuing a career and becoming a doctor. Within days of my graduation I realized that I did not want to spend the rest of my life as a dentist.  Questioning invited me to look beyond my comfort zone. It shook everything up. I realized that I bought into the prison of normal consciousness. Over time I discovered that the only way out was to follow my Spirit.  And I didn’t know what that meant at the time. I decided to follow my heart no matter what. This did not happen overnight. It took twenty years to realize this, one experience at a time.

 I didn’t get it at first because I was in denial. Look at those areas you most want to avoid. Especially those areas you have the most invested in and potentially have the greatest consequence for upset if disturbed. Those are the areas where we are asleep and need to wake up.

Question the level of your joy. If you are unhappy, there is a reason why. It is not natural to be chronically unhappy. You were not created to be unhappy. This is why adults love watching children play. It automatically gets you in touch with a very natural way of being. The ego will say this is not the real world. Spirit will say, be as children and play as children and the world will transform into a playground. What used to be important will be least important and what your heart seeks will be given to you abundantly. This is how things really are.

An awakening moment does not always have to be a dramatic event. It can begin with the thought that things aren’t what they appear to be. The current reality looses its impact and you start looking beyond the model of normal existence.  If something painful happens, you experience the pain and immediately grow. You experience an expanded sense of wisdom because of the painful experience that preceded it. This realization is a break through into a new reality. The death of my father cracked my cocooned prison of normal reality, and I began to get a glimpse of a new world that awaited my arrival.

It is natural to grieve when you loose someone. It is an appropriate response to have deep emotion and express with heartfelt tears. I did this for a long time at the loss of my dad. Thirty-nine years after the death of my father, I now experience his presence anytime I think of him. I am in touch with my love for him in the present moment. There is no room for regret or sadness in this space.

What I began to realize was that the pain I felt was the result of loving so deeply. How fortunate to have been able to feel such love for another.  To know that I could be capable of such profound love was a gift. Gratitude replaced sorrow. My new quest was to continue to share and help others expand this love throughout the world.

Once you embark on the Spiritual path, it is all up hill from there. The path can be steep. It will be full of learning experiences that are not visible to the explorer who travels this road. The signs are often not visible because your ego is sitting on your shoulder the whole way. And egos make terrible navigators. They continually misread sacred signs and are Spiritually dyslexic.

You will be invited to confront a truth, engage in a moment of realization that often lurks in unpredictable shadows. You will find yourself in valleys of despair and darkness with no compass to get yourself out. You may even be on the brink of despair and have nowhere to turn. And for some who hit bottom, Spirit will emerge to have you do extraordinary things. You will get up and inch by inch move in the direction your heart says to go. What stimulated your action was the very pain and discomfort that now motivates you to seek another way. Bless this - do not curse it. The blessing of this opens your eyes. Your ego will go crazy with this and it does not make sense to bless that, which brings your pain.

When life comes at you, you will experience the ecstasy of joy and the depth of sorrow. How you translate the darkness will determine how long you stay in the pain. It can be an awakening moment accompanied by loss and grief. The pain will pass. If you resist the pain and do not allow yourself to feel it deeply, it will soon turn into suffering. This is not punishment. It is the fail-safe system designed to get you to finally confront your life and take action. You can get it with a feather or with a hammer. It is up to you. To curse the experience is to not see the experience. It will surface again later…it always does.

Jesus preached to “love your enemies” and to “forgive those who trespass against you.” What he was saying was to dissolve the illusion of separation because we are all one. And the greatest power in the universe that heals is love. Those you perceive as enemies often bring the greatest awakening for your compassion. When you love that which appears to bring you pain, you are forced to shatter your old model of reality. By recognizing that no one really is against you, you are free.

You no longer see potential threat in the world. You see what Saint Francis of Assisi saw. Everything is connected. Brother sun and sister moon became his family. He embraced everything-  even those experiences that most of us would translate as evil.  There is a story of St. Francis talking to the fire that was about to be used to burn the cataracts out of his eyes. Brother monks were holding him down, and a red-hot iron was inching closer to his eyes. With a trembling body and faint smile, he whispered to the fire, “Old brother fire, be kind to me and I thank you for your healing.” Can we not do the same when we see the fire of confrontation approaching us along our Spiritual path? It is possible to feel the pain yet know and recognize the gift.

The ability to feel our life as we move through the world is a gift from Spirit. Why come to earth and become human if not to feel the journey? To avoid the painful feelings is ego’s way of hypnotizing us into mundane normal reality. This path goes in circles and is filled with redundant suffering. But even this boring cycle of suffering will eventually kick you out of its own orbit. It is a built in mechanism in each human being to have a breaking point where enough is enough. The greatest suffering of all is the emptiness that rises from identification with your ego mind. Pain deepens the more you identify with the thoughts in your head. This causes a gap between you and your Spirit.

But don’t worry. Your Spirit will eventually bring an experience to you that will have the capacity to knock you out of this unconscious cycle. Though your body may feel the pain and your emotions might react to negative thoughts, your Spirit is forever patient and loving. Whether you are conscious of it or not you will grow. You can’t learn less. Each experience, each day, each moment, you grow. With each breath, you become wiser and evolve. It is part of human evolution.

The spark of awareness is often ignited through the friction of unconscious acts. For many months after the loss of my father, I was very unconscious and didn’t realize that my depression was the first part of my path. The ego is the only aspect that is asleep. It is unconscious. Awareness is always present, and it can take a leap of faith stimulated by the force of pain to jolt you to wake up.

Many years after the death of my father, I finally grew to be at peace with my old model of that experience.  I no longer wished I could be back on that lawn hugging my dad. No more regret or sadness about the loss. The emotions have now evolved into a greater sense of gratitude, deep love and faith in God. The depth of my loss pales in comparison to the infinite power of love I have for my father. To be able to experience fully the love you have for another, means you are aware of your capacity to love all beings in this world. You were not created to love only a selected few. You are here to realize your capacity to love infinitely and act in accordance to this knowing.

I now embrace my father anytime I desire. Through the power of memory and the gift of choice, I feel him as close as I did when he was in his body. I know that we do not end when the body dies. And it is our infinite Spirit that breathes love into our souls.

And if ever my ego momentarily distracts me as I move along my Spiritual path, I go and take a look in a special box I have in storage. A neatly folded pair of old pajamas with hunters shooting pheasants is resting in a very special place. 

Jeff

 

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