Stage 5 - Merging with the Illusion? What on earth does that mean?

I love this stage but I didn’t always. When I first read the 12 Stages of Healing by Donny Epstein, this one didn’t really resonate with me. It took several years of attending workshops, reading and practicing this stage before I really started to appreciate it.

So the first challenge for me was the title - Merging with the Illusion. I really had no idea what that meant.

Let me tell put this into context I hope this will help you to understand.

We are all born to different parents, grow up in our neighbourhood with or without extended family. As a baby we are totally helpless and reliant on our parents to feed and nurture us. It takes many years before we are capable of looking after ourself. And so the human brain, which is totally amazing, wants to ensure that we get fed and housed. And as it observes and learns, it sees what emotions and behaviours are acceptable to get love and which ones are not.

So you may grow up surrounded by loving adults, who have challenges expressing emotions, or maybe just anger and you learn that to be safe and be accepted into the “tribe” you must never admit to being angry or show anger. So instead you learn to be super accomodating, even when anger may be the appropriate emotion and you bend your bodymind around this, making a story up about how “anger is bad” or “good girls don’t show anger” or “anger is for wimps”.

Whilst this may serve you for a short time, as you mature and grow through the 12 stages of healing, or human consciousness you start to realize that you are more. That parts of you are indeed angry and maybe parts of you are whole other host of emotions that you never deemed possible.

In Stage 5 we start to merge with the energy that created those stories and as we merge through our story of how we have to be, a whole bigger landscape opens up as to who we are and who we can be.

So in stage 5, finally the monkey mind quietens and we start to realize we are so much more than the child that needed to fit in.

And as we start to merge with our stories, we often notice that the people around can seem different. If we stay with the anger pattern, we may have been very aware of peoples anger and very sensitive to “all the angry people out there..” often polarising (stage 2) about this group. As we merge with our stories we may find that anger around us either lessens or when it does show up we respond it a totally different way. We see the world in a different way and the world is different. Our expectations have changed and consequently we focus and see different things.

Although I’m giving very conscious examples I often find that the stage 5 rhythm just takes over and we feel ourselves merge energetically with ourselves without truly knowing what it’s all about. When this happens and the rhythm becomes part of us, there is no need to know, just flow and evolve and relax into your process and observe how you change and the world around you changes and just be grateful for your progress.