A Travel Essay from the Inner Journey

The concept that “attitude is everything” is woven through the whole ethos of the Gene Keys teachings; it is, in fact, woven through your entire Gene Keys chart.

And nowhere is this more apparent than in your Evolution sphere.

I have Gene Key 38.1 in my Evolution sphere; this is the Shadow of Struggle, and it is, quite frankly, a bit of a double whammy for me. You see, the whole Evolution key is all about struggle … we evolve, just like every species evolves, through struggle.

Evolution is the pressure of struggle that causes us to shift our behaviour in order to survive and to grow. So, having my Gene Key that is all about struggle actually be the Shadow of Struggle … well, that’s a lot of pressure!!

Every human is fallible and you are no different in this. Where you may be different from most is that you have the courage to admit your own faults and learn to live with them, even taking advantage of them.
Richard Rudd, The Sage’s Golden Path Retreat

A Prayer

Reading this was like a benediction, a prayer said over me by a wise one. Of course I am fallible. I spent so long in the mire of my own self-loathing that I would literally do anything to gain acceptance. And that made me feel weak, that led me into so many poor choices. When I think back to my younger self, the desperation in her almost chokes me.

I desperately wanted to be loved so I would give my power away to people that I knew were bad for me (or just plain bad). I would think that if I gave them what they wanted, they’d be nice to me, they would want me around. It never worked out that way. I allowed myself to be used then discarded. I allowed myself to be used because not only was I desperate for love, but I also simultaneously believed I’d never get it, because I was worthless.

I told myself I was weak; I told myself I was nothing and that I didn’t deserve to be treated any better.

My faults were not that I was doing anything bad; my faults were that I didn’t love myself. I didn’t believe in myself. I didn’t trust myself. I couldn’t see my own gifts.

I see them now! I see my Gifts in all their glory. And I see how my Shadows were always portals into this Gift-filled, loved-filled woman that I am.

My fallibilities did not stem from me being a bad person; rather they stemmed from me not believing just what a good person I actually am. 

All About Attitude

This Evolution key is all about attitude.

This Evolution key is the fulcrum on which my attitude balances.

I beat myself up, I focus on all of my mistakes and fallibilities, and I slide down into the Shadow side, weighed down there by self-loathing, bitterness and victimhood.

But if I take the attitude of compassion for myself, if I see my struggles as doorways leading to strength and resilience, if I see my weaknesses and fallibilities as tender spots that need love and understanding, well, then the bar floats up and I slide into my Gift of Perseverance.

I float in space, seeing all the goodness in me. I see a woman who is always, in every moment, doing the best she can.

I can take my fallibilities and turn them into the compost that feeds the tree of my life. I can take the weakness and wrap it tenderly around my new shoots of self-esteem and self-belief.

Weakness is tenderness. Now, there is a thought to bring a healing balm to a sore soul.

Seeing my own fallibilities is radical self-honesty.

Self-honesty is an essential ingredient in sincerity, which just happens to be Richard Rudd’s Sage word for my Gene Key 38.1! You can read more about my interpretation of “sincerity”, my GK38.1 word here.

If I truly want to practice sincerity, the first place must enfold with it is my own self-belief and self-worth.

I must sincerely, deeply and completely love and accept myself first, before I can send waves of sincerity out into the world.

Programming Partners

Your Evolution key is the programming partner to your Life’s Work Gene Key, and it reveals the Shadow you must embrace and transform through your daily challenges. (From the Sage).

My Life’s Work Shadow is Provocation …

Provocation and Struggle. These Shadows are so intricately linked that you can’t have one without the other. They are not easy Shadows to transform, because we are kind of programmed to believe that Provocations are external, that we have no control over them, and therefore we have no control over the Struggle that comes hand in hand with them.

And it’s true, we don’t have control over external circumstances. I had no control over my dad dying, or my mum retreating emotionally, when I was a young child. I had no control over the people whom I had dysfunctional relationships with, nor over the shitstorms they let loose in my life.

I Do Have Control Over My Responses

But what I do have control over are my reactions and responses to the Provocations.

I have control over the attitude I meet the world with.

Shift that and I shift the trajectory of my life.

Shift my attitude from being a victim of these Provocations into one where I use those same Provocations as doorways into growth, and I move from victim to warrior.

Shift my attitude to Struggle from victimhood to acceptance, and everything shifts.

In both of these Shadows, a poor attitude makes me a victim.

And a good attitude makes me a warrior.

In Reality, I Am Always Struggling With Myself

In the Sage teachings, Richard Rudd says that when you realise that all of your struggles are actually with yourself and not with the external world, then you break the pattern of struggle in your life, and you have access to all the answers you have been seeking.

This has been a gradual realisation for me, that all the Struggles I have faced in my adult life have really all been about my inner struggles with self-esteem. When I was a child, and my dad died and my mum withdrew emotionally, these were external struggles, external suffering, which, as a child, I had no control over.

But these struggles set up a pattern in me, a whole belief system was formed around my sense of lack. I literally lacked parenting in those formative years, and that cast the die for how I would approach lack in my adult life … which meant that for a very long time all that I could actually see was the lack.

As an adult, some of the struggles were real, external struggles too … the dysfunctional relationships, the financial poverty, the lack of support … but the one thing that compounded all of these external struggles and made them all feel so insurmountable and overwhelming, and so bloody relentless, was my attitude to them.

I thought I was weak. I thought I was worthless. I thought I had no control. I thought I was trapped in a life where I was destined to face struggle and suffering every single day. I thought that life was destined to be a never-ending series of disasters, pain, and abandonment.

There was no self-compassion. There was no self-love. There was just me, being pushed between those two bullies of Provocation and Struggle.

All of my external circumstances became excuses for me to beat myself up, blaming myself, believing that I was only struggling in life because there was something so wrong with me, that I must deserve to be treated this way.

We Are All Born Worthy

But there was never anything wrong with me. I’m not saying I was perfect, none of us are. If there was something “wrong” with me, it was that I lacked self-love; it was that I existed in a state of a deep lack of self-trust.

There was this numbness, this feeling that I was missing some important part of myself that other people had.

I see now, after all this work, after decades of solitary inner work, and three years of Gene Keys journeying with Hayley Curtis, that the only lack in me was that lack of self-esteem. The lack of self-love. Coming to understand that I could never be worthless, even if I tried, because we are all born worthy, slowly started to change my attitude, first to myself, and then to my external world. I started to forgive my younger self; she was, after all, doing the best she could with what she had available to her at the time. I started to give myself the grace I give to other people.

Miracles

When I start loving myself and stop struggling with these false beliefs that I am somehow worthless, then a truly miraculous thing begins to happen … I become, first, more able to cope with external struggles; and then the power that those external struggles has over me starts to diminish. I am no longer a victim.

I am seeing external circumstances for what they are … at worst, simply external circumstances over which I have no control, but which mean nothing about my worth.

Or, at best, they can become portals into something new … a deeper understanding of myself, an opportunity to grow, a doorway into a new way of thinking that has the potential to open me up to whole new worlds.

Your Evolution Provides a Diagnostic Tool

I love the way that Richard Rudd describes the Evolution Gene Key as a “diagnostic tool that shows you how aligned you are to your Life’s Work, and ultimately also your Radiance and Hidden Purpose”. Boom!!

It will tell you when you have somehow gone adrift from that which aligns with who you really are and what you are here to do in the world. He also cautions that it is up to us and us alone to pull ourselves back on track, when we do go awry on our life’s journey.

And this is why attitude is of supreme importance.

My attitude determines how I face Struggle.

Will I react from a place of victimhood and taking it all personally? Or will I respond from a place where I see the Struggles as portals into my Perseverance, Dynamism, Authority and Resourcefulness?

Will I face the Struggles with an attitude of them being out to crush me? Or will I stand shoulder to shoulder with my weakness and face the Struggles, turning them into an opportunity to grow?

Sometimes, shit just happens. And sometimes you actually are a victim to someone else’s shadow patterns over which you have no control. It doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you. It’s just life.

And realizing that was huge for me. It continues to be a daily lesson for me to learn and probably will be for the rest of my life … when external circumstances or people present to me as Struggle, that it’s not about me and my worth.

The Miraculous Puzzle

For me, that understanding is the first piece in this miraculous puzzle that is life … the understanding that Struggle is not about my worth.

And then, when that realisation dawns and I’m able to have compassion for myself and forgiveness for myself; when I am able to hold forgiveness for that younger self who always seemed to be getting it wrong; when I can feel love for myself instead of blame, then the next miraculous thing is able to happen … I am able to see the learning that there is inside the Struggle.

I’m not falling into the self-blame and the self-flagellation over what a fuck-up I am, (or else why would all this bad shit be happening?!). I’m able, from the space that that opens up inside me, to see that there might be something for me to learn.

Now, I’m not saying that I will always find the lesson right away; because so many of the lessons and so many of the insights and breakthroughs I’ve experienced have been such slow burns. They’ve been like slowly-building waves of understanding. So, I might be faced by a Struggle, which will take me a long time to see the lesson it is hiding in its folds. But I’m definitely getting quicker at it!

It has come up for me countless times through this Gene Keys work that it all comes down to attitude. You can have two people having the same excruciatingly bad struggle or suffering in their lives, but because one holds a low frequency attitude and one holds a high frequency attitude, they both have a completely different experience of that struggle.

I am choosing the high frequency attitude to struggle.

I am choosing to believe that when things go wrong, it’s not all my fault. It’s not all because there’s something wrong with me.

I am choosing to see my Struggles as doorways into understanding myself, loving myself, and accepting myself.

All of the photographs I have used in this essay were taken at or just after sunrise. For me, being out in the world at this time of day, especially if I have time to enjoy it, to stop and take a photograph, to just walk in the early morning light, fills me with joy, and sets me up for having a good attitude towards the whole day.

If you’d like to see more of my photographs, you can find them on my Flickr page.