A Pandora Box
- DP
- Aug 8
- 7 min read
Updated: Aug 19
Summer days have their charm. I often find myself lost in thoughts staring out of the
window in my new at home office space.
The forest that makes up our backyard is in full bloom and in the past few months I have
spotted several wild animals like groundhogs, badgers, frogs, turkeys, a range of
different beautiful and colorful birds and, of course, our regular visitors: deers, rabbits
and squirrels.
Care of the environment is not something very close to my heart, though I try to do what
I can to reduce my carbon footprint and overall plastic consumption.
The impact of human behavior on the environment was only one of the many topics
discussed during the 2024 assistance group with J&M. Probably the least guts stirring of
all.
Pets, toilet paper, meat eating, chocolate/tea/coffee consumption, were the ones
that seemed to stir up people’s feelings more than anything else.
For me it has been my first in person seminar and I experienced first hand the
discomfort most people talk about when they describe their first in person meeting with J&M.
You would call my reaction one “by the book”: finding it really hard to focus on certain
topics, feeling less like myself, acting out things that I would normally have more “under
control” and feeling lots of my addictions exposed.
The main topics of our talk were: arrogance/demands, spiritual beliefs and self love.
On the way out from the seminar on day 3 I felt a stir up of emotions, none of which felt
pleasant. The two main ones I could identify were anger and feeling offended (like
having a hurt ego of some sort). The anger had to do with the fact that I felt I was trying
to somehow connect with J&M but all my attempts were frustrated by them keeping a
certain distance from me, and the second had to do with my own realization of how
not that pleasant I am with people around me. I will elaborate more on this later.
Leaving the seminar I felt wounded and still in shock, and for a few weeks I stopped
watching all videos from DT and just focused on understanding why I felt so challenged
by their behaviors.
I prayed about receiving more clarity on this issue and, sure enough, two weeks
after the event I got my answer.
It was my daughter’s birthday party when this friend of hers showed up. I was very
happy to meet her at first and, after having a brief chat with her mom, I invited her to come in and have some fun with all the other kids invited to the event.
Within minutes of observing her attitude in the group, I started to feel the need to
somehow put a brake on her demands on everybody around her and my initial welcoming behavior transformed into a much stiffer one.
The party was at a place where girls would get all possible kind of special treatments,
from personalized braids to make up with sparkles, cupcakes and juice boxes and
Karaoke singing.
In every single one of these activities she would be completely overbearing towards the
other girls. When waiting for her turn to get her braids done, she kept asking over and
over again to be the next one in line, even if she was the last one to show up at the
party. When we moved to the table to have a cup cake she smashed one on her face and ate it so fast she barely chewed it, then proceeded to clean her dirty hands on the table and chairs and with her mouth full of dough she called the waitress and asked for one or two extra cupcakes. No please, thank you or may I.
Finally, when they moved to the stage to sing the songs, she grabbed one of two
microphones and she did not allow anybody else to use it, and when I asked her to
share it, she would point it at the face of the person that wanted to sing but without
handing the microphone over.
At that point I stepped in, asked her to let go of the microphone and moved her to the
back of the stage to let the other girls dance and sing like she had been doing the entire
time.
From that moment onwards I spent the rest of the party keeping an eye on her and
making sure she would not oppress every other girl attending the party.
It was not her attitude that made me connect the dots to the assistance group. It was my
response to her attitude that reminded me in flash what J&M felt to me during the
assistance group. That’s when I realized that I must have been quite overbearing and
demanding during the talks. What I thought was engagement turned out to be a desire
to drive the conversation in the direction that I liked the most, and I’m sure there was a
pretty strong underlying demand directed at J&M when I asked them if I could share a
piece of paper with some of the questions that I wanted them to answer.
It was a light bulb moment, a split second realization, and when it hit me how similar I
must have been to this girl, I felt so humiliated and so humbled at the same time.
Because of my previous attempts to get rid of my arrogance, I was convinced that I had
chipped away at most of it and, therefore, made significant and visible steps towards
being a more humble and loving person.
I am not going to say that it was all in my head and that I have made zero progress, but
certainly it was now clear that my assessment of myself was not as accurate as I would
have liked it to be.
I felt grateful for the genuine feedback (which I got through their firm behavior) and for the changes that it allowed me to make.
In a weird way, I was happy to be brought back to earth and made aware of my true
condition, even if I perceived it as quite a firm hit to my ego.
In Aprhaar’s words: “Truth, however unwelcome its first appearance may be, is far more
beneficent in the end than an unfounded fiction”.
While I continued to process emotions and watch other assistance groups from their
2024 tour, I never went back to rewatch the talks from those 3 days. Until a few days
ago.
It’s pretty insane how different it felt to rewatch the video versus being there in person.
A lot of the answers that I felt were very harsh, or full of anger, didn’t seem to be that bad
at all. They were firm, but also communicated with love and respect.
In rewatching the entire 3 days discussion I also realized how little I grasped of it.
One of the most important messages that they tried to convey to us was about spiritual
beliefs and their weight on our pain.
When processing emotions I have been always very focused on the hurt that was
caused to me. I thought the only necessary step for growth was to feel and released
that grief from childhood and with that all of my behaviors would change naturally as a
consequence.
I did not understand that childhood’s grief is only the first block of a much more
complicated structure that WE create on top of it, and I certainly did not understand that
it is the structure on top of that little block that causes 99% of our pain.
The first step therefore shouldn’t be to try and feel the grief of what was done to me
during my childhood (or at any point in time), but rather identify what SPIRITUAL
BELIEFS (or convictions) I developed when I chose not to feel the grief and, of course,
connect with the damaging nature of those believes.
It is in asking for forgiveness to God for those damaging and wrong beliefs that we can
eventually access the childhood pain and have a change of behavior which is caused by
a change of heart. When the loving principle is in our hearts, we will no longer need to
think about what is the right thing, we will just know it.
When I understood this one indispensable truth, everything shifted internally.
I looked back at some recent events that caused me lots of emotional pain and those
false believes started to pop up everywhere like mushrooms. It was as if I had been on
this exhausting hunt looking for a hidden treasure, digging the forest ground inch by
inch, day after day after day, when suddenly a Park Ranger passes by and goes “if
instead of digging you stand up and search for the signs all around the forest trails, they
will tell you exactly where to find each treasure”.
It seems logical after you know it, but that is not what you think when you first come into
the forest without a map and without a proper visibility of the trail. You don’t even think
that there is any relation between the signs and the treasure cause you think the sign is
too obvious and plain. It has to be something harder and most complicated, which is
probably another wrong spiritual belief in itself.
That being said, my focus is now mostly on discovering more and more of these
spiritual beliefs and try to connect to their damaging nature in order to develop a sincere
feeling of repentance for it.
Years ago, I watched a really interesting interview between Geoff Whitehead and Jesus.
At the end of the interview Jesus asked him what he thought about the hours long
conversations that they just had, and he said “What started off as a study of you, has
become a study of me. […] My friend keeps asking me “is he really Jesus?” and I said I
don’t care anymore, it doesn’t really matter. I’m not in that line anymore. The experience
that I had is what I would have expected if I met Jesus. There is a truth that I can see as
a truth and there is a truth that I haven’t seen before that I need to explore. There is a
confrontation, a personal confrontation, an internal war, and that is what I would have
expected”.
20120112 Interview With Jesus - The Real Life & Purpose Of Jesus P2 - YouTube
That expresses pretty well what it also meant for me to meet J&M, but I’ll lend Isaiah’s
words to express even better how I feel about this special encounter with them:
“God’s messengers, as the God they serve, seek to be known for what they are, not for
what men judge them to be. “
I feel like a girl who found a treasure chest full of toys...and I giggle at the thought of which one I will get to play first. :)
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