Inside of us is an electric fence.
You’re getting ready to say something to your mother that you haven’t said before.
It could be a compliment. It could be a critique. It could be about the rattling noise in her car.
Then fear takes over. It feels like you are shaking. Maybe you are.
Welcome to your electric fence.
Nothing has happened in your life, yet you feel emotionally and physically electrocuted in that moment.
It stops you in your tracks, and it traps you in your personal circle of familiarity.
Emotionally Attacking Yourself
The electric fence is pure resistance, and it isn’t just fear.
It’s all kinds of crappy emotions that you–yes, you–use against yourself.
Shame, anger, self-hatred, guilt, self-doubt, and more come charging into you to short-circuit this new action you’re about to take.
Facing Your Anger as a Spiritual Practice
Standing at the fence line, an ego structure shouts, “You’re heading into dangerous territory!”
Then it fries you with an uncomfortable experience.
Most people immediately backtrack to safety.
Justifying Your Avoidance and Ego Fear
After the experience with the electric fence come all the ego justifications and/or self-judgment about why you don’t want to challenge your electric fence.
You’re not strong enough, ready enough, or good enough.
Ah, the self-worth ego.
Or perhaps your ego excuses are:
“You didn’t really need to go there;”
“Things are fine;”
“Mom will figure out the rattling problem on her own;”
“I have all my truth already;” or
“Everything is already perfect as it is.”
The self-justifier ego can and will say anything to justify why you don’t need to move through the electric fence of your creation and why you are fine to stay in the circle of your suffering.
Or convince you that you aren’t suffering when you are.
3 Types of Conscious Suffering
Again and again, you will find that you are your own worst enemy.
No one makes you feel this electric fence but you.
No one makes this electric fence happen but you.
This invisible internal line in the sand stops you from experiencing so many other possibilities in life.
Already Experienced with the Fence?
Some of you have experience with the electric fence.
Maybe as a teen, you felt it as you asked out that attractive person. Maybe in your physical pursuits, you’ve felt the challenge of being at your body’s limits. Maybe in your career, you accepted new responsibilities and learned how to do them.
The fence isn’t new.
But I’ve watched so many people who are experienced pushing an edge in one or two ways who never get close to the fence with their more fundamental ego attachments and structures.
These people shift to different parts of their inner prison cell, pretending that they are spiritually progressing.
7 Signs of Spiritual Progress (and 7 Signs that Are Not Progress)
The Electric Fence and Familiar Suffering
In short, there are many aspects of the electric fence that encircle and ensnare you in a false sense of safety.
Ironically, most of that ego “safety” feels bad, but it is so normal that you don’t realize it.
You may also be too numb and over-stimulated to feel the badness of your familiarity. People call this ignorance bliss.
It’s not.
It’s suffering.
And staying inside your electric fence, your suffering continues.
But there is a way out.
The Way Out, The Way Through
The way out is true love–the true love of awareness.
Not human love. Human love is full of conditions, although a little bit of that can help.
When you are serious about freedom and facing your electric fence, you come back to that space of awareness. In that space of true love, you don’t feed additional electricity into the fence.
In that space of awareness, you still get electrocuted by all your conditioning.
But in that space, you still do the thing that your ego is electrocuting you about.
Then, you see what is on other side.
Then you do this again and again and again.
Finding Life on the Other Side, Not Death
Each time you do, the fence weakens because you do not find death and destruction or any of the threats your ego tells you will happen if you go one more inch.
You awaken to life.
What Is a Spiritual Awakening?
So much of life is wonderful and beautiful. It’s not the horror show that the electric fence suggests.
That’s just your conditioning.
By experiencing the other side of the electric fence, the power you give to that fence dwindles. Which makes it easier and easier to step through that fencing.
One day, you take it down so completely that you just go live your life.
