The Fourth Essene Mirror: The Love You’ve Forgotten
The Fourth Essene Mirror: The Love You Have Forgotten
Our world is a complex set of mirrors, in which each of our relationships reflects aspects of ourselves back to us so we can see who we truly are.
This includes relationships with partners, parents, strangers in the street, nature, the universe and money. We are in relationship to everything that surrounds us.
A mystic Jewish sect called the Essenes, who lived around 2000 years ago, believed there were seven types of mirror of relationships. These are known as the seven Essene Mirrors, and I’ve been fascinated by them for many years since watching Gregg Braden’s amazingly ’90s workshop on them.
I have always wanted to understand these mirrors more deeply, so this series will explore what each of these mirrors really reveal to us and how they guide us to align more truly with ourselves.
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Travelling deeper from the third mirror of magnetism, the fourth Essene mirror shows us the compulsions that drive our behaviour.
This is an elusive mirror because the love it reflects back is hidden beneath a behaviour or series of repeated choices.
For some people, it may be a clear addiction to substances, for others it may be more subtle and even socially approved, like people pleasing. It can be a tendency towards anything that becomes an unconscious choice, that we don’t have much power over, that takes priority over our other wants and desires.
It may feel like an ongoing battle between wanting ‘this’ but doing ‘that.’ Like wanting connection but avoiding people; wanting to feel healthy but over-indulging in food and beer; wanting to be successful but not being able to pull yourself away from the TV; wanting to be heard but not being able to speak up; wanting to be happy but not being able to stop working.
This can be anything where your energy feels split: you keep saying or thinking you want one thing, but then your behaviour says otherwise. On one side there is a fantasy, on the other side there is the reality and both want to exist. In some people, awareness of both may be buried so deep that they’re unconscious: they’re so ‘in’ the compulsion that they can’t see what they’re doing, or the desire they have that they are giving up in exchange for it.
The way to tell if something is a compulsion rather than a conscious choice, is when it gives momentary relief, but has unwanted consequences after. This could be a hangover, loss of money, people to answer to, or even just that you remain in the same situation instead of getting into a better one.
Compulsions feel good or we wouldn’t be drawn to do them. However, they feel good in a way that shuts us down rather than opens us up. Shutting down or numbing out often feels like the easiest choice in the moment because we’re reaching for a lower vibration that we’ve already felt and experienced countless times.
Opening up feels more uncomfortable because it takes a stretch into the unknown, it’s leaving our comfort zone, it’s creating space and bringing more life in. This can be a fine line to navigate if you’re learning to follow what feels good and be kind to yourself, because there are layers to what feels good. The feel-good that opens you and creates change in your life often feels against your natural inclination; it will have a layer of resistance rather than the soft easy feel-good lull of what you’ve always done for relief.
Being able to recognise what the fourth Essene mirror is showing you and how you can choose to respond differently, helps you from staying at best static, at worst from going down the path of giving up more of yourself in exchange for a consuming habit.
We all have a destructive streak, and this fourth mirror reflects that back to us. However, in-built within destruction is creation, and hidden inside our unconscious habits are our deepest desires: the hidden love that we have forgotten, that we have piled stories and behaviours on top of so we can barely see it anymore.
The reason we choose the compulsions we do, is that they give us something that is a shadow of what we really want. It’s an illusion of the real thing, yet often in order to get the ‘real thing’ we have to exchange the illusion of it. It’s a leap into the unknown and it’s not an easy one or the reward on the other side wouldn’t be worth it.
You may have a strong desire to feel alive, present, connected. Getting inebriated may give you this in abundance, yet the price for it because it’s not real (it comes from outside rather than within you) is that you’ll feel dead for a couple of days afterwards.
You may have a strong desire to feel empowered, independent, strong, and so you think you have to control those close to you. This gives you the illusion that you are in control, yet the price is you know you are deeply dependent on those around you to give you this feeling, which makes you feel even weaker and more insecure than you did to begin with.
The desire might be to feel respected, special, knowledgeable, so you withhold your words and talents until you’ve created the ‘perfect’ thing, that can’t be touched by the judgements of others. This might satisfy you on an unconscious ego level, but remains a fantasy so you never get the embodied feeling of recognition and being heard.
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The good news is that our compulsions are our teachers. They’re not reasons to deprive ourselves or beat ourselves up: they show us what we really want but can’t quite reach by ourselves yet. If we want to be healthy and strong but keep choosing to eat loads of junk, it’s because that loads of junk is giving us something we currently value more than the idea of being healthy.
Even more importantly, it’s giving us clues towards what ‘really healthy’ actually means for us. In this example, ‘really healthy’ may mean really loving food, feeling healed and supported by food, rather than deprived and hungry which we assume healthy has to mean. Comfort eating junk food is a closer match to that version of healthy than starving on a very controlled diet.
Our work is to feel what the value and message of what we’re drawn to is and make peace with it.
Resisting our compulsions just doesn’t work: we can see this in how so many diets fail, how the war on drugs failed, how much trying to quit anything creates an instant rebellion and desire to do it more. We need to listen to what the compulsions are telling us. We want what is hidden within our addictions, not the bland fantasy alternative of perfect living.
When you’ve gotten drunk once (or many times), you know the fun, confidence, excitement alcohol can give you. When you know it, you can access it within yourself without the support of alcohol — even if you believe you can’t. You can sit for five minutes and tune into that feeling, practice how it feels in your body and mind, cultivate an intimacy with it.
The more you can do this, the more you will realise alcohol has taught you what it needs to and you don’t need it in order to feel confident or excited anymore. You can have fun without the hangovers and cost — you stop giving up parts of your life in exchange for a compulsion. The fourth Essene mirror has served its purpose.
You can do this with any compulsion — including feeling what you gain when you’re in avoidance, indulgence, with-holding, over-reaction. Each habit is giving you something that you want and can experience without the ill-effects.
This doesn’t mean you have to give everything up, but it does mean you get to claim your choice and power back.
Through doing this, you get to uncover the love you’ve forgotten: the love of feeling connected, happy, present, significant that exists within yourself, that’s been hidden beneath a compulsive behaviour towards the illusion of what you really want.
I offer alignment coaching to help you navigate your relationship with yourself and your world ~~ visit http://www.river-meets-sea.co.uk
