Where Did You Go?

Something I recently shared with a client has stayed with me because I think it sits at the center of so much of the work we are here to do.

He asked me how he could help himself, and my answer was simple, though not necessarily easy: open your heart.

Opening the heart is not just about becoming more loving or compassionate. It is also about removing everything that has accumulated there that keeps love, life, God, and creation from moving freely through you. Resentment. Anger. Shame. Blame. Bitterness. The constant need to point outside of yourself and explain why your life is the way it is because of what someone else did.

There comes a point in spiritual development when pointing fingers has to come off the table.

That does not mean people have not hurt you. It does not mean abuse did not happen, betrayal was not real, or that you should excuse the behavior of those who caused harm. It means that eventually you have to decide who is going to be responsible for what lives inside of you now.

Someone may have placed the wound there, but they cannot be given permanent stewardship over your heart.

Your heart is your Inner Temple, and you are responsible for what is allowed to remain there.

This is one of the reasons I keep returning to the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. After they ate the forbidden fruit, they became ashamed and hid themselves. When God returned to the garden, the question was not a furious accusation. God did not come storming through the garden degrading them for their weakness, humiliating them for their curiosity, or screaming about how badly they had failed.

He asked, Where are you?

That question has always struck me as much larger than geography.

God knew where they were.

So perhaps the real question was: Where did you go?

Where did you go when shame entered you? Where did you go when you became convinced that something about you was no longer worthy of being seen? Where did you go when you decided hiding was safer than standing fully exposed before God?

They had moved away from the light.

Not because the light rejected them, but because shame convinced them to hide from it.

I think humanity has been repeating that story ever since.

We hide in all kinds of bushes.

We hide in anger. We hide in resentment. We hide in victimhood. We hide inside what our parents did to us, what our partners did to us, what society did to us, what religion did to us, what our childhood did to us. Sometimes those things are very real, very painful, and very worthy of being acknowledged. But if we build our entire identity around what happened to us, eventually the wound becomes the place from which we create.

And that is where victim consciousness becomes dangerous.

There is an enormous difference between having been victimized and choosing victimhood as a permanent state of consciousness.

One acknowledges an experience.

The other hands your creative power to the experience.

If everything happening inside of me is permanently someone else's fault, then I have also made someone else responsible for changing it. Now I cannot be free until they apologize. I cannot heal until they understand. I cannot move forward until justice arrives. I cannot have peace until someone else becomes different.

I have placed the key to my own temple in another person's hand.

That is not freedom.

Victim consciousness will always create more victims because it creates from powerlessness. When I believe I have no authority over my own internal world, everything I create begins from the assumption that something outside of me is more powerful than what is inside of me.

Eventually, that cycle has to stop.

The finger turns inward, not in condemnation, but in responsibility.

What is actually living in me?

What resentment am I carrying?

What anger have I fed for years?

What story have I repeated so often that it has become part of my identity?

What shame still tells me to hide?

What belief about myself makes me feel unworthy of being seen by the Divine?

These are not comfortable questions, but they are sacred ones.

The work of clearing the heart is not pretending you were never hurt. It is not suppressing anger or forcing yourself to forgive before you are ready. It is not positive thinking pasted over an infected wound.

It is becoming conscious of what you are carrying and deciding whether you want to continue feeding it.

Because we feed things with attention.

Every time we rehearse the grievance, we feed it. Every time we return to the resentment, we feed it. Every time we build another layer of identity around the wound, we give it more life.

Eventually we have to stop feeding what is consuming us.

Clear the Inner Temple.

Neutralize what no longer belongs there. Understand it. Learn from it. Take the wisdom. Take the lesson. Take whatever gold the experience gave you, and then begin removing the poison from the cup.

Not because someone else deserves your forgiveness.

Because you deserve your life.

And I am not going to give anyone a manual for exactly how to do that.

I can offer teachings. I can ask questions. I can help someone recognize patterns. I can walk beside a person for part of the journey. But ultimately, the road inward belongs to the person walking it.

The map is inside you.

That is part of the initiation.

You have to learn your own landscape well enough to recognize where you disappeared from yourself.

And I think this is part of what returning to God actually means.

Not becoming perfect.

Not becoming obedient enough.

Not performing spirituality correctly.

Coming out of hiding.

Standing again in the light without the shame that says you are too damaged, too dirty, too angry, too broken, too sinful, too wounded, or too far gone to be seen by the Divine.

God is still walking through the garden asking the same question.

Where are you?

Where did you go?

What shame keeps you from standing in the light of God?

What makes you believe you are unworthy to be seen by the Divine?

What have you filled your heart with that leaves no room for the life you say you want?

Because if the heart is filled entirely with resentment, anger, blame, hatred, shame, and old wounds that have become identities, there is very little space left for anything else to live there.

At some point, you have to make room.

If you want peace, make room for peace.

If you want love, make room for love.

If you want life, make room for life.

If you want God, then begin clearing everything inside of you that tells you to hide from God.

This is the road home.

And maybe the first question on that road is not, How do I fix myself?

Maybe it is simply: Where did I go?