Teal Swan Articles - Page 14 - Teal Swan Jump to content

Teal Swan Articles


The Defective Doll

It doesn’t take a genius to see that our relationships on earth today are completely dysfunctional.  It also doesn’t take a genius to see that if we don’t do something about it, we (the human race) are going to self-destruct.  Today, I’m going to expose one of the patterns that is causing the most damage between one another.
We do not love each other.  We fell in love with the idea of one another.  When we fall in love with the idea of one another, we relate to each other as objects.  Objects that are supposed to meet our needs and have no needs of their own. This begins, like all things in childhood.
Most parents alive today have children because of some need they have that they think the child will meet.  Perhaps it’s to guarantee closeness with a partner. Perhaps it’s to feel a sense of self worth, value and validation.  Perhaps it’s for societal esteem. Perhaps it’s because giving a child what they never had would heal their own traumas.  Parents don’t really admit to the reasons that they have children. They couldn’t because so often it would be too self-centered.  Our ego prevents us from really seeing ourselves in this way. The thing is, the child that is born to a parent is their own person with their own preferences and destiny and wants and needs and feelings.  So children rarely ever conform to the real reason that the parent had the child in the first place. The child does not meet the parent’s needs. And this is a recipe for disaster.
One of the most common dynamics that we see in the world today is that a parent (usually a mother) wants a child that will satiate her needs in the same way that a doll satiates the needs of a four-year-old girl.  The four year old feels a sense of self-esteem in having the doll and dressing to match the doll and pretending to be needed by the doll and pretending they have a connection with the doll. This parent does not actually want a child that is a unique and individual person.  This parent wants a doll that is animated and a doll that is a mini-me. They want this doll to act how they want it to act. They want it to be hungry when it is convenient for them. They want to be able to put it down when they want to do something else and have it shut its eyes and open them again only when they want to interact with it.  They don’t want the doll to need them when they don’t want to be needed.  
For the father usually this doll of a child that they want is not about feeling a sense of self-esteem and personal validation in caretaking anything.  It is more about having a status symbol, like an animated trophy. It is about having something that through its successes validates him as a person.
For this parent, the person the child actually is and the needs and feelings a child actually has and the ways they are different from the parent will not be well received.  Instead of validating the parent’s sense of self, this child’s existence will invalidate their sense of self.  This child will have needs that the parent does not want to meet and will not operate according to the parent’s schedule.  And so, this child will be rejected. This rejection leads down two different paths. Both of which are equally painful.
When a child is young, they cannot perceive themselves to have a life separate from their parent.  A baby cannot actually preoccupy itself. A baby also cannot soothe itself. So a baby that is rejected will experience a void when this occurs…  A void like a pet or a sentient toy that is put on the shelf.
I highly suggest that to grasp the horror of this relationship with one’s parents that you watch the Pixar movie: A Toy Story.  But pretend that the children in the movie (Andy and Sid) are parents to the toys they have. The experience that so many of us live with our parents is the horror of being a toy, an animated object, in our parent’s reality.  We are either the toy that is never valued and so is born and lives and dies on the shelf. Or we are the toy that is so loved when it is on the shelf. But once we are unwrapped, the person unwrapping us is instantly disappointed and so discards us immediately.  Or we are the toy that is loved like nothing else for a short period of time and then experiences a fall from grace when a better toy (sibling) comes along. Or we are the toy that is loved forever on the condition that we become exactly what our owner wants us to be.   What we long for is for someone to see that we are real and to love us forever for what is real about us.
If we were the doll that was perceived to be defective because we couldn’t control our animation to match perfectly what was wanted by our parent, we were rejected and put on the shelf or punished for it.  Like a toy or a neglected pet, we may be fed and clothed, but we do not have a life. Our life only has movement and meaning and emotional breath if we are interacted with. So when we are not, we experience crippling separation anxiety.  We dissolve in the hell of knowing we have no value to the person upon whom our life depends. We feel we are not real without them. We feel the potentially eternal hell of our living and self concept being completely at the mercy of another person who we can’t make value us enough to play with us.  And we do not know if or when another person will come to claim us. And even if they did, it wouldn’t erase the fact that we were rejected by the person who mattered so much to us. And when we try to cry out to get the love back and our life back with it, there is no response. Our parent goes on with their own life as if we are screaming inside but not making a noise.  Or they shame us for reaching out for them with our voice or actions. On a visceral level, it feels like someone has run through our chest, solar plexus, lungs and rib cage with an old fashioned lawn mower. We often resort to addictions to try to numb the pain of this ineffable wound.
We grow up to become a person who feels we have no life if we don’t have a partner.  Until we heal this wounding, we will line up with partners who follow this same pattern of rejecting us and putting us on the shelf to only play with us when they want to.       
If we were the doll who could control its animation to be exactly what our parent wanted and thus maintain love in this way, we will feel like a GI Joe at a tea party.  We too are not loved for what we are. But instead of being discarded for exposing what we are, we pretend to be something else. The pressure of this inauthenticity makes us not feel as if we have an individual life.  Our identity is consumed. Therefore, we must push people away and be alone to feel a sense of self. On a visceral level, it feels like we are a fly caught in a spider’s web being slowly spun to the point of suffocation and simultaneously being eaten alive.   
We grow up to become a person who feels we have no life if we don’t push our partner away so we can be alone.  Until we heal this wounding, we will try to conform to our partner’s idea of what they want but will eventually not be able to keep up the act and will take off the mask and make a break for our freedom by telling them that our interaction with them is only going to happen on our terms.  But because they valued us for the mask we first presented, we will be rejected for who we really are again.
In both scenarios, we receive the message that we are not valued by the person who gives us life.  We either had to be what they wanted instead of ourselves to be loved or couldn’t be who they wanted us to be in order to be loved.  So we are innately rejected. Our self-concept is complete and total shame.
Self-hate occurs in us because we either are not lovable as we are or if we were discarded emotionally, we could not become what would make us lovable.  We are so desperate to be loved, we feel the need to cut these aspects of our self that are met with rejection away. We internalize the message about ourselves.  To understand how this dynamic works, watch my video titled: Self Hate, The Most Dangerous Coping Mechanism.
If we are born to parents who wanted something other than who we are, we will hate ourselves erroneously.  Imagine a person buying a horse when what they actually wanted was a horse figurine. They would reject us for manure.  They would hate how big we were. They would be mad that they had to spend money on our hay. They would feel frustrated that they had to groom us.  Eventually, they’d neglect us in our stalls and even sell us. But that rejection would not be because something was wrong with us. It would be them at fault for buying a horse when what they really wanted was a horse figurine.  This is the reality when what our parents really wanted was not a child, but an animated doll.
Because our parents saw us as their thing, like a doll, they could not attune to us.  Imagine a child dragging a doll around by the neck. But that doll is actually alive. This is the terror of our life experience.  In not attuning, we cannot feel loved because we can’t take something as part of ourselves if we cannot even perceive the reality of that thing.  It is merely a player in our own pretend game.
Being raised in this dynamic makes it so that we feel like objects in each other’s realities and we treat each other like objects in each other’s realities.  We treat each other like we are only as good as our use. The entire world we live in becomes a world of playthings and penny candy… A world where we cannot see, hear, feel, understand each other and value each other for who we really are.  A world where we cannot find people who are compatible to us and can therefore be in harmony with us and make us feel loved. We cannot attune to each other. We must learn to attune to one another to stop this dynamic. To learn how to do this, watch my video titled: Attunement (The Key To a Good Relationship).  
We need to get very clear about the deep, dark and real reasons we are thinking about having children before we have them.  We need to accept that any child that is born will be born as their own person. They may be totally different to what we want in a child.  They may be totally different to us. They will not operate according to our schedule. They will have wants and needs when it is incredibly inconvenient to be needed.  They will have their own needs, wants and preferences and destiny. And they need to learn that they can have that and be loved specifically for that and to have us too.  
We need to break out of our single family households so our children can have access to multiple resources.  This way, if they can’t have us at a given moment, they can have someone else. They will not feel as if they must be a doll in our reality and they will never feel put on the shelf.  Imagine being loved for what you actually are and forever.
We need to see that we have a life regardless of whether people are or are not interacting with us.  But it is a personal choice to have interaction in our life. We need to learn how to have ourselves and have other people too at the exact same time.  Having people must never be contingent upon becoming exactly what they want us to be. The time has come to live an authentic life. And to choose to see people for who they really are instead of to hold them to a role in our game of pretend.  If we do this from the get go with people, we will find people who are compatible to us and who really will love us for all that we are. To know how to do this, watch my video titled: How To Be Authentic.
People are worth infinitely more than their use.  If we were raised in a world where like a doll, we were only wanted for our use, we will see the world like this.  We will only want people for their use and when they don’t conform to our ideal for them, we will discard them. By doing this, we perpetuate the cycle of objectification and rejection.  We perpetuate disconnection on this planet. We guarantee that we will all be dislocated from each other’s hearts and from the web that unites us. We will fail to love. The time has come to demolish the self-concept of the defective doll and the doll that perfectly followed its operating instructions.  The time has come to choose to love what is real.

How Did We Get Like This?

Human beings are so profoundly alone.  The way we live today is like roommates on the planet earth.  Some roommates we get along with and some we want to avoid or kill.  But we do not live one life together. Instead, we live out our separate lives in the same vicinity as other people.  We lack emotional connection even when we are surrounded by other people. This feeling of being profoundly alone is the root cause of unhappiness in the human race.  It is the root cause of addictions. It is the root cause of suicide. It is the root cause of acts of terror. And it is the root of the dysfunction in the way society is structured.  But we weren’t always this way. So how did it get like this?
Humans used to live in a state of emotional connection.  Ironically, one of our greatest strengths is what ultimately removed us from that state of connection.  And that is our intellect.  All that an ego is, is a self concept.  Our intellect gives us the capacity to form a concept of self.  This makes us embody the concept of the thought of “I”. We saw ourselves as different from and divisible from others.  “I” is a thought that acts like a cancer, separating everything. If you would like to understand more about this, watch my video titled: Oneness is not the ultimate truth of the universe.   But it is important to understand that this is the first intellectual advancement that would be as detrimental as it ever was beneficial to us.
It used to be that our survival was completely dependent on each other.  Our basic physical survival was based on interdependence. We could not afford for any member of our group to not be seen, felt, heard and understood.  We could not afford to be out of alignment with one another. That was a huge liability. If your life depends on something, you remain very perceptive to the actuality as well as the wellbeing of that thing.  The scary thing about being dependent on anything is that you’re at the mercy of it being provided. For example, if your main source of food were corn, you’d be dependent on corn. But if there was a drought and no corn grew, you would suffer.  Or if you were dependent on someone hunting for your food, but they never came back from the hunt, you’d starve to death. So, naturally, we used our intellect to seek to improve our lives by finding ways to be less powerless as individuals. We found ways to get away from being dependent.  We removed ourselves from interdependence with just about everything and took control of everything instead.
For example, we used our intellect to create clothes and houses to not depend on the seasons and elements.  We started planting crops to not depend on what the earth naturally provided in a given year. We created money to not depend on another person liking our trade.  Even though this had many benefits, it also came with a monumental downside.
The idea of “I” automatically gave rise to the idea of “mine”.  This further separated us in that we began to treat people upon whom our survival no longer depended as things belonging to us or things opposing us.  As we became less and less dependent on other things, including each other, our basic survival no longer depended on the wellbeing of others.  Instead, other people were seen as either resources for us to use for our own benefit (slavery is an example of this) or as threats to our wellbeing.  We started to control them and eradicate them and only add to their wellbeing conditionally if they complied to our wishes. We lost our motive to stay connected.  We became more and more independent. We lost survival as our motive to perceive one another and to treat their wellbeing as indivisible from our own.  For the first time, we could look at someone whose wellbeing asked something of us and we could say “no… it doesn’t affect me if you’re feeling that way, it doesn’t threaten my survival.  It has no impact on me.” This is the origin of war.
Wars simply made matters much worse.  They rendered so many people hurt that they placed everyone in the kind of survival situation where survival was not dependent on the capacity to become interdependent, but instead on one’s ability to be completely self centered in nature. Due to their pain and the survival situations they were put in, they became completely self-focused. Pain has a tendency of doing that to a person. They were unable to really feed the wellbeing of the people around them, including their children.  
Children growing up in the kind of emotional environment where parents are just trying to survive and where they were treated as objects belonging to their parents, learn that their parent’s wellbeing has nothing to do with their wellbeing.  This is a household of emotional neglect and even abuse. To understand emotional neglect, watch my video titled: Today’s Great Epidemic and How to Cure It. Children raised in this environment grow up with the idea that their wellbeing is dependent upon not being dependent on anyone else for their wellbeing. They become narcissistic in that life is about everyone being out for themselves.  And they develop several adaptive strategies to ensure they will be able to meet their individual needs in a way that does not depend on anyone taking them into consideration in a loving way.  This is the foundation of the dysfunctional family system. These children will in turn grow up to treat their children like this. It is like a cancer that passes from generation to generation.  A cancer of non-consideration. “ I cannot perceive your feelings, thoughts, desires, needs etc. because that does nothing for me. You only exist in so far as what you can do for me.”
Gradually, we lost our motive and thereafter ability to really perceive one another at an emotional level.  We learned to live individual lives on planet earth side by side. And the less we depend on each other, the less connected we become.  The structure of our society is one that continues to separate people further and further. We have become completely attachment and relationship disordered in nature.  And we continue to propagate the idea that independence, being alone and meeting our needs completely for ourselves is something to develop and take pride in.
By thinking our way out of interdependence in terms of physical survival, life for people on earth became a zero sum game.  You vs. me. A game in which people perceived it to be possible for you to lose and me to win or vice versa. Ultimately it is not actually possible.  The very thing we thought up for our survival is the very thing that will damn it. It is the very thing that is making our world unsafe and painful today.  
We are in a phase of human evolution today where we are going to reverse this process completely.  And ironically, it is not going to be done by getting rid of the ego initially.  It is going to be done by the ego understanding that its survival depends on others.  We must gain back our motive to be connected and interdependent and therefore attuned to another person.  We must gain back the complete embodied understanding that the wellbeing of other things, whether they be human or non-human, is indivisible from our own wellbeing.  When we fully realize this, we will choose to be connected in a way where we can fully perceive them. There will no longer be emotional neglect. There will no longer be a void within people.  There will no longer be abuse. There will no longer be war. There will no longer be any form of disconnection between us.
We must choose to be dependent.  There is nothing powerless about the choice to be dependent and it is safe assuming that both people realize that their wellbeing is inseparable from the other person.  This is the foundation of interdependence.
From here, we will realize that there is no “other”.  That is an illusion. This is when the thought “I” and all concepts connected to it like “mine” will dissipate.  So will our sense of isolation along with it. It will no longer be a thought kept alive by the minds of men. Our survival as a species is completely dependent upon the conscious choice to be interdependent.

Internal Arson, The Amazing Application Of Anger

Anger is by far the emotional state that we disapprove of and try to suppress in ourselves as well as each other the very most.  This isn’t surprising because anger is notorious for creating social conflict. But there is an amazing application for anger that most people would never suspect.
Somatically, anger feels like an emotional version of fire.  Like fire, it is aggressive in that it usually projects outward and feels very hard to contain.  It wants to consume anything in its path and as such, it is often destructive in nature. We like to think that creation is good and destruction is bad.  But a universal principal is that destruction is necessary for creation. Therefore destruction and creation do not have to be contradictory. They can be highly complimentary.
What we learn from forest fires is that they are purifying.  They destroy so that the ecosystem in an area is restored. It rids an area of what is dead, dying and/or no longer benefitting the area.  The decomposed organic matter that it creates enriches the soil, making it easier for new growth.
Anger has been critical to our survival.  Anger pulls us out of powerlessness and the pain of being hurt and being afraid.  This is why anger can be used as fuel. It is a huge burst of energy. It means we are taking our power back.  Anger means we think we have a personal choice to make. Even though anger is a valuable self-preservation instinct that calls for the restoration of our empowerment and for the life we consciously choose, when we feel anger, we don’t treat it as such.  We’ve been taught it is so wrong that our immediate reaction to it is to fear it, suppress it, reject it or do anything we can do to release it and get rid of it in some way. I did a video titled: ‘How To Deal With Anger’ a while back in which I explained the danger of approaching anger in this way as well as tips for what to do with anger when it arises.  I suggest watching that video if you want some additional ideas for what to do about anger.
Here is the thing; anger is designed to distance us from things that threaten our wellbeing.  Some times this distancing separates us from things we need to be close to and thus prevents love.  But sometimes it separates us from things we need to be separated from for the sake of our wellbeing.  When anger distances us from things that we need to be separated from, it is like a forest fire that is designed to distance the forest from what holds it back from growth.  
And so, an amazing technique we can use with our anger is to do the opposite of what we would normally do with anger.  We do not try to make it go away. We do not suppress it. We do not try to get back to love. We do nothing to diminish it.  And we don’t direct it towards anything. Instead, we go somewhere where we can be totally undisturbed and we close our eyes and we invite it to become an internal forest fire that burns everything internally.  We invite it to get rid of everything internally that we don’t want there anymore so that we are completely internally purified to start over totally fresh and from the ashes internally.
For example, if we have had a breakup anger is a natural thing to feel during the grief process.  We can sit down when we hit this phase and close our eyes as if we are experiencing a shamanic journey/meditation of sorts.  We can see what color the fire is and what qualities it has. We can contain it internally and deliberately so that it will consume the unwanted things that exist within us.  We can even play music that helps the fire burn more aggressively and more destructively. But we can invite the destruction consciously with our free will. We can see it burning up our attachments to the person we broke up with.  We can see it burning up memories we have with them, both good and bad. We can see it burning up the fantasy or visions of what we wanted with that person, but could not actualize. We can see it cauterizing the emotional wounds we sustained.  You can see it burning up patterns, thoughts and beliefs that are detrimental to us relative to the breakup.
You can use this internal fire of anger to consciously destroy anything you want.  Let your intuition be the guide of what this fire needs to consume. Be with it for as long as it wants to burn until it burns completely out, leaving a blank slate of charred internal ground behind.  Let it burn until all that is left is only a place to build new; only the potential for new growth. You can direct this fire but do not control when it is or isn’t finished. Let it burn. Invite it to burn.  Invite and consciously choose the destruction in the name of letting go of whatever needs to be let go of.
If you want, you can use music to enhance this fire.  This is a good time to use super angry music in your meditation.  And switch to music that makes you feel like letting go once the fire turns to embers or ash.  You may want to use breathing techniques to enhance it as well. This amazing application for anger is like a personal re-birth process where you are cleansing your entire being a bit like a phoenix.  
I want you to imagine that you are so sick of your life and so hurt by it that you set it on fire and just watch it burn and thank the flames that dissolve it.  This is the same level of release you want to achieve with this exercise. Except it is your own being that you are going to mentally imagine the anger is burning up; specifically anything that does not serve it and that is not conducive to a new life or moving forward.  Invoke the flames instead of resisting them, thanks the flames as they consume everything within you that should no longer be there.
It is natural that after you do this process, you will feel much more free.  But you will also most likely feel raw and like so much that you are used to feeling internally is now gone.  You may also feel underlying emotions that are exposed during the process, like sorrow. Sorrow often follows anger.  Sorrow is a bit like rain after a forest fire. It cools the scorched earth and settles everything, saturating it so that it can restore.  Allow the emotions that the fire of anger makes way for as well without trying to change them. From there, let go and allow yourself to internally progress.  You do not need to try to create anything. Creation and new growth comes naturally as a result of any space being cleared by fire. Simply expose yourself to any experiences, things and people that are nourishing and replenishing.      
Destruction has an incredibly valuable space in this universe as well as within our own being if it is consciously instead of unconsciously carried out.  If the intention behind doing it is purification and letting go, it is not detrimental or criminal, it is beneficial. And anger is naturally adept at being used in this way… for conscious internal arson.                              
      

INCOMPATIBILITY (A Harsh Reality in Relationships)

For relationships to work, they have to feel good to both people in the relationship.  This is true no matter what kind of relationship it is (friendship, partnership, family relationship, work relationship etc).  Obviously this is much easier said than done. But one of the top reasons that relationships do not feel good and are unsustainable is: Incompatibility.
We are conditioned to believe that love triumphs over all.  We have been conditioned to believe that if we are genuinely a good person, we should be able to have a feel good relationship with anyone and everyone, regardless of what role they are playing in our lives.  But I’m going to tell you today that if you are holding yourself to this expectation, your relationships will end in pain. There is a big difference between loving something and being compatible with something.  A bird may love a fish for example, but if their desires for a partnership requires them to live in the same place, there is no way to make that happen without killing either of them.
Incompatibility is the condition of two things being so different in nature and so uncomplimentary in that difference that they are incapable of coexisting harmoniously.  It is tempting to assume that incompatibility is simply about having differences. But what incompatibility is really about it is putting people with these non harmonious differences in roles or positions with each other that require there to be either no difference or that require a difference that is non harmonious in nature to be harmonious.  
This is the case with all relationships, but nowhere is this more easy to see than in partnerships.  One of the most common incompatibilities in partnerships today occurs with opposing attachment needs.  One person in the partnership will desire a partnership that is very close and committed, where both people are living life as a joint venture and take responsibility for one another.  In this relationship, it is assumed that they are doing everything together unless it is mutually agreed that they will do otherwise.
The other partner prefers his or her space.  This person does not want one life with anyone but prefers for they and their partner to have two separate lives and to come together to enjoy closeness and share each other’s separate adventures with one another.  This partnership is not a relationship where they take responsibility for one another and it is assumed that they are doing everything separately except for at nighttime when they go to sleep, unless it is mutually agreed that they will do otherwise.  This is an example of an incompatibility that has no remedy because if either partner conforms to the desires of the other, the relationship will be miserable for them and eventually (because only unhappiness is the result) both will end up unhappy and incapable of maintaining harmony with one another.  This relationship is a guarantee that either one partner will feel limited, not free and suffocated or the other will feel constantly pushed away and abandoned. There is often trauma that creates these extremely different needs in adult relationships, specifically abandonment on one side and enmeshment on the other.  But it does not matter because neither partner can try to heal the other one into being compatible.
When incompatibility is present in a relationship, it is usually very difficult for people to admit to it, to change the nature of their relationship, to change their roles in each other’s lives or to end the relationship.  We want everything to work out so badly because we can’t face the reality of the incompatibility because of what it would mean to us. But because of this, we destroy the relationship. What we do is that we try to make the other person compatible with us by making them wrong or bad for their difference.  This creates shame in them. And they most likely will do the same to us. After a while, the emotional condition of the relationship itself is shame and resentment towards each other because of it. Often, when we make the other person wrong for their difference, we come up with a reason why they are wrong for it and try to then heal them out of that difference or try to change it so that it doesn’t exist.  This never works because if you try, the message conveyed by approaching them in this manner will be “you need to be fixed because something is wrong with you.” They will feel totally unloved by you and unaccepted and unwanted as they are.
One of the main signs of incompatibility in a relationship is that either one or both people in the relationship will feel totally unloved.  The most glaring sign of incompatibility in a relationship is that you will be unable to genuinely say that you want the other person to be exactly who they are.  The truth will be that you want them to change and that who they are in this moment, if nothing else changed, causes you pain. In an incompatible relationship, you will spend your time vacillating between wishing the other person was different and wishing that you were a different person.  Chances are if you really want the relationship to work, you will try endlessly to change them and endlessly to change yourself so there can be harmony. But it will be futile. The relationship will become the biggest source of pain in your life.
This mutual shame created by incompatibility is greatly enhanced if either person is unable to be authentic.  Many people grow up in households that have no respect for boundaries and so safety in the house is about throwing your unique identity away to create social harmony rather than developing a solid core and really knowing yourself.  When this is the case, a person grows into an adult that does not know himself or herself at all. Because of this, this person wants a relationship but has no capacity to assess compatibility before entering into a relationship. Instead, they will try to become and promise to be exactly what the other person wants and needs.  This will be impossible of course to maintain because it is impossible to deny who we really are and what we really want and need. The truth will come out eventually but often far after two people have already committed to a kind of relationship where these differences make for an impossibility to maintain harmony.
One of the reasons we tend to be inauthentic is that we feel so much shame for our personal truth and what we really want and need that we cannot admit to it.   Or we feel the consequence of being authentic is not something we can face. The truth comes out, as it always does, in subconscious ways. We send mixed messages constantly and other people start to guess at our truth even when we deny it.  But what we have to see is that we are setting ourselves up by doing this. We are also setting other people up. We are setting ourselves up to be loved for a mask, not for who we really are. And because they agreed to the mask, when we remove it, they will feel duped and may reject who we really are.  We are also setting them up because they are agreeing to a relationship and assessing compatibility based on something false. They can’t discern incompatibility if we are leading them to believe we are compatible to them when we are not.
One of the best examples of this is a gay man who was raised to believe being gay is an abomination and that by engaging in an intimate relationship with another man, he would risk eternal damnation. Because of this, he cannot be authentic.  He may enter into a heterosexual marriage, trying to convince both he and the woman he is committing to that they are compatible. They are not compatible in the role they are entering into together. But the truth will not come out until later when there is a whole lot more of a consequence for all parties involved to discover that there is an irreconcilable incompatibility.    
To learn how to be authentic, watch my video titled: How To Be Authentic.  You must know yourself in order to establish any form of relationship that is genuinely compatible.
Sometimes, when we experience an incompatibility, we can find a third option.   In fact, if we cannot find a third option when incompatibility is involved, our relationship is doomed in the form it is in.  This is an arrangement where by agreeing to subtle changes, both people can be happy. Other times, finding a third option is literally impossible.  But when we cannot find a third option arrangement that feels good to both people, it is usually because that person is in the wrong role. In fact the only way to resolve the incompatibility so there is any harmony in the relationship is to change the role they are in.  This is very much the case in companies in the corporate sphere. For example, someone who is in a role of manager may be terrible as a manager (and therefore incompatible to the company itself) but may be perfect in customer support. This is also very much the case in partnerships.  For example, a person may be truly incompatible as a partner but may be a truly great friend. And what is true is that our loving of someone is really about our capacity to change someone’s role in our life (even though it may be a painful process of letting go and of change) rather than to reject or to hate them or punish them for not being compatible to us in the role we want them in.  And/or to throw them out of our life completely.
The single hardest thing by far when it comes to assessing compatibility is that attraction has absolutely no respect for compatibility.  I will be discussing why we have attraction for the people that we do in a later video.  But when we find ourselves attracted to someone and wanting so badly to have a relationship with him or her, and it just feels right because of that gravity between you and them, it is very difficult to see reality vs. the fantasy you have for what it could be.  It is also very difficult to see that incompatibilities that are not a big deal when two people first fall in love may be incompatibilities that make a relationship impossible down the road.
A good example of this is religion.  For some people, being a different religion from their partner is a difference that does not qualify as incompatibility.  For others, it is a huge incompatibility. Some religions are not something that is only done on Sunday. It is an entire way of life that governs what someone does and does not do on a daily basis.  For example, if someone is Mormon, the way life is lived is so different that the behaviors of a non Mormon spouse would be considered to be incompatible. Also, the intention that a Mormon has in choosing a spouse is to share in the celestial afterlife together.  A non-Mormon cannot make it to the celestial afterlife. So if a Mormon married a non-Mormon, it would mean that they would have a temporary life with them until death, which feels hopelessly empty and would create extreme distress. Therefore, a Mormon marrying a non-Mormon would be incompatible where as a Presbyterian marrying an Episcopalian might not be an incompatibility depending on how both people feel about it.  
Another super hard thing is that many of us were incompatible with the very family that we were born into.   It is an assumption that by being born into a family, we will be compatible with that family. This is just not the case even though it is taboo in society to say that.  If our differences cannot be accommodated by or accepted by our family, the reality is that many of us would have ended off much better in a different family. But adoption is a very hard thing emotionally for all parties and it is not societally accepted for adoption to occur on these grounds.  As a result, when this was the case, we developed a core self-concept of shame. When this was our experience and therefore our core wounding, we carry this unhealed wound into adulthood and so we will find ourselves in relationships with incompatible partners over and over again until we can find resolution to this wound and be aware enough to consciously choose a compatible partner.  
I’ll give you a little consciousness treat and tell you something.  People who were wounded by being incompatible with their family and therefore being pushed away, shamed and rejected for who they are, are desperate to belong.  They want closeness, tend to cling in relationships and they are so desperate for connection that they commit to people who are incompatible to them even after they become aware of the incompatibility.  It is a bit like being so desperate for water that you’ll drink it even if you know it is poisoned.  But because of their unhealed wound, they will often end up in relationships with people whose childhood wound is that they had to throw their identity, preferences, thoughts, feelings, needs and desires away if they were incompatible with one of the adults in the home so as to create social harmony.  This person has no idea who they are and therefore cannot be authentic. This person also experiences relationships as suffocating and will push partners away. Therefore, the relationship becomes a mirror of both people’s childhood wounds. It will be a relationship with incompatibilities. The main incompatibility being that one person will feel constantly imprisoned by the relationship and as if they are losing themselves.  The other will feel constantly pushed away and abandoned. Both will feel shamed for who they are. The universe is hoping that through the conscious awareness of this wound, both can heal it. One will heal it by consciously finding true compatibility in a kind of adult adoption process. The other will heal it by consciously choosing to live in alignment with their authenticity and have someone love them as they are, even if that love takes the shape of changing the role they are playing in someone else’s life.          
The argument that people have for putting a lot of effort and even time into getting to know someone completely, before fully committing to someone being in a specific role in your life, holds serious weight when it comes to compatibility.  The reality is that life changes, people change and unfortunately, you can’t make people be authentic, especially if they don’t even know themselves enough to be authentic.  All of these things make it hard to guarantee that you are genuinely compatible with someone; or will stay compatible with someone for the rest of your life.  But genuinely knowing yourself and being brutally honest with yourself about your internal truth, including your personal preferences, feelings, thoughts, wants, needs and dislikes will make it much easier to see what differences between you and people will make for genuine incompatibility.  It will allow you to put people in your life in the roles and positions that they truly belong in so both you and they can be happy.

School Shooters (Understanding School Shooters and What To Do To Prevent School Shootings)

Today’s world is much different than it used to be.  It used to be that acts of terrorism and randomized violence were so rare that no one ever really thought about it.  Now it seems like you can’t look at the news without hearing about a terrorist attack or a school shooting. And the emotional atmosphere in the world today as a result, is one of unsafety.  It is beginning to feel like anyone could be the target of totally unpredictable attack. But today, I’m going to make things a little more predictable for you and increase your awareness by demystifying school shooters.  
As we progress through this episode, I want you to keep in mind that my intention is not to condone the actions of school shooters.  The wake of suffering that they create is enormous. No one who has lost a loved one to a school shooter should be asked to feel forgiveness or practice empathy for someone who has hurt them to such a degree.  It is up to their own healing process when or even if that ever happens.  But so much of the solution with regards to school shooters, lies in our capacity to understand them.
Many people would love to hear me say that school shooters are simply mentally ill and so “don’t worry, they are nothing like you”.  But this is not the case. To understand school shooters we are going to have to make our ego very uncomfortable by ceasing to see them as “those people” who are nothing like you.  I always get upset when I hear about school shooting drills happening in schools. Because the reality is that if a school shooting happens, there is a very high likelihood that the very kid who is going to be doing the shooting is also participating in those drills.  We act as if anyone who could carry out this kind of action couldn’t possibly be one of us.
Our incapacity to understand school shooters begins with our incapacity to understand emotional neglect and loneliness.  When we are looking for the conditions that create a person who is suffering enough to carry out an act of terror, we should be looking for something that is often invisible.  Instead, we are looking for abuse we can see or for loneliness we can see.  And this is why it seems like there are no symptoms, characteristics or conditions that seem to be unanimous amongst all school shooters.  But when we can see these things in the life of a school shooter, it is lucky.
It takes a whole collection of different factors to create a school shooter.  But the culprit that unites them all is in fact invisible. What is unanimous amongst them is emotional neglect, which is something that can’t be seen because it is a suffering because of what isn’t happening instead of about what is happening.  And what is unanimous amongst them, often as a result of emotional neglect, is a sense of isolation that exists even when they are surrounded by other people.  This is why not every school shooter is physically socially isolated. But I absolutely 100% assure you they are isolated emotionally.
To understand this dynamic of emotional neglect completely, I want you to watch my video titled: Todays Great Epidemic (And How To Cure It).
We are living in the Emotional Dark Age.  It used to be that we were living in the Dark Age when it came to pathogens.  This is why the Plague was blamed on prostitutes and taken to be a sign of displeasure by God.  We used to be completely confused about why people got sick and how sickness spread. Our confusion about school shooters is exactly the same.  We do not understand emotions. We do not understand how to create the right emotional conditions for a person to feel connected to another person.  We don’t get what we don’t overtly see and have not experienced for ourselves. This is why emotional neglect is not something parents get they are even doing with their children.  It is not something we get that we are doing to each other.
Every act carried out in this universe is carried out for one reason and that is because the person doing it thinks it will help them to feel better.  It is a desperate attempt to seek relief. Though every case of school shooter involves a unique cocktail of experiences and influences that makes them carry out the act where other people don’t, the truth is what they all have in common is the inability to truly connect emotionally to other people.  So let’s look at how this works in the mind of the most difficult to understand school shooter. This school shooter is not isolated physically to the outside viewer and we cannot see overt signs of abuse in the family.
Imagine that you are a kid who grows up in a house where you are fed and clothed but there is no deep sense of connection on an emotional level with the other people in the household.  You do not feel seen, felt, heard or understood. Because of this, often the people in your household are un-attuned to you. Things happen in the household and also in life and these things cause emotional pain.  But because the people around you are un-attuned, they don’t realize the impact these painful experiences are actually having. Instead of being emotionally attuned enough to help you work through these painful emotional experiences with a sense of connection, they do things and say things that have real impact and that really hurt.  Even when they are trying to love you.  But your hurt is invalidated when it occurs because no one sees it and even shames you for feeling hurt.  So you have learned to hide it. There is no way then to resolve these emotions of deep hurt.
Hatred is a cover emotion for hurt.  It takes over in order to make a person feel less powerless. You feel isolated even when everyone is at the dinner table together.  You feel you have no significance and doubt whether you really exist. Because of the deep pain you feel in this situation, you start to hate people.  You are secretive about that hate. You simply notice that feeling hate feels much better than feeling hurt that you are powerless to do anything about.  
Because you have learned connection (or lack there of) from your family, you carry these patterns into your relationships outside the household.  Even though it may look like you have friends on the outside, none of them are genuinely close to you emotionally. They don’t really know you. That causes you pain as well.  You notice that the closest you can get to feeling emotionally close to someone, is when they are suffering emotionally like you are. You notice that when tragedies occur, people feel like you feel and for the first time, you feel like you exist.  When they go back to being happy, it feels like they leave you behind. They are in a different reality that is inconsiderate of the pain you are in. This makes you feel hurt by them and totally alone.
You begin to fantasize about forcing them to see you and forcing them to be in your reality.  You dream of forcing them to feel empathy through going through a situation that forces them to feel what you feel.  This makes you feel less alone. None of this is particularly conscious of course. You begin to pre-meditate about it.   
So then, you lose the hope of ever really being connected because of a series of events that push you over the edge.  Perhaps someone breaks up with you and you get disapproval in the form of a bad grade in your class and you get a parking ticket.  On that day, you decide you have nothing to lose anymore, because the parts of you that put the brakes on this impulse are the ones that thought connection might just be possible and now they see it is futile.  And so they are overpowered by your pain. You go out into the world (for a student, school is their world) and you carry out the attack. If you have particular people who you feel have hurt you in this way, like school personnel or girls who broke up with you, you will target them.  If you feel this way about everyone, because you feel like the world is entirely me and them, you will shoot anyone you see.  In that second, you are significant.  In that moment, even though they don’t consciously realize it, you have succeeded in making them join your reality.  
This is where I need you to really stretch your mind.  This is the real reason that anyone carries out this type of attack… Underneath it all, it is the literal only way that a person feels is available to them after all other hope is lost to get the emotional connection they can’t get in any other way.  In that moment that you injure or kill them, they feel your loss. They feel your powerlessness, they feel the pain that is bad enough at this point that it feels like life cannot go on. They feel the horror of your emotional life. They feel and see the world that is going on inside you underneath the surface façade.  
You may have been trying to get them to see this.  You may have been dropping hints or crying out for help before.  But no one succeeded in seeing you. So, you had to force them to.  Now they get it. But now, they turn you into a monster. When you perceive that it is not you that did it to them.  It is them that did it to you and now they are getting a taste of the very same emotional medicine.
This is what happens in the case of the school shooter that no one can explain because on the outside, nothing seems to set them or the pain they experienced in life drastically apart from anyone else.  Every other case offers more easy to understand elements that contributed to such an action.
It is critical to understand that each person’s perspective is very different.  Nowhere is this truer than the perspective of a child and the perspective of an adult.  For example, for an adult, the jealousy that a toddler may feel when a new baby enters the house should not be a big deal.  To an adult, it should be exciting to welcome a new family member and it is something the kid should just get over. To the toddler I can promise you it is quite a different experience.  If the parents don’t play that situation right from the get go, it is a massive betrayal. To put it in a way you can emotionally understand it, imagine that tomorrow, your spouse walks in the room and says, “I have decided to be in a relationship with this other person too.  Oh and since it’s a new relationship, they are going to need more attention in the beginning. Don’t be jealous because only bad people are jealous. Eventually, you’ll get used to it.” And you are just expected to be ok with that. Chances are, you’d see that as petty abusive.  
That is the emotional experience a child has when a new baby comes into a house where they had such an intimate relationship with mom and dad before when the introduction isn’t done well.  But no one would ever call it abuse from the outside, even though it very much felt that way to the child. And believe me, many people never actually get over that experience even in their adulthood.  
So if we are looking specifically for pain drastic enough by our external standards to constitute as abuse or to cause the kind of actions a school shooter carries out, but we are looking for that pain to be caused by something that we, being outside their perspective would consider to be “bad enough”, we are going to fail to see them, fail to see reality and fail to understand how to change this dynamic in society so these acts don’t occur.    
School shooters contain an emotional void where true connection and human intimacy should be, but isn’t.  And this connection is not something that can occur when you are simply around other people physically.  And what the future will prove is that trauma (all be it trauma that most people don’t’ see) is the cause of both narcissistic personality traits and psychosis, which are two traits that are most common amongst school shooters for whom we cannot overtly see a traumatic experience to pin their behavior on.  I will be talking at length in the future about this because it is not something that mainstream psychologists have caught up with yet.
There are some reasons why school shootings are getting so prevalent today.  
One is that in this era of very fast awakening and shift in collective human consciousness, human shadow cannot hide in a closet anymore.  Instead, it is coming out in plain view to be integrated.
Another reason is that we are being desensitized to violence on a mass scale.  The media is making killing seem commonplace. And many of the video games that people are playing for hours upon hours cause the player to identify with the person carrying out the violence and in many cases shooting.   And unfortunately, many of the people who suffer from emotional isolation and powerlessness tend to gravitate towards video games where they can exit their reality as well as identity and also carry out violent acts because it makes them feel less powerless.  These violent movies and video games allow the person to see that it is possible to transform from a nobody with no personal power or significance into an earthly god who is above laws and empowered through aggression and violence.
But it is much harder for the brain to differentiate between the images it is seeing on a screen (as well as the feelings and associations caused by it) and reality than we currently know.  When we desensitize our brain to violence, we no longer feel there being a drastic gap between what is occurring physically and what is occurring in the mind. There is often a sense of dis-reality already present in the perception belonging to the people who carry out these acts.  And we have to continue to increase the level of stimulation in order to feel the same chemical release on our brains. So there is often an escalation path they take, just like we see with addiction but relative to violence.
Another reason this is so prevalent today is that the people of today (even more so the children of today) have much, much more stressors thrown at them but with much, much less resources for dealing with it.  We have become increasingly more and more isolated. When we used to live in tribe and then community, and then even with extended family, we had multiple people to go to for help regarding how to deal with stressors.  If we couldn’t get connection from one person, we could find someone else to connect with. That is not the case today. The world is too hard for most of us to deal with. Which leaves us much less available to our children.  But now, we have become so isolated in our own little households that we are all they have.  And so, they have only the resources that we demonstrate to them to work with.  
So for example, if we show them that the way to deal with emotion is to stuff it down and pretend it doesn’t exist, they will copy that.  It will work horribly for them. But they don’t have anyone who deals with emotion in any other way to sit there with them and actually help them with how they are feeling.  And our schools today are not a place where most kids can get these needs met and find these resources. They are places where many kids feel more isolated and more traumatized and more powerless and more disciplined instead of guided.  School is a place that adds to emotional pain for most children alive today. It is even more so the case for the two most isolated kids in school 1. The social outcasts who are isolated in every way. 2. The social actors who are surrounded by other kids, but no one sees them because they are in a relationship not with them, but with the role they play.  
Prevention of this kind of violence is necessary.  And that goes much further than actually noticing the signs when they occur.  There is often a degree of hinting with regards to attacks. They often try to recruit others to participate or tell people not to go to school on certain days or talk about what they want to do or engage in progressive forms of violence.  We have to really take ownership of each other in society in that when we see these signs, we take responsibility to do something about them and in a loving way, not a way that isolates them further.
We need to make more resources available to all children so they have more tools available for how to deal with the stressors in their life.  We need to be emotionally close and connected consistently with our children so they feel significant and develop empathy and feel as though they belong.  Many people would imagine that most school shooters come from underprivileged circumstances. But this is not the case. Though there are school shootings that occur in impoverished and underprivileged demographics, it is not the norm because ironically in underprivileged areas, there is often more outreach of people providing resources outside the resources they get in the home as well as more of a banding together of community.  This is not often the case in middle to upper class households where it is assumed the child is getting all the resources they need, when often the emotional resources they need are totally absent.
But the best form of prevention we have is to understand emotions and how to deal with them.  We have to understand connection and genuine intimacy and to create it. And even though it would be good for this to happen at any point, this has ideally got to start before these people develop the emotional void so consistent with emotional neglect.  Pain that is not properly addressed, either becomes directed externally or internally or both. In the worst cases of all, this means suicide, murder or both. To understand more about this, watch my video titled: The emotional wakeup call.
The real reason these attacks are carried out is because a human being feels an insatiable need to emotionally connect and feel significant and empowered but for a vast variety of different reasons and conditions in their life, they have failed in every other way to get it to happen.  I know this is not what meets the eye, because it seems like anyone who is killing people is trying to push people away from themselves. But in fact the opposite is true. And we need to have the awareness to see that in order to do what it will take to prevent it.
School shooting is not a problem with an individual.  It is a problem created by society itself. We fail to connect to one another and really see, feel, hear and understand each other.  And because of this emotional distance between each other, we feel the world is unsafe and renders us powerless. And because of our unconscious psychology, when we are put in this position, there are only two roles to identify with.  A winner or a loser, the strong or the weak, a victim or a perpetrator. Because of this collective psychology, we are sending a mixed message. We may say at a societal level that killing is not ok. But look at what a superhero does in a movie.  He kills all kinds of people and we look at him and call him good. The rift between the bad guy and the good guy is a rift that further separates us from one another. It is a rift that makes us alone and powerless to one another. And it is a rift that has to end.

Self Hate, The Most Dangerous Coping Mechanism

Coping mechanisms are strategies and behaviors that are carried out to mitigate, manage or adapt to anything that causes distress.  If we cope with something, we do so because we feel we cannot change the stressor itself. We have to adapt to it so that the hurt we feel as a result of it is decreased or eliminated.  We would all hope for a world that did not have to be coped with. Alas, that is not the world we currently live in and so it must be said that even though all coping mechanisms hold the potential to be limiting and damaging to a person in the long run, certain coping mechanisms can be more detrimental than others.  And the most dangerous coping mechanism is self-hate.
At first glance it may be hard to see how self-hate could possibly be a coping mechanism.  After all, self-hate can’t possibly decrease a person’s distress can it? The answer is yes it can.  And to see how, we much journey back to the genesis of this coping mechanism.
When we look at a dysfunctional home, what we find is that the root of each person’s self concept in the family system is shame.  This feeling of shame has been passed down from generation to generation. It is the primary stressor in the household. Everyone has to find a way to cope with that shame.  The ways they cope with that shame set up the dysfunctional family system and determine what role each person will play in it.
To understand how self hate develops, we must see that if one or more of the parents is dealing with a baseline self concept of shame, a child being different to that parent in any way or even asserting a boundary will trigger that feeling of shame.  It will invalidate their identity, which they already subconsciously think is bad. This is why the golden child in a family will learn to cope by throwing their identity out the window as a strategy to avoid being shamed and ostracized within the family.  They will become a ‘mini me’ as an adaptive strategy to the parent they feel they must please in order to stay safe with.
The child that cannot adapt by throwing their identity out the window and whom can’t find a way to please the adult consistently for a multitude of reasons will be so upsetting to the self concept of the parent that the parent will subconsciously turn against the child.  They may say, “I love you” to this child and try to do loving things for them, but the truth of how they really feel is not what they are presenting on the surface and the truth comes out in all kinds of ways. Their only way of avoiding the shame they feel and the shame this child triggers in them is to emotionally disown the child and deflect that shame onto the child and that child then becomes the family scapegoat.  It is to say, “I’m not bad, you’re bad and you are my problem and now I’m the victim to you, and so is everyone else in the household.” The family can then hide all of their dysfunction behind this “family problem” person and can see themselves as the good ones because all of their focus can be placed on trying to fix what is “wrong” with this person. What is wrong with them is that everyone in the family has turned against them for being different and for not being able to change that.  But the other people in the house can’t see this. This person has become the identified patient in the family.
The experience of being turned against by the very people who you need love and belonging from the very most is so painful it is beyond describing.  And it makes it so the child has no way to feel safe. They feel hated by their family, especially the parent who initiates this shame deflection. They are growing up with an antagonist, an antagonist upon whom their life depends.  And the way a person copes with this is genius in the short term but completely destructive in the long term.
A child put in this position, pushes themselves away.  But they can’t physically do that so what happens is the pushing away of themselves, splits their consciousness in half.  To understand more about this concept, watch my video called Fragmentation, The Worldwide Disease. When they split their consciousness in half, one half contains the parts within them that they perceive that their parent hates.  The other half becomes a mirror image of their parent… An internal antagonist. This internal antagonist takes over the job of hating them for the parent. It becomes the one that is constantly shaming and criticizing the parts within this person that are seen as wrong and bad by the parent and now as a result, by the person themselves.  This makes the hurt not only controllable, but predictable. And the child believes that by doing this, they might just be able to change the things that are so detestable about them. The person has become their own abuser and hater so that the antagonistic parent is never given the occasion or opportunity to do it. Imagine you were going to go up to someone to hit them and they just started hitting themselves.  What would you do? Chances are, the desire to hurt them would go away. You’d feel on an energetic level that your goal was already being carried out. You would feel like either something is really wrong with them so they must need your help or that they agree that they deserve it to such a degree that they are going to do it for you. This would make you feel validated. This is usually the point at which the parent gets an extra boost of self-esteem through turning themselves into the “false healer” and the child is turned into an identified patient.  
As you can see, this self-hating aspect is actually trying to save their life and rescue them from the wrath of the parent.  This part holds the truths of what matters most to them. For example, perhaps what the parent hated about the child was that she was so sensitive.  The self-hating part will constantly criticize and shame her for being sensitive. Because the thought is that with enough disapproval of it, she will either stop being that way or be motivated to fix it.  And this will get her the sense of belonging and safety she wants. We can then tell that the truth this self-hating aspect holds is just how important belonging and safety are and how much she needs those things.  Ideally, we need to figure out these valued and needed things that the self hater is holding the truth of and try to get those things directly in the places that we can get them from.
Self hate is a coping mechanism that is so dangerous because it is a coping mechanism that may keep you safer from the external hater/antagonist, but it leads to constant anxiety because you are living with a part that behaves like an enemy in your own skin.  And it leads to all kinds of dangerous behaviors in the long term. Things like risk taking, abusive relationships, self-destructive behaviors, self-injury and even suicide.
When you find this part within you, see the benevolent reason for its existence.  See that its strategy, though genius while you were living in an abusive environment, is now destroying your ability to live a life that is worth living.  See that the parts of you that this part has turned against, need to be accepted and loved instead. Go directly for the things you were trying to indirectly get by trying to hate these parts of you away.   Give them to yourself and get them from others. The life you want to live is just on the other side of wanting to be you instead of agreeing with your antagonistic parent that you should be someone else.                            

Make Everything Matter

A while back I did a video called Meaning, The Self-Destruct Button.  In that video, I demonstrated how the meaning you assign to an experience can destroy your life.  Today, I’m going to show you how meaning can save your life. I’m going to show you how finding meaning and a way to make the things you do really matter, will totally transform your quality of life.
Fulfillment is a feeling we are all looking for in life.  We want to feel fulfilled by the things that we are doing.  We want the things we do to really matter. We want a life that is rich with meaning.  But all too often we feel like we are just going through the motions of life, getting busy with the emptiness of the things that we feel must or should be done.
We need to take two approaches to making our life rich with meaning through living our life for what matters.  The first is to make sure that everything we are doing actually matters. The second is to realize that if we change the meaning of what we are doing, we can make most of what doesn’t seem to matter, deeply matter.
When we take the first approach, we take a serious look at whether what we are doing really matters or not.  And we then live our life according to what really matters. We stop putting our energy into the things that we realize really don’t matter.  One of the greatest gifts of lying on your death bed or experiencing a near death experience or even of having someone you love die, is that it puts all things into perspective.  It shows you what really matters. One of the best tools to use in your life on an ongoing basis is to practice closing your eyes and imaging that you are on your deathbed but you are looking back at whatever you are currently and in this moment trying to make a decision about, whatever you are putting your energy into, whatever you are worrying about, whatever you are doing or thinking about doing.  And ask yourself, does this matter? If the answer is no, stop putting energy into it and find something else that matters to put your energy into. If the answer is yes, ask yourself why for the sake of your own awareness.  And put energy into it. For example, does doing this video really matter?  Yes. Because I feel that by doing this, I will be showing people how to really live while they are here.  And the value of this kind of information will outlive even my own temporary life. Only you can know what really matters to you.  Start to live every thought and word and action in your life according to what matters.
When we take the second approach, we can look at anything we are doing, any activity, and we can change the way we look at it so that doing it can really matter and really have meaning.  For example, I could decide that doing the dishes in the sink really does not matter. It is just something that has to be done. But what if I realized that doing the dishes takes pressure off of other people in the house and that frees them up to experience more things that they enjoy?  Then doing the dishes does matter.  Doing the dishes does have deep meaning.
Or for example, I may have a terrible customer support job at a cell phone company that I hate.  I may tell myself that my job does not matter and that there is no meaning in what I am doing. But what if I realized that making someone’s phone work might just be the thing that makes it so they can have the talk that saves their relationship or what if making someone’s phone work is the reason that someone sees an amber alert and actually reports the whereabouts of a child that is stolen.  Then, suddenly your job really matters.
Sometimes, we cannot change the fact that something we are putting our energy into does not really matter and does not hold deep meaning.  But often we can change the meaning we assign to the things we are putting our energy into and as a result, we can make the things that seem to not matter, really matter.  This is one of the deep meanings behind the old Buddhist sayings “before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water and after enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” This saying conveys that enlightenment does not change what you are doing in your life.  It does not make you any less human. What does change however is that the way you see those simple activities, and the meaning you assign to doing them, changes the quality of doing them completely. Before, chopping wood and carrying water was a chore that had to be done…  Something you had to mindlessly get out of the way before doing something that actually mattered to you. After, chopping wood and carrying water has great meaning.
A little tip is that you will notice that most of the things that really matter and most of the meaning that enriches your life are things that create and enhance your connection with other people.  We need to be living our lives from both perspectives simultaneously. If we live with both the strategy of making sure that anything we are doing really matters and also of finding a way to look at the things we are doing in terms of why they really do matter, our life will be so rich with meaning and our life will matter so much, we will feel we have really and truly lived.

Own People!

In today’s world, the word own has become a dirty word.  It has such a negative connotation that chances are, when you saw the title of this article, you felt a minor shock wave of fear and even offense.
Ownership is associated with possession.  The problem with this is that possession is a concept that in and of itself has both a light side and a dark side.  This dark side reflects the shadow of mankind’s limited consciousness. To possess something is to have that thing in that it belongs to you.  This is actually the positive side of possession. It is an inclusion-based concept. To love something is to take it as part of yourself. This means it automatically belongs with and to you and so you have it.  
Where possession goes dark is that the second meaning of possession is to have complete power over that thing that you have.  This is the negative side of possession. But what if I told you that this second part of possession has nothing to do with possession or ownership in and of itself?  Un-awakened men simply decided, at the mercy of their own fears and therefore impulse towards power, that to have something meant to control it completely. But this is in fact the opposite of true ownership.
If you have a negative association with ownership, it is because you suffered from being controlled, which is shadow ownership.  Someone decided that you belonged to them like an object, but that you were not a part of them and so you were powerless and your best interests were never seen or cared for.  You have never experienced true ownership.
To truly own something is to see it as part of yourself.  If you see something as part of yourself, it becomes impossible to hurt that thing without hurting yourself.  You cannot usurp its free will without harming yourself. Therefore, in true ownership, which is for something to be a part of you and therefore to belong to you, the best interests of that other thing is of the utmost concern.
So much damage has been done by us throwing out the concept of ownership in our relationships with one another.  When we do not own other people as part of ourselves, we feel no responsibility to them. We take ourselves to be totally separate from each other, we think of them as ‘other’.  We are in fact much more at risk of playing a zero sum game, where we are looking to win and for them to lose. We become self centered and are only in relationships as a transaction, a means to an end.  We are not in relationships for connection itself, where to have that connection, we must see, feel, hear and understand the other person.
To explain this dynamic further, let’s look at an area within society that has been greatly impacted by the move away from ownership…  Men and women. For thousands of years, women were considered to be the property of men. But most men did not take women as part of themselves in this ownership.  They did not consider the best interests of their wives or daughters or even sons for that matter. They just took possession to mean they got to control them however they wanted.  They were totally in the form of shadow possession. But when the feminist movement came through and demolished the idea that a woman is the property of a man, men were forced to relinquish possession of women.  They let go of all ownership towards the women in their lives. This did not only mean the bad form of possession, it meant the good form too. Relationships between men and women have suffered immensely.
Women enjoyed the sense of containment, belonging and safety they got from being owned by men.  Now, one of the top complaints you will see in couple therapy on the part of the woman is that a man takes no direct responsibility for anything.  He doesn’t take direct responsibility for her wellbeing or the wellbeing of the kids. The man is “hands off”. Now to many women it feels like either being in a relationship alone or like the man is another child or like she is being exploited by him.  It feels like instead of really owning her and the family as his own and therefore providing containment and taking care of them through his own volition, he lets her do it all and simply participates to the degree that he is either nagged to participate or whenever he can get something from her, like sex.
When women complain about where the cowboys went to or watch Jane Austin films and get turned on by them, this is the quality they are looking for and are missing in modern men.  If you are interested in trying to understand the energy of true ownership, I suggest you watch a movie titled: Rob Roy, in which the main character, Rob Roy portrays positive masculine ownership and the villain, Archibald Cunningham portrays the exact opposite; non-ownership.  Watch this movie with the idea of ownership of others specifically in mind. Simply keep in mind that at this time period, people did not understand the idea of ownership of all things, including one’s enemies, as part of themselves. This is a graduated, conscious understanding.
No one can tell you the negative side of no ownership quite like orphans, foster care kids, illegitimate children, family black sheep or the children that suffer emotional neglect in childhood.  When children are in any one of these positions, no one owns them so as to become genuinely invested in their wellbeing.  No one takes them as part of themselves and so they feel they do not belong.  They feel pushed away. They are starved of so many emotional needs. Things like love, understanding, belonging, containment, emotional intimacy and protection.  Regardless of what the physical dimension may look like, the truth is that they are exposed and alone, and must fend for themselves. Even if they are around people and even if they have caretakers, those caretakers do not provide genuine security.  They simply make sure the kid does not physically die. To be genuinely owned is the desire of anyone who grew up with this trauma. They often are so hurt by the absence of ownership that they dream of even having the shadow form of possession, where someone is invested enough that they control their every action.
To be truly owned is also the desire of people who experienced the opposite trauma…  Shadow possession. In shadow possession, it seems on the outside like the adult completely and entirely owns the child.  This takes the form of total control. The child in this environment doesn’t get to have any boundaries. This person grows up with a HUGE aversion to ownership.  They fight to have a sense of self and autonomy. What they don’t know is that they were never really owned either. What they desperately crave is to be able to have their own personal thoughts, needs, wants, preferences and feelings but also be able to belong with someone and be close to someone and have them.  They desperately crave for their self hood to be acknowledged and their unique best interests to be considered. This is only possible with true ownership where you cannot take someone as part of yourself and therefore belonging to you, without genuinely considering them and capitalizing on their best interests. In true ownership, it can only ever be a win-win.
When we were not owned, or when we were shadow owned, we don’t own the people in our lives.  We perpetuate the trauma of non-ownership. We either control them and don’t take their best interests into account or leave them in a constant state of insecurity and pressure because we treat them as totally separate to us.  If you look at the most extreme forms of pain on our planet, you can trace it to a lack of genuine ownership. We do not own anything that we want to have be separate from us. Therefore, we refuse to own homeless people. So they die every day on the street.  We refuse to own prisoners so we punish them and lock them away. We shadow own children, so we treat them as if they are dolls instead of people. We shadow own little girls and sell them in the sex trade. We refuse to own people of other colors, social classes, genders, cultures and religions as part of our collective humanity and so we feel no responsibility towards their wellbeing and in fact go to war against them.  And we refuse to own the part of us that we don’t want to have be part of us, so we remain internally fragmented, which makes internal peace impossible.
A sense of ownership is what causes us to take care of the thing we feel that sense of ownership towards.  We are committed to it. It makes that thing or that person’s best interests indivisible from our own best interests.  It makes it so our commitment is to find a win-win scenario, which is the basis of trust. A sense of ownership is a divine responsibility.  And so, it is with this in mind that I tell you.  The time has some for us to separate the shadow form of possession from the light form of possession and start to really own each other.  The utopia we have been dreaming of will not come to be unless we begin to own all things we see as “other” (human or otherwise) as part of ourselves. To truly integrate something is to truly own in.  To truly love something is to truly own it.

Why Spiritual Teachers, Gurus and Self Help Experts Can Be The Least Authentic and Most Dangerous People of All

Chances are if you are watching this, you have been on the path of spirituality and/or self help for long enough to have encountered several teachers, experts and leaders.  But chances are, you do not clearly see the most common dysfunction among them because they do not see this dysfunction in themselves.  This most common dysfunction is a direct contradiction to the very healing they profess to stand for.  And it is a dynamic that can turn dangerous.
I did a video a while back called Fragmentation, The World Wide Disease.  If you have not watched that video already, I highly suggest that you watch it now and then come back to this video because it will greatly enhance your understanding of this dynamic.
The process of life in which we encounter trauma, takes us out of a state of wholeness.  It fragments us into parts.  If we do not have a way to resolve and thus integrate that trauma we experience when we are young, we must dissociate from it.  Our consciousness splits in order to cope with it.
Consciousness itself functions like water. At the moment of trauma, when we dissociate, part of our consciousness branches off from our main consciousness.  Our consciousness splits, just like the river does.  It is an act of self-preservation.  It is easier to comprehend of this process of splitting that is fragmentation in terms of how it effects our being by imagining that when our consciousness splits as the result of trauma, our ego splits in two.  Our sense of self becomes fragmented.  So even though we have one body, within that body, we end up with multiple polarized selves.
There is a split between the vulnerable self and the self that coped with that vulnerability so as to self preserve.  This is super important because we identify with, embody and accept inside ourselves only one polarity and reject, deny, suppress and disown the opposite polarity.   We identify with the parts of ourselves that coped to self-preserve.  These aspects protected us.  They allowed us to stay as far away from our vulnerability as possible.  But in this state, we are unhealed and we in fact cause fragmentation in others when we are coming from this place.  Healing from this fragmentation is all about becoming whole again.  But as you will see, this is the opposite of what most experts in spirituality and self-help are doing.
To explain this dynamic that is occurring within so many teachers in this field, I will reveal the most common split that occurs within them as well as its origins. Most people in the spiritual and self-help field come from a childhood with extremely painful emotional dynamics.  Many of these dynamics, such as emotional neglect, they themselves do not recognize. Most of them ended up in a position where at a VERY young age, an age where their emotional and even physical needs were not being met reliably and they could not meet those needs for themselves, they experienced trauma. Imagine a baby lying in a crib needing contact comfort or being hungry and not getting that need met, being made to cry themselves to sleep.  The level of powerlessness can be so intense that what occurs is a fragmentation, a split within the being’s consciousness between the temporal self (the body) and the conscious perspective (often referred to as the mind).  The dissociation that occurs at this level mimics a near death experience where the conscious perspective returns to a perspective that transcends the physical dimension.  It is for lack of a better way of describing it ‘higher dimensional perspective’.  This was what allowed them to self preserve… To get away from the terrible powerlessness of the infant perspective and the starvation because its needs were not being met.  The person then identifies with this part of themselves and rejects, denies and disowns their temporal self.  By doing so, he or she becomes inauthentic, not the whole truth of themselves.
He or she mistakes the transcendental perspective self for all of who he or she is.  He or she calls it their “real self”.  They have no idea that all that is happening is they are coping through identification with this part and rejecting their temporal self.  Imagine how dangerous it could be to confuse one fragment within yourself as all of who you are, as your real self, as your soul or as your higher self.  To understand more about this dynamic, watch my video titled: The sad truth about most gurus.
There is an old saying, “No disguise could be better for the Devil than Christ”  Any part within us is in fact part of the ego.  So there could be no disguise better for the ego than an identity that doesn’t see itself as ego.  There could be no better disguise for the ego than a transcendental self.
This particular identification with only the transcendental part of oneself is the most dangerous identification to have for many reasons.
In a multi dimensional universe, different dimensions have different and often contradictory laws.  For example, from the physical dimension, death is a reality.  From a higher dimensional reality, death is an illusion.  In the physical reality, pain can destroy someone’s life.  From a higher dimension, pain is also an illusion.  From a higher dimensional reality, where no resistance exists, if you focus on pain, you fuel pain, which only creates more of it.  From another dimension, where resistance exists, if you ignore, suppress and deny pain, it only gets bigger.  From a higher dimension, you chose into this life to experience exactly what you experienced.  From a lower dimensional reality, you created your reality because of your focus and from an even lower dimensional reality, you did not chose to be abused at 3 and then lose your husband and then die of cancer.

What we tend to do if we are fragmented and selectively identified our self is that we tend to do the same thing to the universe that we do within ourselves.  Within ourselves, certain parts of us reject, invalidate and deny the reality of other parts.  So what we do externally is we use higher dimensional truths to invalidate and deny lower dimensional truths.  We cannot hold space for the idea that BOTH are in fact true and must be equally seen as real.  You have all heard these types of statements… The physical dimension is not real, it is just a hologram.  Pain is just illusion.  You came down to this dimension to concern yourself with only your own personal expansion and therefore joy so you are supposed to be focused on yourself and let everyone else sort themselves out.  They committed suicide because that was the best path to their own freedom and so it is all perfect.

Many times the spiritual aspect of oneself, the one that a guru or spiritual teacher is identified with, is able to resonate at a frequency so high that they have access to 11th dimensional awareness.  It is a perspective that is objectively true, so as long as a teacher takes that part of themselves to be ALL of who they are because they see it as the ultimate truth, it will be impossible to argue with them in any way about their perspective.  Because from a higher perspective, they are 100% right.  But they are right only from that perspective.   They refuse to accept any parts of themselves that resonate at a lower frequency, like their body, as true.  They believe their temporal aspect is the illusion and is false.  By believing this, they propagate and embody fragmentation.  They in fact campaign for fragmentation and selective identification.  This ultimately leads to death because a person cannot stay alive if the gap between the physical aspect and non physical aspect of themselves becomes too wide.
  This kind of teacher, which is the vast majority of them, campaigns for fragmentation indirectly.  They teach it to those that follow them.  They will teach their following to fragment and selectively identify in the exact same way that they have done to cope.  They make the polarization within a person much, much worse to extremely detrimental ends.  If a person is in pain, they may tell them, “it is illusion”.  They may teach you to deprive your physical body and deny instincts and needs in order to reach the truth of who you are.  They may teach you to tap emotions away when they arise to be integrated.  They may tell you that any pain that arises is just the ego and by dis-identifying with it (and not engaging with it further), you become awakened because the ego is trying to prevent awakening.  If one of your loved ones dies, they will tell you that death doesn’t really exist and grief is just the refusal to see this.  They may have sex with disciples and say, “it’s to heal them sexually”.  They may go so far as to create something like Jonestown because they refuse to see that there is any value in this physical earth.  Bottom line, this teacher hurts people and this teacher teaches their following to propagate further fragmentation in themselves, the EXACT opposite of integration and therefore healing.  What they are teaching is ego, simply an ego dressed in a spiritual disguise.
  This kind of teacher does not see what they are doing as harmful.  To the opposite, they see integration as harmful.  They see accepting your temporal aspect as real as falling prey to illusion.  They see embracing your vulnerability as weakness that prevents you from creating the life you want to create.  They see acknowledging death and loss as ignorance.  They see validating pain as fueling illusion. They see acknowledging the part of one’s self that feels like a victim as propagating victim mentality.  They see the purpose of physical life to be transcending it. And the list goes on and on.  This kind of teacher is completely inauthentic but is convinced they are the most authentic.  This teacher is in more denial than most of the people who are totally lost in the matrix.  Therefore they, themselves are in fact preventing themselves from actualizing, awakening, enlightenment, wholeness and oneness.  And they are in turn preventing it in their following that holds themselves to the same standards, beliefs and practice.   If you are following this kind of teacher, you will feel increasingly like parts of you are shameful and are therefore to be moved away from or transcended.  This teacher will seem to transcend human reality and not admit to any human aspects like emotions, attachments, desires, needs or reactions within themselves.  You will constantly feel like you are failing to meet the standards they put forth and seem to represent. This teacher cannot be in a space of AND consciousness.  For example, instead of being able to see “yes, no death exists at the level of consciousness itself but also this person has died in the physical and so there is a great loss”.  They will only be able to see “no, there is no death, it is only an illusion and feeling loss means you’re in that illusion”.  For more information about this, watch my video titled: And Consciousness, The Modern Day Replacement For The Middle Way.
In the future, as more people become aware of this terrifying dynamic within themselves, two distinct camps will begin to form within the spiritual and self help field.  1. Those who believe in integration as the path to awakening and whom walk that path (integration of vulnerability and strength, powerlessness and empowerment, dark and light).  2. And those who still and often unknowingly side with selective identification as the path to awakening (denying vulnerability so as to be strong, denying powerlessness to feel empowered, embracing only light).
To be a teacher of integration is to expose the parts of yourself that are human and to not make those traits “less than or unacceptable”.  To be a teacher of integration puts people into a state of cognitive dissonance where they are forced to either discredit you based on your humanity or to be able to accept the totality of a teacher being both human and beyond human simultaneously.  If they accept this reality, they are then able to accept it within themselves.  No part of them is made the enemy.  All parts are treated as equal partners playing different roles in their awakening.
As fractals of Source consciousness, we fragment ourselves in the same way that Source itself did.  But now, Source is turning the corner and is coming back into oneness.  Within us, as fractals of source, this takes the shape of a resolution of all polarities within us.  It looks like standing between all opposites and bringing them together instead of siding with one or another.  This is extremely brave work that will involve developing a capacity to feel shame and fear instead of run from feeling it.  We have shame and fear about anything we have suppressed or denied or rejected within ourselves.  Re-owning those parts means facing that shame and fear.  But true inner peace and as a result, external peace is waiting for us on the other side of this process of integration.
And so I ask you to consider, what if your spiritual aspect, the one that is transcendental and that has so much awareness, was not in fact the real you, but was just one part within you… A part that at the moment you are completely identified with to the degree that you dismiss and undervalue and minimize the others?

Will Healing Ever End?

When people start off on the path of healing something, they often do so with a feeling of excitement and empowerment.  We feel like we have the power to actually create the feel good life that we want.  Any time we find a new tool to heal with or approach to healing or new process and we experience some healing with it, we feel like we have finally found THE answer and that in no time, we will be completely healed.  We will be living a healthy life of total bliss and harmony.  And then something terrible happens.  We hit something else that needs to be healed.
I don’t need to explain this dynamic much deeper because chances are, if you are even watching this video, you know exactly what it feels like to hit the terrible disappointment and overwhelm and hopelessness that comes with the experience of healing something only to find something else is unhealed and to heal that only to find out that something else needs to be healed.  And to heal that only to find out that something else needs to be healed.  
To level with you, it starts to feel like you are just one never ending fucked up onion.  This not only kills your self-concept, it kills your hope that you will ever achieve the perfect life you have been envisioning for yourself…  Maybe it doesn’t matter if other people seem to be getting better, you are just so damaged that there is no way to fully heal.  And let’s be honest, you don’t want your life to be condemned to the process of painstakingly trying to put something that shattered back together again.  After all, you will most likely die trying.  Maybe the law of attraction people have it right and the more you focus on healing, the more there is that needs to be healed.  So maybe you should just stop trying to heal and distract yourself with positive focus.  Maybe the truth is, there is no end to healing.  
If you are feeling this way in your awakening journey or in your healing process, the first thing that needs to happen is you need to hear the following:  Welcome to the club.  You are so not alone in this feeling.  And hitting this point in your healing process is absolutely universal.  But then, you need to know the following:
Anything that has a beginning has to automatically have an end.  This is the universal law of polarity.  So, if there was a beginning to your wounding, (which there was) there is also an end to it and we call this the state of being healed.  Even universally speaking, universal fragmentation (which is universal wounding) began with the thought “I”.  This means that even universal fragmentation will come to an end.  The opposite of fragmentation is that which is beyond ‘oneness’.  If you want to understand this concept, watch my video titled: Oneness Is Not The Ultimate Truth Of The Universe.  This means for any of you who recognize that as a fractal of the universe, you are not just healing your own fragmentation, but the world’s and the universe’s fragmentation, yes there is even an end to that.
  The resistance that you have to healing will be greatly reduced by understanding what healing is exactly.  Healing is the process of positively changing a pattern.  It is to experience the opposite.  For example, to heal loneliness is to experience togetherness.  To heal a broken bone is to mend it. It is to go from fragmented to whole. It is to go from unwanted to wanted.  Healing is therefore about desire.  Therefore personal expansion is about healing.  This means the entire process of universal expansion is about healing and you came here to life for personal and universal expansion so healing is essentially what you came here to life for.
No one is born on earth without opting into unhealed ancestral patterns.  No one experiences life on earth without experiencing what is unwanted.  Trauma is currently a fact of life.  Every person is here to heal many things.  Most people simply do not realize this.  Most people are busy pretending they have nothing to heal because of the cultural stigma and sense of failure associated with something being wrong with you.  We make the fact that we have healing to do, mean that something is wrong with us.  This is odd because it means we have judged that where we are is wrong.  The healing of things creates universal expansion.  This means if you are in the process of healing, nothing is wrong with you.  It means you are alive.  If you want to know more about healing, I suggest you watch my video titled: What Is Healing?
  We tend to look at healing like we look at a dirty kitchen.  We feel like it is something we have to get done and that we can’t really start living or feeling good until it is entirely done.  This is daunting if we have opted into a life where we are particularly wounded and therefore particularly fragmented.  When we look at healing like this, we get the same feeling that we experience when a colossal knot gets tied in fishing line.  We feel like there is no point, it’s too hard, we should just cut the line.  But I want you to realize that literally any time you heal anything, you will feel just that much better and your life will get just that much better.  The process of healing is more like cleaning a window covered in dust and cobwebs.  You don’t have to clean the whole thing so that light can finally get in.  Each inch you clean lets that much more light into the room.  This means the better it gets, the better it gets.  You can and will feel good.
  Even though there is absolutely an end to the process of healing, the process of healing will get better if you stop focusing on needing there to be an end.  The closer you can get to not caring if there is ever an end, the less the process of healing will cause you to suffer.  You don’t want to spend your whole life feeling shitty cause you aren’t where you want to be and judging where you are as wrong.  Ask yourself a question: How could I fall in love with the process of healing?  How could I fall in love with the process of finding out how to change something unwanted into its wanted opposite?  In my next point, I am going to tell you the reason to approach healing in this way especially if you have committed to the path of awakening.
  When people have a personal enlightenment experience, like Buddha did, we could say that they have fully individually healed.  They have fully integrated on an individual level.  But the individual awakening puts you back at square one in a way because part of personal enlightenment is to realize that you and the universe are one and the same.  You are essentially a fractal of the universe at large.  The universe is therefore within you, not just external to you.  And this means that even if you have awoken, if there is even one person on earth that has not, you cannot be fully awake.  This is the point at which most awakened beings become teachers and healers in an in alignment way.  This is the point at which healing is no longer simply an individual process, it is a process that involves the entire world and more than that. The universe at large.  There can be no division between individual and collective healing.  If there is a war happening in the world, there is a war within you.  We can address this world both externally and internally because they are one and the same.
But when we realize where we are as a universe and where the world is and where human beings are, it is easy to see how many things there are to heal. We will most likely spend a lifetime or hundreds of lifetimes and the human race alone will not be fully healed.  We don’t even know consciously what a fully ‘healed’ human looks like.  Instead of giving up because it is too much of a daunting task to face, we can see that we simply need to focus on whatever is in front of us at the moment.  Healing will happen one step at a time and the better it gets, the better it gets.
  While we are focusing on healing, essentially closing the gap between where we are and where we want to be, what we have and what we want, we can greatly improve the process by not trying to avoid the process and to the opposite, not trying to rush the process to get it all done.  We can focus on what is already healed within us.  Any gratitude practice or positive focus practice will help us in this respect.  We can also do things just for the simple enjoyment of it.  You are here to really live the experience of healing.  This means if you manage to go from loneliness to togetherness, revel in it.  Do things that are fun.  Do things that make you smile and laugh and feel inspired.  Soak it up.  Don’t just look for the next thing to heal.  You can live while you are healing.
  Never approach healing as if you are trying to fix yourself.  When people experience the feeling that doing shadow work only leads to more shadows or that trying to heal yourself only leads to more things to heal most often occurs in people who focus on healing as if something needs to be fixed.  When we focus at ourselves or at other people as if something needs to be fixed, we are focusing at ourselves or them with an attitude of ‘something is wrong with you’.  This makes it so law of attraction lines us up only with more and more things being wrong with us.  When this is the case, often what we need to do to heal is to focus at ourselves so as to see what is right about us.  It means that the healing is in learning to be unconditionally with ourselves with approval as we are instead of trying to change ourselves.
  There is no way out but through it.  We are hard wired to avoid pain.  We are always looking for the relief.  If we put our hand on the hot stove, we take it off.  We all want to get out of pain.  So often the ways that we use to get out of pain only compounds the problem.  Even though we feel temporarily better, like with Novocain, it does nothing to create actual healing and as is the case with so many of our coping mechanisms, in fact only wounds us further.  In some cases, as is the case when part of the healing process involves grief, the only way out is to go completely through it.  This means we have to make negative emotion and pain something we are willing to feel in order to feel better.  To understand more about this, watch my video titled: The Emotional Wakeup Call.   The healing of the collective human consciousness is dependent upon us creating a society where we can make room for pain.  You currently live in a world that has made only positive things, like positive emotions and success and being healed, acceptable.  This is a world that sees anything less than this as a failure.  This prevents people from healing.  It prevents people from admitting to where they are and taking the sometimes counterintuitive steps they need to take in order to heal.  It is ok to not be ok.  It isn’t what you want for yourself or for anyone else.  But pain is not the enemy.  Neither is negative emotion.  All it is, is information that you aren’t where you want to be or that something needs your loving attention so that it can be healed and integrated.  We need to learn to go toward the pain with our consciousness to truly heal and truly awaken.  The only way out…  is in.
  Nothing is permanent.  There will be times, especially if what you are healing is states of powerlessness, where it will feel like the unwanted state will never, ever end and that you can do nothing to end it.  But it is in fact impossible in a world that operates according to the universal laws that are in place here for anything that has a beginning to not have an end.  It is also impossible in a universe with these universal laws to desire something that cannot happen. It is only possible to not know exactly how to make them happen at the current moment.  But finding out how to create what we desire is the juice of life.  It is so much of what you came here to experience. I know that sometimes it feels like the healing process will never end.  But it can and it will.  But you can get to the place where because the better it gets, the better it gets, you will not really care if it ends.  In fact the process of healing is what you will feel like you get the greatest joy out of.

What Is Healing?

Before you continue reading this article, I want you to stop to answer this question without looking up any definitions or involving any one else’s opinion:  What is healing?  What does it mean to heal?   
Healing is one of those things that is a part of every person’s life but we all conceptualize of it differently.  We know that healing implies some form of positive change.   But we often feel confused about what it entails and how exactly to achieve healing.   
When it comes to our physical bodies, when we say healing, we usually conceptualize of it meaning to return to or to achieve a state of wholeness and health where we are free from illness or injury.  When it comes to our emotions and mind, we usually conceptualize of it meaning to get over something so we feel good emotionally and are thinking positive thoughts.  But this way of conceptualizing of healing leads to genuine confusion.  It makes healing into not only an abstract concept, but also it turns the process of healing into a kind of ‘quest for the holy grail’.  
Today, I’m going to explain what healing actually is on the most fundamental level of our existence.  And by knowing this, you will not only understand what healing actually is, you will have understand the strategy for how to achieve it.  
 
TO HEAL IS TO EXPERIENCE THE OPPOSITE
At the most fundamental level, everything is energy.  Energy is simply potential energy until different patterns arise within that energy.  These patterns are what dictates whether energy ultimately becomes a toothbrush or an emotion or a tree.  Patterns are like the blueprint of your physical existence.  Because everything is a pattern, all forms of illness are also specific patterns.  And to heal something is to change that pattern.  Therefore, the first layer to understand about healing is that to heal is to change a pattern.  It is the opposite of repetition and redundancy.  Now we must look at how to change a pattern.  
When something is unhealed, it is exhibiting a pattern that we don’t like.  It is in a state that is unwanted.  Therefore, we can greatly simplify healing in that it is a change of a pattern that is unwanted into a pattern that is wanted.  This usually entails changing it into the opposite pattern.  Therefore, the second layer to understand about healing is that healing is to experience the opposite. 
Now that you understand that to heal is to change a pattern into the opposite, let’s see how it works practically in several different scenarios.  
If our leg is broken, to change that pattern of broken into its opposite is to put together/ mend.  
If we feel demeaned, to heal is to feel valued.
If we are traumatized by snakes, to heal is to form a different association with snakes so that instead of feeling negative towards them, we feel positive towards them.
If we are lonely, to heal is to achieve togetherness. 
If we are chronically thinking that money is hard to get, to heal is to be able to think the thought that money comes easily.  
If we are abused to heal is to be treated lovingly.
If we feel powerless, to heal is to feel empowered.
If we are stuck, to heal is to be able to move.     
 
THE ROOT TO PHYSICAL AILMENTS

The answer then for how to heal is simply to figure out how to go from point a to point b.  For example, how to go from being alone to being with people.  Where this gets complex for most people is in the realm of physical ailment.  The reason is that the patterns involved in physical ailment are not purely physical.  For example, we could look at cancer and say that if cancer is abnormal cell growth and division, to heal cancer is to be free of those abnormal cells and for the body to achieve normal cell growth and division.  However, what most people do not know is that underlying every physical ailment is an underlying problem in consciousness.  Another way of saying this is that there is a mental and emotional root to all physical ailments.  
Cancer occurs when the consciousness loses control over its own cells that make up the body.  These cells cease to follow the signals that tell them what to do in the body.  They go rogue. This occurs because the pattern that has been adopted by the consciousness of the individual is perceiving oneself to be out of control and therefore powerless.  This is the main reason why cancer is so prevalent now a days.  We feel more and more powerless and out of control in our own lives.  But depending on the type of cancer, the feeling of being out of control and therefore powerless is relative to different things.  Each organ in the body corresponds to different types of consciousness.  
To give you a few examples, the stomach relates to our capacity to accept things.  The breasts relate to responsibility relative to others and to the giving of love.  The bones relate to our experience of foundation and support.  Therefore, for the sake of your understanding of healing as it applies to cancer, I will greatly simplify the idea of healing cancer in this way:  The real underlying cause of bone cancer would be feeling totally out of control and therefore powerless to creating a stable foundation in your life which includes the experience of having support.  Therefore healing bone cancer would in fact be about feeling empowered to and capable of creating a stable foundation in your life, which includes the experience of having support.  
 
CANCER IS ABOUT CHILDHOOD GRIEF
The reason that so many people say that cancer is always about childhood grief is because these patterns in our consciousness that lead to cancer in specific areas always have their roots in our childhood experiences.  This is usually when we adopt these patterns in our consciousness.  For example, a child growing up with parents who are either absent or living in their own realities may feel like they have no stability or support and if this person does not find something else in their life outside mom and dad to create that experience for them, they would be at risk for bone disorders, including (if they feel totally powerless to create it) bone cancer.  
Yes, it is at this point that all parents, including myself are about to collapse on the floor from the torment, fear and pressure of feeling like we could potentially doom our children’s future with the slightest mistake.  I realize that because so much of our suffering has its roots in childhood experience as well as ancestral patterns that we opt into in this life, that parenting seems more terrifying to most of you by the second.  I will do an episode on this in the future so that parents don’t die of nervous stress.  But for this episode, I only introduce this point about the kind of patterns in consciousness that underlie physical ailments so as to help you to better understand healing.          
To heal anything, we must ‘experience the opposite’.  We must experience what is wanted, instead of what is unwanted.  And this is why healing is the premise of universal expansion.  Once we achieve whatever state is wanted, we are then free to give rise to new desire.  It is desire that is always calling universal consciousness into the new; beyond where universal consciousness has been before.  So knowing this, anytime you feel you need to heal something, but healing that thing feels abstract to you, look at the current state of whatever it is that is unhealed. Become conscious of its current pattern and from there, figure out what the opposite pattern would be.  The process of healing then is before you.  It is the process of going from point a to point b, from the unwanted experience to the wanted experience.  And there are so many ways to do that, which is why so many different people succeed at healing with so many different approaches.            

When the only way to be OK is to not be OK

I have been traveling the world and will continue to do so with the message that it is ok to not be ok.  We live in a society that is obsessed with happiness.  The message is that if you aren’t feeling happy, something must be terribly wrong with you.  But today, we are going to look at another dynamic.  We are going to look a barrier to happiness, which is when the only way to be ok is to not be ok.
In human society, envy is a reality of human existence.  It does not feel good to feel less than.  It does not feel good to feel like you can’t have something you want that someone else has.  Envy makes people perceive a huge grand canyon between themselves and the other person.  When we are not conscious enough of what is going on, we end up simply reacting to the pain.  When we react to the pain of envy, we seek to remedy the gap between us and them by pulling them backwards, trying to take away what they have that we don’t have, trying to prove that we are better then them and treating them like the enemy who is hurting us.  This sets up a dynamic where even though we all want success and happiness, there is a certain amount of social risk involved in getting those things or letting other people know that we have them.  Even though it is socially unsafe to fail completely and to be super unhappy, there is a certain amount of social safety in talking about what is wrong with you and bad about you and in not being super happy or super successful.  It guarantees that you will not be a target and can thus avoid pain.             
But sometimes, this social patterning goes much deeper and being not ok is a means of survival.  When most people have children, they are not in a place where they have resolved their own unresolved wounding.  In fact one of the main reasons that children even happen in the universe is for the sake of expansion.  They come to reflect their parents.  By reflecting their parents, they needle their parents into their expansion.  The shadows of the family line come to be resolved through progeny.  When parents are particularly unhealed, like they are in a dysfunctional family, what is happening in a parent’s conscious mind is far different than what is happening under the surface of what they can and will consciously admit to.  
This parent may say that they want their child to be happy.  But the child’s happiness is actually a threat to his or her own sense of self.  I will paint you a picture of what I mean.  I want you to imagine a little girl who is super happy lying on the living room floor with her fruit snacks and toys.  When the mother sees her daughter happy, it reminds her of how happy she isn’t.  It reminds her of the way she sacrificed her own ambition for the sake of staying home to raise this little girl.  It reminds her of how she feels used and abused because while this little girl plays, she has to clean the dishes and do the laundry.  She feels like she has no personal success and instead is expected to be a slave with no personal worth of her own.  She actually feels like her daughter is leaving her behind and abandoning her emotionally when her daughter is happy and she is not.  This pain wells up in her.  She is not conscious enough to do anything constructive with it or change anything about her life choices because of it.  So, she feels like this little girl is causing her pain.  Her subconscious rises up with vengeance.  The mom blindsides this little girl by shaming her for being selfish or withdrawing or complaining to someone about motherhood in front of her or tells the little girl something that would make her sad or afraid.  All of this is done to re-establish a sense of closeness with her daughter.  But the message is clear:  “You cannot be close to me if you are happy”.  Closeness with our parents is what our survival depends on.  And so the child will give up joy for fusion with this person.  
When we grow up around adults like this, we learn that joy is socially dangerous.  We learn it is the road to isolation and punishment.  And so not being ok is our way of establishing social closeness with people.  Not being ok is also our white flag that we raise to cry mercy.  We know that if we demonstrate that we are not ok, people will not have any motive to tear us down or add pain to us and might in fact be manipulated into being loving towards us instead.  
If we grew up with this kind of dynamic, we also learn that we can’t take things too far in the opposite direction.  This parent lives their life from a foundation of shame.  If we are miserable, they will take that personally too but not being able to face that shame, they will deflect it and turn you into the family problem.  They will use your unhappiness as a way to escape from their own problems and to meet their needs through other people’s pity.  To understand more about this dynamic, I encourage you to watch my video titled: Deflection, The Coping Mechanism From Hell.
Many parents with this pattern build their relationship with their children on obligation.  When their child is not ok, out of obligation they come close to their child.  When the child is ok, they vanish to do their own thing.  I watch many children growing up in this kind of environment that take the crumb of obligation as a substitute for real love.  They constantly create conflict or crisis or accidents to get those crumbs because the alternative they are looking at is emotional starvation.  
The thing that makes this pattern the most difficult to see is that it is not that people caught in this pattern act as if they aren’t ok when they are ok.  They genuinely are in hell emotionally and they genuinely have things going wrong.  They are genuinely wounded.  It’s just that even though they consciously want to heal and be ok or feel happy, a huge unconscious part of them resists that because the prospect of being ok is terrifying.  It has been ingrained that being ok and happy means guaranteed pain.  So they learn that there is a very safe but painful sweet spot called ‘I’m not ok’.  
Many people, who grew up in this pattern as children, learn to adapt by creating fusion with their parent by spending their lives devoted to the wellbeing of their parent.  This is the heart of the parentified child syndrome.  This child gives up their happiness for their parent’s.  They learn that their only worth and value is to rescue their parent when he or she is unhappy.  When the parent is happy, the parent often withdraws to do his or her own thing.  The message this child receives is that he or she is only going to receive connection when someone is not ok and that conversely, they are going to be abandoned if someone is ok.  This person grows into a person who will withdraw any time someone is happy or will create a collapse in someone else so that they aren’t ok so they can come in and get connection through the rescue of the very negative emotional state that they, themselves created.  This child grows up to be a person who feels they have no worth in and of themselves.  No one could possibly want to be with them for them.  The only reason anyone would want to be with them is to use them as an emotional buoy.    
As adults, the people who learned it wasn’t ok to be ok and that the only way to have emotional closeness is to either not be ok or for the other person to not be ok, find each other.  They find each other and perpetuate these same painful patterns of staying unhappy and creating unhappiness so as to maintain closeness.  And we need to be aware of this dynamic if we want to change it.  It isn’t possible to be happy and not have closeness with other people.  But even if it were, happiness is not worth being alone.  And so, if we don’t become aware of this pattern so as to make different choices in our relationships, we will never be ok and we will never be happy.  We will side with being close to each other and unhappy instead.
We tend to project the idea that we had of our primary authority figures over the universe at large and or God.  What we expect from the universe is no different from what we expected from them.  If this pattern was the pattern in our childhoods, we expect that any time we are ok or worse… happy, it is a guarantee that the universe will immediately knock us out of that place with a stressor, pain or tragedy.  We need to see that this has nothing to do with the universe at large.  It is other people who created and may be currently creating this pattern because we perpetuate this pattern in our adult relationships.   The universe is not against your happiness, but it is a real potential that someone in your life may be.  
In truth, connection and closeness should have absolutely nothing to do with being ok or not being ok.  Whether a person is happy or not should have nothing to do with connection.  They are two independent things.  We need connection if we are OK and we need connection if we are not OK.  But in today’s world with today’s social shadows, we need to begin to let ourselves be connected and be happy at the same time.  We need to stay connected whether we are happy or sad.  Happiness has got to cease to be something that isolates us or causes us to isolate other people.  By making this change in our relationships, we will create a world where it will not only be ok to not be ok; it will be ok to be ok.                               

Do You Make Relationships A Task?

When most of us enter into a relationship, we do so because we can’t wait to be near someone. We get butterflies in our stomach.  Wild horses couldn’t hold us back from them.  We finish all of our other tasks so that we can get to what we really want, which is to just be with them; enjoying their presence and connection. But for some of us, at a certain point in the relationship, something changes.
The pattern I am about to expose is a pattern I have seen in some women but it is by far and away most common amongst men.  And it is a pattern that is the road to ruin in relationships.  It is in fact the single biggest contributor to women deciding to cheat.
There is a phase of a relationship called the limerence phase.  This is the phase where wild horses couldn’t keep us away from someone and all else that we could be doing pales in comparison to being with that person.  Our bodies are alit with a chemical cocktail that causes us to feel totally and completely in love.  For most couples, this phase begins to wear off somewhere within the two year mark.  People start getting used to each other and taking each other for granted.  It is at this point that either the relationship slowly dissolves or we now take the opportunity to practice conscious love by choice.  It is at this point however that many people, especially men, begin to see the relationship as a task… As something that needs to get done.
Many people, especially men, approach life as if it is a never ending to do list.  Life isn’t about being.  It is about doing.  It’s about the bills that need to be paid, the chores that have to be done.  Life is about the steps that can be crossed off of the list so you can move on to the next thing.  Even vacations become a thing to check of the list of things that need to be done.  If we are not careful and are not loving consciously, our relationship falls into this category of things that need to be done. Our relationship becomes a task.
We do this with our partners, our friends, our children, our parents and the list goes on and on.  We destroy our relationships by making the other person feel like they are a chore that needs to be done.
I cannot tell you how many men have destroyed their relationships this way.  Their wives of girlfriends become one of their many tasks.  Now, instead of being with their girlfriends or wives because they really want to be with them, they think of the woman’s need for them.  Being with her then becomes something that he is doing in order to keep her happy and maintain the relationship in the same way that repainting the exterior of a house is the way to keep it from deteriorating.
Why does this destroy a relationship?  Because it means that they have become a task that has to be done.  No one’s self esteem can survive that message.  The message is ‘you’re not good enough for me to want to be around you for my own sake and do these things for the joy of seeing you feel good.’  Imagine a man taking a woman on a first date.  Imagine he showed up late and said, “Ok, I finally have some time now since I finished all the stuff I had to do today and I still have a lot to do but I know it’s important for you to have someone one on one time with me.”  Or imagine that when he handed her flowers he did it with an air of doing it just because it is something a man should do to keep her happy.  This man wouldn’t make it past the first date.  To be honest, he wouldn’t make it to the first drink.
If we are treating a relationship like a task, we are not really deciding to prioritize being with the other person or doing things for them from a space of loving them and enjoying their presence and wanting to be around them because we value their presence in our life so much.  Instead, we have decided that having the relationship in our life is important and there are steps we have to take now for them or for the relationship, whether we want to from our hearts or not, to ensure that the relationship is maintained.  For women, sex often becomes one of these ‘tasks’.  For men, quality time often becomes one of these ‘tasks’.  It is impossible for the other person to feel loved when we treat doing them like it is a task.
Our being with another person should be led by enjoyment.  It should not be a task.  If the relationship is a task and we cannot use our conscious minds to chose to love them in a way where we can re-access the genuine desire to be with them and do for them, then the relationship is not a healthy one.  It has become a means to an end for us.  The relationship has become a transaction.  And after becoming fully conscious about what exactly changed for us, we need to seriously consider whether we should stay in it.
If I really appreciate being with someone, I do not approach being with them like a thing that must be done.  They do not have to ask me for my presence either.  I approach it like I can’t wait to do it for my own sake.  If I really love someone, I do not need to commit to the task of demonstrating love for them.  I feel naturally inspired to touch them, tell them loving things, do things for them, give them gifts etc.
Any time you set aside time to spend with another person, ask yourself why you are doing it.  If nothing else, it is important to be conscious of your actual motives, no matter how unsavory they may be.  Whenever you do anything for someone, ask yourself why you are doing it.  Are you doing it as a task?  Are you doing it because you really, really want to for the joy of it or are you doing it as a necessary step to ensuring something else that you want?  If you are making the relationship a task, put yourself in the other person’s shoes.  How would it feel if they treated being with you or doing things for you like a chore or like a to do item to check off of the list.  How would you feel if the message they were sending was that they were in the relationship for your sake and not their own? Only you can answer these questions and know whether what you are doing is right for you or whether you need to make a serious change.
Life is not a task.  Relationships are not a task.  Life and love is not something you can check off a list.  They are not a means to an end.  They are the end you are seeking.  Be in life and be in love as if the being in and of itself is what you came here for and you will have happy relationships.  And never forget, a happy life is about happy relationships because relationships really are what life is composed of.

Is It Your Decision Or Not (Personal Freedom and Relationships)

We all want to be with people who act like adults in relationships.  Unfortunately, our capacity to be adults in our relationships is greatly hindered by our capacity to take ownership and responsibility for ourselves and our loved ones. 
Boundaries are a sense of self such as personal preferences and aversions, personal desires, personal needs and personal emotions.  They are essentially your personal truth at any moment.  When we were young many of us grow up in a household where we are not allowed to have boundaries.  We were not allowed to define ourselves because our parents perceived it as a personal threat to their personal preferences, desires, needs, feelings and therefore personal truths.  Therefore, asserting our personal boundaries was met with disapproval, withdrawal and punishment.  We needed closeness with our parents desperately.  The only way to achieve this and reduce the conflict between us and them was to abandon our boundaries.  We did things not because doing those things was a decision coming from our free will, but because we wanted to not get in trouble.  This pattern of doing things just because we don’t want to get in trouble is a pattern that we carry into our adult relationships and because of it, we re-enact a child and punitive parent style relationship in our friendships and partnerships and work relationships and end up feeling miserably resentful and controlled in our relationships. 
The first thing you need to accept is that free will is an absolute of your existence.  You had free will even as a baby and child.  It is just that the consequences of exercising your free will as a child are often too great and so you make the decision to comply.  You are actually using your free will to decide against yourself in this scenario.  Because of this, it doesn’t feel like that decision is actually your decision.  It feels like you are forced into it.  It feels like someone is putting you in the position where there is only one decision to make.  And they have put you in that position.  But you still could hypothetically choose not to comply.  You could choose to bear the brunt of the consequences instead.  None of us would expect a child to do this.  It is out of the choice to self-preserve that they choose to abandon themselves for the sake of fusion with their parent.  But we have to see that it is actually a choice they are making with their own free will to do so.  We need to see it is a choice they are making in order to see the meaning of ‘owning a decision’.  If in this scenario, a child really owned that they are consciously choosing for the sake of themselves to comply, they would feel their own free will and therefore not feel controlled. They would be hurt and angry that their parent did not accept them for who they are at all, but resentment would not be the emotion they felt towards their parent.
We see this dynamic all the time in adult relationships where one person complies with another person so as to not get in trouble and to maintain closeness or harmony with them, but does not really own their free will involved in that decision and so they feel controlled and resentful.  And this leads to all kinds subconscious behaviors that destroy the relationship.  For example, a wife asserts that she needs to see more of her husband.  She has been expressing insecurity about whether the marriage will actually last because he is so unavailable.  When his work day ends, he wants to go out to drink with his colleagues at the bar.  But he rushes home instead, after expressing to his friends that he can’t because “the ball and chain” referring to his wife.  He is doing this purely to avoid the consequences.  He is not doing this because he really owns her happiness as part of his best interests and therefore really owns the decision as the decision that is best for him to make.  He hasn’t owned it as a self serving decision.  He also hasn’t really considered whether he genuinely wants to make a stand against having to be available.  Therefore, when he comes home, he is irritable, acts as if he doesn’t want to be there and does little things like spend a long time undressing and checking his phone as an act of rebellion against the oppressor, his wife.  In reality, she isn’t the oppressor at all.  He has projected his own mother onto his wife.
Another example is friend one tells friend two to invest money with the new product they are selling.  Friend two is afraid to insult friend one and create a conflict by saying no.  So, he says yes.  He did not say yes because it is a decision he really owned, he didn’t make it his.  Therefore, he didn’t assume the risks involved as his own chosen risks.  The investment turns out to be bad and so he loses the money.  Now friend two is really upset at friend one.  Friend two feels resentful and as if he was duped.  Now, he distrusts friend one and expects friend one to make amends. This confuses friend one because even though friend one feels guilty that he was the one to suggest the investment, he assumed friend two chose to take the risk out of his own free will. 
The amount of examples I could give for this dynamic are endless.  But it all really boils down to one concept:  We must learn to feel the reality of our free will in our relationships and in every choice we make. If we make a decision, we must make it because we really consciously take that choice to be in alignment with our own boundaries.  We must make the decision our decision, not a decision we are being forced into against our will.  No one can actually force you to do something against your free will.  What they can do is to put you in a position where making the choice they want you to make is the only decision that will ensure your self-preservation and so most people make that choice.
If you struggle with this dynamic in your life, it is a near guarantee that you also struggle with transactional style of relationships.  When we do things to avoid being in trouble, we comply with other people and all too often expect them to do the same for us when things really matter to us.  When they don’t, we feel this is wildly unfair.  We essentially comply to ensure that they will comply as well.  For this reason, after you watch this video [read this article], I strongly encourage you to watch my video titled: Cut The Invisible Strings.      
Any time you do anything, you need to ask yourself “Why am I doing this?  Am I doing this simply to stay out of trouble or avoid consequences?”  If so, you are at a crossroads.  Either you own that decision completely, so you find a way to change your perspective so that you can make that decision something you are doing because it is the best decision for you to make with your own free will and because of that you want to because it is self serving as well.  Or, you decide there is a genuine need conflict and so, taking care to take the other person as part of yourself instead of wage war against them, you are going to enter into a conscious conflict so you can both arrive at a decision that is in alignment with both of your individual best interests, a decision that both of you can individually own and feel good about.
On the rare occasion, genuine incompatibilities make it so when this occurs, there is no way for two people’s best interests to be in alignment and this leads to either a change in the type of relationship itself or to an end in the relationships.  But it is the rare occasion and even if this is painful, it is better than feeling like you have given your needs, desires, feelings, and personal truth up to stay in a relationship and are therefore miserable in the relationship.     
Becoming an adult in our relationships has first and foremost to do with owning our free will and exercising it.  We must use our free will to own the decision to include someone as part of ourselves and therefore to take the other person’s best interests as a genuine part of our best interests.  It is at this point that we become responsible, not only for ourselves, but also for those that we love.  Not because we feel forced against our will to do it, but because we genuinely want to do it.

There Is No Such Thing As Self Sabotage

So many of us struggle with behaviors that create more problems in our lives and that interfere with our goals.  Self-sabotage is a part of so many people’s lives is it not?  The answer is no.  The first thing we need to do is to look at some examples of self-sabotage.  We have something to do, but we procrastinate it.  We hold onto addictions like binge eating or drinking.  Consciously, we really want a relationship to work, but we keep pushing the other person away or doing and saying things to create conflict in the relationship.  We consciously want a job, but we suddenly say things in the interview that makes the boss check us off his list of candidates.
Self Sabotage is essentially thoughts, words and actions (behaviors) that are self defeating.  They work AGAINST you when it comes to attaining something that you want.  Clearly you can see that self-sabotage is a reality.  But I’m here to tell you today that it is not a reality.  How can that be?
Consciousness can and does split itself.  This means that even though we call our self by one name and therefore identify ourselves as being one unified thing, the reality is that we are more of an amalgamation of fragmented parts or selves.  We are more like a mosaic or a stained glass window.  Our degree of internal suffering is about the degree of harmony (or lack there of) between these internal selves.  If you are experiencing self sabotage, it is because not all of your internal selves or parts agree with your conscious desires.  One or more of them are resisting or opposing the parts that contain your conscious desires.
I am making a bold claim.  I am telling you that there is no such thing as an internal saboteur and there is no such thing as an internal abuser.  If any of your internal parts or selves are resisting or opposing your desires, or if any of them are hurting other parts of you in any way, it is because they think it is in your best interest for them to do so.  In other words, they believe they are saving your life by not going along with the plan.  For this reason, we cannot say that they are against you.  They just don’t agree with the rest of you about how to be FOR you. 
Here are some examples:
We have something to do, but we procrastinate it.  In this scenario, one fragment or part within us (the one we are consciously identified with) has made the decision to do something.  The other part thinks that doing that thing will lead to discomfort or some kind of pain.  Therefore, it is trying to prevent you from experiencing that pain by keeping you from doing it.
  We hold onto addictions like binge eating or drinking.  In this scenario, one part (the one we are consciously identified with) has decided it is committed to stop the addiction.  The other part believes that the life you want is not actually possible to achieve and so it thinks that letting go of the addiction will simply make it so you are in hell alone and now have to just sit in the agony of that misery permanently.  It would rather you have the Novocain so to speak.
  Consciously, we really want a relationship to work, but we keep pushing the other person away or doing and saying things to create conflict in the relationship.  In this scenario, one fragment or part within us (the one we are consciously identified with) has made the decision to be in a relationship an make it work.  Another part knows that relationships have been so painful in the past and that it has been abandoned and therefore thinks abandonment is inevitable.  So it is trying to save you from the pain of getting attached to something you are inevitably going to lose.
  You consciously want a job, but you suddenly say things in the interview that makes the boss check you off his list of candidates.  In this scenario, one part of you has decided the best idea is to work at that job.  The other part thinks that job is not what you should be doing.  That it is in the opposite direction of your authentic essence.  And that therefore life will be drudgery and effort if you take that job. 
  Self hate.  That’s where you think you have me beat right?  Obviously self-hate is the exception to the rule.   Think again.  When you discover the parts involved in self hate what you find is that a person internalizes their external abuser.  Essentially, one part feels that by hating and punishing and therefore trying to get another part to change, it is preventing them from getting that hate and disapproval and shaming and punishment from the outside, from another person.  By doing so, it is trying to get the person the love they so desperately need from the outside.   Metaphorically speaking what any form of self sabotage always has in common is that one part thinks the answer to a good life and happiness is going left and another part thinks that going left is literally the road to ruin.  But what you must see is that both parts actually have your best interests at heart.  We have to understand that no part within us is actually against us.  We need to approach the issue with this understanding to create alignment within us between these opposed parts.
There are limitless possibilities for why a part is opposed to our conscious desires.   But in order to move beyond the behaviors we call self-sabotaging, we must see the self-preserving nature of them.  We must empathize completely with the parts within us that think our salvation is in the opposite direction of our conscious desires.
One of the best methods for exploring this part is that we can close our eyes and ask to see this part that is doing the self-sabotaging behavior in our minds eye.  The one that is procrastinating or causing conflict in the relationship or is showing up to things late or is screwing up interviews.  We let the image of that part appear however it appears.  If it helps us, we can see if this part within us has a name.  We can begin to observe it and study its behaviors and perspectives and wants and needs and motivations.  We can ask it questions.  We can explore its relationship to other parts within us. 
Alternatively, we can let go of being identified with the perspective of that thing we want being what is good for us and instead, choose to fully become only that part within us.  If you do it this way, you are deciding to allow the consciousness of only that part to take over your body.  As if it were another person within you and you were getting fully into its perspective only.  State internally to yourself or choose with your intention, “I accept to become the part of me that fill in the blank.”  Such as “I accept to become that part of me that shows up late”.  Or “I accept to become the part of me that wants to keep drinking”.   Then surrender and allow the energy of that part of you that shows up late to fill in the spaces within your whole body.  Then, you can write as that part.  You will write in terms of “I” but, “I” will be this part speaking, not you.  Don’t think about the answers you give, just give them as if you are doing a steam of consciousness exercise.  Know that anything that is said or felt during this exercise is valid and has appeared for an important reason.
The goal is to seek to find a way for both of these opposed parts of you to agree upon a course of action.  It is as if our objective mind acts as a benevolent mediator who can empathize with both sides and whose goal is to find a way for both sides to win or feel good with a course of action or decision.  Be open to the idea that by exploring that part’s perspective that you may change your mind about what you actually ant or what is actually right for you to do.
We will see an end to the ‘self sabotage’ when we choose to resolve the pain contained in this part that is keeping it fragmented from the rest of us.  We can meet its needs with our imagination and subsequently implement the changes this part of us needs in our day-to-day life.  We can also improve the relationship that this part has with the part within us that it is opposed to.  By doing this, we create internal peace and integration.  We can restore ourselves back to a state of internal peace.
If we experience self sabotage, we fear ourselves and we distrust ourselves.  But there is no reason to feel this way towards yourself.  Even the parts within you that seem to be hurting you, are actually doing so because they think it is in your best interests.  This means that even if they disagree on the general strategy for how to make you feel good and live the best life possible; this is what they all ultimately want. They want you to feel better.  They want you to live the best life possible.  And so, because of the purity of their intentions for you, it can be said that there is really no such thing as self sabotage.

The Real Reason Relationships Don't Work

There is a little boy.  His mom was a stay at home mom and his dad was a lawyer.  His parents have decided to get a divorce.  They move into different houses.  The boy has to go back and forth.  Because they got a divorce, the mother had to start working and so the boy is put in daycare.  He only sees his dad on weekends.
In this little boy’s reality, he has lost his parents and his sense of home.  His dad is now inaccessible to him.  And so is his mother.  He has no stability.  He is now forced to spend the day with strangers.  He has lost the life that he loved.  He is in pain and he is afraid.  But there is no resolution for this.  There is no resolution because in his parent’s reality, they are both still there for him.  They are both accessible to him.  They have gotten a divorce, which hurts, but it was for the better since they were both unhappy in the marriage.  In their reality, everything between them and their son is fine.  He is being taken care of.  Because this is their reality, when this little boy starts getting nose bleeds (the non physical cause of nosebleeds is needing one’s pain that is not being acknowledged to be seen) and when he starts acting differently, they assume that something must be wrong with the boy.  They can’t see what is actually causing these reactions in the boy because what is actually happening to him doesn’t fit into their perception of his reality.  They are not actually seeing his reality.  They are only seeing their own.  And in their reality, the boy’s actual reality cannot be accommodated.
There is an emotional grand canyon between this child and his parents.  In fact, there is no relationship between this boy and his parents because they occupy different realities.  In a world where we can have different experiences of the same situation, we have different perceptual realities.  If we cannot acknowledge, see, feel, hear, understand and accommodate each other’s realities by seeing them as real, There is no relationship.  There is only the illusion of a relationship.  There is only the promise and potential of a relationship.
For this Grand Canyon to go away between this boy and his parents, his parents would have to see that from his perspective, the fact that he has lost his home and lost access to his parents and lost stability and is now in lots of pain because of what he lost is REAL.  Just because they are right that they still love him and they haven’t abandoned him and the divorce was for the best doesn’t make his reality any less real.  If they can’t do this, they cannot make any of the changes necessary to help this boy to feel better.  They cannot resolve the rupture in their closeness.  Anything they say or do will merely be an invalidation of him.  Anything they say or do will simply condemn him to being stuck in that pain and that fear with no resolution.  The entire relationship is a gaslight.  The parents inability to see, hear, feel and understand their son’s reality makes it so they constantly make him believe what he sees, he doesn’t see accurately, what he hears, he doesn’t hear accurately, what he feels, he shouldn’t feel and that his reality is not real.
I want you to imagine that your right leg is shattered.  Your left leg is fine.  Your left leg’s reality is that it feels fine.  Your right leg’s reality is that it is in agony.  If the left leg is unwilling to acknowledge that the right leg’s reality is agony, it may try to run a race.  It does this because it wants to run.  To acknowledge that the right leg is shattered and is in agony would mean that it would have to change something.  It couldn’t go forward with running without making some kind of change first.  And if it did, it would have to live with the reality that it is an abuser of the right leg.  To avoid seeing itself in that light and to avoid having to change, it simply decided not to see the reality that the right leg is in agony and is shattered.
I did a video a while ago called “The Most Dangerous Parallel Reality”.  In this video, I explain the mechanism of parallel perceptual realities and why they are so dangerous.  I want you to watch that video when you are done with this article.
The unwillingness to occupy the same reality or accommodate each other’s reality is an epidemic in our relationships.  Because our own realities were not seen, felt, heard, understood or accommodated, we either live our lives in torment (and some of us do) or we disconnect from other people’s realities too and become the problem.  We cope by solidifying our own reality to the degree that we do not perceive the realities of others.  We decide they aren’t real.  Our relationships become a battle of reality vs. reality.  And if we have grown up in this kind of split reality where no relationship actually exists, we become a match to relationships in our adulthood where there is also a split reality between ourselves and our partner.  There is no actual relationship at all.
Using the previous analogy, if the parents try to get the boy to accept their reality as his reality in the divorce scenario, not only is it an invalidation of his reality, the reality is that he will not be able to because doing so does not address any of the pain he is in.  It brings no resolution.
From the outside, we can see that the parents are right from their perspective and the boy is right from his perspective and neither perspective invalidates the other.  They are playing different roles and these different roles come with different experiences.  But we can also see that if these parents don’t accept his reality, the relationship between them is doomed.
I did a video called get on the same page.  I strongly encourage you to watch that video if you haven’t already or even to watch it as a refresher.  The unwillingness to accommodate each other’s realities and respond directly to those realities is the greatest from of different page you can be on in a relationship.
Now this is where I’m about to give you the holy grail of this concept… A relationship is actually only ever as good and strong as the perceptual reality of the person who is in the most pain in the relationship.  This is the reality that matters.  The negative perceptual reality is where the separation in the relationship actually exists.  It is not the positive perceptual reality that is the problem.  It is not the positive perceptual reality that needs something to be done and needs resolve.  By not accepting that person’s ‘relationship reality’ so to speak you are condemning them and thus yourself to that separation.  You are choosing to keep the Grand Canyon.
We must take the reality of the person who is in the most pain and address it directly as if it is real because it is real and therefore needs our care and attention and needs changes to be made.  We need to decide on those changes and make them so there is resolution to that pain.  If we are unwilling to do that, we are condemning them to their pain and to their pain alone.  We are choosing to be in a relationship on different pages.   We are choosing a physical relationship with no emotional relationship.  You are choosing to exist in different parallel realities under the same roof.  This is a relationship that is actually doomed to fail.
Doing this means you must be willing to face your own shame.  Doing this means you must be willing to make changes.  Doing this means you have to come out of denial.  Doing this means you cannot live in your own comfortable bubble reality to the exclusion of everyone else.
Here is an adult example.  A husband decides that he wants to start a business.  He decides he is not happy being a support person for his wife, it makes him feel unfulfilled.  He has to go out and create something.  When he does this, when he puts his focus elsewhere, his wife feels abandoned.  She feels like her husband is not available.  She feels deeply hurt.  She is forced to find her emotional support from one of her friends.  He is convinced this is a perfect scenario.  He gets his needs met and she gets her needs met this way.  This is his positive reality.  This is not her reality.  Her reality is that her husband has vacated a spot and feels happy that someone else is meeting her needs instead of him.  Her reality is that this marriage is painful.  By seeing that he feels happy and seeing the reason why happiness is his reality, she is accommodating his reality.  It doesn’t make her pain go away.  But this means she is in the third reality, which accounts for both people’s realities without one person’s reality invalidating the other.  He is not in this third reality.  He has not accommodated her reality.  He is alone in his reality and he has left her alone in her reality, but does not see it, so he does nothing about it.  She sees his reality as real and he does not see hers as real.  She cannot force him to see her reality as valid.  And so she is stuck.  If he does not see this reality of hers as real, which will require him facing the shame of seeing that he has created this scenario and it will require making some kind of change; if he doesn’t find some way to remedy these feelings with her, the relationship will eventually end.
We must be brave enough to attune to other people in our relationships.  To learn about how to do this, watch my video titled: Attunement (The Key To A Good Relationship).  And we must address a person’s feelings and perceptions as if they are real.  Only then, can we actually make the necessary changes to create repair in our relationships.  For this reason, I ask you to watch my video titled: The Emotional Wakeup Call.
We must be brave enough to see, feel, hear and understand someone to the degree that we can perceive their reality, no matter how painful it is.  Closeness must be more important than maintaining our own personal comfort.  If it isn’t, then we will be doomed to be comfortable up until the relationship inevitably ends.  And then repeat that cycle over and over.  We must be willing to see the Grand Canyons between us.  We must be willing to see each other’s reality as real so we can address it in a way that resolves it.   Otherwise, we are the left leg, telling the shattered right leg that it is just a drama queen or is just too sensitive or is actually fine and just doesn’t know it.  Otherwise, we are condemned or we are condemning our partners to being in pain, alone in our relationships with them.  We are condemning them to being unsafe with us because if we don’t see them and feel them and understand them and see their reality, we will consistently say and do things that cause them pain.
I started off this episode with an example of a little boy because we have gotten to this place in our adult relationships because this was the nature of our relationships growing up.  It is the extreme rarity to have parents who could conceive of the idea that their child could be having a different experience of reality than they did.  It is the extreme rarity to have parents who were even willing to see their child’s reality at all, much less to see their child’s reality as valid.  Therefore we were in so many painful situations that we just had to live with.  There was no way to resolve anything.  We were forced to became accustomed to distance between us.  We were forced to become accustomed to relationships that were not actually relationships at all.  And this is the real reason that our relationships are the greatest source of pain in our human lives.  This is the real reason that most relationships today don’t work.

The Real Holy Trinity

In spirituality you hear constantly about a person being made up of body, mind and soul.  This is not actually accurate.  The soul, which is the non-physical stream of consciousness in fact splits itself into three when it projects forth into a physical incarnation…  Body, mind and heart…  Feelings, thoughts and matter.  This is the real holy trinity.  
The split between these three aspects when they are opposed is in fact the root of suffering for a physical human.  It is the integration of them that creates true peace in oneself and consequently as a result, true peace on earth.  We cannot achieve a state of peace or joy or achieve anything we truly want if we are in a state of fragmentation.  And if at our core, there is a split between these fundamental aspects of ourselves, body, mind and heart, we will always suffer.  But herein lies the problem within spirituality and within the world.  Number one, people do not even see that these three aspects within themselves are split, divided and in an abusive relationship with one another.  And number two; integration of these three aspects is not what people are teaching in the world or practicing.  In fact, what is being taught and practiced is the exact opposite.   
Depending on where you look in the world, people hold one of these aspects to be more important than the others or more powerful and supreme.  This enhances fragmentation and therefore suffering.  In the academic world, the mind is considered to be supreme.  Logic must rule over emotions and the body is a side-note.  In the sports world, the body is considered to be supreme.  The emotions are of next to no importance and the mind is only as good as it serves the body.  In the spiritual world, the heart is considered to be supreme.  The mind is expected to be a servant to the heart and the body is often seen as a complete illusion.  
Look at every spiritual quote you ever came across about the heart and mind or heart and body.  Things like “problems are in your mind, solutions are in your heart” or “the heart must be the master and the mind the servant for the mind makes for a terrible master.”  Or “The heart is the new mind” or “follow your heart, not your mind.”  Or “Sometimes the heart needs more time to accept what the mind already knows”.  Or “Remember that all is eternal, all pain is an illusion.” Or “The body is an illusion, this body may die, but my soul carries on”.  Long story short, most of them fuel the imbalance of power between them.  And most of us read those quotes and react positively instead of being horrified.  
I want you to be horrified.  I want you to do something and I mean now.  Go look up quotes about the heart, mind and body on the internet.  But I want you to replace one of the words in the quote, heart, mind or body, with your own name.  For example, if a quote said, “follow our heart not your mind” it would change to either follow your heart, not Teal or Follow Teal, not your mind.  You could also change all of the words, heart mind and body to your name so it would be “follow Teal, not Teal”.  This exercise will show you the truth about what we are doing to ourselves.  This is the relationship we are culturing inside of ourselves.  All three parts are equal parts of ourselves.  And we are creating separation and opposition and power imbalances between them.  We are creating abuse between them.  This is a split that all of us who are currently embodied possess today and must see inside ourselves.  
The shape that defines their relationship is meant to be an equilateral triangle.  The absolute and whole truth is the space or fusion between all three…  A space of perfect connection between all three.  No leader and no follower.  The ultimate manifestation of the soul into the physical dimension where divinity can express itself in the physical fully is achieved by creating this perfect integration of body, mind and heart.  Each part manifests the whole; it is the true holy trinity.
We need to regard each of these three aspects as an integral part of who we are.  See each for its inherent limitation and inherent gifts.  We must see each as equally important as the other two.  There can be no leader among them.  They must decide together upon a course of direction and action.  There must be harmony and agreement between them.  Each must take care of the other.  They feed into one another and cannot be separated from one another.  Each is critical to the health and wellbeing of the other two.  It is a three-way marriage.  All of them are real and valid.  You are not here to transcend any one of them.  They are the perfect manifestation of your soul.  None of them can be your enemy.  Each of them is your partner here in life. The harmony of the relationship between them is the core of our life experience here on earth.  Today, I ask you to commit to that integration… To commit to that harmony.

How To 'Be In The Flow'

When it comes to success and happiness, nothing is more important than being ‘in the flow’.  We hear ‘being in the flow’ as a buzz word phrase around the world today and it sounds like it would be a good feeling thing, but most of us have no idea what the hell being in the flow actually means.  I’m going to clear that up for you today so you know exactly what it means and how to do it.
To get your mind on board, I want you to imagine that your soul is like a current of energy water that is flowing from a higher dimension into this physical dimension.  Just like the current of a river, it has momentum as it flows down here into the physical dimension.  Your physical self that you call by your name was in essence a thought created by your soul.  It is a second point of perspective and it has free will.  Because of that free will, the you that you call by your name in this life can consciously (and more often than that, unconsciously) choose to think and say and do things that cause you to go with your souls’ current or to think and say and do things that cause you to go against that soul current.  When we are going with that current, it can be said that we are in alignment and when we go against that current, it can be said that we are out of alignment.
When we are going with the current, we know it because of the way we feel.  We feel relief.  We feel the same sensation that we would if we were to just let go and let ourselves float in a river with a current that was headed towards everything that we want.  This emotionally translates in our bodies as things like inspiration, excitement, joy, passion and appreciation.  We can then say we are ‘in the flow’.   When we are going against that current, we also know it because of the way we feel.  We feel tension and resistance.  This emotionally translates in our bodies as things like feeling stuck, frustrated, powerless, depressed, anxious and other painful emotional states.  It can literally be compared to facing upstream against a very powerful river.  If any of you have done that, you know that it ends up exhausting you, stressing you out and in some cases drowning you.
I’ll give you an example: Lets imagine that the intention that your soul created your physical embodiment in this world with was for it to be a teacher.  But in your life experience, you adopted thought like ‘it’s critical to be respected and the only careers where you can get respect are those where you make a lot of money’ so you take the action to become a lawyer.  You are thinking and doing things that are against the current of your own soul.  You will know you are going against that current because you will feel resistance.  You will feel unfulfilled.  You will feel uninspired.  Your actions will take effort.  It will be so much harder for you to pass law school than it will for people for whom being a lawyer is actually in alignment with their soul current.  You will not be ‘in the flow’.     
 Being in the flow also applies to things in the external world.  These currents exist all over the place and being in the flow in the world is about aligning your own current to the external currents around you.  For example, the weather may decide to create a hurricane.  It’s not then possible for you to ‘be in the flow’ if you continue to push against that and demand for an outdoor wedding to take place despite that fact.  You would then be fighting against the external current that exists.  This always ends very badly.  It requires a re-adjustment so that you can stay in alignment yourself according to what you desire, but without going upstream against that external current that is occurring in the world.  Relationships are essentially all about this.  Relationships are about two people staying in alignment with themselves, while staying in alignment with each other.
Being in the flow, which is also referred to as ‘the zone’ when it comes to activities, causes us to enter a psychological and physical state where when we are doing something, we are completely present with it instead of divided in any way.  There are no contradictory energies interfering with the flow of our focus either internally or externally.  Nothing is preventing us.  We feel focused, completely energized, and in full enjoyment of the process of that activity.  It takes almost no effort to do that thing and our productivity goes through the roof.  The energy that extend towards something feels good and fulfilling instead of depleting.  It is as if the doing in and of itself actually renews you.  When we are in this state, it is almost like our soul is saying, “Yes, this is what I came here for”.  The most successful people on the planet in every field have managed to think and say and do things that cause them to be ‘in the flow’ and as such, they have the current of the universe at large and their souls backing the actions they are taking in the physical dimension.       
How To Get In The Flow:
The single most important piece of being in the flow is prioritizing how you feel over anything else in your life.  Do not act from a place where you are out of alignment.  Get to a place where you feel relief before you take any action whatsoever.  Your emotions will tell you whether you are in the flow or out of it.  They will indicate whether there is something in you that is working against the current or not.  Any action taken from a place where you don’t feel good or are feeling prevented in some way is going to line you up with undesired results and even potentially no results at all.  The most successful people in the world will make this piece more important than anything else.  For example, one reason these videos are so successful is that I have decided I will never write one if I feel bad or like I am forcing anything to writing one.  I will not sit down with my computer until I can feel that I am in the emotional space where I feel inspired to write one.  The same goes for any of my events.  Everyone on my team knows this.  I will not move forward if there is resistance.  I will stop and become aware of the resistance that exists and care take it so that all the momentum of every member of the team is going towards doing the event.  As a result, there is no contradictory energy going into an event.
  Get a handle on what you desire.  Desire is what creates the momentum of the stream of energy we are speaking of when we talk about flow.  What we have to accept is that the universe at large knows our desires intimately.  It is always taking us in the direction of what we truly desire.  The more conscious we are of what we desire, the less we interfere with that current.  The more we trust the current.  We begin to trust that if something changes, or falls through, it is actually in our best interests ultimately.  So many of us are not living in the flow because we are too scared to truly prioritize the way we feel and follow our joy and desires.  We may have wanted to be a musician, but we decide to take a job we hate.  This is a very simple example of being out of the flow.  We cannot think and say and do things that contradict our desires and be in the flow at the same time.
  We need to become aware of and seek to integrate our own fragmentation. One of the reasons it is almost impossible for people to live in the flow is because their own consciousness has broken into many parts.  When this is the case, the flow of our souls’ energy is going in one direction but then we have many parts of our physical embodiment that are going in different directions from not only that soul steam of energy, but also in different directions from each other.  For example, one part of us wants to be on stage, another wants to hide.  One part of us wants a relationship, the other hates people.  Noticing contradictory energies whether they come from inside you or outside you is the best way to identify that you are not currently in the flow.  This creates a state that is not conducive to achieving anything.  It is like being in a boat on a stream where one person in the boat is paddling upstream and another is paddling downstream.  We have to get these contradictory and polarized energies within us to a place where they can align and agree upon a singular direction. To understand this concept in depth, I want you to watch my video titled: Fragmentation, The Worldwide Disease.
  Be like a fish in ocean currents. In reality this entire universe is a single organism and everything is connected. Responsiveness to other things within this universe needs to be a normal part of daily life.  Most people think they are above this need to be responsive.  When conditions change, we don’t want to change with it.  We want to be independent agents.  We are like fish that encounter a shark and keep on swimming towards it because we’ve decided on that course of action before the shark was there.
The topic of commitment is a totally different thing.  Being flaky is something else entirely.  But our commitment needs to be to staying in alignment with ourselves and staying in alignment with the people we are in relationships with more so than to anything else.  And this requires flexibility, like a fish in the ocean whose direction changes if the tides change.  To be truly successful, you must be able to change plans at a moments notice so that you are always working WITH your own internal current, the currents of the universe at large and the currents of other people instead of against any one of these currents.  To be in tune with ourselves and in tune with others and in tune with the universe at large, you have to be willing to stop dead in your tracks and re-evaluate and change course if it becomes obvious that something is out of alignment.  This is exalted spontaneity.  Some people who like control think that this is unsafe because it ads an element of unpredictability and uncertainty to life, but this actually is the safest state to commit to because it guarantees that you are not the fish that is swimming towards a shark for the sake of your own pre determined plans.  You are connected to everything in the universe, everything is interdependent and so responding to the shifts in those currents is responding to your own current.  There is not actually a contradiction between yourself and the universe at large.  We are part of something bigger than ourselves.
  Act fast on inspiration.  One major mistake that people make is that when they feel inspiration (which is like a wave) they do not get up immediately and ride that wave to shore (the shore in this case is manifestation).  When you get inspired, you have literally 5 seconds to take your first action, even if it is writing something down to carry out the action you feel inspired to take.  To do this is to work with the currents and to ride them like a surfer and it will take so much less energy on your part to make thoughts become things and manifest what you want from this state.  People who are successful don’t wait on inspiration ever.  They capitalize on it immediately.  They ride it like a wave all the way to the completion of an action.
  Practice being completely present.  We have to make a practice of focusing our consciousness and attention into our bodies and into whatever activity we are doing fully.  This is best seen through the analogy of an athlete.  Imagine an athlete whose focus and attention is completely on the game.  He is allowing all of the energy of his own consciousness into this moment doing this sport that he loves in the physical dimension.  Now imagine that same athlete worrying about whether or not he is going to win or lose.  Or imagine that athlete stressing about whether his relationship will last or not.  You can see that those thoughts rob energy and therefore presence from his game.  They may cause him to take an action that sabotages his game.  Because of the contradictory nature of the directions his energy is going, he cannot be fully in the flow.  The same principal applies to relationships.  If we are in the room with someone, we need to be fully there with them and immersed in them.  If we cannot be, we need to address any resistance that is preventing us from doing so, so that we can be fully present.  In this state, all doing naturally arises as a result of being and the doing is therefore much more powerful and effective.
  Become familiar with the feeling of ‘rightness’.  This is not a concept.  We may think with our mind that something is right but when if we feel into it, it feels all wrong.  You see this in the movies all the time when a person ends a relationship when you can tell that they know it feels all wrong and to the rest of us in the audience it feels totally wrong.  The feeling of rightness is like an internal YES with no internal NO.  It will feel expansive.  It will feel like relief.  It says says to us, I don’t necessarily know why this thing feels right, but it just does.  Keep following that feeling of rightness.  It is an indication you are in the flow.
  The road marker or quern for flow is synchronicity.  The more in flow we are, the more synchronicity occurs.  These are meaningful coincidences that cannot be explained in the physical dimension by cause and effect.  We cannot do anything to directly cause synchronicity to happen and yet it does and it does so to meet our needs.  In these moments you can see the interconnectedness in the world.  You can see that your own internal flow is part of a larger flow.  These often show up as fortuitous events.  For example, someone you love has cancer and you end up sitting on the airplane next to someone who is a cancer specialist with a radical new treatment.  Notice and follow synchronicities.  They mean you are in the flow.  When you get adept at living in flow, your entire life will become a series of synchronicities.  Flow allows you to be in the right place at the right time.  You will feel good to act at exactly the right time to act in alignment with universal timing.
  Meditate daily and/or do some kind of introspective activity daily with no distractions.  When we are caught up in the routine of life and when we are identified with our thoughts and lost in the word of action, we tune out the ‘subtle’ internal currents that are occurring within us.  We are completely out of alignment and unaware of ourselves and also others.  You cannot live in alignment like this.  You can’t be in the flow this way.  Introspective awareness exercises are one of the best maintenance tools of flow in your arsenal.  It is my promise that these internal currents will not feel subtle when you become adept at flow.  Instead, they feel like internal tsunamis.
  Accept that the flow is a moment to moment thing and will be for the rest of your life. Like a current, it is constantly in motion, constantly changing and mutating.  It is not something that is static ever.  Every moment of the day is an opportunity to be in the flow or out of the flow with yourself and with other things.  The waves of life never stop coming.  Desires never stop arising.  Conditions never stop changing.  Self-discovery and increasing awareness never ceases.  So being ‘in the flow’ is not something that you do and then you can stop focusing on it because it is done.  It is more like surfing.  A surfer never stops becoming aware of the flow of the water and adjusting his or her thoughts and actions accordingly.  The surfer simply gets better and better at it.  There will never be a day where you will stop having to find alignment with yourself and with other people and the world around you.  You will simply get better and better at it.  It will become like second nature.
  Follow your joy.  How you feel matters more than anything else and more than that, thinking thoughts and speaking words and taking actions in the direction of your personal joy is the north star of achieving a state of living in the flow.  Your purpose on this earth in this life cannot be separate from your joy.  It is a vibrational impossibility because of the way this time space reality and life itself was designed.  Therefore, the way to find your purpose and continue to stay in alignment with it is to follow your joy.  It is worth every risk there is to take in this world. I cannot tell you how successful in every sense of the word and how beautiful and full of meaning and feel good your life can become if you commit to being ‘in the flow’ in a state of alignment within yourself and with others and with the world.  Every video I have ever created or will ever create is created to help you get closer to this state of being.  You really can have the life of your dreams.  In fact, you were meant to.

Thought Is A Sense... The Realization That Will Set You Free

Even though people live with their thoughts every single day, they have no idea what thoughts actually are.  This is the main reason why people can’t figure out what to do with them and either don’t value them or give them too much power.  What people don’t realize is that thought is a sense.  It is a sense just like the sense of smell, sight, hearing, touch and taste.  One could in fact call thought the actual sixth sense and intuition simply the capacity of any of the senses to perceive stimulus that exists beyond the vibrational range of the physical dimension.
A sense is essentially a faculty by which a being perceives external stimulus.  It is reactive in nature.  What makes thought so confusing is that we don’t perceive ourselves to be ‘perceiving ‘thoughts.  We perceive our thoughts to be solely our own creation.  This would be similar to perceiving that we are always the creator of every sound that we hear in the world; or that we were the creator of the sensation of burning when we touch a hot stove.  Thinking that every thought is our own is one reason that we believe every thought we have is true and become so attached to them and overpowered by them.
Something that we need to understand is that thought is an observational response to external stimulus.  It is a response that we have, like every other sense.  We can observe a thought in the same way that we can become conscious of a nearby smell.  We can be conscious of ourselves only because we can sense ourselves.  We know ourselves and are authentic only to the degree that we can sense ourselves, which is something that most people are not really trying to do.
Thoughts differentiate.  They bring definition into the quantum field so to speak.  The universe is energy and energy vibrating in different ways.  The universe can be seen as a seamless sea of vibrations.  And every stimulus that can possibly be sensed in the universe is a vibration, including and most especially a thought.  Since the first thought, every successive thought has been in essence a reaction to those that came before it.  This is why it is best to consider that thoughts simply arise.  You do not even know where they arise from.  It is possible for the energy of your consciousness to formulate thoughts in the same way that your body formulates the sensation of hot when we touch something hot.  And we can formulate thoughts in response to other thoughts, not just things in the world.  It is also possible for you to perceive formulated thoughts that were created by ‘someone else’.  For example, when I drive across a really high bridge, I see people perceiving the millions of thoughts that people have had about driving off the bridge.  They are perceiving those residual thoughts in the same way that a person would hear music.
This universe is governed by the Law of Attraction.  Things of like frequency coalesce.  Thoughts attract other thoughts, not just physical manifestations.  When a thought is fueled with enough energy (which trust me is almost nothing) it attracts another thought of similar frequency and that thought attracts another and another.  And this is the chain of thought we perceive ourselves to be thinking.  Because this process or chain reaction is occurring within our mind, we perceive the thoughts to be created by ourselves internally instead of by external stimulus.
Most of our senses are tailored to the physical dimension so that we can navigate this learning hologram called life on earth.  But it is possible to expand any of our senses to perceive beyond this physical dimension.  As many will attest to, on the path of awakening, every sense begins to widen.  Eventually, you can taste color and see sound and visually see things like auras that technically belong to other dimensions of this universe, which are overlaid with this one.  Seers and fortunetellers perceive thoughts consciously that resonate at a frequency well beyond the physical dimension, where time does not exist.  Mediums hear things well beyond the physical dimension, which is why they can talk to dead relatives.  But even people who are not particularly open in terms of their perceptual capacities often perceive thoughts that are not theirs and are not a response to something tangibly physical.  A good example is that when people sell houses after an unhappy marriage that ends in divorce, you can walk a perspective byer into that house and without telling them anything, they will begin to have thoughts about loneliness, feeling trapped, overall unhappiness and they will turn down the purchase even if it makes the most perfect rational sense for them to buy that house.
Because thoughts are a reaction, just like any other sense, you can see them as a kind of chain reaction.  And feelings are most responsive to thought and thus your emotional faculty reacts immediately to the thought that it comes into contact with.  To become conscious of this chain reaction, next time you catch yourself in a chain of thought, stop and backtrack and see if you can figure out what started the train of thoughts.  What you will notice is that something you interacted with, whether it is the sight of something or something you hear or a thought you coalesce with, is a stimulus that causes a chain reaction of thoughts.  Your attention follows each thought that arises until some other stimulus occurs and that either continues to add momentum to the chain of thoughts or causes an entirely different chain of thoughts in a totally different direction.
To complicate things, at the second to the highest dimensional level of this universe, all is one.  This means that every thought that has ever been thought or will ever be thought is your thought.  But here in the physical dimension, you perceive yourself to be separate from other things in the world.  It is at this dimension that we can talk about the fact that you are perceiving thoughts that are not even your own.  We can also go further.  In this dimensional field, you are not your thoughts any more than you are your hearing or you are your sight.  These are simply capacities that you have.  The very fact that you can witness your thoughts means that you are not the same as your thoughts.  They are other than you.  You are the perceiver of them, the same that you are the perceiver of the music being played.  But even if you are the creator of the music and perceiver of the music, you would not look at the music and confuse it AS yourself.  If you are more than your thoughts, you have the capacity to use them and influence them.
 You can use your free will to focus and thus have influence over what you are perceiving.  That is to say, you can focus on something, which acts as a different stimulus, which will cause a chain reaction of different thoughts.  You can chose to focus on certain thoughts that arise in the consciousness and thus fuel them with the energy of your own consciousness, or let them pass.  You can choose which thoughts to directly interact with and which ones not to.  And if you feel like your consciousness pulls you to interact with a certain thought, there is some form of awareness you have to gain through the interaction with that thought.  It is time to realize that just like any other sense, the conscious witnessing of your thoughts can be used to awaken you to truth.  We have an idea that thought is the enemy to awakening.  This is not the case at all.  Any sense can limit you and any sense can be what sets you free.  For this reason, I highly encourage you to watch my video titled: Is Your Mind Your Friend or Foe?
It is important that along with using the awareness of this sense to gain awareness in general and awakening, that we focus energy towards bringing pleasure to this sense of ours in the same way that we do to our other senses.  For example, we buy perfumes to please our sense of smell; we eat delicious foods to please our sense of taste.  We decorate our homes to please our sense of sight.  We need to deliberately focus on thoughts and things that cause a chain of thought to occur that feels pleasant to us.  When we do this to nourish ourselves and maintain our wellbeing, as opposed to doing this to escape from thoughts that are unpleasant, it is perfectly in alignment.  It is part of a healthy life.  Most people never do this.  Most people never consciously deliberately look for stimulus to please their sense of thought.
Using positive thinking to escape from negative thoughts and feelings is like sleeping on dog poop, but spraying the dog poop with perfume first and convincing yourself that you are sleeping somewhere sanitary.  The negative smell of dog poop was an indication that you had to clean up.  Avoidance of negative thought can really get you in trouble in life, especially when it comes to awakening.
Our senses tell us so much about ourselves and about the world around us.  They provide so much value.  It is possible to use thoughts to escape from awareness.  It is also possible to use thought to enhance awareness.  If we touch something hot, we know to take our hand off the stove.  If we taste something bitter, we spit it out.  If we think a thought that causes us to feel pain, we have the capacity to figure out what stimulated it and make changes either to our angle of perception or to the circumstance itself that is serving as the stimulus for those thoughts.  This is what meditation does in fact.  It purifies the sense called thought.  It slows the momentum of chains of thought, it can introduce new stimulus to create a new chain of thought, it allows us to become aware of the origin of certain thought as well as what to do with the awareness we gain due to the thoughts we are perceiving.  It allows us to discern thoughts that resonate at the frequency of truth and which resonate at the frequency of illusion.
Because thought is a sense, we need to treat our sense called thought with as much care and discernment as all of our other senses.  Our senses can tell us great truth.  Our senses can also be fooled.  Our senses can be limited.  Our senses can lead us to awakening.  Given that thought is a sense, whole books can be written on the topic.  The many implications of people having this realization are vast.  But rather than explain every implication, I’ll leave you to discover it instead.  I’ll leave you with the question, If I accepted that thought was a sense, just like any of my other five senses, what would be different for me; what would change about my life?

Play It Forward

As people, we have the tendency of avoiding discomfort and structuring our lives in a where we can consistently avoid discomfort.  But there are a great many things that cause discomfort that are actually good for us.  Awareness is not comfortable, because it entails accepting things we would rather deny.  But it is good for us to be aware.  Exercise is uncomfortable, but it is good for us.  Growth is uncomfortable, but it is good for us.  And perhaps most of all, change is uncomfortable, but it is good for us. 
In this effort to avoid discomfort, we tend to trap ourselves in situations that are comfortably unsatisfying.  For example, we often get stuck in routines, we stay in unhealthy relationships, we stay in a job we hate, we use coping mechanisms that make us feel better in the short term but ruin our lives in the long run. We do not make changes that are necessary to make in order to really live the lives we dream of.  The best analogy we can use is that in order to avoid the discomfort of really high heat that would cause us to make changes to get off of the flames, we build our lives on top of embers that burn us eventually, but slowly enough that we don’t realize it until we’re fully burnt. 
There is a technique that we can use to turn up the heat in advance, so we can have the motivation and awareness necessary to choose the discomfort that is actually good for us instead of staying in the coals so to speak.
I want you to do an exercise.  Set aside some time and go through the following process: Close your eyes.  I want you to look at your life right now from where you are right now.  Look at how life feels right now, what you’re thinking right now, look at what you do everyday.  Look at the people that are in your life.  Look at what causes you the most distress today and joy today.  Imagine that nothing changes at all; you’re still doing the same things and are still in the exact same place in one month.  What does your life look and feel like if you are in the exact same circumstances in one year.  Has anything gotten worse?  Now imagine that you are in the same place doing the same things in one year.  Spend a few minutes experiencing this.  And when you have done that, spend a few minutes imagining that you are in the same place doing the same things in 5 years.  Then do the same thing for ten years.  Then imagine 20 years.  Then imagine 40 years.  Them imagine you on your deathbed.  Having played out your life, having made no changes to yourself and what you are choosing and doing every day, what did you realize?  This is the fate you are headed towards if you make no changes and live your life accepting mild dissatisfaction to avoid discomfort.     
The benefit of you doing this process is that I do not have to tell you anything else in this article.  Having done this exercise, you already know what needs to change.  Now, all that is left is to do is to ‘get out of the coals’.  
×

Where can we send you your 5 free guided meditations?

Join Our Newsletter And Get Teal's 5 FREE Guided Meditations as a welcome gift!
Your privacy is our top priority. We promise to keep your email safe! For more information, please see our Privacy Policy
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue.

  I accept