A Fresh Look At Betrayal

At some point, we’ll all feel like someone or something has betrayed us.

Betrayal, as defined by Wikipedia is: “…the breaking or violation of a presumptive contract, trust, or confidence that produces moral and psychological conflict within a relationship amongst individuals, between organizations or between individuals and organizations.”

So many, in these overwhelming times, have felt the sting of betrayal. Whether it has been a clash of views, government overreach, harm through illness, harm through medicine…betrayal has been a dominant narrative that has woven itself through our ancestry and certainly through current cultural milieu.

I have thought a lot about betrayal lately. It is something that I have wrestled with my whole life. It has made an indelible mark on my psyche, my physical health and my relationships.

Anytime we venture into the nucleus of struggle and get brave enough to wade into its murky waters, we often see that the struggle is not what we thought it was. It is only when we hold the struggle at bay, condemning and arguing with Life that, this isn’t right!!!…it shouldn’t have gone this way!!!!…that the struggle will appear as an impossible hill to climb.

But when held in neutrality…by sitting in its nucleus with curiosity…we suddenly see it from an entirely new vantage-point.

I’ve done this very recently with betrayal. I’ve had no choice. This body of mine is one of those bodies that wears every unmet emotion.

Having had an autoimmune disease since I was 7 years old, I’ve been sent on a journey to uncover what betrayal has to teach me.

This is how Grace operates.

It can appear as overwhelming love or fierce provocation.

Betrayal and autoimmune disease, it appears, are also partners.

This came to me like a lightning bolt in the middle of the night a few weeks ago. As I’ve been struggling again with my health, and my immune system has, once again, gone to battle with this body of mine, I’ve been asking, inquiring, moving steadily towards its epicentre.

In an autoimmune body, the immune system attacks its own tissue. It seems to be confused. What ensues is a crisis of identity.

It is self rejecting self.

It is self betraying self.

No matter who or what has stepped up in my life…in your life…to hurt, betray and haunt, we can know, without a shadow of a doubt, that is has been done for me; for you.

On a soul level, there is no doubt about this.

The Universe only has one gear, and that is Love.

Everything else is an illusion.

So as I have entered into the holding space known as Betrayal I come to some startling truths.

First, in order for the betrayal to gain entrance and take up space in this body-mind, I had to agree to it. I had to open the door and invite it in.

And even before agreeing to it, I needed to believe that something within me was worth betraying.

In the embrace of such pain, betrayal entered and it began a lifelong teaching. A harsh one. A painful one. But more than anything, a loving one.

It taught me that everything that I had believed about myself, my worth, my place in this world was not true. I was not the small, unworthy, unloved, unattended to girl that I had so convincingly believed myself to be.

And in reality, no one betrayed me.

That is not actually possible.

This is a revelatory truth. A paradigm shift. A harsh crack in the mirror that I’ve been looking in my whole life.

The only betrayal I have ever experienced has been at my own hand.

It was me who decided I was unlovable, replaceable, unworthy. It was my embrace of an idea of myself as cut-off from love, as someone who was disposable, wrong.

And as the world spun on its axis in the last two years and a media-fed frenzy fuelled a revolt against anyone who did not abide by the one acceptable narrative, I told myself that it was me who was irresponsible, selfish and reprehensible.

Well, fuck that.

Once I got brave enough to enter into my own role in this war on sovereignty, I saw so clearly that I had, once again, opened my door to something that wasn’t actually my burden to bear.

As does every single life-form on this planet, we each walk an individual path that is prescribed whether we deem it acceptable or not.

How do I know this to be true?

Go back to when you were five years old, ten, fifteen…could you have predicted, with any measure of reliability, that you would wind up where you find yourself today?

Of course not.

Your life, my life, simply unfolded.

And even when life took you into a direction that had you stomping your feet and proclaiming…this can’t be!!!…it rolled on anyway, did it not?

Carl Jung, the great psychologist, centred his work around what he called Individuation; meaning, society and culture will shape us from a young age and then, at some point, it becomes an existential imperative for us to unlearn or dismantle our early conditioning to find out who we really are.

In one of Jung’s central essays, he wrote:

“Individuation means becoming an “in-dividual,” and, in so far as “individuality” embraces our innermost, last, and incomparable uniqueness, it also implies becoming one’s own self. We could therefore translate individuation as “coming to selfhood” . . .”  ~ Carl Jung, Two Essays In Analytical Psychology

In other words, our Soul’s path is an unavoidable path.

You can fight yours all you like, but like a flower whose imperative it is to break through soil in the first blush of spring, your own, individual evolution can not be stopped.

And to try is to do so at your own peril.

I know this.

I’ve fought myself for years.

And it has cost me dearly.

So when someone tells you…tells me…my choices are wrong, careless, misguided…I actually have to agree with this in order for it to take up residence in my being.

But if someone were to say to me, Nice straight hair, Ann!…I would laugh it off. It couldn’t land. Why? Because I have curly hair.

Easy peasy.

But some things aren’t so easy.

And when we have corporate interests who are incentivizing our regulators, media outlets and tech platforms, it becomes easy to fall prey to a…there’s only way to do your life…prescription.

So in the face of this paradigm shift that we currently find ourselves in, the squeeze is on. It will tell you, in no uncertain terms, how life should be.

Don’t believe it.

You can trust the self-organizing Intelligence of the Universe.

Not every tree grows straight.

Not every animal looks the same, hunts the same, mothers the same or behaves the same.

And just as every star in the sky is unique unto itself…every snowflake that falls is made of its own sacred geometry…you too, are here not to abide by a conformist mentality that can only serve another, but to walk in your own shoes that the Universe has made just for you.

Anything else is just an undermining of your own basic nature.

Your true self is coming for you whether you like it or not, and it is time to step in…unapologetically.