The Viable Alternative

It was the last Saturday of November 2013, and I was lying in my bed on my back calling out to God for answers because it was a HORRIBLE year.

I had lost a childhood friend a few months earlier who I had known since his mother was pregnant with him. The circumstances how I found out his death were very bizarre.

Six weeks later his father died.

Another three weeks later another close childhood friend within this same group was diagnosed with testicular cancer (thankfully it was caught in time and he’s okay).

Back in June of that year, another close friend of the family who was like an Aunt to me and gave me my first summer job after my Freshman year in college was killed suddenly by a freak accident.

To top it off, my financial situation was abysmal.

I had gotten back into real estate earlier on that year after taking several years off, and I couldn’t make a dime to save my life. A good portion of the deals that I was working on that would’ve given me a solid financial base to help me get on my feet, work on the projects that I wanted to work on so that I could live the life that i dreamed of living would wind up falling apart in one way or another, no matter how sure they looked to close.

Trying to make money out of my chosen profession was like trying to draw water from a stone.

I prayed, I fasted for days at a time (I started off at 12 hours and eventually went up to seven days), I even enlisted the aid of a very anointed man of God who was known to get miraculous results for people he ministered and prayed over, all in the hopes of removing whatever blockages that lay in the financial realm for me and receiving a financial breakthrough, but all in all, I got NOTHING.

All I saw was time passing me by while the projects I wanted to work on gathered dust and the things I wanted to do got postponed again and again because I COULDN’T MAKE ANY DAMN MONEY.

It was totally depressing and emasculating as a man to not feel like I had any control over my destiny.

I started to think that maybe God was trying to play a big joke on me and use me as an example to others of someone with wasted potential who lived life, completely unfulfilled, not being able to accomplish anything. If that was the case, I considered just ending my life because I REFUSED to be the butt of anyone’s joke or used as an object of humiliation.

To add to all this, I was told by a minister in the Church that my desire to model and inspire others with my image was against the will of God and the reason why I was suffering financially. Then my mom was on my case telling me to grow up and give up my “childish” dreams. In fact, when I found myself lying on my bed calling out to God, I had just come from seeing my mom, and listening to her pooh-pooh the vision I explained to her of what I wanted to achieve in life.

Oh what a life.

So, I’m lying on my bed, frustrated, deflated, confused and broken, and decided to just have it out with God and lay it all out on the table, in order to get answers as to what in the hell was going on.

After about a half hour of emptying out my soul, I’m lying there, and I hear God speak to my spirit. No, not like in the movie “The Ten Commandments” where God loudly commands Moses to go free His people. This one was more like the still, small voice that people often speak about.

Within my spirit, I hear Him telling me, “It’s your emotions in you that sabotage and block your success.”

Huh?

I had no idea what that meant, but for all the skeptics and non-believers out there, I knew this wasn’t me, because there was no way I could’ve come up with such a radical concept on my own.

From that point, over the next few months, God started to answer my question by leading me to more information about emotions.

I wound up discovering online a field called bio-energetics, which is a system of alternative psychotherapy based on the belief that emotional healing can be aided through resolution of bodily tension. Through this I learned that via tension, the body stores emotions from traumatic, painful, and emotionally intense experiences we go through when we don’t give these emotions a healthy outlet.

Many people, in fact I would say most people, present company included, are walking around with all this tension in their bodies because of all these unreleased emotions from the past. These emotions carry memories, and guess what? As long as these emotions stay trapped in our bodies, they can trigger over and over again the painful memories connected to them via external or internal stimuli, causing us to keep on reliving the past.

These trapped emotions are the reason why many of us find ourselves repeating the same type of destructive patterns in various areas from our health, to our finances, to our career, to our romantic relationships, etc.

Could these trapped emotions be the reason why nothing seemed to be working out for me financially and also why I had problems committing to women or would straight up sabotage things with them?

When I got involved with this woman last year with whom I had this intense emotional and spiritual connection, I started to get these huge anxiety attacks. One in particular I had lasted over two days, and during this bout after I was able to pinpoint the trigger and finally purge the anxiety from my body, it dawned on me through a stroke of insight that I had a huge ocean of unreleased negative emotions stored within me that I was completely unaware of that I was unconsciously reacting to and that were unconsciously controlling the results I was getting in many areas of my life, including my finances and romantic relationships.

It was at this time, May of last year, I came to the decision that it was time I start seeing a therapist because I realized that there was no way I could resolve all these intense underlying emotions on my own.

“Just when the caterpillar thought the world was over, it became a butterfly.”
– Proverb

A month later, I started an alternative type of therapy called body oriented therapy, which involves not only verbal dialog, but also core emotional release. I’m now ten months into it and I’ve started to experience healing on a deep emotional level which has given me a greater sense of confidence, self esteem and for the first time in years, a profound certainty that everything is working out for me. I’ve finally been able to let go of the steering wheel and let God take control, knowing He can do an infinitely better job of steering my life than I can.

I feel a very firm, solid foundation is being laid for me to finally build the life I want.

What I’ve learned from this whole experience is that if you’ve gotten to a point in your life where you want to give up because you’ve experienced disappointment after disappointment, nothing seems to be working out in your life, and life just seems to have it in for you, know that you feeling that you’re at the end of your rope is not necessarily a bad thing. God is trying to make you see that your old perspective that led to your old way of doing things is no longer working. He’s hoping that after you hit the brick wall enough times, you’ll finally surrender yourself and allow Him to show you a new perspective that will lead to a different course that will ultimately lead to a newer, better life.

Remember this proverb, “Just when the caterpillar thought the world was over, it became a butterfly.”

That’s exactly what is happening to me.

This is The Viable Alternative.

Hope this helps,

Ike Love