Choosing Our Playmates

In my process of working through a long standing personal pattern of trusting people who are close to me to have integrity, then finding out the opposite of that, my soul self showed me a depiction of two basic playgrounds we can choose to play in.  One is a playground of genuine, happy, free, cooperative kids, who enjoy each other and know how to play nice. These kids play with honesty, transparency, and accountability. The other is a playground of fearful, mean, destructive kids who enjoy vandalizing and hurting others, either for fun or because they refuse to help themselves; they lie, manipulate, and cheat.   I have played on both playgrounds in my life. When I spent time on the mean playground, I got hurt from broken glass, or got into some kind of trouble.  I was drawn to that playground in resonance to the pain I carried, and the drama of intensity I had been accustomed to growing up with.  From those playground experiences, I decided to reside on the nice playground instead, and learned how to have fun without the rush of breaking things, and gained more self worthiness to play with nice kids, who treated me well.  I no longer had a tolerance for jerks, and didn’t want anything to do with them, their drama games of destruction were boring.  However, I wasn’t completely rid of the vandal kids from the neighboring playground.  Once in a while, one of those ‘bad’ kids would approach me, wanting to play, seeming to be nice, when underlying they still had a red glowing pain inside. We all have that red glow of pain to some degree; how you manage that pain comes down to how honest you are with it.  Upon befriending this kid, and embracing them into my nice playground, it was a matter of time, before my friend’s true colors came out, and they brought broken glass into our play circles, showed us it’s fun to play with fire, until the recklessness consumed our playground and burned it down.  After experiences like these, I became on guard against vandal kids, with an old pain enraged and activated, red, glowing me up brightly, ready to fight any little shit who tried to approach my nice playground.  What I was really doing was inviting more of these ’bad’ kids to show up by putting energy into my fear of unknowingly entertaining these types.  In order to break this attraction pattern, I acknowledged that there are people who are true and there are people who lie, cheat, and steal, it’s a fact of life in the world we live in.  And, sometimes, while picking an unsuspecting rose, we are going to get pricked by an unforeseen thorn.  Painful experiences are part of the reason we choose to be human, it is one way in which we learn what are Truth is.  To neutralize my fear, I allowed myself to feel the unresolved pain from long ago that has been the magnet for these painful interactions of deception.  Once the feelings were felt to the core of this pattern, the activated and protective warrior was neutralized and could put her defensive sword down to stand in peace.  I can now tranquilly reside on the nice playground with genuine good kids, while the other playground feels like it’s on another plane of existence.  The mean kids would be bored and disinterested on the nice playground, even if they were to become aware of it; healing my pain, cleared the resonance.  I do believe in redemption, so if a ‘mean’ kid was genuinely interested in joining me on the nice playground, that is fine, but the minute they pick up a stick and try to poke my eye out, back to their playground of broken glass they return, until they learn how to play nice.  Before this recent life experience catalyst, it felt like I was tending to a lovely garden, but always looking over my shoulder on guard for someone to stab me in the back. Now, after resolving this old wound pattern,  I can happily tend to my lovely garden, and have an increased awareness of when a unsuspecting ‘bad’ kid approaches the boundary of my playground, whereupon, I can turn them away with clearer discernment than ever before, that this neutral state allows.