When I first began all this personal growth work, I was excited that I could change. I was grateful and excited that I was finally being given the tools I had been searching for and even had begun to lose hope in their existence. When the tools involved looking at my pain head on, it was scary, but I was so desperate, I willingly and eagerly did so. I spent years looking at my pain and processing pain. For years, I lived in emotional pain on a daily basis. And, I was grateful, because I was moving through stuff, finally finding answers, and I was no longer stuck and living without hope. But years is a long time to live in, and process through, historical pain. At what point do you come up for air? At what point do you acknowledge that living and processing historical pain isn’t how you want to live out the rest of your life?
“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.”
Barzakh is an Arabic term that has a few different meanings depending on the context in which it is spoken. One of the first meanings I was taught, was how it means that place of transition we sometimes find ourselves existing in. When we’re in transition, it can feel a little disorienting. We find we have one foot squarely planted on one shore, where we were, and our other foot securely planted on an opposite shore, where we’re going. So, for a little while, it can feel like we’re existing on two different shorelines at the same time; partly existing where we’re headed and partly existing, at the same time, where we used to fully stand. If the two places are very different, the disorientation can be quite profound. Sometimes it feels uncomfortable because you don’t feel like you’re steady anywhere since you’re not fully on one shore or the other, and you’re just aware of the ocean separating the two shores underneath you, instead of steady, solid ground.
There came a point, where Allah’s guidance was clear, it was time to look forward and focus my energy forward, and less of my energy picking apart my past, digging in the refuse for nuggets of gold and jewels of understanding. It was leading to diminishing returns. I didn’t have to live so squarely in the center of this barzakh anymore. I could now start transferring my weight forward in the direction of my happiness. And the best part was, I didn’t decide it was time, Allah informed me it was time. I could trust it wasn’t some part of my ego, tired of the pain, finding an escape. And in its escape just keeping me further stuck and destined to repeat my past patterns.
In this barzakh, I was trying to steer my ship toward a star, guiding me to my inner happiness, by looking at the lessons of my past. I was facing backwards, trying to course correct based on the lessons of my past. And then checking my bearings by looking forward at the star. My guidance was, it’s time to fully face forward, keeping my eye on the star (Allah). My ship’s steering would remain wobbly and shaky until I did so. At some point, the lessons of my past could no longer inform my choices of the future. My past taught me skills about survival, especially in difficult and bleak situations. To live a life of gratitude and happiness, it required a whole new set of skills I had never encountered, let alone developed within me.
That blew my mind. It still does. I spent the first three decades of my life believing I had to do certain things to “be happy,” someday. And the truth is, for me in my journey, those things helped me to survive, but would never support me in reaching true happiness. There are skills to develop, that I need, that will allow me to be happy. What? Seriously? What? I need to develop skills that will ALLOW me to be happy?!? Mind blown.
“The journey is what brings us happiness not the destination.”
I couldn’t understand this quote until recently. If your destination, like mine, is Allah, the infinite, as we can never truly “reach” Allah (depending at what level you’re speaking at), then this quote is true. Allah is everything, especially, our journey. The 99 Names of Allah are all verbs. How does one manifest action with inaction (what we imagine once we have reached our destination)? One doesn’t. Our happiness is in being, i.e. we are “human beings”…and our being happens in motion of some kind. Even resting and experiencing peace, can be motion (and why I’m using the words “action” and “motion” and not “doing”).
So change, especially change away from existing in the trauma-survival mindset, to living a life of abundance and happiness, is a journey with many stages, many barzakhs, big and small. And a big barzakh is the realization that there comes a point where focusing on the past no longer is as necessary and beneficial as it once was. At that point, it’s time to face forward. When I begin to face forward, I’m finding out, there are whole skill sets that I had no idea even existed. I need these skills to allow myself to be happy. It’s not that I have to pursue happiness, I have to allow myself to be happy. It blows my mind on so many levels. Peace and love.
Have you ever had a moment where you realized it was time to shift your attention? How did that shift impact your life? Please feel free to share it in the comments below.
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