Obedience: Toxic or Divine?
To whom or what do you offer your obedience?
Obedience is a quality of soul, so it’s within you as a seed or potential that can be cultivated and practiced. But unlike other soul qualities like love, truth, courage or sovereignty, which have their place in every aspect of your life, obedience flows in just one direction — towards the promptings of your soul and the embrace of the sacred.
Having said that, obedience remains a part of our everyday lives and serves a necessary function in our world.
As social beings, we obey the laws of the countries in which we live in order to further the civic good. We obey certain social norms — ones that also align with our soul’s purposes: to treat others and the world around us with respect, compassion, kindness, generosity, equity and gratitude, for example. To avoid behaviours that impinge on the freedom and sovereignty of others, or that cause harm.
These are norms we choose to obey because they benefit all beings and contribute to wholeness.
However…
Obedience becomes a liability when we obey social, legal or familial norms without discerning whether or not they align with our values and serve the sacred in all life.
When you obey internalized voices that tell you who and what you should be; when you hide your naked face, your vulnerability, your power, your love, for fear of judgment and condemnation, for fear of the consequences of disobeying unspoken rules of normative social behaviour, you sacrifice the infinitely precious truth of your being.
Misplaced obedience creates suffering. It causes fragmentation in place of wholeness. It’s a kind of blasphemy that’s so ubiquitous we barely notice it in the busyness of our day-to-day lives.
The colleague you’re trying so hard to impress; the interview in which you bury entire aspects of your personhood; the ways in which you compress and distort parts of yourself to fit in — these move you out of alignment with your soul, and into a wasteland in which who you are is never enough. In which the earth, in all her sacred beauty, becomes a thing to exploit rather than a being to love and cherish.
Here’s the litmus test that separates toxic obedience from the soul of obedience: When obedience (to systems, ideas, beliefs, patterns, thoughts, people etc) moves you away from your soul and the soul of the world; when it causes fragmentation rather than wholeness, it is misplaced and requires urgent recalibration.
Our times call for forensic discernment in the practice of obedience.
Notice where you experience a split between what or whom you are obedient to, and the activity of your soul. Then, shift the riverbanks of your obedience so it flows towards your soul and the sacred.
Notice the difference — in you, in your relationships, in your experiences, in your world — when you do this.
#Devas #Obedience #SoulAlchemy
