Indigo Adults
by Kabir Jaffe & Ritama Davidson
Reprinted, with permission of the publisher, from INDIGO ADULTS © 2008 Kabir Jaffe & Ritama Davidson. Published by New Page Books a division of Career Press, Franklin Lakes, NJ. 800-227-3371. All rights reserved.
Chapter 3
The Nature of Indigo Souls, Part I: Freedom, Vision , Truth Sense, and the Need to Grow
As Indigo Souls, you have a fundamentally different inner quality to your thinking, your feelings, and to the energies that you carry. These differences are a source of much hope and possibilities for the world and for the future, because you carry a sense of values, a vision of potential, a sensitivity and respect for life, and a sense of inter-connectedness that makes your life-affirmative and in honor and support of all living things. Because we, as a group of souls, have more impact, more effect upon the world and its structures and institutions, we will create and produce fundamental changes and shifts in the structures of civilization and society.
Some of the basic qualities of Indigo Souls are freedom, vision, truth sense, the need to grow, sensitivity, holistic thought, heartfulness, and the new spirituality. Let’s explore these, beginning with freedom. (We’ll explore the first four qualities in this chapter, and the remaining qualities in Chapter 4.)
Freedom
Probably one of the most fundamental qualities of Indigo Souls is freedom. You are connected to an inner voice and a rhythm of being. You have a strong sense of yourself and who you are. This makes it difficult for you to listen to what you are told to do, or “should” do. You are attuned to this inner life and follow it more easily than you do the outer voices of society or the voices of others around you. Consequently, in many respects you could be called “Rebellious Spirits.” It is not that you are actively in rebellion for rebellion’s sake; it is more that you do not want to follow something that limits life. There is a strong awareness in you if you are being controlled, limited, or pressured from the outside. And if you are, you will fight against it.
That fight in you is interesting. It may take the form of outer rebellion or an adamant assertion of no. It often takes a more subtle form—an inner no, even if on the outside you are saying yes. The first type, the obvious no-sayers, often get stuck in this rebellion and can spend a lot of energy fighting for their “rights,” their boundaries, or whatever just cause is in their field of focus. If you fall in this category, your teaching is to learn flexibility, putting yourself to the side sometimes, and learning to compromise in a balanced way. From an energetic level, you need to bring your heart chakra into more activity and relationship with the world around you and “tone down” your solar plexus. This is not so easy to do because much of your identity comes from standing against something or standing for something else.
The second type of person, the inner no and outer yes-sayer, has a fundamentally different challenge. You are the majority of Indigo Souls. You are basically gentle people. You are not polarized in the solar plexus (the warrior, the fighter, the competitor), which is where the previous soul groups that compose most of humanity today have been focused; you are polarized in the heart. In that sense you are more respectful and gentle; you don’t want conflict and you will try to avoid it. This brings one of your fundamental challenges: In avoiding conflict, you often go along with things you don’t agree with, or things that you don’t feel comfortable with. You compromise. There becomes a division inside of you, a division between what you say and do on the outside, and what you think and feel on the inside, your deeper knowing, your truth sense.
This is one of the areas of challenge for you as an Indigo Soul. Society today is still built on the Piscean Age. One of the downsides of this age is the predominance of masks and roles that hide the inner feelings and the deeper authenticity. And you, like all of us, need to get along with people; you have basic security, love, and communication needs that must be met. The result is that you end up playing roles or wearing masks that are necessary for survival in this society. But these masks never feel right. These roles are too limiting.
Some Indigo Souls can do this and yet, while doing it, can keep in contact with the essential inside. But many of you lose contact with your deeper self. You adapt—but now there is a division—and your Essence retreats. The result is that you live in a kind of an ongoing identity crisis. You may play the role but never quite feel comfortable in it, or you might even function well in the role (because you have a lot of brightness and creativity that comes through it), but somehow you are not really nurtured by it.
Many of you will take on the role because it is necessary, but underneath your rebellious spirit fights against the falseness and restrictiveness of it, and may sabotage it. This is a big theme for many Indigo Souls: How are you sabotaging the roles or situations that you are in?
Because of all these dynamics with false roles, masks, and identity, many Indigo Souls are struggling with their identity in society, with success, and with outer accomplishments. Either you can’t play the role, or you can’t find a role that you are willing to play, or you are playing the role but are fighting and sabotaging it.
So one of the major teachings for Indigo Souls is the right meaning of freedom and individuality. There are different levels:
There is freedom-against or rebellion-against. For example, I might be against repressive society, or I might be against authoritative control. That is the first level.
The next level is different: Instead of freedom against, it is freedom for. It has to do with “what do you value?” Instead of being against something, you are seeking to create something new that is of value to you. You are living for your vision.
Ultimately, there is an even higher level of freedom: the freedom to be your real self. It is the freedom from the limiting aspects of your personality structure. Then, no matter the limitations of the outside world, which will always be limited, you are free in your consciousness.
Vision
Vision is one of the deepest notes reverberating in the Indigo Souls. You have a deep sense of carrying something “new,” carrying something that you feel is a “better” way, a more life-affirmative way. You aspire toward a higher possibility. You have probably been seeing possibilities since you were very young.
Perhaps as a child you were always asking, “Why should we do it this way; it seems limiting; it seems disrespectful, why? I know there is a better way.” You have sensed that there is a better way. And there is a better way! You may not have been supported when you talked of it. You may have felt like a lone voice crying in the darkness, so you may have learned not to trust your insights, but, no matter how much you distrusted or fought against them, they didn’t go away. This is the spirit of the New that is calling you.
Sometimes we don’t see the New; we just feel frustrated with the Old. We don’t know what the New is; we just feel locked in, restless, dissatisfied. You look at society and its institutions, organizations, and forms of relating, and are keenly aware of the limits and the restrictiveness of these forms. It is good that you see this because it keeps you from getting caught and ensnared in these collective forms. But this can also be destructive to you. Your mind can get caught in a negative loop. Then you see what’s wrong but you don’t look to see what can be made right. You focus on the problem instead of seeing the solution.
If that is the case for you, then I invite you to look deeper. Your dissatisfaction is because something of the spirit is imprisoned and not flowing. You sense there can be something better, freer, more liberated, more life supportive. Your challenge is to look for the new possibilities and what is a next better step: to find your vision and then to act and to become creative, to become communicative and expressive of your vision.
This is very challenging. It is one of the greatest challenges to follow your heart, your vision and spirit, especially in the face of non-understanding from others or outright adversity. In so many ways, when you come forward with your vision you get cut down. You may be told to “stop dreaming,” “get real,” “get your feet on the ground,” “come live in the real world,” and “stop being naïve”—so many negative messages are communicated to you verbally or non-verbally. Occasionally you get support and find resonance, but to a great extent you don’t.
Remember that you are here as an agent of change. You are here to begin to live and embody—in your own life, in your own way of Being—something New. And you are here to express that to others in a respectful way. It takes courage.
Bright souls—visionary souls—have always been coming into incarnation. These are the souls who were burnt at the stake and who were persecuted by the Inquisition. So in the collective racial memory, there is a deep fear of the new vision that you carry inside of you. This fear of persecution sits deep in your cells. In many ways this is one of the greatest fears that you need to overcome. Your vision and your truth have been life-threatening in the past, and your protection system is deeply threatened by them.
And yet, we probably live now, at least in the Western part of the world, in the most open and liberal society that may ever have existed. A wise woman in the past that worked with herbs, energy, and healing would have been called a witch and burned; now she puts up a poster in a health food store and has a Website. It is a different age, a different time. There is a freedom and a permissiveness today that is wonderful. So the limits and fears that we have are based on racial memory more than on reality now. That doesn’t deny that in some ways you are still a misfit and a stranger to many people around you. Although it might and probably will lead to a certain amount of rejection, non-understanding, ridicule, or separation, it’s not life-threatening. You can handle it.
And more than handle it: It is your challenge and your responsibility to become the builder of your vision. First, above all else, is to honor the seeds of the new that you see inside. You carry many, many pictures and images of new ways of being. It is as if your soul has a blueprint of the full flowering of possibilities that are seeking to unfold at this time within human beings. You have a sense of a new way of being psychologically and spiritually healthy, a new way of relating with the body, with nature, with material objects. You see new forms of relationships; new forms of communication; new forms of work, career, and making money; new understandings of power; new forms of society. You have ideals of a new medicine, a new education, a new form of family, government, and so forth. And I want to say to you clearly: you are not a dreamer with your head in the sky. What you carry is a recognition of something that is held in the inner world as a blueprint of a whole new way of living and of being.
It is as if you are a seed that has written into your genetic blueprint what kind of a flower or tree you should become. Your sense of this blueprint is very real in your inner consciousness. In some ways, it is probably one of the strongest and most powerful forces in your life. Just to exemplify this, try to imagine giving up your dreams and living a traditional, conservative life without any higher meaning or purpose. You cannot!
That is the force of the New; that is the force of the vision calling you. You are a visionary. Listen to your vision and trust it. Give it space in your feelings and thoughts; give it space in your actions, in your relationships, and in what you say. Through doing so you are evolving the world! You are building new thought forms into the dimension of thought that surrounds the planet. You are creating new emotional and energetic vibrations and structures within the energy world that surrounds the planet. Recognize your potency as a builder. You, together with many others, are building new frequencies, new paradigms, and inner energy states, and later those energies will take outer forms and structures.
Truth Sense
One of the other areas that is of prime importance to you is what I would call an “intuitive sense of truth.” You have a sense of what the inner core of things is. For example, a person may be saying hello, and smiling and behaving nicely, but you may sense that that person is putting on a mask and is in pain inside. You may see that a person is behaving generously, but sense that underneath the person is being manipulative or tricky. This “truth sense” runs deep in you. You have a love of truth. When truth is there it has a kind of clean and pure sound that you feel in your body and that makes your spirit rejoice.
The challenge that you face is that we live in a world of deceptions and lies. We live in a society that is based on appearances, not on truth. We are brought up as children to behave in a certain way, to show a certain face. The result is that many of us have to repress our truth sense. We have to repress our own feelings. Maybe we feel uncomfortable about something that is happening, but to handle the situation without extra friction we have to smile and make nice about it.
One of the greatest losses that happen to us is that many of us disconnect, at least on the conscious level, from our truth sense. Perhaps we get caught in the way we think we should behave, or in the way we have been taught to behave. Or perhaps we put on blinders. We may see the good in other people but our filters are blocking us from seeing the destructive patterns that person is carrying, with the result that we get hurt.
We do not want to see things that are not so comfortable. And that is our challenge: to see that there is both light and dark. Human beings carry within them a broad spectrum of energies, ranging from some very bright and wonderful spiritual dimensions to some very dark, dense, and frightening energies. Most of us have learned to not see the darkness, but it is there. It is operative and having its effects. So an important part of your challenge is to have the courage to open your eye, your third eye, to see the truth of what is. And that means in your self as well.
We don’t want to see the darkness in our selves. Many of us are also afraid to see the light in our selves because it means we might stand out. We are afraid to acknowledge our intelligence, our strength, our vision, our love, and our spirituality.
Seeing the truth is wonderfully refreshing. If you see a problem and you look it in the eye, then you know what the problem is and you can do something about it. If you deny a problem and make nice and gloss over it, all you have done is to push it under the carpet where it festers and creates more problems.
The same is true on the opposite side. If you are dealing with truth, you are dealing with what is real in the depths of yourself and the other person. In a sense truth equals intimacy, because, if you are in your truth, and the other is in his or her truth, then there is a meeting of the inner with the inner, instead of a meeting of the mask that veils with the mask of the other that veils, as is normally the case. How can intimacy happen between masks? It is like two knights in medieval armor trying to hug each other. How intimate can you get when you are behind a wall of armor and protection?
So, as Indigo Souls you are entering a new dimension of relating: a dimension based on honesty, on real communication, and on the intimacy that comes through real communication. And to become real means to put your walls and your masks away, and let your self be seen and become more vulnerable. So truth, honesty, intimacy, and vulnerability are all deeply woven together. You are seeking this form of relating, and nothing else will satisfy you.
The Need to Grow
Your truth sense is connected to one of the deepest needs and longings of all Indigo Souls: your desire and calling to grow. You are blessed and cursed with a perpetual sense of dissatisfaction with who you are and with what the world is. One part of you is always, always aware that you could be more—more loving, more in your energy, more sensitive, more powerful, more, more, more—in a thousand different ways more. And that is true. Your soul is calling you to be more. Your soul is stretching you to be more. In so many ways you are constantly working on yourself, challenging yourself, pushing yourself to be more.
We describe it as a blessing and a curse because, on one hand, the blessing is that through this stretching you are becoming more. In the process you are giving birth to yourself, giving birth to a whole new way of being, giving birth to a new humanity. So your calling and your urge to grow is, in many ways, the greatest contribution you can make to the building of the New Humanity.
But the curse is that you are so often not satisfied with yourself. There are two wonderful inner sub-personalities, the Critic and the Perfectionist, that get in gear and beat you up for not being perfect. And they pull in a third sub-personality called the Pusher that then drives you remorselessly to be more. In the old society, the force of the Pusher was focused on achievement in the world, on having outer success. For Indigo Souls the Pusher is about becoming spiritually more. You may not care so much about having great outer success and millions of dollars (Of course you wouldn’t mind it if you had it! And for many of us, our inner growth is intimately woven with outer success.), but instead you care about greater authenticity, having a more open heart, being more in your energy, being more in truth, being more connected, and on and on.
So your task is to learn the wonderful art of what they call in Zen “Wu Wei”: the art of doing without doing; working without working; being totally in your energy and totally relaxed. That means trying to build a new world and seeing a future that is wonderful, and giving 100 percent of your energy to create it, and at the same time not being attached and being in acceptance of what is right now. We are learning to accept and enjoy what is with all its limits and imperfections even while working to change it.
Questions & Answers
· I am carrying this fear of ending like John F. Kennedy, and I wonder if this is just my fear, or is it a kind of collective fear that I am feeling?
Our collective unconscious holds a deep fear of persecution; it is not safe to be too creative, too bright, too much in your truth. Look at our history and what has happened to so many great people who have been speaking their truth: Jesus, Socrates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and so many others. Your fear is very realistic.
Though we still have reasons today to be fearful, things are so much better than they have ever been. So these fears are not so much in response to the realities of today; they are more shadows from our past. They are passed on through the collective unconscious, and possibly through the genes, or through memories of past lives. These fears also result from innate fears from our instincts of being different than our peer group with the resultant judgments.
What I’m seeing for you personally is that you are not energetically fully present. It’s as if you are floating above yourself and your feet are not planted firmly on the ground. This can be the result of deep persecution fears. When we have such a fear we don’t want to bring our selves fully into the body. I also see that you are a passionate person, and the calling to speak and live your truth is strong. And that the fear of persecution is inhibiting you to act and live and fully be here. It is a big step to work through these fears and to make the decision to come into the body and to really live here.
· I am afraid of stepping into personal responsibility and power, like I will make mistakes if I come into my power.
A soul can incarnate with a sense of mission and purpose to contribute and help change things—to be an agent of change in a society in transition. My sense for you is that this is not the first time that you have done this in a moment of collective change. Those times were much denser. The human vehicle was not as evolved as it is now. The instinctual forces were rawer. Consequently, many very bright souls who came into denser and rougher vehicles got caught and used their power and aggression and intelligence in ways that were not so refined or loving or harmonious. Almost every light worker that has existed on this planet has misused power, and has suffered through it. The forces that were so raw and powerful in you would take over, even while other parts of your consciousness suffered because of it.
I think part of our lesson as light workers is to learn acceptance, forgivingness, and compassion for our imperfections as light workers, and then to have the courage to jump in again, willing to do our best, knowing we are going to make mistakes. You are in good company; there are only imperfect light workers on the planet. Let me make it very clear: As Indigo Souls entering this New Age, we have more power available to us internally because of our consciousness and because of our technologies and the growth of knowledge than we have ever had before. Many of us would like to think of the New Age as an age of love, light, and celebration. But I would like to say that, in addition, it is an age of power. It is our task to use that power—creatively, with love and intelligence—and not to shy away from it. We are powerful people, and as we evolve we are only becoming more powerful. I see spiritual growth as a growth into handling greater levels of energy and power, and learning to handle them with greater love and intelligence.
· I have the feeling that even today a lot of light workers misuse their power. Although it is meant well, they still misuse it. I would like to see us look at this and deal with it in a more honest way.
We as human beings have never really addressed the issue of power honestly. If you look at our political situation in the world today, it is essentially an alpha male power game of who rises to the top. Even in our so-called enlightened and modern age, how many politicians are out there that we can say we truly respect and honor? The forces of ego, domination, and power still wrap human beings deeply. And the exact same forces that we see in the political world are operating in the spiritual world: ego, competition, domination, comparison, etc. You look at the church and you see constant power struggles throughout its history.
And why should we, just because we are in a New Age and carry some new energies, think that we are beyond all that? We are not. The New Age and the light workers in the world, all of us have a lot to learn about power. And that will be one of our challenges as we move into deeper levels of honesty and truth: to start looking at our power issues and working on them.
· You talk about truth, but it is not actually graspable for me. What is truth?
Let’s say that truth, at this moment and time, would be a sense inside of you as to what you really feel or really see in a situation. Not that it is the Ultimate Truth, or that it is even right. We call it “Listening In.” Somehow it is as if you turn your ear inward and you hear what your inner is saying or feeling. What you start to recognize is that we have many levels of response and feeling. For example, someone says to you, “Would you like to do this?” Part of you will feel, “Oh yes, that is fine.” But as you look deeper you notice that there is a little something uncomfortable in your belly, and as you start to penetrate more you find that you are not so fine with that. You didn’t want to say it, perhaps because it would embarrass you, or hurt them, or something. So by listening in you penetrate through the surface layers and begin to feel deeper feelings and perceptions that you have and might not have been so comfortable with.
And then there is a way of communicating from this perception of truth. Instead of saying, “The truth is...” (which tends to sound like the Ultimate Truth given by God Almighty), you’re saying, “My truth, as much as I know it in this moment is.…”
– same asker as before]I can ask in any situation, “God direct me to the truth,” and I always get a clear answer.
It is beautiful that you have such a direct connection to the Transcendent, and that answers come so clearly. It is something to treasure and that you can rely upon. At the same time, I want to give you a word of caution. I would be very careful of believing that everything you hear is God speaking directly to you. As you sit with that “truth” and go deeper into it, it may change and evolve. It is the nature of the mind to want to have absolutes, and there is nothing more absolute than the feeling that “God told this and this is THE truth and that’s the way it is.” It is easy to fool our self, easy to hypnotize our self. And with you in particular, one of the dangers that I would alert you to is the hypnosis of believing that “what I have just heard is God, or my higher self, my guides, or some inner authority figure speaking the absolute and ultimate truth.” Perhaps it is. Treasure the insights and what you hear. And at the same time be alert, be discriminative.
· I am having a big struggle with speaking my truth. I sense that I have so much in me to contribute and bring out, that I have talents, that I am really good at some things, but I am really in a struggle to own it and express it.
I see two things. First that there is a fear in you to come out, and stand out, because the moment you stand out is the moment you can be pulled down. It is almost a genetic fear in our cells: “Don’t stand out too much,” “Don’t be different,” “Don’t be too visible,” “Definitely don’t be better,” because it is dangerous. And the second fear results from a set of cultural beliefs: that we are sinners, that we are wrong, don’t be egotistical, be humble—as if it is a sin in God’s eyes to say, “I am great.” There is a fear that, if I did that, I will be punished. So it takes a lot of courage with both those fears to step out and let your self shine.
[Q – same asker]Yes, and at the same time there is such a big drive in me, sometimes I can’t contain it, it is so present and it is so strong to go and to do, and just to be doing what I am here to do. Sometimes I feel, “Why is this old stuff holding me back?” It is not going fast enough for me; I want to drop this old coat; it is clinging to me too much.
When I was 19 years old, I was studying therapy in Arizona with a man who was about 50. He was a highly respected group leader, therapist, and spiritual leader in the community. One night we were talking in a restaurant. During the conversation he said in a very matter-of-fact kind of way in response to something we were speaking about, “I am a top therapist.” I remember my reaction: I kind of jerked back in my seat and thought, “Oh, what an ego trip.” And then I looked at my reaction, and I realized that he was a top therapist, he was a superb therapist and recognized as such in the community, and he had said it not as a puffing of his ego, but just in a very matter-of-fact way in the course of the conversation. I realized that basically he had just said the truth, and he was comfortable with it. It was the first time I had ever seen someone who so clearly knew himself, honored himself, and could just let himself be what he is. He set an example for me to live up to.
· I see in my kids how normal it is for them to be in their truth, and it makes me humble about how can I educate them and raise them up. Somehow all I can do is give them love and allow them to grow. They already seem to know so many things much better. I think the teachers are afraid of them. They have 30 individuals like them in the class and they are telling the teacher the truth—“Look at what you are doing”—and the teachers are getting very frightened. It is hard for teachers to find their way.
I have a feeling that kids start life by knowing the truth, and it is we parents who condition them out of it. I know you as a parent: You have a lot of listening space for your children’s essence and truth, and a lot of respect to not limit them, or impose your system of beliefs on them. That doesn’t mean that you are perfect, or that you haven’t done your part to condition them. But when you have done things, you quickly notice and try to rectify them.
One of the reasons for this is that you are an Indigo Adult who has Indigo Kids. Your kids are lucky, because they are getting a nurturing environment where they are fundamentally understood and supported. I am reminded of Kahlil Gibran’s book The Prophet, where he talks about children. He says, “Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, and though they are with you, yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts. For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.”
To live what he is speaking about takes quite a mature state in a parent or a teacher: to let the children be, to be available to give them what they need, to avoid the tendency to want to package them, and to let them find their own.
When you spoke about school, it reminded me of something. I can’t remember the exact numbers, but there is something like 8 million children in Germany who are on the drug Ritalin as a way to counter what is seen as attention deficit disorder. A lot of these very bright and energetic kids are not well-behaved. They are in touch with themselves and a deeper truth sense and way of being, and are following it. But the teaching model in the schools is still in the old way. These kids overwhelm and frighten their teachers. The teachers react by trying to close the kids down, put them in a box, or drug them. So there is a great challenge that the school systems face: Instead of trying to make the children fit into the school, the school has to transform to fit these new children. The schools need to develop a new education for these new souls.
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