Hard Knock Life

Liz: So we said in the previous episode that what underpinned 3D was separation and separation was managed through polarity. Everything that was positive, there was a negative, if you will. And judgment always led to pain because the result of judgment was often shame, guilt, and always reinforced that sense that I am somehow wrong, I'm bad, I'm not good enough. So we were constantly locked in our karmic themes, in our loops, if you will, rehashing the same story over and over in different scenarios. And that's what created our hard knock life. We were never going to win. We were always going to somehow get knocked down and life was just full of very painful moments, punctuated by occasional happy things.

Rhea: Life was a gift, but it was one that we also needed to survive through, we needed to make bearable.

Liz: And so in order to make things bearable meant that we had to cut those parts of ourselves off that somehow made us different, that made us want for more, that made us somehow think that we were wrong or different or stupid or whatever made us outliers.

Rhea: And so all the bits of us that weren't conforming, whether it was I didn't want to get married at 28 or maybe I didn't want to have children, or maybe I didn't want to do this kind of job, or maybe I didn't want to spend my money this way or have this kind of house or whatever it is, we ignored that and we made ourselves believe that we wanted what everyone else wanted or what we thought they wanted, because that was what you were meant to want.

Liz: Yeah, and that came from sacrifice, didn't it? I'm going to work hard so I can buy this. I'm going to go to school, even though it doesn't feel right to me and get a particular degree in something that doesn't really interest me or it does not reflect my passion or my personality or how I really identify myself, but I'm going to do it so I can have XYZ life. So the actions that underpinned separation and how we defined happiness in three dimensional reality demanded that we sacrifice ourselves.

Rhea: Well, you couldn't get one without the other, right? You couldn't have happiness without it costing something. Happiness wasn't free.

Liz: Ever. And if you believed that, then there's something wrong with you. And so somehow suffering became this hallmark of how worthy we were. Artists would suffer for their craft, mothers would sacrifice and suffer for their children, and husbands would sacrifice and suffer for their families.

Rhea: In order to show care, you had to sacrifice yourself in some way.

Liz: Oh, absolutely. Even with work, you had to pay your dues. Everything was sort of delayed gratification, if you will. May not happen in this lifetime. I mean, religion teaches us that the gratification isn't necessarily in this lifetime, because living is suffering, happiness is sacrifice, but you'll have it after.

Rhea: Eventually.

Liz: Eventually, even if you don't get to enjoy it. The afterlife will be full of pleasurable things. And we have been sold that for eons, haven't we?

Rhea: Yeah.

Liz: So in order to be able to sacrifice, to believe that we weren't worthy enough to be ourselves, that we were enough, that we had to start judging. Okay, what part of myself is not good enough? So I'm going to give that up. So every time we would give up a part of ourselves, we would dismember ourselves, if you will.

Rhea: Yes, yes.

Liz: And that dismembering of our person, our identity, our worth, our sense of self is really what led to our disempowerment.

Rhea: As you start kind of unpicking all that stuff and you start allowing yourself to reconnect to the other parts of you, you start realize how much of yourself you just weren't in order to be accepted.

Liz: Yes.

Rhea: It was kind of like cutting off a limb in many ways, because I was just pretending that these parts of me didn't exist, but they did it. And so, because I wasn't able to own myself, I wasn't able to step into my power because I didn't know who I was.

Liz: There's so many ways in which we've been conditioned based on our gender, based on our ethnicity, based on our race, that we were forced to change in order to make us palatable, and it happens to everyone. No one was more worthy of being saved than someone else.

Rhea: We don't get stuck in just our stories, like the stories we tell ourselves about whether or not we're good enough, we also get stuck in the larger stories too of groups of people. About where you're from, what your background is, what you look like and what that means about how you're not good enough too. And that's how we're judged by strangers by those stories, not by the stories that we tell ourselves or the people around us tell us, but by the collective stories of our heritage or of our incomes or of our geographical locations, whatever it is, for example, being an Arabic woman.

In many ways, there is so much stigma around that. What does that mean? What can you do? What can you not do? How must you look? How must do you act? Who can you marry? What kind of life must you live? You know, I can tell you very personally. I was constantly being told everything about who I was and who I was going to have to be, and so many parts of me didn't fit in that, and I silenced every single one because that's what I had to do and that's what I had to be.

There's always going to be an expectation that we can break. There's always going to be something that we can make ourselves bigger than. And that's not because we're trying to defy someone else or trying to prove someone wrong. Oh, look, you said, I couldn't become a CEO and now look at me. Here I am! Legally blonde moment. You said, I couldn't become a lawyer and go to Harvard. Now here I am, valedictorian. You know what I mean?

Liz: Yay for Elle!!

Rhea: Yay for Elle. We're not proving people wrong. That's not the point. It's just we are being who we want to be, and it's just as simple as that.

Liz: It is, and it needs to be as simple as that. That's what kind of what we were referring to in Season 2, when we said growing up and coming into a level of spiritual maturity, which is really about coming into your greatest power as an individual means casting off so much of the identity that we felt we needed for this world, but at some point to really come into our greater identity of who we are, where we recognize that we are truly divine at our core, which is really what connects us all is to understand that, as you said, nothing really separates us anymore, that those 3D-constructed obstacles or boundaries over our race or ethnicity, et cetera, really don't exist, that they are just all constructs that kept us separate.

Rhea: And we know that. We see that. It's all crumbling around us.

Liz: We know that, yet . . . Yes, it is, and yet we still operate within the confines of our old identities.

Rhea: Yeah. Because even by saying that you're overcoming an identity still means that you're operating within the confines of it.

Liz: And it's not about self-denial, but it's just about acknowledging that beyond those surface things, there's so much to who we are. Somewhere within, we are connected and what connects us has nothing to do with any of that. I think that's really the point is the fact that what we can do for future generations - as parents, as caretakers, as aunts, uncles, as anyone who knows what this young generation will be facing - is to really understand that we want for them a different story. And so what is important to give them is the gift of not burdening them with the kind of history and legacies that we grew up with.

Rhea: This is all you can be.

Liz: Or this is what will happen to you because . . . .

Rhea: Yeah. But that's also because in separation, in judgment and all the rest of it, that's what it was always like. There was always a price to pay for happiness. There was always a price to pay for power, for success.

Liz: Always.

Rhea: As we said at the beginning, it was always like that. So in order to achieve something, you have to have experienced it in a bad way first, you know what I mean? So I know what success is because I've experienced poverty. I know what peace is because I've experienced so much chaos. I know what power is because I've always been so disempowered, but is that what I want for my kids? Is that what I want for my nephews?

Liz: Is that what you want for yourself going forward?

Rhea: No. To live in a world where I know that in order to get something good, I have to have something bad, or if I haven't had it bad, wait for it to come, cause that's the other thing we do. So, Oh, this was easy. This worked out. Oh, too good to be true.

Liz: Yeah, or I succeeded in spite of . . . There's a lot of those in spite of’s.

Rhea: If you just think about whatever kind of weak point anyone you have as a listener, kind of just think about what your weak point is and think about if that happens to you in an easy way, would you trust it? But if you worked really hard to achieve it, would you trust it? And you're much more likely to trust the one that you worked really, really hard to achieve.

Liz: And to be fair, hard work is a nice thing. I mean, it's . . . .

Rhea: It does pay off and you do have to work hard for things that you want, and we're not talking about that.

Liz: It doesn't feel hard when you're passionate about something.

Rhea: when it's hard, to be honest.

Liz: Yeah.

Rhea: It can to be honest. So I wouldn't agree with that.

Liz: Okay. Should we restate? Is there something you're trying to tell me, Rhea?

Rhea: Honestly, editing, it feels like hard work.

Liz: Okay. Well of course certain things are going to feel hard. We don't love every piece, but the bigger picture really does motivate me at least where I'm like, I do love this enough that this one thing I find a bit tedious. Shit! I'll do it.

Rhea: Yeah. We're not saying don't work hard and sit on your ass and everything's going to come to you. No. Everything in this world does require some form of effort and work. I think it's also just our concept of what work is and what it entails and what it needs is also quite skewed.

Liz: Very much.

Rhea: And it does become a challenge.

Liz: And that's when it comes down to - sacrifice. When work starts to seem like sacrifice, and I keep looking at that phrase "have it all, having it all".

Rhea: I'll never forget. I read somewhere years ago and I'm sure everyone's heard some version of this. Let's say you have sections in your life, like romance, family, work and friends. And I read somewhere that you can never have all four going good at the same time. If one goes really well, the other one falls apart. All four aren't going to work always the same time. That definitely is part of the little voice in my head. One of my fears I would say is that it's not possible for everything to be going well.

Liz: Right. Some of that, I think ties back to your karmic theme. For some, that is just because we're still maybe working through an aspect of that karmic theme. And I do think that we can have it all. In Oneness Consciousness, it is possible, but it's a matter of two things. One, what our priorities really are. Like, how do we define success and work success and family, et cetera? And the second thing is to understand that what we thought we really wanted or what would work for us in 3D is not something we can necessarily take with us into 5D oneness.

Rhea: Explain.

Liz: So it might be that our definition of success shifts. It might be that our definition of what family really means shifts. It might be that our definition of a solid relationship shifts a bit as well.

Rhea: They're not another version of sacrifice? My version of family has shifted so that I can be happy in family. My version of relationship has shifted so I can be happy in relationship.

Liz: No, because you're not doing this from a mental place. When you've come to that space of peace and healing that is required to come into peace and healing also some fears and stuff like that, a lot of the other external stuff goes. The FOMO goes, the expectations go, and that's why we have built up to this is when you're looking at all these concepts, what you're understanding is that all these things that 3D life made me think I needed to have, I don't really need to have anymore. So now I don't need to work to pay my mortgage. I don't necessarily have to work for XYZ things. I will be content with this because I feel like a whole person when I'm doing this, as opposed to working at a job that gives me anxiety, that demands that I feel like I have to take antidepressants just to function.

Rhea: Yeah. So I have to go and find my happiness somewhere else because I'm suffering here and all the rest.

Liz: Exactly. And so that's really what that means. It's not that you have to re-work it like, okay, my family story is really going to shit. I'll just be okay with it and then therefore. We're here to heal ourselves, and when we do that, all of those areas of our lives will end up having to shift, but it will make sense to us once we've done that.

Rhea: So it's kind of more, just like the more you feel peace inside of yourself, the less the external validations to show that you feel peace inside of yourself you need.

Liz: Right. And the more self-love you have, the more you don't go chasing it elsewhere. I love myself enough to say these are where my boundaries are. This is what the line I draw. In any area of my life, doesn't even have to be romantic. It doesn't necessarily have to be a family. It could be with friends. You know, if you've always been a doormat to friends who just kind of waltz right in and make everything about themselves, perhaps you're like, you know what? I can't see you tomorrow. So you do end up having it all. That your definition and your version of “all” changes.

Rhea: But it doesn't change. It just comes back to who you are rather than who other people want you to be. Because if we are in step with ourselves, we aren't suffering,

Liz: But it comes down to understanding how worthy we really are. We forget that so much of the external validation and things that we were taught we needed in 3D right down to the validation of relationship and money would show us just how worthy we really were. And the measure of our worthiness, if you will, in 5D - not that there's really a measurement - but we can only know that we are worthy of having it all when we can see that we already are all. Does that make sense?

Rhea: No, you lost me totally.

Liz: Because when we are one with ourselves, we are enough. That connectedness as One in All means that we are ALL.

Rhea: I think it's just a bit too meta.

Liz: It is. It comes down to understanding that we are worthy, but only we can a) determine our worthiness and b) . . . 

Rhea: Determine our wants and needs

Liz: Exactly, and provide them for ourselves.

Rhea: Because we just do make the choices that allow them to become possibilities.

Liz: Yeah. That's enough. But not to expect others to give it to us.

Rhea: Because that's not power.

Liz: No, it's not.

Rhea: For this concept of having it all for everything to be working, it goes against everything we've ever been taught.

Liz: Very true.

Rhea: Everything. My mind can't get there. I notice it now

Liz: By the way, your mind can't get you there. That's why it's so difficult to believe because the mental body rules 3D. That is the predominant way in which we function in 3D. We have our physical bodies obviously, but our minds run the show. So it is really difficult to conceive that this is a possibility because our minds are like, nope, sorry. But if we are to really conceive of a 5D existence in Oneness Consciousness, that requires, as we've said before, the emotional body to step up, which means we have to give room for our emotions to partner, not necessarily run the show, but to really partner with the rest of our bodies. And that's really also our spiritual body, our higher consciousness. You don't have to be spiritual per se, but it is important to at least have adapted to a kind of knowing and intuitive understanding if you will, or some kind of higher consciousness that does allow for the possibility, as you said. The possibility that we can have it all, because we can be enough, that we can be whole, healed individuals in our own world.

Rhea: But then I guess the question in my mind then goes to, but then how do you grow? Because having it all means everything's working nicely. So then what happens when something goes wrong? Cause then you can't have it all, cause otherwise we're not growing and evolutioning and all the rest of it.

Liz: Right. Well, this is once you've pretty much burned out your karma, so then you're evolving through a space of love and learning that way. Just doesn't have to be that massive, heavy trauma pain shit that karma has brought.

Rhea: It's more like bumps.

Liz: Exactly, which we will encounter even when you're in that peaceful space. As we mentioned in the previous episode, you can still be in bliss but still things in your life can sort of turn to shit a bit, and that maybe you're not going to have a great day or two or three, but your inner core, that inner peace barometer, if you will knows that that's just you working through something.

Rhea: And it's never as dramatic as it was before.

Liz: Exactly. And it could feel dramatic and your mind can be like, You see? I told you. It's never going to be possible, but your heart says, no, I still feel okay. I just need to feel this for a moment and it's not going to define my existence. It's not going to define my life. It's not going to allow these old fears to surface where then all of a sudden, I'm like living in a state of fear and then I backslide into my old shit again. It doesn't have to be that way, and that's what we mean by having it all.

Rhea: I see.

Liz: Because that is how we're growing and evolving.