Nobody gets out of the vast experience of this life without some intimate understanding about the nature of that word "reaction" and how it plays out in so many of our relationships and how it contributes to the ways we have chosen to live and even to the ways that we unknowingly acted when we didn't mean to but invariably did nonetheless.

Our reactions to people, situations, and to the places we frequently find ourselves serve to define us to others and yes, to ourselves. The ways that one acts upon those thoughts and feelings and impulses that rise to the forefront of many a setting and situation place intimate levels of revealing to everyone around us. The factor that often goes completely unnoticed is the revelation that many do hide from themselves. The only times that some of our more colorful reactions become truly peeled away to our awakened spirit is when we are forced to take a good long and hard look at how we have been acting and the source of many of these colors can be a difficult thing to paint onto our own particular tapestry. Eventually however most everyone gets an unbounded look into their own souls.

This is growth!

This is revelation!

This is a reawakening to who we are, not to who we think we are!

This author can recall a lesson he learned a long time ago about reactionary behavior and the critical importance of not impulsively releasing the thought, the word or heaven forbid, the fist and the hand without first taking a moment or more to review why some reactive feeling or emotion was rising to the surface or seeming to be forced to the surface as a result of some situation that we never thought would be coming down that pathway of life on our given day.

The lesson was to "never, ever, act out or allow yourself to act out upon anger, rage, or any impulse that you would inevitably be sorry for." The real lesson of course to this is that one is responsible for every action and reaction that one acted upon and yes, this included verbal and even postured responses as well.

This all cuts right to the chase of our spiritual connections to others and especially to our inner-intimate connection to ourselves and what motivates us to "be" as we would be instead of "be-ing" who we truly know ourselves to be.

Everyone has reactions to life and to situations. Everyone has reactions to family and to strangers, to our environments, to our social settings and to the oddities of many of those situations as they rise on any moment of any day we cross our paths with.

What serves to define us completely aren't the immediate reactions that may not quite serve us best in the moment, but rather in the concrete ways that we allow ourselves to feel safe and secure enough of our own spirit to be able to share this spiritual core of the self with others and yes, with ourselves.

As we travel that daily path of life that gives us the fuel and the color of the feelings of life, we also travel a long and winding pathway of self-definition that continually serves to define us and that allows us to re-define ourselves to ourselves on a continuing basis.

This an intimate part of the nature of spirituality!

This is a colorful part that makes the experience of the existence of life worthy of our time!

This is what will inevitably define ourselves to ourselves best and as those many Mothers out there have tried throughout the ages to drive into all of their children's minds to it sticks;

"In the end it will all come out in the wash!"

What does matter however is that in that wash, we all choose the soap that we use to reveal the colors of our clothing, and it's the colors that we wear each and every day.

Why dull them with increasing layers of soulful and spiritual unrevealed dirt to the point where we cannot even see the brilliance to the colors that define who we truly are?

Think about it...

As Always,

WD Allan

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