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One of the questions I sometimes ask myself is what the benefit of internal work is. I ask this question because it can be easy to get so caught up in the internal work that you don’t seem to really make progress because you’re busy dealing with whatever is coming up internally. You can get stuck in your head and your heart at times because of how intense internal work can get. Yet I think that staying the course with internal work is ultimately beneficial. After all, when you are doing internal work you are getting the opportunity to recognize your issues and triggers and work through them in a way that can liberate you from them. A life unexamined, in contrast, is often messier in the long run, even if in the short run it seems less complicated.
Yet doing internal work is not easy. When you are working on those internal issues you are stirring up the deepest parts of yourself and coming up against whatever issues are otherwise being acted out in the background of your life, in a very real and conscious way that calls upon you to come to terms with those issues. Coming to terms with those issues can be hard, especially when you seem to get through one layer of the issue and then encounter a deeper layer of it. The work can seem like it’s never ending and at times your life will get messier because of how that internal work spills over into life.
The benefits of internal work play out in the long run as your life becomes calmer and less chaotic. For instance when I review my own life I definitely can point to how much more chaotic my life was in my twenties as compared to my thirties and likewise how in my forties my life is continuing to become less chaotic and more focused. While some of that change may be attributed to life lessons a person learns, I do think the more internal work you do, the deeper changes you have, which can ultimately be helpful in your magical work and your life. But that doesn’t make the work easier.
There are times in my life where I have questioned the benefit of doing internal work, especially when it seems that it doing it has caused more drama and unhappiness than it has decreased. When I have stirred up the muck of my life and had to examine my role in situations and painfully realize my faults instead of hiding my head in the sand, it has been hard to do, because its not fun to see yourself so vulnerable, so weak, and so human. Yet it is essential. It is not even the muck of this lifetime you deal with, but also the muck of other lives that have not been sorted through. When you sort through that muck and resolve it you liberate yourself from it and from the patterns that have restricted your life. You free yourself to discover who you can really become.
When I look at my life and I look at how much has changed, and how I have shifted as a person, I know what the benefit of internal work is. At the time I’m in the thick of it, it can feel like I’m going through the dark night of the soul, and that can be the case. The deep internal work calls on us to face our inner demons and learn how to make friends with them, so that we can make the changes we need to make. Recently, I’ve been doing a lot of internal work around family and doing that work has lead me to a couple pivotal realizations and breakthroughs, allowing me to free myself from attachments I have around the concept of family. They haven’t been easy realizations to have but they have allowed me to see specific behaviors in a different light and step away from continuing to do those behaviors and move in a healthier direction for myself and the people in my life. The same can be true for anyone else who does internal work. Stick with it, and you will get results that ultimately transform your life for the better.
