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Teal Swan Articles

How To Trust Yourself

Self trust can be summed up as the assured reliance on your own character, ability, strength, and truth. This sounds straightforward enough. The problem is, most of us have spent our lives listening to our parents, our government, our teachers and our bosses. We have been raised with the idea that we do not know what is best for ourselves. Instead, we are taught that other people who “know more than we do”; know what is best for us. Because of this, we choose what we think we are supposed to choose. We try to live according to what our society says is “right”. We allow ourselves to be who we are told that we are; and we are caught in an endless struggle of seeking approval and reaching for recognition. The result is that we loose trust in ourselves.
The cost of shaping ourselves to fit the desires, preferences, and expectations of others, is losing ourselves; and when we loose ourselves we become frozen without direction, unable to make our own choices. The two most painful states in this universe are self-hate and self-distrust. It just so happens that one comes from the other. Self hate comes from self distrust. Life is torture when you don’t trust yourself and without exception, people who suffer chronically, suffer because the root of the dysfunction in their lives is that they don’t trust themselves. They don’t trust themselves to be able to influence how they feel, they don’t trust themselves to not give into others they don’t trust themselves to create their reality, they don’t trust themselves to make the right choices. They don’t trust themselves to know. The list goes on and on.
So here are some tips for how to begin to trust yourself
Build your self-confidence. Self-confidence and self-trust are a married couple. When we use the word confidence, what we mean is your ability to depend upon yourself. If you don't have self confidence, you won’t feel able to depend on yourself. When we understand that lack of self trust, goes hand in hand with lack of self confidence, we can easily see that not trusting ourselves is a self worth issue. It is an issue of devaluing and invalidating ourselves. If we don’t trust ourselves, we lack self esteem and we do not perceive our own value. One of the reasons that we do not trust ourselves, is that we do not accept our own abilities, talents, intentions, and value. Take time to acknowledge your abilities, talents, positive traits, and thus value. Allow yourself to do what you are good at and what comes easily to you. Everyone is good at something. We don’t often allow ourselves to do what we are good at however because we have all been raised in a society which values effort. Most of us think it is weak to do the things that come easy to us. But for us to learn how to trust ourselves, we need to allow ourselves to do what we are good at and what comes easily to us. If we always feel as if it is a struggle to do things, we will always feel behind the pack. So own up to the things which you excel at, and then focus on designing your life around those things. Give yourself permission to take pride in them and give yourself credit for your successes. These steps will give a hefty boost to your self confidence and subsequently, your self trust. Let go of the idea of “the” right answer and just look for “your” right answer. Those of us, who don’t feel as if we can trust ourselves, are preoccupied with the idea of right and wrong. It paralyzes us. We fear making the “wrong” choice so much, we procrastinate making any choice, and we trust everyone’s opinion except for our own. It is important for us to realize that when we are facing a problem or decision, there is no such thing as one right answer that we have to somehow find. Gain perspective by eliciting other people’s opinions, but do not “weigh them” in order to make your final decision. Instead, make your own decision. Use inquiry to question your current perspective and consciously choose a perspective, which serves your highest good. Every single person, experiences the world in their own way. So we make decisions about what is right based on our own individual assumptions, judgments, perceptions and past experiences. No two perspectives will be the same. And no one can see the situation from your perspective. You are also never going to have all of the information that you would like to have in order to make your decision. You can’t know everything and so sometimes you have to take a risk by making a choice anyway. You cannot find a “right” answer. All you can find is your right answer. Take risks, even if taking those risks results in making “mistakes”. We have to be willing to take risks and make mistakes in life. One day during my sports career, I was in a panic about racing as usual. At that point in my life, my self worth was completely tied up in performance. As a result, I had the habit of getting such bad performance anxiety that I did terribly in races and sometimes didn’t even show up for them. But on a chairlift on the way to the starting gate, I had an epiphany. The epiphany was this: I have lost 100% of the races that I didn’t run. This is the case when we don’t take risks. We like to think that if we don’t take risks, we don’t fail. But the truth is the exact opposite of that. If we don’t take the risk, we have already failed. While it can be scary for us to take risks in life, it is one of the best ways we can build our capacity for self trust. Taking risks takes courage, and courage makes us feel better about ourselves. It allows us to see what we are really capable of, which in turn helps us to trust ourselves. You wont know that you can trust yourself unless you take a risk and see that you can. Own the responsibility for your own decisions and their consequences, both the positive consequences and negative consequences. Owning the responsibility for the decisions we make, is crucial when we are developing trust in ourselves. We need to experience both the process of making a decision and the process of directly experiencing the results of that decision so that we can learn. If we fall into the trap of denying our part in the decision or blame others for the decision we made, we end up depriving ourselves of the opportunity to learn. Likewise, if we try to escape from the consequences of our decisions, we miss the opportunity for getting the feedback we need so that we can make better decisions in the future. This is the same thing as robbing ourselves of an improved life in the future. Also, we cannot blame someone else without simultaneously acknowledging our own powerlessness to them. Thinking of yourself as powerless, does the opposite of encourage self trust. It makes you feel like you can’t rely on yourself. Live your life according to your own personal sense of integrity. Those of us who don’t trust ourselves often struggle with our own sense of integrity. If you are not living with integrity, your goals become hard to reach, you attract people who are also not living with integrity, your self concept disintegrates and you lose your trust in yourself. Lack of integrity can reflect out into the world in big ways such as intentionally sabotaging someone else or stealing from them. It can also reflect out into the world in small ways, such as telling little white lies, gossiping or not standing up for yourself. Any lack of integrity erodes your self-concept. Identify what it means to you personally to have integrity. No one can decide this for you, because no two people have the same values, morals and ethics. Identify the areas of your life in which you are not living with integrity. Then pick three changes you can make right now to restore your integrity. For example, your answer may be to write an apology letter, or to “come out of the closet” to your family by telling them that you are gay, answer may be to stop gossiping or to re pay money that you stole. Compile a list of all the ways that you do trust yourself. Our level of trust is often different relative to different things. For example, we may trust our instincts relative to some things, like driving our car; while we doubt ourselves relative to other things, like making a good impression in an interview. Take some time to compile a list of all the ways that you currently know you can trust yourself. Compile this list by filling in the blank as many times as you can. “I trust myself to________”. For example, “I trust myself to be loyal to the person I have committed to”. Or “I trust myself to be loyal to my own happiness regardless of whether or not that means breaking a commitment that I have made to someone”. Some other examples might be, “I trust myself to care for my pets”. Or “I trust myself to do exactly what I say I’m going to do”. Or “I trust myself to make a breakfast which tastes good”. Nothing is too small or too large to include in this list. Any kind of trust, no matter what it is in, is important because it is trust. We have the tendency to ignore the ways that we actually do trust ourselves, when we become aware of the ways that we don’t trust ourselves. This corrodes our self-concept. It disables us by making us feel bad about ourselves, instead of simply allowing us to incrementally build trust in the things we don’t currently have trust in. Listen to your feelings. They always have important messages to share. If we want to trust ourselves, we need to learn to trust our own feelings. Feelings are the truth of who we are. Most people who are alive today have forgotten their most acute and accurate sense of all—their emotions and sensations. The average person views feelings as a menace; something to fight, something he or she is powerless to, a drawback, and even something to distrust. The average person does not know what purpose they serve. The result is, many of us are living in a tug of war between being a slave to them and flipping around to wage war with them. We have a multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical industry set up to make a profit from chemically aiding people to suppress their feelings and change them. This is especially sad considering that your feelings are the compass guiding you through this venture called life. They are all the guidance you will ever need. That is why intuition speaks to you via the route your feelings. It is only when we ignore our feelings (the compass) that we become convinced that our feelings have ever failed us and are ever negative in nature. In effect, we ignore our internal compass while it is screaming at us louder and louder, and then we blame the compass itself for the reason that we are upset, because it feels so unnatural and miserable to us to be going in the wrong direction. Now we come to the last and most important tip it comes to self trust… The reason that you don’t trust yourself is because you abandon yourself. You do this by not listening to and honoring your feelings (we call this violating your boundaries) and you run from your negative emotion. The holy grail of self trust is learning to STAY, which is an acronym for STop Abandoning Yourself.
The first way we learn to STAY is to Stop running from our negative emotions. Can you count on yourself to be there for you? For most people on earth the answer is no. The reason is, they keep trying to feel better. When you start to feel negative emotion, part of you feels really worried and afraid because it knows that the other part of you is going to try to run away from you if you feel that way. You keep trying to get yourself to feel differently so you will want to be with yourself. Most of us only want to be with ourselves if we feel good. We do anything we can do to feel differently so we will want to be present with ourselves and our lives again. Sometimes we even engage in destructive addictions to escape the way we feel and therefore ourselves. This does further damage. It reinforces the idea that if you feel bad, there is not only a consequence of losing yourself, but also of being hurt by yourself intentionally as punishment. Every time you try to feel better, you try to escape yourself and in doing so, you abandon yourself. Can you trust someone who abandons you? No. In order to trust ourselves we need to prove to ourselves that we will not try to escape ourselves when we feel negative emotion. We will sit with the emotion and be with ourselves exactly as we are unconditionally. I teach a way to do this in my video titled “healing the emotional body. If you begin to stop abandoning yourself when you are experiencing negative emotion, you will come to trust that you will always be there for yourself. You will feel a deep sense of inner peace arise within you.
The next part of the equation of STAY (stop abandoning yourself), is to develop healthy boundaries. The holy grail of self-trust is boundaries. Having a sense of self vs. other is part of participating in this physical dimension. The individual perspective and experience is what is currently serving the expansion of this universe. And so, we perceive a difference between ourselves and the rest of the world. This individual perspective is a kind of boundary that defines us from everything else. We have heard again and again from self-help experts and psychologists that it is crucial to our wellbeing to develop healthy boundaries. But what are boundaries really? Boundaries are guidelines for how someone relates the self to the rest of the world. They are rules of conduct built out of a mix of beliefs, opinions, attitudes, past experiences and social learning. Personal boundaries operate in two directions, affecting both the incoming and outgoing interactions between people. Personal boundaries help to define an individual by outlining likes and dislikes and what is right for them personally or wrong for them personally. Defining these things helps us to know how we will and wont allow ourselves to be treated by others.
Here are some signs that you have unhealthy boundaries
Saying no when you mean yes or yes when you mean no. Feeling guilty when you do say no. Acting against your integrity or values in order to please. Not speaking up when you have something to say. Adopting another person’s beliefs or ideas so you are accepted. Not calling out someone who mistreats you. Accepting physical touch or sex when you don’t want it. Allowing yourself to be interrupted or distracted to accommodate another person’s immediate wants or needs. Giving too much just to be perceived as useful. Becoming overly involved in someone’s problems or difficulties. Allowing people to say things to you or in front of you that make you uncomfortable. Not defining and communicating your emotional needs in your relationships. The biggest issue related to boundaries isn’t that other people violate our boundaries, it’s that we violate our own boundaries. By letting someone violate our boundaries, we violate our own boundaries. This is self-betrayal. If you go against your personal boundaries, you violate yourself, you abandon yourself and you allow self-hate to rule the day.
I’m going to simplify the concept of boundaries and make them very easy for you to understand. Your boundaries are defined by your feelings. Your feelings will always tell you whether a boundary of yours has been violated, no matter what kind of boundary it is. For example, if someone said something that hurt you, it means they crossed an emotional boundary and you will feel hurt, which is your indication that your boundaries need to be re assessed. Another example could be, someone asks you to a party and you feel as if you don’t want to go, but you go anyway, you feel bad, which is your indication that you have violated your own boundary. This is why it is so crucial to be in touch with how you feel all day every day.
We can think of a boundary as an imaginary line that uniquely defines and separates your personal happiness, your personal integrity, your personal desires, your personal needs and therefore most importantly, your personal truth from the rest of the universe. He, who does not listen to and respect what he himself feels, violates his own boundaries. He, who does not listen to and respect what others feel, violates other people’s boundaries. It is as simple as that. So practice really listening to and feeling how things feel. Listen to what your feelings are telling you. They are speaking to your personal truth. It is crucial that we not only know who we really are and what we really want but also that we know that we are known for who we are and what we really want by others. When we are ashamed of who we are and what we want, we have poor boundaries and we are shamed for whom we are by others all the time. The person who has no self-trust, was the person whose feelings were invalidated as a child.
Here is a common scenario: A child begins to feel angry because their parent is always working and never has time to be with them. The child expresses that anger and is invalidated, the parent says “I spend more time with you than any other parent that I know spends with their child” and the child is shamed for being ungrateful. The child learns that the way they feel is not true and that they should be ashamed for feeling the way they feel. Anger is not acceptable. So the child creates a false self that is cannot express anger and who says “thank you” all the time. Over time, he or she believes that who they really are is happy and grateful. They have never really admitted to the fact that deep down, they truly feel angry. So how do you know if you have set up a false self? You fear other people thinking negatively of you. Ask yourself these questions: Do I know what I really want? Do I let other people tell me what to think or believe and how to feel? Do I do things I don’t really want to do and say yes when I really want to say no or say no when I really want to say yes? Am I afraid to let people know how I really feel? Am I afraid of people thinking negatively of me?
Beginning to care how you feel, pay attention to how you feel and honor how you feel, is like Pandora’s box. You will not only begin to trust yourself, but your life can never be the same once you do. Trusting yourself is a process. So let it be a process. Trusting yourself is not something that you can suddenly wake up and decide to do. It is the inevitable byproduct of gradually making changes to the way you think and the way that you live your life.

You Don't Fear The Unknown

As people, we become addicted to knowing. We become addicted to the acquiring of knowledge. When we grasp a new concept, our brain releases a dose of chemicals similar to opium. Knowledge addiction gives the physical human a strong evolutionary advantage. We are guaranteed to progress if we are hard wired to learn. The human biological system, being a reflection of the greater universe (which is geared towards expansion), is essentially designed to maximize the rate at which new but understandable information is acquired. Once you have acquired a new bit of information, you spend your time learning something else. Without thinking about it, we pick out experiences that are new; experiences which cause us to know more. A biological addiction to know more is perfect design because it endows the physical human with a perpetuating beneficial learning behavior, even if misery and negative consequences are experienced along the way. This is helpful in an environment of contrast such as this.
This desire for knowledge is not in and of itself negative. But there is a shadow side to the quest for knowledge. The shadow side is that knowledge is often used by the ego as a security blanket. The ego uses knowledge to avoid things that it fears. Things like insignificance and worthlessness and pain. Knowledge is worshipped by cultures the world over and knowledgeable individuals are valued. They command respect within their society. In society, knowing more about something than somebody else boosts one’s social status. We become significant to others when we know something more than they do. We become significant when we are the venue through which they can get their knowledge “fix”. It is easy to see then how the ego could use knowledge to avoid insignificance, personal insecurity and worthlessness.
Knowledge also helps us to avoid future calamity. If we know the winter is coming, we can stock up on food and survive the winter. If we do not know it is coming and do not stock up on food, we may die. If we are a person who worries about the future and most of all who does not trust ourselves to create a reality that feels good to us, knowledge becomes a tool for self-protection. Knowledge is the worrier’s best friend. Knowledge is often used by the ego to keep itself away from the rocky seas of uncertainty. Cognitive closure makes us feel safe. If we look at the ego for what it is, which is an identity (the identity you call by your name, which is temporary and also illusion), we quickly see that the ego’s goal is to stay alive and serve as contrast for our true self. The ego serves us by facilitating our expansion. And one way it does this is by keeping you alive in the physical long enough to learn/progress. And if the ego’s goal is survival, knowledge is more essential than even food or water is. After all, knowledge is what allows us to find food and water in the first place. All humans are knowledge junkies as long as they are identified with themselves. We are set up to go after the goal of realization or the goal of grasping a concept. We go after the goal of knowing instead of the process of learning. This makes the learning experience uncomfortable. This makes learning something that we have to “get through” in order to get to the mental carrot we are chasing. You’ve heard it gain and again, we fear the unknown. Guess what? The idea that we fear the unknown is total Bull Shit. We don’t fear the unknown. If we truly feared the unknown, babies would fear everything and they do not. What we fear is what we project into the unknown based on our previous experiences. When we are facing the unknown, the mind goes to work projecting it’s already acquired fears into the unknown to try to predict what lies in the unknown and then goes to work trying to figure out how to avoid those fears. It’s those projections that we fear. For example, if we quit our job that we have been working at for 10 years to do something radically new and different with our life, we are venturing into the unknown. But we don’t fear that unknown in and of itself. We fear the potential failure and fall from grace that we could experience socially by venturing into the unknown. We fear this because we have experienced the feeling of failure and fall from grace before and wish to avoid this feeling at all costs. We do not fear the unknown in and of itself. We fear the potential unwanted things we predict that the unknown could contain. If we learned to not project our fears into the unknown, the unknown would no longer be scary. The ego is obsessed with the quest for truth and knowledge because it’s convinced that knowledge and truth will keep unwanted things from happening to it. But the unknown holds a glaring truth; like a clam holds a pearl and that truth is that the state of learning is a higher state than knowing. The open state of inquisition and questioning is a state open to all possibilities. The closed state of knowing shuts the door to further learning. In a way knowing is ended-ness. You can’t know everything about everything. Source doesn’t even know everything about everything. There would be no reason for life to exist if source knew everything. Source only knows what it knows up unto this point. You, being a microcosm (a fractal) of the larger universe, only know what you know up to this point.
Most of us fear not knowing because we fear that as a result of that lack of knowing, we will end up going through a “bad” experience. Your worry will greatly be reduced when you train your focus to see that value is contained in every single experience. There is a Zen master that once said, “the barn is burnt down, now I can see the moon”. Inherent in that statement is the idea that even the things that we would identify as a tragedy contain value. If there is value in all experiences in our lives, we will not run around trying to avoid certain experiences. That in and of itself is liberation. Bad experiences or Unwanted experiences are only what we call experiences, whose part in our growth and integration we do not yet understand. The minute we understand that all experiences enrich our life because they all cause learning and growth, we cease to see any experience as bad. We begin to see experiences from source perspective. Source does not see “bad experiences in life” as bad. Source sees every experience, no matter how uncomfortable as an integral, valuable experience. The experiences we go through are open to interpretation. That’s the beauty and the pain of it. We can interpret any experience in a way that causes us to suffer or we can interpret it in a way that causes us to grow and integrate, thus becoming more whole in and of ourselves. You cannot know everything about everything.
Expecting yourself to know everything about everything is cruelty. It is also the result of fear. The universe works like this, questions lead to answers, which lead to more questions which lead to more answers, which lead to more questions and no one, not even the universe at large, knows if there will ever be an end to this cycle of questions giving rise to answers giving rise to questions giving rise to answers. The progression of thought may be eternal and it may not be eternal. You have heard the expression “It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey”. What If I was to tell you there is no destination? Now it really is only about the journey and all life is nothing more than a journey. All life is based upon exploration, expansion, adventure, the progression of discovery and learning. So how do we come to love learning without becoming attached to knowing? We release the fears we have surrounding the idea of not knowing. We admit to what we are really afraid of. For example, I might be afraid of not knowing because I have chosen a career that is built upon the expression of information. I might be afraid that if I do not know all the answers to everything, that I will lose my value to the people who come to seek my knowledge. I may fear that if I lose my value to them, I will fall from grace and be rejected by the very people who profess to value me now. Or I might be afraid of not knowing because if I don’t know, I could make a tragic mistake. And if I make a tragic mistake, I would feel bad about myself and it would revive my childhood feelings of shame, which are painful. We need to be brave enough to face what we are trying to avoid by knowing. We need to own up to and face what we are really afraid of. We need to turn around and face the fears that we are projecting into the unknown. Because the unknown has become a scapegoat that keeps us locked in a vicious pattern of avoiding what we are really afraid of, which I can assure you is not the unknown.

Cutting and Self Injury

Cutting is one of the most misunderstood human behaviors most especially because of how much it scares people. People assume that cutters are dangerous. The common thought is “If they could do that to themselves, what could they do to me?” And like any addiction, cutting is an extremely difficult thing to stop. For this article, I will be referring to people who engage in self-harming behaviors as cutters. I use this term, because it is the common term used for those who engage in self-harm. But let it be known that cutting is not an identity, it is a symptom. And cutting is only one form of self-harm. There are also people who burn themselves, intentionally imbed objects in their body, poison themselves, bruise themselves, intentionally break their own bones, pull out their own hair, freeze themselves and the list goes on. Each method of self-injury is preferred by the person doing it for certain reasons. For example, a cutter may prefer cutting because they feel like the trapped emotion in their body is being washed out or released with the blood that they spill. The first thing we must understand is that cutting is not the same thing as a suicide attempt. Though some cutters are suicidal, some cutters are not. Cutting is a coping mechanism. The second thing we must understand is that cutting is addictive. It is an addictive compulsion. For anything to meet the criteria of addiction, it has to adhere to the “3 Cs’”
Craving for the substance,  Loss of control once the thought to use arises and Continued use in spite of negative consequences. Cutting fits these three criteria and a lot of the addiction to cutting revolves around the addiction to endorphins.
Endorphins block pain and also play a part in our ability to feel relief and pleasure. They affect us much like codeine or morphine does. When endorphins reach the opioid receptors limbic system (including the part of your brain called the hypothalamus), you experience relief, pleasure and a sense of satisfaction. You also feel more calm and positively energized. Here’s the thing, when your body experiences pain your brain releases endorphins. Endorphins both soothe and energize you so you can get out of harm’s way. For this reason, cutting soothes negative emotion. It is a coping mechanism which provides temporary relief of intense feelings such as anxiety, guilt, depression, stress, emotional numbness or a sense of failure or self loathing and low self worth or the pressure of perfectionism. We can become addicted to the chemicals that our own body produces in response to certain things with the same veracity that we become addicted to a street drug. And as soon as we associate the action of cutting with the corresponding feeling of relief, we create neuropathways in our brain that automatically compel us to seek relief when we feel negative emotion by cutting. But that is just the tip of the iceberg.
To understand the motive for cutting, we need to go even deeper. Self-harm is not a behavior solely demonstrated by humans. Animals who are captive also engage in self-harming behaviors. What does this teach us? It teaches us that the human cutter feels as if they are captive. Without exception, like a caged animal, the cutter is in a prison where negative emotion (especially despair and hatred and rage) cannot be expressed. And so those emotional states are internalized. There is nowhere for the energy to turn but inward towards the self. And so they are expressed upon the self. The emotional states that compel a person towards cutting are the result of childhood traumas. For example, one of the most common causal situations that leads to cutting is that a child perceives themselves to be emotionally rejected by a parent that is supposed to love them. This is common of course if the child is born to a critical or perfectionistic parent. The child develops hatred and rage for that parent and experiences a deep level of despair but when the child expresses those emotions, they are shamed for it. Their emotions are invalidated. Their parent turns the emotion back on the child by implying that the emotions mean something is wrong with the child because there is no other valid reason for them to feel that way. Because of this, the feelings are internalized. The child becomes hyper-critical of themselves and that hatred, now internalized becomes focused at the self. To further understand this causal scenario that leads to cutting, imagine a fish in a fish tank. Imagine the fish projecting emotion outwards. The emotion will hit the glass walls of the tank and ricochet back towards the fish. As a cutter, it may take you years to realize that no child is born hating themselves. That instead, some aspect of you was rejected or hated by those who were supposed to love you and that because you were never allowed to expose that truth of you lives without it being invalidated, you internalized it and now treat yourself the way that they treated you; like something is inherently wrong with you and that you are bad and thus need to be punished. Cutters exchange emotional torture for physical mutilation. All cutters are self-loathing. All cutters are self-critical. You did not learn to view yourself this way by chance, you were seen this way by other people and that is how you learned to see yourself this way. I challenge you to look beyond the surface of things, beyond the myth that because your parents are your parents, they love you and instead look deep within yourself and admit to who should have loved you but didn’t or couldn’t.
Cutting is so often a sign of abuse, especially sexual abuse because it is a manifestation of the despair and self loathing that arises from internalizing the despair and rage that occurs when we are not loved by someone who we wanted to love us. It is also an attempt to gain control over our body, which we did not have control over when it was being used by other people. When it comes to our negative emotions, we do not feel the capacity to feel the feelings we feel, especially if our feelings were treated as “not ok” and “not valid” growing up. So, we are after two things: Sedation and Control. To sedate our emotions means to numb or drown out our awareness of our uncomfortable or painful feelings. To control is to gain power over our discomfort and pain. When we feel negative emotion, we feel out of control, so we gain back out control by exerting control over the way we feel. All addictions without fail exist to either sedate or control the way we feel. Cutting accomplishes both sedation and control. Endorphins sedate our feelings. The act of cutting, gives us control over our bodies and control over causing a sensation of relief within our bodies by causing an endorphin release. There are two main types of cutters, those who keep the cutting secret and those who are demonstrative about it. Whether a person is secretive or demonstrative about cutting says a lot about whether they are more desperate for sedation or more desperate for control over themselves. Those who keep their cutting ritualized and secret are more desperate for control. They often cut in areas that are not visible to society, like the inside of the thighs. They feel no control over their bodies or their emotions. By doing what they like with their body and keeping it secret, they keep something for themselves. This gives them a sense of control over themselves, which they have been lacking.
Those who cut in areas on their body that are open to public view like the wrists or arms, are more desperate for sedation. They are desperate for the sedation to come through other people. These cutters are desperate for rescue. Society shames them for cutting by saying that they just cut for the sake of attention. And so, they cannot admit to anyone or even themselves that what they want is for someone to notice. They are in a prison of a torturous situation, unseen by society and the people around them. They are shamed for wanting the attention that subconsciously they do want so badly. They want attention because they want someone to save them from the hell that they are living in. Think of it as a visible SOS. Shaming a cutter for wanting attention is like shaming a person in a hostage situation for trying to get attention by writing SOS on a wall. The dream is that on top of the sedation of the endorphin release, someone will come to sedate our pain by loving and caring about us enough. Of course cutting has the opposite effect on people; it drives them away.
When it comes to cutting (like any addiction), stop making healing about stopping the behavior itself. The behavior of cutting is just a symptom of a deeper cause. Symptoms disappear only when their root cause disappears. When I work with cutters, we do not make the healing process about cutting at all. We view the behavior of self-mutilation the same way we would view a rash. It is a symptom. We get down to the business of addressing the root cause. Cutting is done to avoid and escape from the way we feel, but as long as we avoid the way we feel, we cannot find healing. We have to be willing to go in the opposite direction when we feel upset and use the compulsive energy we feel to propel us deeper within the very emotion we are trying to escape from. We set out to integrate the emotional body. For this reason, I ask that anyone who is struggling with cutting watch my video on YouTube titled Healing the Emotional Body. There are many techniques that are designed to end the cutting behavior itself. For obvious reasons, I think this is an artificial solution. It is treating a symptom instead of a cause. That being said, I will tell you the single technique that worked to end my own cutting. The cause of your cutting is rooted in very early childhood. No exceptions to this rule. This is why all good emotional trauma techniques to some degree put you back in touch with the child within. And once you have begun to interact with the child within and recognize the childhood place where your negative emotions come from, you have the single best tool to thwart your cutting behavior. It can be summed up in one sentence. IMAGINE THAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO CUT THE CHILD IN YOU.
Most cutters have a ritual spot that they cut. My spot was in the bathroom. I found the most adorable childhood photograph of myself that I could and taped it up on the wall of my bathroom. If you don’t have a picture of yourself, imagine yourself as an adorable child. When you go to cut yourself, imagine that you are cutting the small child you. When I began doing this, every time I went to cut myself, I would imagine grabbing the arm of this little childhood self and cutting her. I’d imagine her crying and not understanding why she was being hurt and punished in this way. The first few times I did this exercise, I collapsed into tears on the bathroom floor. I could not do that to a child. And so, because that child is within me, I could not do it to myself. And I will say that if you are able to cut despite the presence of this child within you, you are still not in touch with the child within on an experiential level. You are conceptualizing of a theoretical child you do not feel within you yet. If you know someone who is cutting, you must know that you cannot stop their behavior for them. They have to want to stop cutting and to want to stop cutting, cutting has to not serve them anymore. And as long as they have un-integrated emotional trauma within them, the cutting still serves them because it allows them to escape those painful emotions. Keep in mind that the worst thing you could do to a cutter is to shame them for cutting, this does nothing more than add fuel to the fire of why they are cutting in the first place. If you want to help, don’t react to the cutting behavior itself. Demonstrate your unconditional love to them by drawing attention to and desire to understand the emotions that they are trying to escape from by cutting. On some level, every cutter wants you to know how much pain they are in. They need to be acknowledged and they need their pain to be validated instead of invalidated. They need to be loved regardless of how they feel instead of be led to believe that they are only lovable and wanted if they feel good. What they need is the opposite of rejection. They need to know that something is right with them instead of wrong.
If any cutters are reading this now, take this last sentence I have said to heart. What you need is the opposite of rejection. Nothing is wrong with you. Instead, something is right. Your emotions are reflecting deeply suppressed emotional trauma. Traumas you may not even be willing to admit to yourself yet. Identify your triggers. The scenarios that cause you to cut are a hint about the emotional trauma you suffered at the hands of other people in your childhood. Your emotions are telling you exactly and accurately how you have been emotionally treated by others. Just don’t expect the people who treated you this way… to own up to it.

Psychic Attack

Psychic attack is a fancy name for negative energy being focused you with the conscious or subconscious intention to inflict harm upon you, or any aspect of your life. Focus manipulates and moves energy. Harm can be focused towards your emotional, physical, spiritual or mental state. Those negative energies are projected in the form of thought and intention. They are a byproduct of the psyche. At the extreme end of the scale of psychic attack, we see the deliberate practice of hexes and curses; in other words, spells that were created to harm instead of benefit an individual.
The reason people feel so intimidated by psychic attack is because most people do not understand what it is fully. Because of the name it was given, people associate psychic attack not with the psyche, but with psychics, magic and the supernatural. We have the tendency to call anything that we do not understand supernatural. The minute we understand it however, it becomes natural. Psychic attack can involve ritualistic technique, but by far and away the majority of psychic attack is not ritual and involves nothing other than the thought and intention for harm to come to someone. Psychic attack has long been associated with voodoo and with a kind of witchcraft called black magic. Black magic is considered to be magic that is done against the free will of another person. In reality, you cannot do anything against the free will of someone else because in order for him or her to experience you harming them in the first place, they would have to already be holding a vibration that matched that experience. This is seen universally as an invitation and thus in accordance with free will. The way that people feel towards us and think about us as well as their intention towards us produces strong energy signatures. When we become a match to these strong negative energy signatures, like anything, they affect us. Here are some symptoms that we commonly see in association with psychic attack.
Experiencing frightening nightmares Seeing your attacker in a devilish way, either in your dreams, your meditation or in your thoughts Suddenly acting totally out of character Major changes in clarity of thinking or analytical ability Sudden ongoing fatigue for no apparent reason A drained feeling Icy cold feeling on part or all of your body Hearing voices Strange or recurring accidents A discomfort or fear in a specific room or area in your home or office Sudden illnesses that elude diagnosis Feeling someone touch you or bump into you when nobody is present Sudden depression without an apparent cause Seeming ongoing bad luck Disturbing Visions or hallucinations Irrational fear, anger or sorrow A negative obsessive thought, desire or fetish that won't go away Having thoughts and images of your attacker creeping into your mind constantly Feeling that you are being watched and seeing shadows around you from the corner of your eye, even when you are alone That being said, nothing can assert itself into your reality against your will. For anything to show up in our reality that negatively affects us, we have to have already been either consciously or subconsciously offering a vibration that called it to us. Awareness of what is happening diminishes the effect of the psychic attack significantly. And awareness of the occurrence of psychic attack involves much more than realizing that someone is projecting negative thoughts in your direction. It involves an understanding of the psychic attacker and of why it is occurring in your reality.
Psychic attack in truth has everything to do with the “out of alignment” state of the attacker, as well as the “out of alignment” state of the victim. Psychic attack is based mainly upon feeling of jealousy, anger, revenge, perceived powerlessness to you or fear of you. The psychic attacker, just like the victim they choose is a person full of trauma. They view the world through the eyes of trauma and create a lot of drama because they engage with the world as if the world is a hostile environment. They live in a state where they vacillate between attack and defense. It is important to remember this; no one will ever attack you psychically unless they feel somehow attacked by you first. To understand this, take a look at jealousy. If someone is jealous, they perceive your presence as attacking their self worth and so this perceived attack on their self worth puts the into a state of defense, where they wish to strike back. As far as the victim of psychic attack is concerned, it is important to understand that when you are really in alignment, no one could do anything that could cause you to feel negatively. You would be so far outside their vibrational range that you would never encounter someone with negative intentions towards you. You would be so open to the flow of infinite energy, that no one could ever take enough energy from you that you would feel a deficiency. We cannot discuss psychic attack without discussing victimhood. The victim does not know that they are the initiator of those experiences. All the psychic attacker is, is a vibrational match to unhealed aspects of us, mostly that reside in the subconscious that we are not yet aware of. You cannot be a match to psychic attack unless there is a point of attraction to it within you. So universally, this point of attraction to it is seen as an asking for it. If you do not have any idea how things are coming to you because you are unaware of your shadows and you are unaware of the fact that your reality always comes in response to your vibration; and you’re looking at your world and seeing bad things happening to you or other good people (things you don’t think you or they deserve), your logical assumption is that there must be outside influences that have the power to assert themselves in your reality. Then you think “I had better defend myself”. “I had better push against these influences”. “I had better protect myself”. “I had better get better weapons to fight that”. But this is a misunderstanding about how this universe works and like all things; you cannot push against psychic attack and not draw it to you. When you give your attention to someone or something else that causes you to feel negative, you, yourself are pinching off the flow of infinite energy to you and yet you blame the way you feel on them. They are the “reason” you unintentionally cut yourself off from your own alignment. You blame them for how you now feel because the way you feel happened in response to placing your attention on them. The problem is that you cannot blame someone else for how you feel and not simultaneously acknowledge or activate the vibration within you of your own powerlessness. Powerlessness increases our victimhood vibration and thus increases our manifestation of psychic attacks. Prolonged states of anger, rage, resentments, bitterness, vindictiveness, fears and suppressed trauma from childhood will draw and attract people who are so not self aware that they carry out psychic attack. Ongoing repressed negative emotions will always eventually turn into a physical reflection of those emotions.
To understand psychic attack further I’ll share a personal story. Last year, I had flown to the east coast to hold a synchronization workshop. The day before the workshop, I hosted a frequency art gala to explain, showcase and sell my frequency art. A woman who was very disturbed attended the gala that day. She attempted to deceive me into thinking that she loved my work and wanted to collaborate one day. But her energy conveyed quite the opposite. She was threatened by me. Most of it was jealousy. She considered herself to be a shaman and felt as if it was unfair that someone my age (with such obvious inexperience) could draw the large audience that she had always desired but never experienced. To justify her jealous hatred towards me, she decided that I was illuminati and was intent on saving the world by preventing me from continuing with my work. That night, as I was talking to people and teaching a trauma release process, she walked around the room picking up crystals and used them in conjunction with her walking cane to “hex” me. Then she diligently proceeded to invite groups of people into the hall where she explained to them that I was illuminati and provided them with sound reasoning for her claim. One by one, she tried to convince people not to attend my workshop the next day for the sake of their own safety. She managed to convince about ten people to abandon my teachings and not attend the workshop that night. I felt completely targeted. My energy level collapsed. If I did not understand psychic attack, I would have convinced myself that I needed further protection and that I was the victim of attack. But when you understand your own shadow side, psychic attack can no longer be seen as attack. It can only be seen as reflection. In truth, that experience was a reflection of the pain I felt as a child when the Mormons in the town I grew up in (despite my desire to do good), labeled me as evil and ostracized me from society, separating me from the children I wanted to play with. Because that vibration was still present within my emotional body, it was still a point of attraction, which invited this woman into my experience. She was not an attacker; she was a messenger for an unhealed aspect of my being. She was a messenger of unhealed aspects of many people there at the gala that night. Everyone who interacted with her came face to face with the reflection of their own various suppressed trauma. Use the contrast of psychic attackers to do two things. 1st recognize the reflection of someone projecting negative energy in your direction as a reflection of a deeply suppressed trauma within you; a reflection of past feelings of powerlessness, despair, desperation, hopelessness, fear, unfairness etc. Explore the feelings you have about being a victim or experiencing undeserved harm. This is what the revolutionary psychologist Carl Jung would have called shadow work. Prod around in the subconscious and integrate unresolved traumas. 2nd use it to design your reality by identifying your desire. Realize that what you want is to be more in control of your own vibration than this. What you want for example might be empowerment and allowing. Then, intentionally go in the direction of that. Do more things that cause you to feel empowered. Pay attention to anything or anyone that causes you to feel more allowing of other people and how other people choose to behave. Focus on anything that diminishes your resistance to and your fear of others.
Understand that you can’t arrange the circumstances of your reality enough to control everyone else’s people’s behavior. You can’t protect yourself without simultaneously activating the idea in your reality that there is something that you need to be protected against. When you get control of your own vibration, you are exempt from the experience of other people dictating the way you feel.All other techniques for dealing with psychic attack must come second to this.
There are multiple techniques for dealing with psychic attack that can be used in conjunction with intentionally integrating your past trauma and unhealed shadow aspects and increasing your vibration. The ones that I think are the very best for psychic attack are:
White sage. White sage has been used for thousands of years for neutralizing energies. You can dab the essential oil on the pulse points of your body. You can also use the smoke of a smudge stick of white sage to neutralize energies in your home. By pulling the smoke gently around your body and into your auric field, you can neutralize the discordant energies in your auric field. You could also benefit greatly by planting it around your house. Carry the minerals, whose frequencies are the best at deflecting negative energies, transforming negative energies and cloaking. In my opinion, these are back tourmaline, obsidian, pyrite, moldavite, spirit quartz, fire agate, and chiastolite. Use herbs or plants whose frequencies are the best at deflecting negative energies. In my opinion, these are: Sage, Rosemary, Eucalyptus, Frankincense, Oregano, Clove, Lavender, Juniper, Ylang Ylang, Tea tree, and Sandalwood. Visit energy worker professionals that you feel drawn towards, who are adept at auric cleansing and who specialize in assisting people with psychic attack. Visit open minded, spiritually aware psychologists that you feel drawn towards who are adept at helping people integrate the subconscious and become aware of painful emotional and mental patterns within them. Now I’m going to share with you an old spell formula that was used back in the day for protection. Today, we have the understanding that protection invites something that needs to be protected against, but nonetheless, this formula creates a very strong vibration that can deflect negative energies. To create this formula, we put 8 oz. of water in a spray bottle. Make sure the water is obtained from a natural, pure fresh source such as spring water, lake water, river water or artesian well water. If you absolutely cannot find natural water, use bottled spring water. Put 6 drops of rosemary oil, 6 drops of sandalwood oil, 8 drops of frankincense oil, 5 drops of juniper oil, and 3 drops of lavender oil into the water. Add 8 fennel seeds and 3 whole cloves. Drop 3 small protection stones of your choice into the water (my favorite is black tourmaline). Expose the mixture to the color violet. To do this, you can imagine the color violet being diffused into the mixture or you can cover the bottle with a violet colored cloth for an hour. Then, by projecting your intention into the mixture, mentally ask the ingredients to awaken. Ask them to help keep you clear of negative energies and deflect negative energies directed at you. When you feel as if the time spent focusing your intention towards the creation is sufficient, or when you feel as if the ingredients are coming alive, shake the mixture 28 times and spray yourself (as anything else you want to shield) with it. Shake and re spray it anytime you feel like you need it. This mixture will last for about several months before it looses its potency and will need to be replaced. Store it in an area where it is shielded from absorbing other energies in the house. Another thing you can do to thwart psychic attack is meditations and visualizations. There are many options available on line, but my favorite meditations and visualizations for psychic attack are done with the intention of cleansing. Cleansing is quite simple to do. Spend fifteen minutes imagining washing the inside and the outside of your body as well as your aura with clear white liquid light. Or, imagine bathing in a pool of sacred cleansing water. Imagine watching the toxic, negative energy and debris flowing out and away from you and being absorbed into the soil, where it will be claimed and transformed by earth element. These visualizations can be greatly enhanced by doing them while taking an actual bath in water that has been diffused with Himalayan salt or sea salt. When you have successfully addressed the shadows within you that have attracted this experience into your reality and when you are feeling more empowered, work on viewing the experience from a higher perspective. This allows you to develop compassion for the psychic attacker. Vibrations of love and compassion and peace and joy are instant disablers to any negative energy focused at you. Chances are you do not yet realize how painful their life truly is. You see, any vibration you hold, including an intention you project outwards, is reflected in your own reality. For this reason, a person who consciously or subconsciously desires your harm is a match to harm themselves and so they will experience harm coming to them. This is why in the practice of witchcraft, there is a thing called the law of three. The law of three basically states that whatever intention you send out into the universe, is sent back to you times three. And this is true on a vibrational level because this universe operates according to the law of attraction. And the more you focus on something, the stronger it becomes and the more dramatically it shows up in your reality. Those who engage in psychic attack on a subconscious or conscious level live acutely painful lives. Psychic attack is not something to be afraid of. It is not something mystical and supernatural that is beyond your control. It is just the natural result of living in a world where people, including ourselves experience trauma and find ourselves out of alignment because of it. The most crucial step to dealing with psychic attack is to recognize that psychic attackers are not attackers, they are messengers for parts of your unconscious shadow that craves to be seen, felt and integrated. They are a call to “heal” unhealed parts within you.

If You Find Your Core Imprint, You'll Find Your Life Purpose

Before we come into this life, we set an intention for the life that we intend to experience. That intention sets in motion the entire chain of events leading to this specific life itself. Without this intention, we would not have this life. We would not be born into this incarnation. While it is true that we intend to have a great variety of experiences in this life, and intend many things for each life, we opt into each life with a core intention. This core experience is the root from which everything will grow. We always choose this core experience before birth. It is the foundation for choosing the parents we choose and the way we will look and the people we will grow up around and our astrological alignments etc. Let’s say that this intention we set forth is to experience unconditional love. Just like we cannot understand white, unless it is compared to it’s opposite, which is black, we cannot understand unconditional love unless we experience it’s opposite. And so, we opt into a life where we can experience conditional love and even rejection. We opt into a life where we can experience the very opposite vibration from unconditional love. And we experience this vibration as a feeling, a feeling signature to be specific. This feeling signature is like a specific flavor in the form of emotion and sensation. Our soul comprehends perception in terms of these feeling signatures, not mental concepts.
The time space reality we are currently experiencing is one of contrast. It is a dimension of duality. We come into this contrasting experience of life on earth in order to experience the black so we can then know and experience white. So we choose into very specific conditions in order to experience the opposite of our ultimate desire for this life, knowing that the experience of it’s opposite will give rise to the awareness and experience of it. When we experience it’s opposite, we do not understand it at first, instead we feel it. The feeling signature of the “opposite” of your ultimate desire for this life becomes your core imprint. It is the thing you came into this life to transform. It is your main purpose for life to use the contrast of that particular feeling signature to find and become it’s opposite.
Once you have adopted this core negative imprint, until it is integrated (potentially for the rest of your life), it will reflect again and again into your adult experience, most specifically in your relationships. You will think that you are in a relationship with different people and you will think you are having different experiences and that the relationships end for different reasons. But this is not the case. What you are missing, is that the FEELING is always the exact same in all of these seemingly differing situations. This core feeling signature, keeps repeating itself as if crying for integration over and over like a skipping cd. If we want our relationships to be different, we must recognize this core imprint, we must become aware of its role in our soul progression. We must use it to find out what we are doing here. If you already think you know what you’re core negative imprint is, suspend judgment. You may just be surprised. I have always prided myself on being completely self-aware. Looking at my life logically, I assumed that my intention was to experience freedom. After all, I have experienced so much powerlessness and captivity. But once I removed myself from the realm of the mind and went into the feeling instead, I found that the core imprint that I came here to transform was the vibration and thus feeling of being forsaken. I came here to experience reclamation. Reclamation of myself and of love, which is total union with source energy. I came into this life to return home. It is easy to see then how all movement that has occurred in my life has been away from the feeling of forsakenness and towards reclamation. And my career as a spiritual teacher falls in line perfectly with this core intention. I now teach people how to progressively attain reclamation.
Our purpose for this life, will almost always feel like the hardest thing for us to align with, because to truly experience it we must first immerse ourselves in it’s opposite. For someone who has felt forsaken all his or her life, full reclamation feels out of reach. It feels like an impossible dream. But our desire to experience this intended purpose is a desire we cannot deny and so, despite the perceived difficulty we will be moving forever in the direction of this experience we intend to have no matter what gets in our way, until we either reset back to source perspective by dying or manifest it in this life. To find this core negative imprint, begin by watching your breath and calming your mind; much like you would with any other meditation. Once you feel the mind quieting it’s activity, consciously recall every significant relationship you have had in your adolescence and adulthood (especially the romantic ones). Recall the circumstances that occurred to make these relationships fail. Now, dive into the way you felt when these relationships were beginning to sour and when they failed and ended. Ask what did I feel after they ended? Notice that no matter what the circumstance or whom you were with, the feeling is always the exact same one. Just feel this feeling. Feel its sensations within your body. Observe it and fully experience it. It may just be the most excruciating feeling you’ve ever tried to be present with and allow yourself to feel. When you have spent enough time with the emotion to feel yourself surrendering to it completely, letting go of all need to change it, ask yourself when was the first time I experienced this feeling? You may or may not have images come to your mind at this point. If not, just stay with the feeling (which will intensify upon asking this question). If you have images, observe them like you are re experiencing a memory. Which is in fact what you are doing. And ask yourself how do I feel? Be patient with this process, instead of looking for the answer, let your soul offer it to you. As if it is a bubble rising up from the deep water. The answer should come in the form of I feel _________. Not I feel like _____________.
If you say I feel like… it means you are conceptualizing of what the feeling feels like instead of experiencing the feeling 1st person. For example, I feel destitute instead of I feel like I have no money. If it helps, you can keep that feeling active in your body and look over a large list of emotions to try to find the feeling and thus vibration that most closely describes your core imprint. If you feel ready, you can apply my emotional body process to this feeling at this point with the intention of welcoming and integrating this particular feeling signature. To remind yourself of that process, watch my video titled Healing The Emotional Body on YouTube.
Now, with the knowledge of this core imprint, consciously think back on your life. See how this is the most familiar frequency you have experienced in this life. And use that to become aware of it’s opposite. Use that to become aware of what it is that you might be doing here on earth. Keep in mind that what people consider to be the opposite of something, isn’t necessarily the opposite of something for you. For example, though traditionally the opposite of panic is considered to be calm, the opposite of your feeling of panic might be trust.
Most of us conceptualize of purpose in terms of what they are supposed to do for a living, “doing” being the key word here. This is not how the larger universe views purpose. So keep that in mind. That being said, your “what I am supposed to do for a living” version of purpose, will most always fit in with this original core imprint and thus intention for this life. The best example of this can bee seen in the movie Stranger Than Fiction. In the movie, Maggie Gyllenhaal plays the owner of a bakery shop. The main character finds out to his surprise that she went to Harvard law school. And that she wanted to make the world a better place with her law degree. She started baking for her study session. Soon she was baking more than studying law and so her grades dropped so far that she dropped out of college. She decided that is she was going to make the world a better place, that she would do it with cookies. The point being that if you examined her core imprint, and the opposite vibration she intended to experience in this life, something like disconnection and kinship, owning a bakery shop facilitated this intention and thus fulfilled her purpose for this life much more so than a Harvard law degree did.
The feeling signature of the core imprint is the ultimate thing we have come here to overcome, because it is the core vibration preventing us from experiencing unconditional love. Becoming aware of your core negative imprint is the first step towards integrating it and it is the first step towards consciously discovering your main purpose for this life. So get ready for your life to make sense. And get ready for changes.

Bury The Fantasy to Let Go Of the "If Onlys"

You probably know that the negative unwanted circumstances of our past prevent us from moving forward with our lives or even from being present with what is. But an often-overlooked fact is that our fantasy about what we wished would have happened also prevents us from moving forward with our lives and from being present.
If we build our life on fantasies or if we cant escape our fantasies because we keep trying to make them come true in our now or our future, we are stuck in life. We have no stable foundation for creating a life that we enjoy. We continue to try to turn our parents into what we wish they would have been, we continue to try to try to achieve the successes that we wished we would have achieved. This is a painful state of desperation. It is “living in the past” to the exact same degree as we do when we are haunted by the reality of what actually happened. Subconsciously, you think that if you achieve that fantasy, your past will be remedied and healed and you can be complete. But if we have any hope of healing, moving forward or being fully present with all of our energy in the here and now, we must stop trying to chase and create that fantasy. Instead, in order to work with what we identify as “real” we must bury our fantasy of how we wish the past had gone. For that reason, I want to introduce a process that will help you immensely. To begin this process, I want you to close your eyes and connect with your heartbeat. If it helps, place your hands over your chest and imagine it beating. Do nothing more than listen and feel for it’s pulse. Breathing in and out deeply and naturally. Continue to do this for approximately 4 minutes. When you feel yourself settling into the experience, think back on the parts of your past that caused you pain. Instead of deliberately going looking to remember specific events, let them surface of their own accord, trusting that the ones that surface are the parts of you which are eager to be released. As if you were looking backwards and observing over your life, where do you feel stuck? What, if you were being honest could you never really get past?
Maybe you were given up for adoption Maybe you were abused Maybe your parents got a divorce Maybe one or both of your parents did not love you like you needed to be loved Maybe you did not fit in with your family Maybe you were bullied at school Maybe you got hurt Maybe you got sick Maybe you missed a crucial opportunity Maybe someone who you loved, died Maybe you struggled for money Maybe you didn’t feel seen or significant Maybe you felt jealous because of what someone else had Maybe you lost a job or didn’t get a job you desperately wanted.
I want you to take out a piece of paper and write down these past events and think about how you would have wanted them to go differently. I want you to write down your fantasy for how you wanted your life to go and how you wanted the people in it to be. Here is an example:
I was born in France where I was surrounded by artists and geniuses. I felt like I belonged. We lived in a Venetian style mansion overlooking a Parisian street full of markets and cafes. My mother was a creative, beautiful, stylish, warm and openhearted opera singer. She loved to wear long velvet dresses and she loved me exactly the way that I was. I was the daughter she always wanted. She looked at me like I was the light of her life. I remember her holding me and empathizing with me when I was upset and telling me that I could trust myself and that she would always be there with me. My father was a powerful businessman who made so much money that I could do whatever I wanted. He was loving and gentle towards me but he was protective and hated the idea of me growing older and moving out of his house where he couldn’t watch over me every day. He would buy me presents all the time. I remember the Christmas when he bought me a horse. It was sitting in the stable with a red bow around its neck. My parents sent me to a private arts school. My teachers were excellent mentors who made me feel seen and helped me to be fearless to express myself. I got to focus purely on my areas of interest and talent. I studied arts and English and physiology. I had a group of really close friends, we did everything together and we even wore matching friendship necklaces as dorky as it sounds. I lost my virginity when I was sixteen to my high school sweetheart on a camping trip. It felt like the closest I have ever been to someone in all my life. I went to Harvard University and graduated when I was 25 years old with a medical degree. I set the world on fire with my new theories about integrative medicine. I was healthy and I was excited to be alive. I was on a ski trip in Alaska when my high school sweetheart proposed to me. We were at the top of a mountain in a ski lodge when I turned around and noticed that he was on one knee holding a beautiful engagement ring. I said yes and the whole room went wild. We called everyone to tell them. His mother cried and said “finally”. We had a perfect beach wedding, our families (who were already friends) were so happy, the celebration lasted long into the night. I opened a clinic, where I employed so many other physicians that I could take time off. So, after a year of marriage, we decided to have a baby. I got pregnant that very same month. I surprised my husband by making a cop pull him over on his way home and pretend to give him a ticket, but giving him the pregnancy test instead. The pregnancy was a complete joy. I stayed at home to write and publish my first book. It was completely stress free. I had a natural orgasmic birth; in our own home with a midwife it was one of the best days of my life. I felt like I experienced the power of my divine felinity for the first time. It was a boy, we were in heaven. The three of us were so connected that I felt a sense of belonging that was even deeper than the closeness and belonging I felt with my parents growing up. And so on… Add as much to this fantasy past list as you wish. Some people will only write one page, other people will be drawn to write pages upon pages. When you are done writing this list, I want you to close your eyes again and imagine this fantasy in depth. For example, Imagine your parents keeping you instead of giving you up for adoption. Imagine your parents deciding not to get a divorce, but instead loving each other Imagine your fantasy father exactly how you would wish him to be Imagine your fantasy mother exactly how you would wish her to be Imagine you taking that opportunity and becoming an instant success Imagine yourself being popular in school and the other children including you and wanting you to play Imagine yourself as rich as a prince or princess Imagine your life exactly how you would have wanted it to be And then, imagine a coffin or a funeral pyre. One by one, imagine laying each fantasy in that coffin or on that pyre.
If you feel like it, once you have collected everything you want to put into that coffin or funeral pyre, mentally say a eulogy, which will help you to release these fantasies. Something like “I hereby lay to rest my fantasy of the mother I wanted. It wasn’t in the cards for me. It did not happen and it wasn’t my fault. I am ready to release you now and live my life from this day forward; doing what I can with what I have from where I am.”
Now, mentally close the lid and place a flower on top and go through the entire process of burying it in the earth. Or light a match and imagine setting the funeral pyre ablaze and watching all of it turn to ash. Feeling grief during this process is natural. Let yourself cry if you feel like you need to cry. Let yourself sink to the floor. Let yourself get angry. Be present with whatever happens inside you emotionally, without trying to change it. And when you feel like you are ready to come back to the here and now, wiggle your toes and fingers and take three deep breaths before you open your eyes. After you open your eyes, take the sheet or sheets (plural) of paper that you wrote all of your negative experiences and fantasies on and find a secure place to set them on fire. Watch the fire consume the words on the paper, knowing that they are now released back to source. You are now free. You are no longer burdened by these past events or weighed down by fantasies that did not come true.
I know that some of you might be confused about why I am introducing this technique seeing as how I teach that mind creates reality and that you could technically manifest anything you like. The thing is, if we are completely honest, we do differentiate between our fantasy and what we know actually happened. The minute we differentiate the fantasy from the reality, we acknowledge the fantasy as not true and the reality as true. You cannot lie to yourself. You cannot actually lie to yourself that something is or could be true if you don’t believe it is true or don’t believe it could be true. Lying to yourself keeps you in a state of self-hate and self-distrust. If we keep trying to undo what was done, we miss opportunities in the here and now. We may not even see them. And when it comes to people, if we keep trying to turn them into what we always wished they would be, we are running into a dead end. We inevitably find out that we have no control over them and that they constantly disappoint us. The reality of who they really are and how they really act is constantly shattering the fantasy we have of how we want them to be.
As morbid as it is, think of being attached to the fantasy of how we wish the past had gone like trying to revive a dead body. It is much the same because we are trying to revive a dead past. How long are you going to prop this dead body up at your dinner table and talk to it and give it baths and pretend it is alive, before you admit to yourself that you know (but don’t want to face) that it isn’t alive. How long before you let the body go? How long until you decide to own up to what was and what is and grieve your losses and set yourself free to move forward with what you do have from where you actually are?
You may feel like doing this process alone, but I have also found that doing this process in groups can be particularly healing, especially if you share your process with each other afterwards and collectively burn your lists. It is natural to grieve the death of a fantasy. And so it is a good idea and healing in and of itself to support one another as you move through this process. This symbolic burial is a perfect way to put to rest the “if onlys”. After all, chasing a fantasy wreaks havoc in our lives. And it prevents the universe from bringing us the beautiful, feel good reality that we have been looking for.

Please Love Me

Today I’m going to talk to you on a very grounded, human level about one of the most common and fatal relationship dynamics that occurs in today’s world. I am going to describe this dynamic in its most usual form, where a woman plays one part and a man plays the other part. Keep in mind though that it is possible for the roles to be reversed and keep in mind that this same dynamic occurs in same sex couples. I am going to call this dynamic the “please love me” dynamic. Usually in the please love me dynamic, the woman is continuously trying to capture and keep a man’s attention (and therefore love). And a man feels like he can’t please the woman (and therefore be loved by her) so he withdraws.
Let’s start with the woman’s part. This is a widespread epidemic. We have all seen those movies, movies like Romeo and Juliet or The Notebook. We crave that level of intimacy. We crave the connection. We are jealous to the point of rage of those women who somehow manage to manifest men who are crazy about them; men who would climb walls and forge oceans and be there for them through thick and thin. We want men who are masculine enough to not be threatened by us, and who are masculine enough to take the lead; men who appreciate us for exactly who we are here and now. But what’s the reality? The reality is that we find men who are never “all in”. We find men who are apathetic towards us. We spend every minute of our lives trying to come up with ways to entice them into the center of the relationship. We try to inspire them to put effort into us. We feel like we have to do backbends to try to capture their interest and keep it. We end up exhausted. We end up feeling lonely. We may be in the same room, but we are alone and in the same room. We start to feel desperate. Desperate becomes the emotional status quo. This desperation for love and attention, this desperation for energy to come towards us, makes us feel utterly powerless to our partner. We start to get angry. We start to criticize. As a result, the men in our lives feel unloved. They feel like we have made a turnabout from loving to hating and as a result, they withdraw. They find ways to distance themselves from the relationship, which makes us angrier, which makes them withdraw more, which makes us angrier, which makes them withdraw more. It is essentially a snowball headed for hell.
And now for the man’s part, men dream of being with a woman who is vivacious and carefree, who can enjoy loving and enlivening moments without stress. They want a deep connection with a woman who is self assured enough to let them be what they are and do what they want to do yet feminine enough to let them take the lead. They want a woman who can love and appreciate them exactly as they are here and now. But what’s the reality? The reality is that you find women who are constantly displeased with something about you. You find women who nag and you find women who criticize. Your life is riddled with stress, a stress that doesn’t exist when you are away from her. You feel like whatever you do isn’t good enough and you can’t figure out what she does want. It’s like you are communicating in different languages. You start to feel trapped in a situation where you can’t win. You don’t know how to make the other person happy. So you start to withdraw. And you start to build a silent resentment. And where does your pent up frustration and energy go? It goes into fantasies, into drugs, into pornography or into other women. As a result, the women in your lives feel more unloved. They start to criticize you more. They start to beg for love in the only way they know how. They pull on you and that makes you want to withdraw more which makes them criticize and pull you towards them more, which makes you withdraw more and like I said before, this is a snowball headed straight for hell. This vibrational dance can be visualized easily by imagining that intimacy and a committed relationship is like a kitty pool between two people. In this dynamic, one partner (usually the female) is trying to entice and pull the other into the kitty pool with her. The other (usually male) is trying to exit the kitty pool. When it comes to what created this dynamic, we must look to childhood. Keep in mind that yet again, there are exceptions to the scenario I’m going to put forward. For example, the same sex parent may have been the offender instead of the opposite sex parent. It just so happens that it is usually the opposite sex parent that sets the vibrational stage for our expectation of romantic partners.
We begin with the girls. As girls we had fathers who could not develop intimacy and emotional closeness with us. We had fathers who always had something more important to do. They were always working at the office or working on a project around the house or engaging in a hobby or lavishing their attention on our mothers. Our fathers did not initiate quality time with us. They did not get to know who we were or what we liked and disliked. We had to literally do backbends to get their attention. They did not extend their energy towards us in any way. Instead, they made us feel like we had to capture and earn their attention and then work doubly hard to keep that attention. As much as we wanted to be, we were not daddy’s girls. This feeling is compounded if our fathers were also not protectors and did not keep us safe from physical or emotional harm as children. People outside the family or people inside the family, like siblings or our mothers, could have inflicted this harm. This feeling is also compounded if our relationship with our mothers was bad because they did not love us well either. If we did not have an unconditionally loving mother either, our desperation for our father’s love increases because we are trying to escape loneliness and also fear through gaining his attention and energy. It is quite common that if we felt like we had to compete with our mother or another sibling for our father’s attention, we will find ourselves involved with an apathetic mate, whose affections stray towards other women. It is also quite common that if we had to compete with a career or a hobby for our father’s attention, we will find ourselves involved with an apathetic mate whose attention will be taken up with work or a hobby. It is hard for us to recognize that the exact same feeling we had in our relationship with our fathers is the exact same feeling we have in our romantic relationships because we have buried this pain of desperation for attention and love from our fathers deeply beneath our craving and wanting of them. We glorified them in our minds and so we cannot admit to how much they hurt us.
Now for the boys, as boys you had mothers who were so enmeshed that they could not let you be free. Your mothers smothered you with closeness, but not a kind of closeness that felt good. You had mothers who mistook worry for love. They nagged you and criticized you. It was a closeness that came with judgment. You had mothers who had a vested interest in how you would turn out, what you would wear and how you would behave. You had mothers who guilted you for making them unhappy. You had mothers who were controlling. Their love felt like poison because it wasn’t given freely. It was only given in response to pleasing them. And it never seemed like you could please them enough. Your mother was unpleasable. She approved of only what you did for her. She loved you only for what she wanted you to be, not for who you actually were. Your relationship with her was stressful. Your mothers made you responsible for their happiness and so; you learned that the only way to survive her was to shut down to her emotionally. You learned that intimacy was dangerous. You want it, but you also see it as an open door for entrapment. You may have been momma’s boys. But the truth is, you didn’t want to be. It didn’t feel good to be a momma’s boy with this mother. This feeling is compounded if you had an overly passive, escapist or addicted father figure who did not fulfill the role of supportive husband when you were young. When this is the case, mothers often use their sons as substitute husbands. Which saddles the son with having to provide emotional support for their mother. This adds even more fuel to the fire of this particular condition.
It is hard for you to recognize that the exact same feeling you had in your relationship with our mothers is the exact same feeling we have in your romantic relationships because you feel guilty for seeing your mother in this light. You feel sorry for her or you feel disloyal to her. To some degree, you are still committed to her wellbeing and so you cannot let yourself see the relationship for what it was. This is one of the most common dynamics in relationships today. We develop the same dynamic with our boyfriends and husbands that we felt with our father. We develop the same dynamic with our girlfriends and wives that we felt with our mother. So what do we do about it? First, we have to recognize that we are trying desperately to heal from our suppressed past pain with our parents by recreating it in our adult lives. Just realizing that you are doing the same thing and are feeling the exact same feeling goes a long, long way. This helps you to pull your energy back from feeding the dynamic. Ask yourself this question, am I trying to turn my apathetic father into the involved, loving, protective father figure that I wanted by trying to turn my apathetic partner into the involved, committed, protective and intimate lover that I want? Am I trying to turn my unpleasable mother into the unconditionally loving, approving, carefree mother figure that I always wanted by trying to turn my impossible to please, critical, clingy partner into the self assured, unconditionally loving, approving partner that I want? As women we have to be willing to let the relationship end and stop pulling at his energy or begging for attention. Our number one fear is that if we stop pulling a man towards us, that he will not come toward us of his own volition. And I am here to tell you that it may just be true. But it is better to not be with a man at all than to spend your time pulling him towards you. There are a great many programs for women that teach you how to train a man to love you like you need him to. One of the number one techniques is called mirroring. You withdraw when he withdraws. You come close when he comes close. And it may work yes. But it also guarantees that you will spend your life living on your toes. Instead of relaxing into a supportive intimate relationship with a man who WANTS to and is WILLING to be committed to a relationship and invest energy in you, your relationship will turn into a highly manipulative game. And you will be doing nothing more than you were doing with your father. You will be doing nothing more than trying to structure your behavior so you can get the reaction you want from him. Pour all the energy you would pour into trying to get him to want to be present with you, into yourself instead. Tell him what you need and want and if he doesn’t follow through, live your own life as if he is not present. If he fades out of your life, that is your indication that he wasn’t supposed to be in it. To some degree you need to accept that if he wanted to be there, he would be.
As men, you need to decide if you really do want to be in the relationship or not. There is no wrong answer to this question. If the answer is no, then cut it off. If the answer is yes, then you’ve got to be brave enough to learn how to initiate and show love. You’ve got to be brave enough to come to the center of the kitty pool and not withdraw. There are people who can teach you how to love someone. There are so many suggestions about how to show love to someone else on the internet alone. Go looking for them. Ask your friends and ask Google how to show love for someone, research romantic ideas. If you can’t figure it out, ask your partner. They will be able to tell you what kinds of things make them feel loved. And you also have to pay enough attention to your emotions to recognize when you are withdrawing and choose to do the opposite. It is a choice that you are making to withdraw and prioritize other things. If you wanted to be with her, you would be. So make that decision.
We also need to do inner child work to rescue the inner children who are actually still stuck in these fatal relationship dynamics with our parents. Girls, you need to mentally create better fathers for your inner children. You need to validate your inner children and give them unconditional attention. Boys, you need to mentally defend your inner children against their mothers controlling and critical behavior. Defend them against the guilt. Mentally create better husbands for your mothers and let your inner children be free. Validate them for who they are and help them to feel loved and seen for who they really are.
Another thing we need to do, is to be clear and brutally honest with our partners about what we want and need from them and we need to be brutally and severely honest about whether we can provide those things for our partners. If not, we need to end the relationships instead of trying for years to force ourselves sideways. We need to let ourselves find people who want to meet those needs. This next tip goes hand in hand with the last. Both partners need to learn how to value themselves. When we do not feel loved because our partner is apathetic towards us or our partner criticizes us, that is our indication that we are not valuing ourselves enough.
The only sure fire way of ending this relationship dynamic so that it does not continue to be a staple of adult relationships in future generations is to parent differently. Mothers, we need to stop nagging and criticizing our children. We cannot make them the substitute for our absentee husbands. We need to separate our fear of how other people will think of us from our children so we can stop controlling them or trying to turn them into what we want them to be. Pretend that your children are unique flowers, you have no idea what they are going to turn into and that is the fun of it. Your job is to unconditionally be present with them. Let them be free. They do not belong to you. They are not extensions of you. Practice positive focus towards them. They are individual beings with their own destinies, their own wants and their own needs. You are setting them up for what to expect from a girlfriend or wife in the future. You are setting them up to be with women who nag and criticize and who are never pleased with them. Fathers, you need to start taking an active role in your daughter’s life. Let go of the apathy. Get to know who she is. Show her that you value and love her. Spend time with her. Let her know that you will keep her safe. Put your energy into her and put effort towards her. Don’t expect her to know that you love her because you are her dad. Intimacy is more than sexuality. Do not be afraid that by being close with your daughter you are crossing a line with her. You can have an intimate relationship with someone that doesn’t involve sex at all. Let your heart touch hers. Intimacy can be broken up into “into me see”.
Intimacy means seeing into someone completely. And showing them that you love them as a result of seeing them completely. You are setting them up for what to expect from a boyfriend or husband in the future. You are setting them up to be with men who are apathetic towards them who do not value them and who withdraw from them. You are setting them up to desperately run after men who do not really love them. This dynamic is so common in today’s world (because of the common dynamic between parents and children) that one could say it is a vibrational epidemic. But the good news is we have the power to end it. And the road to ending it, as always begins with recognizing it.

The Catch and The Loser, A Match Made In Heaven!

One could argue that success and lack of success is just a matter of perspective. But for the sake of this discussion, let’s assume that success means someone whose actions and choices demonstrate a passionate about their progression and as a result they have become financially successful and have attained both personal and career achievements. Let’s assume that unsuccessful means someone whose actions and choices demonstrate apathy about their progression and as a result they have become financially unsuccessful and have atrophied on a personal and career level. I receive e-mails every week from people who are successful asking me why they keep falling for unsuccessful people. From the outside looking in (and to put it in societal terms), this relationship takes the form of the catch dating the loser. So what makes the ‘successfuls’ such a match to the ‘losers’ when it comes to relationships? The answer is low self worth.
‘Successfuls’ are achievers, if you are an achiever, you are an achiever because you were expected to achieve. More often than not, successful people only got love from their parents or caregivers for accomplishments. They only got praise when they were impressing someone. The rest of the time, they were either ignored or were treated like a burden. The ‘successfuls’ needed to earn love. Your parents often saw you as the difficult strong willed child and instead of treating you like you were cherished; your parents treated you like you were something to “put up with”. You go on to try to earn love from your parents and then from society by achieving. You try to accomplish in the hopes that the accomplishment will make you worthy of love. You have a very poor sense of self worth and deep down; you do not believe that you deserve the love you want. You believe that love is a transaction and so subconsciously, you believe that if you are not offering enough (through the way you look or the things you do for someone or the social status you give them or the money you make), there is no incentive on the other end to stay. By securing a partner that has a lot to gain by being in the relationship, you can guarantee that you will not be abandoned. Subconsciously, you believe that if a person was as successful as you were, or even more successful, there would be no incentive for them to stay and be an “all in” partner. Also, if you were to be with a responsible, successful, attractive partner, subconsciously you feel that you would suddenly be demoted and look bad in comparison. Being with them would make you more aware of your shortcomings and your self worth would sink even lower. To begin with, when you first get into a relationship you feel secure in the relationship because you feel that you can trust the commitment of your “lesser” partner. But soon, the love transaction turns sour. It turns sour because suddenly, instead of feeling valued and supported, you feel as if you have caught a parasite. The apathy of your partner and subsequent lack of success, saddles you with all the responsibility. And all that needs to happen is for the other person to relax and “settle” into the relationship (therefore not putting effort into you or their own success) for you to feel as if you are being taken for granted and taken advantage of.
As for the ‘unsuccessful’, unsuccessfuls are self sabotagers. They are self sabotagers because they were sabotaged. If you are an unsuccessful, more often than not, you had parents that only gave you love when you were meeting their needs and wants. You were discouraged from finding your own success. Secretly, you resent that your life has to revolve around other people and what they want and what they need, but you don’t know any other way to live and you don’t know any other way to get love. You have been discouraged so much and disappointed so much that you figure “why try”. Deep down, you don’t believe that you have what it takes to succeed and subconsciously, you’d rather not try. You’d rather say that you could have succeeded, than try to succeed and fail instead, thus finding out that you really are incapable and really are a loser. Your life is a self fulfilling prophecy, where your apathy is accomplishing the very thing you are trying to avoid by not trying. To you, love is a transaction. Subconsciously, you believe that if you are not living your life for someone, you do not serve a purpose to him or her and so there is no incentive for them to stay with you. By securing a partner who needs you to cater to them, you can guarantee that you will not be abandoned. Subconsciously, you believe that if a person did not need you to support them and their success for any reason, there would be no incentive for them to stay with you. To begin with, when you first get into a relationship you feel secure in the relationship because you feel that you will be needed and serve a purpose for your “greater” partner. You also tend to sell yourself to your partner by talking a big game about your ambitions and current situation. But soon, the love transaction turns sour. It turns sour because your walk doesn’t match your talk and when your partner figures that out, they feel put upon by you and by your lack of success and they begin to criticize you. Deep down, you feel guilty. Deep down, you feel bad about yourself. Instead of feeling valuable and needed, you feel like you are a parasite. And all that needs to happen is for your partner to begin criticizing you for you to feel as if you are being taken for granted and taken advantage of.
If you are a ‘successful’ who continues to dates ‘losers’, you need to ask yourself this question “What bad thing would happen if I were to date someone who was responsible and successful and attractive?” You will often find that the successful feels that if they were to find a good catch that was equal to them or better, that there would be no incentive for the other person to be in the relationship. Successfuls feel that they are inherently unlovable for a great many reasons. For this reason, it is important to ask yourself, “What about me would a responsible, successful, and attractive person not put up with?” You will often find that the very things you think they wont put up with are the very things your parents or peers criticized you for. For example, if a mother tells her daughter, “if it weren’t for your good looks, no one would put up with your moods”, she is bound to think a good catch wont put up with her moodiness and would therefore leave her or not enter into the relationship in the first place because of it. If you are an unsuccessful who continues to date successfuls, you need to ask yourself this question “What bad thing would happen if I were to become responsible and successful and attractive?” You will often find that the unsuccessful feels that if they were to become a success, there would be no incentive for people to be in the relationship with them. Unsuccessfuls feel that they are unlovable for a great many reasons. For this reason it is important to ask yourself, “If I were responsible, successful and attractive, why would people not want to be with me?” People who are unsuccessful and people who are successful are a match made in heaven because the difference between them is only skin deep. Looking deeper, we see that they share the exact same vibration relative to the way they see themselves. Also, in this universe where expansion is the order of the day, they perfectly mirror each other’s shadows (unhealed aspects) so that each may be aware of what needs to be integrated within themselves. Developing self-approval is a must for both the successful and unsuccessful. Every morning when you first wake up, pick one thing (to be brutally honest with yourself about) that you don’t accept or approve of about yourself. It is especially good when these things come from your list of answers to the questions you were asked earlier in this episode. Then, challenge yourself to think outside the box (and elicit help from others to think outside the box) and write a large list of things that make you feel better about that thing. Chose things that enable you to approve of that thing instead of disapprove of it. For example, let’s say I think I am dark and I hate that I am dark (and therefore think that it renders me unlovable to an ideal mate),my list may look something like this: Dark looks exotic and therefore people think it is sexy. It is mysterious and intriguing I’m incredibly good at shadow work I go into places inside myself that most people never go inside themselves, which means I know myself SO much more than other people know themselves. I have courage I’m not afraid of the dark side I fear less in life because I’m familiar with the darkness You must have darkness of night to see the light of the stars I have a better Idea about what happiness is, because of the contrast. I break people out of their monotony and captivate their attention. I am not surfacey, I’m deep I can accompany people through their most difficult and real issues, so I am a REAL partner. I don’t have fear about delving into other people’s psyches I am a brilliant therapist/guide/psychologist. I can be with people wherever they are. I am so good at mental chess that I can outwit people’s egos and make people aware of what they cannot see Black is source energy, it gave birth to the light. Alchemy… I transform the dark into light Dark is the most transformative energy. All frequencies are contained within dark. I am always peering into the shadow of life. This means, I live a more real life than most. I like to have fun, but my life is not all about fun. I use this life for my expansion. I use it as the tool that it is. If I am dark and I live in the dark, I have released resistance to the dark, and so, I am pure light. I am cultured, knowledgeable, I have seen so much first hand… I KNOW!!! If I identify with suffering, I’m compassionate. I can befriend those who are lost in the shadow and guide them through it. Because I am dark, I can form deep connections with people on all levels, not just the pretty ones. *I make people feel like they are not alone. The darkness makes you feel like you are alone. Suffering makes you feel like you are not alone. The way I am and the way I look (dark) is an advertisement that I’m there with them… I’m of the dark, So you are not alone here, lets come together, we are together in this expedition through the dark. I make it ok for people to go into the darkness and be where they are. Cleaning up the past, cleaning up the subconscious. It’s wisdom It’s not boring!! The most expansive respectable and lovable beings are of the dark energy… like Thich Nhat Hanh and Osho, Carl Jung, Byron Katie, Echart Tole, If I am honest about it, I love delving into the shadow. It is my passion. I’m a self awareness junkie. He who knows the dark within him, is self aware. Etc. The more you can think of the better.
Aside from the lack of self worth inherent on both sides, the main problem with this relationship is that successfuls and unsuccessfuls both suffer from their perspective on love. Both people believe that love is a transaction. A transaction is like a business deal. It is the reciprocal exchange of one thing for another. They believe something must be given to get love. They do not understand that love is not something that can be earned. They do not understand that love is something that can be given freely without incentive. What they seek in love relationships is not love; so much as it is mutualism. Mutualism is not love. But providing something beneficial for someone can be a good excuse for him or her to focus positively towards you. That’s just the problem. It’s conditional. This mutualism is inherently painful because it makes unconditional love impossible. The second you receive love for something you do; you acknowledge subconsciously that you are unlovable for your being. Love is a unilateral experience. It is the state of unconditional presence. It is the state of positive focus towards something. In fact, the vibration of love and the vibration of appreciation are so identical that there is no need to differentiate between the two. That positive focus unites one with their eternal self and also with the person they focus positively towards. That positive focus does not have to be dependent upon what the other person does or does not do. After all, it is possible to focus positively towards and have positive feelings for an autistic child who is throwing a fit. Positive focus is about the giver, not the receiver. We did not get unconditional presence and positive focus when we were young, unless we were doing something that caused our parents to focus positively towards us. So we do not know what love is or how to give or receive it, any more than they knew what love was or how to give or receive it.
Love is the word we use, when what most of us are talking about in our relationships is mutualism. There is nothing wrong with mutualism. Mutualism supports oneness and unity. But love and mutualism are two different ingredients to partnership. And if love is conditioned upon mutualism then neither partner can be assured of love unless they have something good to offer and keep up their end of the transaction.

Why Your Relationships Hurt

If you really thought about it, I bet you could come up with a description of what your perfect relationship would feel like. The relationship that you consciously want would be unconditionally loving and supportive, intimate and fun. But no matter what you do, you can’t find that relationship. It’s like you are cursed. You keep ending up with partners who make you feel unloved, unsupported, undervalued, unseen and stressed. You keep asking yourself “why do I deserve this?” Well guess what, it has nothing to do with deserving. It has everything to do with your subconscious mind. We are creatures of habit. In this world, which feels chaotic and unsafe to us, we feel as if we can guarantee stability, continuity and a sense of certainty by returning to what is familiar. Instinctually we eat at that same restaurant every week or month. We sleep on the same side of the bed. We assign specific spots to our kitchen utensils. We wear the same style of clothing. We watch the same television shows, we have sex the same way… do I need to go on?
Here’s the thing, when you were a child, with no conscious idea about what love is, and with a cerebral cortex that was not developed yet, you were interacting with the world purely through felt perception. You felt the world long before you intellectualized it. And the way you felt about something, set up your expectations and then beliefs about that thing. Even if you had a violent, abusive or lonely childhood, your home was still “home”. It was where you went to sleep at night. It is where you were fed and clothed (or not fed and clothed). It was where you got your attention (or lack there of). Children are born loving their parents. And they are born assuming that their parents love them. The relationship with the family they are born into is their first taste of human connection and thus, their first taste of love. It doesn’t matter if we, in our adult perspective look backwards and say “that was not a loving household”, a child doesn’t know any different than this version if love that exists in their home. Because of this, they associate LOVE with HOME. The way that they felt in their home and in their relationship with their parents becomes their definition of love. This means, if your home felt like chaos and confusion and loneliness and deception, you think that is what love is supposed to feel like. As we grow up, we become conscious of what is good and what is bad. We banish things we think are bad to the subconscious mind. We try to deny them, we try to avoid looking at them and we try to forget them, and often succeed. This is why so many people do not remember their childhoods. The minute that we develop a conscious definition of what love is and how we want love to feel, we create a rift between our subconscious definition of love and our conscious definition of love. Consciously, we know love should feel loving and supportive and open and trusting. Subconsciously, we know love should feel unloving, unsupportive, constricted and fearful. On a conscious level, we think we are going after the partners who will make us feel that conscious definition of love. But, our subconscious mind (the one that is in charge of our instant biochemical attraction to someone) which is much more primal and much more in charge of our emotions, only allows us to become attracted to someone who fits it’s definition of love. Your mind will link any associations you have with home, with what love is supposed to feel like. And when you consciously decide you want love in your life, your subconscious compels you towards partners who satisfy those associations you have with love. Your subconscious mind takes you back to your childhood home. So this is how it works, if love equals home and home equals abandonment than love equals abandonment.
Let’s say that when you were growing up, you were born to an alcoholic father and an enabling mother. Home to you, felt like anxiety and it felt like crisis. You were always trying to avoid your father’s raging hot temper and you felt like nothing you could do was right. To some degree, everyone’s focus was on your father and so you were ignored whenever you were not being yelled at. You felt lonely in your childhood home. You wanted to run away, but you didn’t know how. When you grow up, even though you consciously want a partner who is there with you and who is kind and gentle and who makes you feel complete inside, you keep ending up with partners who make you feel anxiety. Life with them is one crisis after another. You are drawn to people who at first seem cool and collected, but who turn out to have extremely hot tempers. They ignore you when they aren’t yelling at you. And to some degree, you feel immeasurably lonely, you want to end the relationship, but you don’t know how. The thing is, despite your suspicions, it’s not that all men or all women are this way. You meet plenty of women or men who are loving and who could make for great, supportive partners and who seldom (if ever) get angry. But when you meet them, you don’t feel that “spark”. Your subconscious mind says, “This is not what love feels like, so I don’t think its love”. Whereas, when you meet someone and your subconscious mind senses that they are an unstable person with a hot temper, who is emotionally distant, it says, “Ah, this must be love”. Your subconscious mind, compelled by instinct, takes you right back to your childhood home in the same way that without your conscious notice, it compels you to sleep on the same side of the bed at night. And three months later, you’re kicking yourself asking “why me”? So we are going to do an exercise. Take out a piece of paper and think back to how you felt in your childhood home. Write down what it felt like to be at home and what it felt like to be around your parents growing up. For many of us, home was a mix of good feelings and bad feelings. But it is the painful associations that we have with home that causes the problems in our love relationships. For this reason, when you write this list, I want you to make sure to write down all the negative things and negative feelings you can remember about being in your childhood home and in your relationship with your parents, siblings and/or or primary caregivers up until you left home. When you have completed this list, cross out the word love and in it’s place, write LOVE. You are looking at your subconscious definition of love; do your relationship make more sense now? There is a famous psychologist and self-help author named Barbara De Angeles. She is most known for her work with relationships in the 90s. During some of her seminars, she would have people in the audience do an exercise called the “Wanted Ad”. We are going to do that exercise today. You have seen the “wanted” relationship ads in the newspaper that go a little something like this: Wanted: Sensitive, caring man (or woman) who is capable of a deep relationship. Sense of humor is a must. I’m looking for someone who is successful but is not a workaholic. And most importantly, I seek someone who is emotionally available. If you are honest, healthy, trustworthy and ready for a commitment, then I am the one for you, call (insert number here). However, if you were to match your emotional wants ad to the partners you actually end up with, it is as if your “wanted” ad must have read like this: Wanted: Self centered, insensitive man (or woman) who is incapable of a deep relationship. Seriousness and no sense of humor is a must. I’m looking for someone who is dead broke, regardless of how much he works. And you must be emotionally unavailable. If you are dishonest, unhealthy, untrustworthy and afraid of commitment, I am the one for you. Call (insert number here).
So obviously, as we saw in the previous exercise, what our conscious minds say we want and what our subconscious minds say we want are two different things. So take out another sheet of paper and write down the names of any romantic partners that you were emotionally attached to, including the relationship you are in now. These should be significant relationships. The ones where you felt that you were really in love or at least seriously attached to them in some way. Now, next to each person’s name, write down all of his or her negative qualities. What did you dislike about them or how you felt around them? For example, Mike: jobless, dishonest, controlling, manipulative, moody, used me for money, made me feel like I was worthless, impractical, flirted with my sister, could not communicate, made me feel completely alone. Or Mary: Emotionally unstable, crazy, whiny, insecure, drama queen, victim, made me the bad guy, hated sex, negative, critical, closed minded. Once you have finished, go over your lists and circle any qualities that repeat themselves. For example, if every person you were with was critical, circle critical. These circled aspects will tell you what your subconscious definition of love really is. Now, with the words you have circled, write a creative wanted ad. By doing this, you will come to understand what “advertisement” you are subconsciously putting out for a partner; as well as the kind of people you are actually attracted to. This is the kind of person you have been seeking. This is why relationships are painful to you. It is good if we can learn to laugh at our choices. So, try to make this want ad as funny as you possibly can. Try to write something that makes you laugh. For your viewing pleasure, here are two examples of “truthful want ads”, one written by a female and one written by a male.
Female Version Wanted: Are you looking for a relationship where you don’t have to take care of your woman, where you don’t have to invest any energy into the relationship whatsoever (including money)? Do you want a relationship where you don’t have to think of romantic things to do and can avoid emotional intimacy all together? Then I am the woman for you. I am looking for an apathetic man, someone willing to forsake me, because being forsaken is my secret fetish. I want a man who can make me feel like damaged goods. I want to watch the sun set with a man who is broke, lacks ambition, will only tolerate me when I’m positive and only wants to have fun. No responsibility required. If you like to give up on your woman and you’re trying to find someone who doesn’t feel taken for granted and unlovable when you do that, call me at: (insert phone number here)
Male Version: Wanted: Antisocial bachelor with intimacy issues seeks a dark, vampiric witch who is both crazy and unhinged. I can deal with the craziness as long as you're hot. Sex appeal fixes all problems, until a little while later when problems REALLY blow up. I usually say I want a quiet, simple, stable homemaker; but I actually don't because let’s be honest, I'd get bored of you super quickly. Instability makes me feel at home and I love power struggles. Drama is a must. What I really want is someone that keeps me on my toes like an exhausting and strategic game of chess. If you've had a really fucked up childhood this gives me the chance to 'rescue' you and then I'm all yours. Emotional volatility wins my heart and attention every time... Well, at least my attention. Call me at (insert number here)
When you are done, compare the findings from this exercise and from your previous “home” exercise to gain more awareness of your subconscious definition of love. What you will find is that the same negative qualities you find in a mate, perfectly mirror the way you felt in your childhood home.
Becoming aware of our subconscious emotional drives, is the first step towards becoming vigilent about the partners we choose. And, it clears up the confusion we feel in our current relationships by allowing us to see our relationship dynamic for what it really is. The more awareness we have about something, the easier it is to make changes according to that expanded awareness. Our relationships will improve if we can become aware enough to make our relationship problems (and the discussions that come from those problems) about what they are really about.

How To Stop Expecting The Worst

The feeling of looking forward to things in the future is one of the best feelings we experience in life. It makes us feel like we are excited to be here. It makes us trust that our future holds good feeling things for us. It makes us move forward without fear. It makes us feel like we are headed towards the light and that our desires are meant to be ours. But what about the people who do not feel this way? For a great many of us, instead of looking forward to things, we expect the worst. When we expect the worst, it makes us distrust and fear our future. It makes us feel like we are destined to suffer and that the future holds tragedy for us. Instead of heading into the light, it feels like we are walking around a blind curve and potential indescribable darkness. For us, it feels like our desires are not meant to be ours.
Why do we expect bad things to happen? We expect bad things to happen because bad things did happen to us. To one degree or another, tragedy did strike for us. And when it struck, we felt so blindsided, so powerless and so unable to explain why it happened, that we decided we had no control over our lives. We decided we were at the mercy of a cruel world that could harm us at any moment. We decided that the only control we did have and the only way to ensure that we would not get blindsided again, was to prepare for the worst. Preparing for the worst, is a coping mechanism. It is a survival strategy for those of us who feel deep down as if we do not create our own reality. It is a survival mechanism for those of us who have been hurt and especially for those of us who have been hurt again and again. The most painful part about expecting the worst is the feeling of grieving for things before they have even happened. We miss people before they are even gone. We feel disappointment before we have been let down. We feel the crushing weight of the loss of people we love, even when they are alive and well. So how did this all begin? By the time we had graduated from babyhood into childhood, most of us had forgotten that we selected this life (and our family of origin) because of the way it would facilitate our soul progression. We had no idea that we were creating our reality with our thoughts and that our feelings were reflecting back to us what we were a vibrational match to. And so, we did not recognize the emotional and mental pre-conditions that made us a vibrational match to painful experiences, especially our most tragic experiences. This is why we felt blindsided by tragedy and came to expect the worst-case scenario. For example, lets say that we have forgotten that we chose into this life with a mother who could not love us like we needed to be loved. Lets say that we experienced losing the love of this parent and being ostracized by them and turning into the black sheep of the family. The deep levels of grief that we felt as a result (but tried to suppress in order to survive within the family), is a strong vibrational point of attraction. So, it makes us a match to tragedy, without us even knowing it. We are a match to tragedy because we are not letting ourselves grieve the loss of the connection we had with the person who was supposed to love us the very most. We are trying to deny it, trying to ignore the feeling, trying to feel differently, and doing anything we can to escape that feeling. By doing this, we are resisting and suppressing the feeling. We are stuck in it and it is stuck within us and it intensifies. Then, we experience the manifestation of a tragedy. This tragedy will usually be a magnification of the first tragedy. We will lose the connection with our loved ones even more. For example, one day we are at school and we get a phone call saying that our parent has died. Or we get kidnapped and thus separated from our family to an even more extreme degree. Because we do not acknowledge the way we felt prior to this tragedy, we feel blindsides by it. We do not recognize that this tragedy in fact did not blindside us at all. We felt blindsided only because we were living in an unconscious state. We were unconscious about how we truly felt prior to the incident, and even if we were conscious of what we felt prior, we did not see the connection between the way we felt prior and the way we felt as a result of the incident. Also, we were unconscious that we create our reality. We did not know that we could tell what we were creating in our future by virtue of how we felt today. So, we decided that the only way to ensure any emotional survival was to prepare for the worst so we would never be blindsided again.
It’s not like society looks down on preparing for the worst; in fact preparing for the worst is a glorified idea within our society. Even the military adheres to the philosophy “hope for the best, prepare for the worst”. But does that tell you what kind of mindset you have to be in to be a “prepare for the worst” kind of person? You have to be in an attitude of war and opposition. You have to feel as if the forces in the world are out to get you. To some degree, you must believe that there is malevolence in this universe and that it has its sights set on you. In a universe based on the law of attraction, we essentially experience whatever we expect. For those of us who expect the worst, this becomes a big problem. If we learn that we create your own realty by virtue of what we focus on and believe (we could call focus+believing expectation), and we are chronic worriers who expect the worst-case scenario, we start to fear our own negative focus and our own negative creations. This compounds our worry about the future. We are now worrying about worrying. We don’t know how to stop worrying and how to stop expecting the worst-case scenario, but we want to so badly because we are scared that we are creating the very thing we worry about. But the law of attraction is a very misunderstood concept. Law of attraction works like an impartial mirror. It merely reflects whatever you’re feeling in the form of a physical scenario. This should help you with this fear you have about creating the very thing you’re worrying about by worrying about it. Law of attraction as it applies to worry, means that if you worry, you will not necessarily attract the thing you are worrying about, what you will attract, is more worry. Worry is a match to worry. You will attract more things to worry about and more circumstances that cause you to worry. Tragedy is not usually a match to worry. Tragedy is a match to lower vibrational emotions, like loss and like grief. Lay the mind creates reality to the side for just a minute and pretend that we don’t create our reality. For those of you who don’t fully trust that you create your own reality and who expect the worst-case scenario, the following statistics may just help you out. 40% of what we worry about never happens – so in essence we are wasting our time by worrying about it. 30% of what we worry about has already happened. You cannot change the past – no one can. So in essence, we are wasting our time worrying about it. 22% are needless worries, what we call “petty worries” unrelated to catastrophe, such as we worry what someone else thinks about us or we worry about what’s for dinner, we worry about being late, or we worry about what to wear. 8% of what we worry about actually happens. And of this percentage, 4% of our worries that happen are beyond our control. We cannot change the outcome, no matter how much we plan. These worries may include illness, the death of a loved one or an impending natural disaster. And I can tell you personally that often times the reality of these events are more bearable than the worry. This means, 4% of what we worry about, we have some if not complete control over the results of. And it is the consequence of our action or inaction that creates the problems and challenges we face relative to this worry. Things like “I worried about getting injured in a car wreck, but didn’t buckle my seat belt.”
So what should we do if we are constantly preparing for the worst?
We need to stop suppressing the feeling of worry. We need to allow ourselves to grieve for the original tragedy that we experienced in our lives. Usually, this one is not one that we have conscious memory of. Usually, this one came before the tragedy that we consciously recall. To do this, we need to begin to allow ourselves to feel our feelings and fully allow them. We contain deep wounds within our emotional body. For this reason, I want you to watch my video on Youtube titled “How to Heal the Emotional Body” and apply the techniques suggested in that video. The more willing we are to feel, the less resistant we become to negative experiences, the less we worry about them happening and the less we try to prevent them from happening. We need to acknowledge that part of what is so scary is that we do not know what is going to happen. This is terrible on one hand because it means that bad things could happen. But we can use this uncertainty to our advantage by the simple acknowledgement that good things could happen too. If we can acknowledge that we do not actually know what is going to happen, we cannot say that we know 100% beyond a shadow of a doubt that something bad will happen. Just this simple acknowledgement can release our conviction that something bad will happen and thus, change the way we feel and thus raise our frequency. It is time to take a look at deserving. If you expect bad things to happen and if you prepare for the worst, to some degree you do not believe that you deserve good things to happen to you and yours. After all, subconsciously you think that if you deserved good things to happen, bad things wouldn’t have happened to you. For this reason, I want you to watch my YouTube video titled “Deserving”. And my YouTube video titled “Strike deserve from your vocabulary”. It is time to acknowledge the disappointment that overwhelms your life. So much of expecting the worst, comes in the package of disappointment. We don’t fear disappointment until it happens to us. So, we need to alter our perspective about disappointment. For this reason, I want you to watch my YouTube video titled “Disappointment”. And or gravitate towards any books or materials or programs that are designed to help you with disappointment. Begin to design your day around things to look forward to that you can control. Your day belongs to you. If you fear the future because you expect the worst, begin to place good things in your future by planning things that feel good to you and doing them throughout the day. Think of this like placing gold coins in your future and collecting them. Start very small. If we really expect tragedy to strike and expect disappointment, we will tend to feel like the bigger the thing is or the more we want it, the more likely it is to fall through. So start with things you would enjoy and things you think most likely will happen if you want them to happen. For example, I may believe that a vacation with friends will fall through and end in disappointment, but a lunch meeting with them will probably happen. So, I plan an enjoyable lunch meeting for today. Get in the habit of actually actively planning and scheduling into your day lots of little things that you can look forward to. Things like watching a movie or eating a treat or going on a walk or sitting on the beach or going swimming, or visiting someone etc. The more comfortable you get with expecting things to pan out and go well, the easier it will be to plan bigger things to look forward to and the less you’ll fear catastrophe. Keep a synchronicity journal to record synchronicities in every day. A synchronicity is anything that seems divinely orchestrated. For example, I was talking to someone about unicorns and then I was stopped at a stoplight and a man in a unicorn costume walked right in front of the car. Or, I was listening to an episode of ask teal that said I needed to work on deserving and here I am in the bathroom stall and there’s an advertisement for an upcoming event stuck to the back of the bathroom stall that says “you deserve”. Take note of every little synchronicity in your life. Not only will this help you to see that you are creating your reality, it will also help you to see that there is a purpose to everything. This exercise can even make you feel much less alone; like some unseen force is actually looking out for you and like all things are interconnected. When I’m teaching people to manifest, one of the first things I have them do is to keep a synchronicity journal. Spend time every day in an attitude of appreciation. To appreciate something is to acknowledge something that you enjoy. It is essentially pure positive focus. This time, is time spent observing and acknowledging the things that you do like about your life and that have gone well about your life. Some people carry an item in their pocket, like a stone or a dice and every time they reach into their pocket and touch it, they search for something to appreciate or feel gratitude for. Other people, like myself, wake up and write gratitude lists. To write a gratitude list, list everything you like or love about your life. Both past and present. The sky is the limit; this list could contain personality traits, actual items, people, circumstances, or events etc. For example, I could feel grateful for the book I’m reading, for the way it feels to hug my son or watch him while he’s sleeping, for the way that my cashew ice cream tastes, for how warm and cozy my bed is, for the fact that I get to set my own schedule. The point is, it’s impossible to expect the worst at the same time as focusing on things that have gone well for you or good things happening to you. When you acknowledge that there are things in your reality that feel good to have and to experience, it weakens the belief that bad things always happen. And on top of that, it feels really good to focus on things that feel good to focus on and so; you are increasing your vibration when you do that so you are no longer a match to worry. Reflect back on times when you thought that the worst-case scenario would happen, and it didn’t. Maybe you were convinced that a loved one who was hit by a car would die or slip into a coma, but they didn’t. They made a full recovery. Take note of these times, the brain must be allowed to see proof that it’s chronic worry is not always accurate. We can use doubt to our advantage this time, by letting the brain doubt itself and doubt it’s conviction that the worst-case scenario will happen. Let yourself go to the worst-case scenario intentionally. Most of our pain relative to worry is that we worry while trying to resist thinking about the worst-case scenario. It’s kind of like me saying to you “don’t think about lemons” Lemons are what you thought about the second I said not to. When we’re worrying, we are thinking about the worst-case scenario already, we are just resisting what we are already thinking about. So, intentionally let the reigns go and let yourself think consciously about the worst case scenario. Do not suppress your fears. It is important to acknowledge what you are afraid of. Just the simple awareness of what you’re afraid of increases your vibration. I suggest writing down your fears and allowing your brain to work with you towards alleviating your fears by planning. You are expecting WAY too much from yourself if you are expecting yourself to just stop expecting the worst overnight. Take control of your life by writing your fears down. Now separate your fears into two categories, things you can do something about and things you can’t do anything about. For the fears that you can do something about, start to strategize concrete steps that you can take to reduce those fears. For example, if I wrote down “failure on my career project” as a fear, I might set out concrete steps I can take today to succeed at that job like complete the project by June 1st, pick up supplies at staples, hire a consultant, or start today on the first draft. Then, one by one execute and cross off these steps as you do them. For now, the more control you feel over your reality and life experience, the less you will worry and the more you will start to expect things to go well. For the items in the “cannot control” list, practice the art of surrender or letting go. If you cannot do anything at all about something, worrying about it only hurts you in the here and now and does nothing to prevent anything. It may not be enough to stop you from worrying about it all together, but it is easier to stop worrying about something once our brain sees that no matter how much it thinks about it, no amount of strategizing is going to work. This brings at least some acceptance. Some people may assume that by doing this exercise, you’re focused on things going badly and thus are creating that for yourself. But here’s the thing, for people who are chronic worriers, we tend to worry and not take steps to alleviate our worry. We tend to worry less (and thus create less catastrophe) when we actually let ourselves do what is within our power to do to prevent the worst-case scenario. And if we can eventually go even further and make peace with the worst-case scenario, we will no longer worry about it at all. Begin to think positively about whatever you are worried about. This is not the same thing as lying to yourself. Manifestation experts, spiritual teachers, psychologists and even scientists agree that the things you center your attention on, shape the way you experience life. If you focus your attention on all the painful things that might happen in your future, you are not only calling more of that into your life, you are subconsciously self-sabotaging. Your fears will hold you back. They will harm or end relationships unnecessarily. Your low sense of self worth will prevent you from getting what you want. You may miss opportunities entirely because you are fixated on the painful possibilities of what could come. Start to acknowledge things that actually make you feel better about whatever you are worrying about. For example, if I’m worried that my son is going to get into a car wreck, I might intentionally acknowledge “car seats are made very well these days, he’s being driven by a really diligent person who is a defensive driver, he has an entourage of spirit guides with him at all times to help him, cars are built impact resistant, they are designed for collisions, my son is no exception to the law of attraction, he creates his own reality and since he is a very trusting and playful kid, he is probably not a vibrational match to a car wreck, he is so excited to go on this trip that even though it involves a risk, letting him follow his bliss is worth the risk. I want to stress that you should not lie to yourself while doing this exercise, too many people try to focus on thoughts and affirmations that they think should make them feel better, but that don’t. You only want to focus on things that genuinely make you feel better about whatever you are worried about.
As much as it may not seem like it, you did not come to this life to suffer. You do not deserve to suffer. The universe you are living in is indivisible from you and thus loves you as itself. And having experienced tragedy in the past is no guarantee that you will experience tragedy in the future.

When Happiness is a Bad Thing

As living organisms, we are designed to move in the direction of pleasure and to move away from pain. Our entire nervous system is highly attuned to pain stimulus and pleasure stimulus. We move away from the cactus thorn, we move towards the pretty flower. We want to maintain our positive feelings for as long as possible. Most of us love to feel happy and we will do anything to avoid feeling unhappy, but what about the small percentage of people who can’t feel happy? It is easy to think that happiness is always a good thing. But the truth is, the subconscious mind does not always agree. The truth is for some of us, happiness is like a pot at the end of the rainbow. It hovers in the future like an unreachable goal that we dream of, but don’t think that we can reach. How did we end up this way? We ended up this way because we suffered so much in our lives that happiness began to feel false. We ended up this way because we felt blindsided by painful experiences. When we are blindsided by painful experiences, especially when we are feeling good, we start to feel like happiness turns us into sitting ducks. We start to feel as if happiness is vulnerability that leaves us open for attack at any moment.
This belief system can ride on the back of seemingly insignificant events in childhood, for example, the three year old child is laughing hysterically while running and is not looking where they are going only to fall and hurt themselves. They might make the subconscious decision that happiness is unsafe and find that the emotional fall from elation to utter powerlessness and injury is so unbearable that they would rather just stay on guard and not let themselves feel elation for the sake of their own safety. Another example is a child who gets super excited only to be disappointed. They might make the subconscious conclusion that excitement inevitably leads to disappointment, so they would rather just not get their hopes up in the first place.
Another example is a child growing up with a parent who is a chronic worrier. This child may be playing joyfully when their parent repeatedly and in a panicked tone warns them about bad things that could happen. This instills the child with fear of the world and teaches the child to distrust their positive emotional states as if happiness and fun were a dangerous illusion.
If we take this deeper to what we would consider a significant event, it is even easier to see how this pattern is developed. Let’s say that a young boy is joyously playing with his toys in the house and is making a lot of noise. Let’s pretend that this boy has a violent father who is annoyed by the noise and so, the father angrily approaches the boy and takes him by surprise with a slap to the face. This child then associates joy with the feeling of being blindsided by pain. The positive emotion becomes linked with negative expectation and negative emotional states. And if we take thus even deeper, if we had people in our lives who were upset by our happiness and joy (maybe because they were jealous of it or because it inconvenienced them in some way, or because they felt resentful of us for some reason) then chances are that they deliberately sought to make us unhappy when we were feeling happy. What we learned then is that the only way to get love from them or keep the peace, was to be unhappy. This pattern is especially common in families where a parent is particularly resentful of a child and families where a parent gains their validation through having a child be dependent on them. When a child being happy makes a parent unhappy, the parent will often seek to re establish unhappiness in the child. As a child begins to grow up and become independent, they are most dependent upon the parent when they are unhappy (such as I skinned my knee and need a hug or I’m sick or I can’t reach something). If a parent needs their child to be dependent upon them to feel valid and loved, that parent is likely to subconsciously but deliberately keep the child in a state that is hurt, unhappy, sick or incapable.
As a result of our childhood experience, many of us feel as if there is always a give and take in life and so, if we are happy, we are convinced that it means that unhappiness is inevitably around the corner. For example, if we had a parent who would punish us for “selfishly doing something that made us happy”, we come to learn that if we do something to make ourselves happy, we deserve punishment. We posit this expectation that was developed by our primary authority figure parent over the top of the primary authority figure in our adult lives, which is god or the universe. We expect that there is a give and take when it comes to god or the universe as well. We expect that if we are happy or doing something to make ourselves happy, god or the universe will achieve balance and even the score by inevitably dealing us a pain or tragedy. Here are some important questions to ask yourself if you can’t hold on to happiness: Did it feel like the happiness of one or both of my parents, conflicted with my happiness as a child? Did it feel like my happiness competed with their happiness? Did it feel like there was no way that both of us could be happy at the same time? Did it feel like either I was happy and my parent was unhappy or my parent was happy and I was unhappy? When we feel as if our happiness conflicts with the happiness of our primary authority figure as a child, we grow up to feel as if our happiness is at odds with the universe at large. We feel as if we are in a giant chess match where the universe is against our happiness and wants to punish us for our happiness. We feel as if in order for the universe or God to be happy, we must be unhappy, therefore it will make us unhappy at any cost. When we cannot feel happy no matter how hard we try and we feel as if happiness is false and only negative emotions are real, what is really happening is that we have learned to FEAR happiness. We think that Happiness is dangerous; most often because we have been blindsided by emotional, mental or physical pain when we were enjoying ourselves. And perhaps even more than that, we have repeatedly been blindsided by emotional, mental or physical pain when we were enjoying ourselves. Basically, what is happening for many people who cannot be happy is that the very feeling of joy and happiness itself becomes the trigger for a post traumatic stress response. Why is this a problem? It is a problem because you are now fighting with your own survival instinct to be happy. The wires in your own mind have become crossed to such a degree that your own being is trying to keep you feeling good by keeping you from feeling good. The strongest instinct in the physical body is the drive to avoid pain for the sake of survival. The minute your mind associates pleasure with pain, your brain now wires itself to avoid positive feeling states for the sake of feeling positive. When this has happened, we start to feel like our own mind is working against us. We feel like we are being prevented from happiness in every way, as if our being is an enemy living within. But understanding this dynamic should give you a bit of relief in and of itself because it means that your own being loves you so much that ironically it’s motivation for keeping you unhappy is so that you will feel good. For most beings on earth, joy is their baseline and they experience temporary bouts of unhappiness and pain. But for some of us, especially those of us who find our way to self-help and spirituality, the tables are often turned. Suffering is our baseline and we experience temporary bouts of happiness and pleasure. When this is the case, happiness feels like a fleeting, temporary illusion. Happiness begins to feel not real where as unhappiness feels like a more permanent, inevitable truth of life itself. If suffering is your baseline, I want you to ask yourself two very important and personal questions. Try to answer them with as much brutal honesty as possible.
What is my positive intention for being unhappy or suffering? What bad thing would happen if I were always happy and full of joy? Most of us think that we are trying incessantly to be happy but are not even aware that we have a subconscious motivation to be unhappy. We are in essence engaging in a tug of war between our conscious mind that wants happiness and our subconscious mind that doesn’t want happiness because of what it thinks that happiness entails.
It is essential if you feel like happiness is not something you can hold on to, to sit with your feelings when you feel positive emotions. This means, next time you feel yourself getting excited or happy, sit down and close your eyes and sink deep into that feeling and the sensations of that feeling within your body. Pretend that you are exploring that feeling like a scientist for the very first time. What you will notice is that immediately, when you feel pleasure or joy, the feeling of anxiety or fear or grief or sorrow will begin to creep up within you as well. It is creeping up in response to the fact that you felt positive emotion. Now, as if you were exploring a new cavern within yourself, allow yourself to sink into whatever negative emotion arose as a result of the positive emotion. Repeat the mantra in your mind; “I am completely here with this now”. Breathe in and out in a rhythmic pattern with no unnecessary pauses between them. Once you feel yourself really experiencing the physical sensations of this negative emotion, ask yourself, “when was the first time that I felt this feeling?” Any experience you have as a result of asking that question is valid. Don’t go looking for the answer; instead let it float into your consciousness like a bubble rising from the depths of the ocean. The feeling may intensify. You may get images or memories, or none at all. If you are taken to a memory, spend time observing the memory then imagine that the adult you is entering the memory. Kneel down in front of your childhood self and hold your childhood self. Validate the way that the child feels. Allow the child to feel the way they feel because they are right to feel that way. And when it feels as if your child self is feeling a bit of relief, take action to make positive changes to the memory and re-parent your child. Explain to them that you will keep them safe from negative things so they can play and be carefree and feel happy. Explain that happiness isn’t unsafe. Allow them to do whatever they need to do in order to be able to trust that they won’t be blindsided by pain when they are happy. When I was leading a disciple of mine through this process, she was taken to a memory of herself at four years old. Her childhood self was in the backyard, feeling sad. Earlier she had been playing and laughing in the back yard with her dolls. Her mother, who was a highly stressed out woman who owned a busy cleaning service had seen her playing in the yard and instantly felt put upon by her own child. Her mother felt like an indentured servant to her daughter because here she was slaving away cleaning the house while her daughter played. Long story short, her mother came out of the house exasperated and yelling for her to get her butt inside and help out. She felt punished for playing and for being happy. She made the decision that in order to keep her mother’s love, she had to stop playing and stop being happy. She knew that her happiness instigated emotional attacks from her mother. Her adult self sat with her childhood self and held her. She told her childhood self that what her mother was doing to her was unfair. She explained to the child why her mother was doing it and told her that even though it wasn’t about her, the way she was treated was not ok. She explained that there is no consequence for being happy. After her inner child seemed to feel some relief, she asked her if she wanted to stay with her mother or come with her. Her childhood self said “come with you” and so, she created a perfect little home for the two of them, where her inner self could play and laugh and feel happy with absolutely no consequence. In my opinion, nothing is more important than this particular process when it comes to true healing, because it addresses the causation of the unhappiness, not just the symptom of the unhappiness. Being unable to hold on to happiness is a symptom.
People, who fear happiness, expect the worst. For this reason, I want you to watch my video on YouTube called How to Stop Expecting The Worst. People who expect the worst tend to catastrophize. And no one catastrophizes like people who expect things to go badly when they feel happy. Catastrophizing is the ultimate lethal “what if “ game. Catastrophizing involves a chain of “what ifs”, where each what if leads to another what if, until we are led to the most painful conclusion we can think of. It’s an if A then B, if B then C scenario. For example, if we don’t get a call from someone when we expected them to call us, then they do not love us and if they don’t love us, then they will break up with us and if they break up with us then we’ll have to move out of the house and if we have to move out of the house, then I’ll have no way of supporting myself and I’ll be all alone. We basically assume that every link in this chain of expectation will inevitably occur. The way to break this cycle is to break the catastrophe chain. With each link in the chain, we need to consider the opposite and try to prove to ourselves how it may not necessarily be true. For example, using the previous scenario if the “what if” is ‘they don’t love me’, we could list the things that they have done to show is that they do love us or the reasons that it isn’t true that they don’t love us. Or if the “what if” is ‘they will break up with me’, list the reasons that this wont happen. Do this with every link in the chain leading to the worst-case scenario.
For people who have a posttraumatic stress response to happiness, it feels like the universe is against you, especially when unwanted things happen to you. It is extremely hard to see the roses through the thorns and so perhaps the most beneficial exercise is to keep a positive aspects journal. Every time a negative thing happens, or you encounter something that feels bad, you write down the event or thing and open your mind to noticing all the positive aspects about that negative thing. For example, say I wrote down “I am sick”, some examples of positive aspects could be: I’m taking “me time” I’m spending more time in the present moment The cat is cuddled up with me I’m realizing how much stress I’m in on a daily basis, which has encouraged me to make some changes to my life It’s an excuse to watch movies I have more immunity now that I did before My immune system is working; otherwise I wouldn’t have these symptoms I got to have some really comforting soup This blanket feels good against my skin etc.
And at the end of each day, write a positive aspects list for the day about positive things that happened or things you liked about the day. Doing this enables you to see that unwanted things are not necessarily punishment and that the universe is not deliberately trying to make you suffer. Another thing that is very good for those who have a post traumatic reaction to positive emotions is exposure therapy. Do things that feel good. Prioritize happiness every day at least once, so that you are doing something just because it feels good. This is going to trigger you. It won’t feel good at first. It will feel like an invitation for tragedy and disappointment. But remind yourself like a mantra “It is ok to feel this way”. “It is ok to feel good”. And pay attention to see if anything really bad happens as a result of feeling good. The more times that you consciously notice yourself feeling good and consciously see (and take note of the fact) that nothing bad happens as a result of feeling good, the more this trigger will diminish and the more comfortable you will be allowing yourself to feel good without fear of feeling good.
If you have had negative experiences piggyback off of positive experiences in your life, optimism and positive focus will only seem like naivety to you. For those of us who feel this way, we have to stop caring about whether positivity is true or false and start caring about how we feel. We need to acknowledge and admit to the amount of pain we are actually in; that pain is the truth of where we are. And then we need to begin to pay attention to things that make us feel good and seek out things that make us feel good for the sole reason that they make us feel good. Why do we need to do this? Because we are tired of living our lives this way. We need to begin to treat ourselves like we deserve to be happy.
Ask yourself these questions: Why am I unworthy of happiness? Does me being happy really take away from other people’s happiness? Does me being happy really take away from the universe’s happiness? If I were God and I had unlimited, eternal resources and could do anything, and if someone was happy, would I want to take away their happiness or hurt them in some way? If so, why? If not, why? If I were God and I had all the energy in this universe at my disposal and someone asked me for something that would make them happy, would I give it to them? So then why would the universe or God not want me to be happy and give me the things that would make me happy? We need to challenge the way that we are thinking about this universe and happiness when happiness is a trigger. The way we were seen and treated as children is not a good indication about how the universe at large sees us or will treat us.
If you have suffered most of your life, it seems like the purpose of life is to suffer and so when people say “the purpose of your life is joy”, or “choose to be happy” you feel incapable, unlucky and imprisoned by your pain. Be compassionate with yourself. You are not a negative person, you were hurt. You are not a Debbie downer, you were hurt. You did not deserve to suffer, you were hurt. You are not so mentally ill that your brain chemistry makes you incapable of feeling joy, you were hurt. You are not consciously choosing to be unhappy, you were hurt. What do you do if you were hurt? You slowly get back up again and take little steps to nurture yourself into a place of health. You take baby steps into happiness and you learn by experience that bad things don’t necessarily happen as a result of feeling good. If you can’t seem to be happy no matter what you do, it is not your fault. Stop expecting yourself to suddenly feel good. This is as cruel and unreasonable as expecting a person who has been in a high-speed car crash to suddenly walk. If you can’t touch happiness, reach instead for relief. Think and say and do anything that helps you to feel a little bit of relief and like a person following a yellow brick road, without knowing where it is going to lead, take baby steps towards allowing yourself to go in the direction of what feels just a little bit better and a little bit better. The universe wants only good things for you and in reality, all things we experience, even the unwanted experiences come imbued with invaluable gifts. You don’t have to recognize those gifts right away; in fact it is most likely that you will not recognize them right away. But know this… You didn’t get blindsided as a child by pain because you were feeling happy. You were blindsided because you were not in a safe environment growing up. Maybe you were unsafe emotionally or maybe you were unsafe mentally or maybe you were unsafe physically or maybe you were unsafe in all of the ways listed above. You were blindsided because you did not have the awareness you do now about the fact that you were in fact in an environment that didn't feel safe to you while you were growing up. It had nothing to do with happiness at all. Awareness plus happiness makes happiness a safe place to be. And even if you cannot believe it yet, you deserve that happiness. You deserve to feel safe when you feel happy. It is my hope that you will come to know that one-day. Until then, know that you are not alone. Many of us distrust positive emotion. Many of us cannot touch joy and do not have the slightest idea what happiness is, or what it feels like. And for us, we have one choice and that is to go in the direction of what feels better, nothing more and nothing less.

False Prophets

In my line of work, not a week goes by that someone doesn’t ask me about how to recognize and avoid false prophets. A false prophet is one who falsely claims the gift of prophecy or divine inspiration or who uses that gift for evil ends. Here in we run into our first problem, often someone who is considered a "true prophet " by some people is simultaneously considered a "false prophet" by others. I am no exception to this rule. In fact there are people who think that my stance on this particular subject is just more proof that I, myself am a false prophet. So what exactly is my stance on false prophets? There is no such thing as a false prophet. You cannot be separate from this united consciousness that people call God or Source or The universe, because you are indivisible from it. Every being on earth is an extension of “God”. Therefore, everyone is a prophet whether they know it or not. God/The Universe is not being selective about whom it inspires or whom it talks to. What language does Source speak to people in? It speaks to people in many ways most especially through synchronicity and through reflection. But what you are hearing from people, including myself is a translation. An INTERPRETATION of the information conveyed by God/The Universe. Interpretations are completely dependent upon perspective. Every person has a perspective to offer and perspective is not truth.
No teacher that says that they represent the absolute truth is helping you, because in asking you to adopt their truth, they cause you to stray from your own truth. They wrap up truth for you in a tiny little box and hand it to you so you will never have to feel confused or uncertain enough to think for yourself. I can do no more than anyone can do, which is to offer you my perspective. Try it on. Wear it around. If it fits you, keep it. If it does not, try on a different perspective. If you like parts of my perspective, keep those and discard what does not suit you well once you have considered it and questioned it fully for yourself. Here is my perspective, if I were the only singular God there is, I would send down many false prophets to confuse people. I would send down false prophets by the thousands so that people would become so disillusioned by teachers that they would begin to look for their answers within themselves. It is the false prophets that cause us to set ourselves free from the powerlessness of having to go to church to access God or having to talk to a priest to access God or from having to get our answers from someone else. All prophets are true and cannot be false because they give us the opportunity to know ourselves and know our truth completely. And that is the doorway to self-trust. If a prophet does not teach self-trust, you can be sure that they are coloring the information they are receiving with their own shadows, which are currently driving them towards control. But that is teaching in and of itself. All prophets teach self trust whether they are directly teaching it or whether are providing you that teaching indirectly by providing you with so much contrast that you, yourself are the only thing you have to hold on to.
Your job is not to find a static truth that everyone will agree on and conform to. We only need people to agree with our truth if we need validation for our truth because we are not convinced that it is truth yet. Your job is to find your own truth. Nothing more and nothing less. And you will know if your truth is working for you by the quality of your life. You will know if your truth is working for you by the way that your life feels.
We have an addiction to truth because we have an addiction to being right. We need to find and hold onto truth in the same way that a frightened child needs to find and hold on tight to their pacifier at night. Why do we want truth so badly? We want it ultimately because we think it would make us feel good and safe to know the truth. We can’t stand the idea of being wrong. We are convinced that there is no difference between being wrong and being forsaken. We are convinced that there is no difference between being right and being loved.
Right and wrong will only ever be a matter of perspective. The person who once said the earth was flat was correct from their perspective. Standing on the earth, the horizon looks flat and so from that perspective the earth is flat. When you change perspectives, the earth is not flat it is round. And so only when you change perspectives does the previous truth become wrong. The person, who thought the earth was flat, will only change their truth if they change their perspective. The perspective that Teal is a fraud is as true from the perspective that some people hold as the perspective that teal is the true prophet.
We are all searching for the ultimate perspective, but we do not understand that the ultimate perspective is the unification of all perspectives. The ultimate truth is more close to what I have just said; that all perspectives are true and that if you put them all together, you end up with the ultimate perspective or the ultimate truth. What matters is your truth. Not anyone else’s. You are never going to be able to round everyone on this earth up and get all of them to agree with you. You need to treat all things on this earth including teachers (and the things that teachers say) like ingredients. Let your life become a cocktail made especially for you of only the ingredients that resonate with you. And let those ingredients become flexible and change over time because your perspective (and therefore your truth) will change over time. If you do not want mint in your cocktail, don’t put it in your cocktail. If you do not like affirmations don’t put them in your cocktail. If you like lemon, put it in your cocktail, if you like the idea that you are part of God put it in your cocktail. I want you to start to think of life like an enormous game of go fish. In the game go fish; your prerogative is to collect from the other players an array of specific cards (with fish on them) to make a complete match. Start to pretend that in life, every single being you cross paths with (human and non human) has a huge deck of cards. It is your prerogative to collect from them the cards that make your deck more complete.
Knowing that one-day you may let go of cards that you once treasured because they no longer make your deck complete. Your prerogative is to remain open to recognizing those cars that are meant for you. Without exception, if you come into contact with someone, they have a card for you. They have an ingredient for your perfect cocktail. Be aware that some cards are what I call the “Not cards” or the “Surety Cards”. This means by interacting with some people, you will know much more of what cards you do not want and so you will become more sure of what cards you do want. For example, if you met a person who was really closed off and lonely and that reinforced in you the desire and motivation to be open and connect with others, you just collected a “Not Card/Surety Card” from them. People who fear false prophets distrust themselves, but more than that, they fear malevolence. For that reason it is important to know that there is no such thing as evil. Every single thing on earth is done for one reason, because the person doing it thinks that they will feel better in the doing of it. Murder is not evil; it is done because the murderer wants to feel better. That doesn’t make murder right or good; it simply shows that behind every single action lies a positive intention. All hateful acts are misguided attempts to carry out a positive intention. The ultimate example of what most people consider to be a false prophet is Jim Jones, leader of the People’s Temple. Long story short plastic cups, Flavor Aid packets, and syringes, littered the area where the 909 bodies were found at the largest revolutionary suicide in modern history after Jones urged his followers to die in support of apostolic communism. Do not believe for a second that Jim Jones thought that he was harming people. From his perspective, he thought he was helping people. He was convinced that life on the other side of death would be the only way they could all be free. This example does not show us how evil people can be. It shows us just how dangerous perspectives can be. It shows us how crucial deep questioning is and it shows us how important it is to remain flexible in our beliefs so we do not get hurt as the result of fixating on a specific truth. It shows us above all how important it is to put your trust in yourself and not in a teacher or leader. To use an aggressive metaphor, by taking all a person says as truth and abandoning your own discernment in favor of any prophet, you may end up swallowing the poison with the Kool-Aid.
If you are concerned with false prophets, it has nothing to do with the prophets themselves. It has to do with the fact that you distrust your own discernment. Because self-trust is such a problem for people who feel resistant to false prophets, I recommend that you watch my YouTube video titled ‘How to Trust Yourself”. Discernment needs to be your new focus in your spiritual practice. So, here are some tips for how to get in touch with your own power of discernment. Discernment is nothing more than the ability to chose what is right or wrong, true or false for you specifically. So naturally
Tip #1 Comes in a form of a question: Why do I not trust myself to chose or know what is right vs. wrong or true vs. false?
Tip #2 Is to get in touch with what is true for you. To do this, you have to be willing and brave enough to consider that your truth may be the opposite of what you think it is or want it to be. You have to be willing to be brutally honest with yourself. Getting in touch with what is the most true for you is as easy as imagining that there is a rod running through the center of your body. This rod is like a core. All you need to do is to feel for the truth or emotion or answer that is the closest to this rod. For example if I were to ask you “do you love the person you are married to?” You might automatically want to say “yes” after all you are probably convinced that yes has to be the correct answer to that question if you are married. But if you check in with the answer and feeling that is the closest to this internal core rod, the answer might in fact be “no”.
Tip #3 Is to stay open when it comes to truth, including your truth. This also applies to counter arguments. New perspectives that are even more comprehensive than the ones available today are coming to fruition every day. Next time you see a group of little kids pass you, let yourself smile and know that the perspectives and truths that they might offer one day are going to be more amazing than what you can possibly imagine today. Science reveals new things every year that revolutionize our understanding of the world. If we stay committed to the truth of one religion or one teacher or one scientist, we will miss the opportunity to expand even further. If we stay committed to the truth that the world is flat, we have no room for the truth that the world is round. It is best to hold firmly to your trust in your ability to discern and hold very softly to any and all specific truths that you currently hold. Be open to your opinion changing tomorrow.
Tip #4 When it comes to logical processes, use deductive reasoning and inductive reasoning together. Work from the bottom up and the top down to test truths. An example of deductive reasoning, working from the top down where we begin usually with a general idea or hypothesis is: “I create my reality with my thoughts”. We then narrow it down to even smaller things that can be tested like “I can manifest 100 dollars this week”. And then we work on that and find proof for that and the outcome either proves or disproves the original theory. An example of inductive reasoning, working from the bottom up where we use proof to create a theory would be “I found a hundred dollars, therefore I create my own reality”. We need to use both styles of logical reasoning when it comes to mentally aligning with our truth.
Tip #5 The very best teachers will direct you back towards yourself and help you to develop your own discernment and self trust. They are also open to being questioned and questioning. They will not expect you to take their word for it and they will not punish you for questioning.
Tip #6 Test things for yourself. If they appeal, try them on and try them out for yourself. You should not accept anything as true for you unless it has proven true for you. For example, don’t take someone’s word for it that doing inner child work is the way to solve emotional wounds. Try inner child work out and see if it heals something inside of you. give it some time and work with it for a while asking questions that may come up during the process and getting second opinions and decide for yourself if it solves emotional wounds or not.
Tip #7 Develop your intuition. And trust your Gut. Getting in touch with your emotions and being honest about how you actually feel is step one when it comes to developing your intuition. Make sure that you are doing an ample amount of shadow work because fears and suppressed shadows in our own psyche can interfere greatly with intuition. For example, we could have an intuition that someone is unsafe to be around and on one hand that could be true, on the other hand, we could also be reacting to them because they smell or look like someone who hurt us once and so it has nothing to do with intuition and everything to do with unhealed aspects within ourselves. When in doubt, especially in the heat of the moment trust your gut and follow your intuition. You can always question it later. Often times what you’ll find is that upon reflection your intuition was spot on. There is no such thing as a false prophet because all people are prophets. And all prophets have different perspectives. The trick is to find the hidden prophet within you and to make that prophet’s knowing the most important knowing to live your life by.

Shadow Work and The Law Of Attraction

To understand how The Law Of Attraction applies to the human shadow, we first have to know what the human shadow is. So, what is the human shadow? When you first come into this life, your ego (the fancy word for separate identity) is not fully formed yet. The ego is primarily formed in relationship to others and so the majority of your ego comes about during the process of socialization. This is the time that you learn about the concept of good and bad right and wrong, acceptable and unacceptable. Most importantly you learn about the aspects of you that are acceptable and unacceptable. It becomes very clear that love and reward will come in response to what is acceptable and abandonment and punishment will come in response to what is unacceptable. As a result, we begin to ignore, deny and suppress what we think is unacceptable about us; we split our consciousness meaning, we divide ourselves. And this is how the subconscious mind is born. We could call the subconscious the shadow because we cannot see it clearly and thus are not aware of it and the conscious the light because we can see it clearly and are aware of it.
Separation and division is not a natural state, it is an unhealed state and so the shadow aspect strives to be integrated again regardless of how much we wish that it would “go away”. Our shadow rears its head whenever something in the subconscious is triggered into our awareness by circumstances in our life. For example, if our partner doesn’t show up on time, which triggers a deeply suppressed feeling of abandonment that we are not even aware of, we might spend the next 45 minutes flipping out in what seems to be a massive overreaction to the situation at hand.
Shadow work is nothing more than the process of making the unconscious conscious and the unacceptable, acceptable. And the integration of unconsciousness leads to complete and total awareness. Even so, shadow work is popular with some spiritual teachers, psychologists and life coaches and very unpopular with others. Even channels and spiritual guides disagree on the subject of shadow work. The top arguments against shadow work are “If you focus on your shadow all you will get is more shadow” and “If you focus on needing to clear yourself of your shadow, all there will be is more shadow to clear.” These arguments come from a very limited and elementary understanding of consciousness, resistance and The Law of Attraction.
If it were true that positive focus creates a pure positive person then a person who is petting a puppy or focusing positively consistently would have a pure energy field that is clear of “wounds”. But this is not the case. When I am observing someone’s energy fields and they are focused on something that is positive like a puppy, parts of their energy field become lighter as if they are allowing more energy in while parts such as aura tears and rips and imprints remain unhealed, especially in the emotional body field. No matter how positive someone’s focus is, if their subconscious aspect contains trauma imprints, those aspects do not just go away. When we experience something traumatic on an emotional level, it works the same way as it does with physical trauma. To use an aggressive example, if you are involved in a head on collision and you end up with a compound fracture, for the average person (who does not bend the laws of this time space reality), no amount of pure positive focus is going to put the bone back together again. And if you begin to focus positively chances are that positive focus will simply lead you directly to a doctor who can put the bone back together again. It’s not a comfortable process. It’s a process that demands that we admit that the bone is broken and put it back in place and put a cast on it and focus deliberately on creating the healing state of that particular ailment. If we get a compound fracture and we attempt to distract ourselves from the fracture by thinking positive thoughts, we are now in a mental and emotional tug of war between the aspect that has awareness that this is a serious issue that needs conscious attention and the aspect that doesn’t want to admit to the reality that this is a serious issue that needs conscious attention. Why would we be focusing positively in this scenario where we have a compound fracture? To avoid something. There is an enormous difference between focusing on something positive for the sake of focusing positive and focusing on something positive for the sake of trying to escape from, ignore or get away from something negative. What is the result if we try to escape from, ignore or get away from our compound fracture? It festers. We become incapacitated if we survive at all. In short, when we try to avoid something, the thing we are trying to avoid gets worse. And things we are trying to avoid are the premium content of the human shadow.
This is the exact scenario we face on an emotional level. If we suffered an emotional trauma and we ignore, suppress or deny it in favor of positive focus, we are using positivity to get away from negativity. The emotional wound does not get better; it festers. If you do focus positively, chances are that your positive focus will simply lead you straight to someone who can help you heal and ultimately integrate your emotional wounds. When we are resistant to the idea of shadow work, we are trying to avoid something. When you realize that you are using positive focus to avoid something that feels negative to you, it is time to release resistance to whatever you are trying to avoid. To release resistance to something, you have to turn in the direction of it instead of away from it because turning away from it is done from a space of resistance to it.
When I say, “don’t think about lemons” you think about lemons. This is what we’re ultimately doing on a subconscious level by trying to use positive focus to avoid negative emotions. We’re saying, “Don’t focus on the way you actually feel”. It only serves to magnify the way that you actually feel until the reflection is so big, you can’t escape it. It manifests itself in more aggressive and more aggressive ways hoping that you will come to terms with it and release resistance to it. We are already in resistance to our shadow aspect. This resistance is why it is subconscious in the first place. So what do we do when we are in resistance to something? We must release resistance to that specific thing. But by obsessively focusing positively and trying to ignore it and divert our attention from our shadow, we only resist it further. Because we are trying to avoid it, we are in essence focusing on it and sending it energy without even being aware that we are doing so.
The perfect example of this is Jerry Hicks. Jerry Hicks, who I happen to love, as many of you know ended up getting cancer. This turn of events created massive doubt in the Abraham community. Here is a person who promises in accordance with Abraham that if you focus positively, you can’t get ill. Well it just so happens that cancer is the unfinished business disease. It always comes about as the result of childhood trauma. For Jerry, growing up extremely poor and having been discouraged again and again from his far-reaching ideas made several imprints in his consciousness that despite his positive focus did not go away. Whenever he got close to those shadows, he did what he thought was best and simply diverted his attention away from those shadows. They festered because that “avoidance” was in fact resistance. And that ultimately manifested in a condition that took his life. This is not an uncommon story. The most common turn of events when we repeatedly ignore or deny what is real for us but that is unwanted by us is that it manifests physically as an illness or another physical condition that we cannot ignore. We don’t only suppress and deny and banish unacceptable bad things into our subconscious; we also suppress unacceptable good things. This is what idolization is about. Idolization is nothing more than the projection of the suppressed positive attributes within one person, onto another person, so that they may admire the reflection instead of the source. But for the sake of this video, I’m going to focus primarily on the unacceptable bad things we suppress.
When it comes to suppressed aspects of our being, the first step from a lower vibration to a higher vibration is not finding a thought that feels better; it is awareness. Awareness is always the first step towards vibrational increase when we are dealing with something we were not consciously aware of. It’s the first time you shine light in the dark closet to see what is there. Awareness in and of itself will feel like immense relief. It will cause you to feel authentic and grounded within yourself. We fear our shadow this is why we resist it. By becoming aware of it, we come to understand it and understanding is the #1 way to diminish fear.
Positive focus works; end of story. But there is one enormous caveat to that rule. There is one massive exception. Positive focus works on everything except for the things you’re trying to use positive focus to avoid. Another way of saying this is positive focus works on everything except for when positive focus is used as a tool to enable our resistance.
Many of us are excited to find the power of positive focus because it seems like a get out of jail free card. Positive focus seems like a magic pill that will make it so we can escape and avoid all of our unwanted things. And unfortunately because of improper understanding of law of attraction, many teachers back up the idea that all it takes to create a perfect life is perfect positive focus. Consider this, if we are enthusiastic about positive focus because it feels like a get out of jail free card, it means that we have big things we are trying to avoid. If we have big things we are trying to avoid, like it or not and conscious or not, a large part of our consciousness is dedicated to past traumas. We are like emotional cripples who on one level know we are really hurt and on another level don’t want to admit to it. We’d rather believe that if we focus positively enough, we will miraculously be put back together again. The law of attraction is essentially the law of mirroring. Whatever vibrations are contained within you are being matched exactly by experiences in your external world. And like it or not, your shadow aspects are vibrations within you that are attracting experiences into your life that match them. These shadows must be integrated in order to cease being points of attraction.
I often use the analogy of the radio dial when I am talking about the Law of Attraction. Basically whatever station your dial is turned to, dictates what signal and therefore radio station you will receive. On an emotional level, this means if you are tuned to joy, you receive joy. But this analogy only works if you see yourself in your entirety as one dial. In reality you are more like a switchboard of a multitude of dials. The various frequencies that are being received by these dials, add up to your overall vibration. You have a dial relative to every subject in your life. My dial relative to relationships could be set on despair and so I receive relationships that cause me to despair. While simultaneously my career dial could be set to elation so I receive career opportunities that makes me feel elated and I love my job. If you improve the frequency of the signal being received by just one of these dials, your overall vibration increases. But to say that any positive focus in any area of your life will cause positive improvement in all areas of your life is not accurate. Regardless of how much you positively focus on your career or on your friends or on your body, you can still have a terrible vibration about romantic relationships and so you still experience negative romantic relationships. Then you start to feel like positive focus doesn’t work.
What discourages people the most from doing shadow work is that they have the idea that because focus creates, if they focus on shadow work there will always be more shadow work to do. This is also inaccurate. If we acknowledge that a person is made of pure source energy and pure integrated consciousness when they come into this life, you could imagine that this pure consciousness is a light much like our sun. As the person develops through life and experiences traumas, they do not gain darkness. The light does not go away; rather their light is obscured. When you do shadow work, you will notice that it is as if you have wiped a dusty film off of a window. You do not need to work at creating light, more light simply streams into the room because you have removed what was obscuring the light. You could alternatively see your subconscious aspects as anchors that are holding you underwater. If you turned in the direction of the anchor and unhooked yourself from it, you would not need to swim towards the surface. You would naturally begin to float upwards. This is what your vibration does when you do shadow work, like a buoy it naturally increases because the things that were decreasing it, are integrated, the no longer weigh your vibration down.
Saying that “if you focus on shadow work, there will always be more to do” is like saying that if you stand at the sink and begin to clean dishes, there will always be more dishes to clean, as if a new one will pop up in your sink the second you finish cleaning the last one. People who have dedicated some aspect of their practice to shadow work know from personal experience that over time less and less shadow work has to be done because you have become more and more integrated. But there is a reason why some people feel the opposite. A great many of the people who are against shadow work have experienced what I call an emotional healing crisis or a catharsis. When they first give themselves permission to open the closet to their subconscious, their subconscious comes rushing out like Pandora’s box. It can be likened to an energetic or an emotional flu. Because so much of you was deemed unacceptable while you were growing up, a great portion of you was banished to the subconscious. Because of this, a great deal of shadow needs to be integrated. If you are one of these people, your closet is so full of denied and suppressed aspects that your closet is bursting at the seams. As a result, it feels like your shadows are never ending. Every day there’s a new shadow and you feel the same way you do when you have the flu; like you’re leaning over a toilet and you can’t stop throwing up. It’s easy and tempting to think that your life has gotten worse since you started shadow work. But this is a healing crisis. This is a purge. And ironically, this is the point that most people stop shadow work and turn back from where they came, when it is actually the time that they are passing through the eye of the needle and if they would keep going, instead of turn back, they would integrate if not attain an enlightenment experience. They would experience freedom and wholeness and peace for the very first time.
Why is it important to turn around and face your fears? Because if you turn around to face your fears they no longer hold power over you. You are no longer resisting the unwanted by running away from it. Instead you are shifting into a state of allowing by accepting it. And by doing that, it cannot hurt you or haunt you anymore. Like a ghost, your shadow will follow you to the ends of the earth begging for the light of consciousness to turn towards it. No amount of positive focus will make it disappear. And long story short, focus upon the shadow does not create more shadow because the shadow that is exposed to the light of consciousness ceases to be shadow.

Spirituality 3.0

Spiritual argument so often whittles down to an argument about semantics. But we must play with semantics in order to facilitate our mental understanding of Spirituality 3.0
Thousands of years ago, it was said that desire is the root of suffering. Is this true? No. It turns out that it is not true. The word that was used was Tanha. What is the translation of Tanha? Thirst. What is the difference between desire and thirst? A whole lot. Think of choice as a two-sided coin; on one side is desire, on the other is thirst. Thirst is the shadow side of desire on this coin called choice. Thirst implies that there is a lack first and that the lack is what is motivating the craving we are calling a desire. Thirst is an attachment (craving of something) motivated by an aversion to something. The root of suffering therefore is the state of perpetual movement from aversion towards it’s opposite, which is attachment (the thing we crave because of our acute awareness of the lack of it). Attachment is nothing more than an addiction. The desperate wanting of something because of something you are lacking or trying to avoid. There is a difference between a craving and a desire. Craving is the shadow aspect of desire. The shadow of desire stems from a perceived deprivation. Desire is not bad. In fact, you cannot escape desire in this lifetime, nor would you want to if you really understood it. You can however, transmute it. You can exalt it. Desire in it’s pure form, absent of shadow is like a “yes” to an experience. It is the “yes” that occurs from sorting through contrast. But it is a yes that is not the byproduct of a no. In other words, it is a yes to an experience or the choice of an experience that is not motivated by aversion and thus it does not take on the form of attachment. Desire in its pure form is absent of resistance. It is a tool of the true self. It facilitates expansion, self-awareness and self-realization. Craving on the other hand is a tool of the ego.
Are you ready for a bitch slap? Ego is not a term that the Buddha even knew. It is a Freudian term, which was adopted into modern Buddhist circles and applied to the teachings of Buddha. It was simply the best word we could come up with to describe the difference between the enlightened perspective of no separate self and the illusionary perception of the separate self. Later, Jung called this the “shadow aspect”, meaning conscious versus not conscious. When the Buddha accurately described his enlightenment experience, what he was trying to explain was that he had observed a polarity inherent within himself; a polarity like truth and illusion, conscious and unconscious, suffering and happiness. And that enlightenment transcended all polarity. Enlightenment is not happiness any more than it is suffering. It is liberation from polarity. Up to now all movement within this universe is done to move towards something because you want to move away from something. To move towards what is wanted because of the desire to move away from something that is unwanted. This is the painful and eternal human condition, until it is no longer the human condition. When you live your life moving away from negative towards positive, you are always in motion; you can never stop to smell the roses in the present moment so to speak. All decisions are made by pain. All desires are the byproduct of trying to move away from pain. Imagine a life where there is nothing you wish to move away from. Life is lived for joy in total non-resistance to pain. In order to end this trail of tears, this perpetual movement away and towards away and towards, and in order to end this movement from aversion towards craving, which is all attachment really is, we turn in the direction of our aversion. We sit with it completely. We embrace it. We are unconditional towards it because we let it know that we are willing to experience it without needing it to change. We are set free because of our willingness to bring the light of the presence of our consciousness into the shadow of the absence of our consciousness. We no longer have an aversion to our aversion and so it is no longer our master. Desire is transmuted because it is free of its shadow. And free of its shadow, there is no longer a need for reincarnation. The craving for reincarnation is gone from our very soul. The soul now chooses from a place not motivated by aversion or craving. The process of spiritual awakening happens in three steps, I have named these steps spirituality 101, spirituality 2.0 and spirituality 3.0. Indeed, in the future there may be many more steps. But like the holy trinity, let’s explore these three principal steps that add up to awakening. First, comes spirituality 101. In spirituality 101, you see the possibility that you may be free. You are confronted with the idea that you just might create your reality. So you start to create! You go in direction of what makes you feel joy. You become less powerless. For once, you do not resist your own happiness. You go in the direction of your positive emotions. You prioritize how you feel above all else; in fact your life is dedicated to feeling better. You finally let yourself have what you want. But still, you want those things because of aversions to other things. You are still running from feeling crappy. You begin to feel deep down that this is an endless cycle of aversion and craving, unwanted and wanted. No matter what you get, you want more. This is no longer as satisfying as it once was. So, it is time for the second step, Spirituality 2.0.
In spirituality 2.0, you realize that the answer is to turn around and walk towards your aversion instead. You learn the art of allowing (and thus non-resistance) relative to your negative emotion. You integrate and you start to become whole. The unconscious is becoming conscious. Craving is becoming pure desire. You are becoming whole as the shadow is no longer separated from the light of consciousness. Instead of feeling better, your aim is to get better at feeling. When you feel negative emotion, you do not immediately try to think or do something to feel better, you remain open to what that “negative” state has to teach you. You end up in the present moment. With no aversions and thus no craving the past ceases to motivate you towards the future and you are left squarely in the present moment. You catch a glimpse of peace for the very first time. And then you are ready for spirituality 3.0.
In spirituality 3.0 you can choose to create your reality through the use of deliberate focus but now your choices are no longer the byproduct of aversion and so there is no craving. Instead of craving, we recognize our infinite creator nature and CHOOSE. We choose to be wealthy or not. And we do not choose from a place of pain. In other words, I don’t want money because I’m poor; I want it because I am saying “yes” to that perspective in much the same way that I would say yes to strawberry ice cream. I don’t want strawberry ice cream because I so so so so don’t want chocolate ice cream. Inspiration is what causes our movement towards things that we choose. We are completely in the now. No past is projecting into our present or future. This state of spirituality 3.0 arises organically, as a result of shining the light in the shadow.
To begin with, you start in the state of unconsciousness. You are not aware. You are asleep. You begin to wake up. You begin to realize polarity and see that there is a light and a shadow to that which is you. You realize you are operating entirely as a result of your shadow and so you do anything you can to get into the light. Spirituality 101 is that process. And by doing that, you have climbed out of the abyss of unconsciousness. Then, you harness the light of consciousness to descend back into the unconscious. You shine the light of consciousness into the shadow of unconsciousness. Spirituality 2.0 is that process. And thus the unconscious becomes conscious. Polarity dissipates. You are whole. You experience true peace, which is the transcendence of opposites. Peace is not what we think it is. It is not “getting along”. Peace is much more than the absence of war. It is the absence of internal and thus external conflict. It is the absence of opposition and polarity. It is the center point in the symbol of infinity. No opposites, only one, unified being-ness. That is the state of enlightenment. And the state of enlightenment is not a state of retirement. It is more like the byproduct of the ongoing process of becoming conscious. As the universe (source) becomes more conscious of itself, there is more to become conscious of and so we, a microcosm of the larger universe, must to become more conscious. Because of this, there are always further enlightenments to experience (so far).
The three steps of awakening can be seen in the infinity symbol. Because of how I have named these steps, it is easy to see one step as more advanced than another. But this is not true. They are equal to one another like two sides of a scale; it just so happens that we tend to visit one side of the scale before the other. Looking at the infinity symbol, we can see that there is polarity. On one side physical, on the other side non-physical, on one side life, on the other side death, on one side light on the other dark. But in between them is a point, the still point. This is the part of the infinity symbol that represents infinity. It is not the balance between opposites; it is the union and thus transcendence of opposites. So here we have spirituality 3.0, on one side, spirituality 101, on the other side Spirituality 2.0 and in the middle, spirituality 3.0. It is tempting to rush the steps of awakening. After all, we would love to rush to the state of transcendence, where we have no resistance at all, where we are living in the present moment and are free to choose whatever experience we wish to have. But these steps will not be rushed, because to rush is to be in resistance to where you are. Most often this desire to rush, takes place during our spirituality 2.0 process. Progressing through Spirituality 2.0 requires that our motivation is to be with ourselves completely exactly as we are rather than to change ourselves or our feelings into a better feeling state. If we are doing Spirituality 2.0 so we can get to Spirituality 3.0, we are missing the point of spirituality 2.0 and will never experience Spirituality 3.0. Some people spend years upon years practicing spirituality 2.0. In this awakening process, like life, you learn how to crawl before you learn how to walk before you learn how to fly. They are different techniques, and each leads to the next. You don’t get upset at the process of crawling once you learn how to walk. You don’t get upset at the process of walking before you learn how to fly. You realize there are different techniques needed to facilitate your expansion. Spirituality 3.0 is the beautiful fusion of spirituality 101 and spirituality 2.0. One could say that spirituality 101 is largely about allowing the light and that spirituality 2.0 is about allowing the shadow. And spirituality 3.0 is the transcendence or fusion of those seeming opposites. To use religious terms, spirituality 101 is the Father, spirituality 2.0 is the Holy Ghost and spirituality 3.0 is the Son. In other words, if light is god and shadow is goddess, the fusion of light and shadow, is the child.
In spirituality 3.0, the techniques that we learn in spirituality 101 about creating our reality and choosing thought and deliberate focus begin to be added back into our practice, but because of spirituality 2.0, they have been purified. They are motivated by entirely different intentions. The shadow, now integrated, is no longer driving us away from anything, towards anything else. And so, we are free. Free to consciously chose. It is the state of living godhood. It is the state of self-actualization. It is the state of awakened-ness.

Emotions... The Key to A Healthy Relationship

You have heard it before, in order to reach a state of health, health must be addressed on all three levels, body, mind and soul. This triad has long been considered the pillars of a complete life. But what if I told you that we got it wrong. When we think of soul, we think of the soul as an etheric or intangible energy. Likewise, because of the ethereal, intangible nature of feelings and emotions, (which we do not understand) we called them “soul”. This is why advice about how to feed and heal your soul, is designed to help you to emotionally feel better.
In truth, our soul aspect is innately healthy. It cannot be in an unhealthy state. Soul, which is pre-manifested energy, creates feelings and creates mind and creates body. All three levels of a person are in fact comprised of soul. A body is a soul projecting itself physically. A mind is a soul projecting itself mentally, feeling is a soul consciously perceiving. Because of this, we could look at it one of two ways, the first is that the three pillars of health are body, mind and emotion. The second is that emotion is the language of the soul. If you choose to see it this way, then the key to what people are calling soul health is your emotional health. Part of emotional health, is the conscious acknowledgment of our non-corporeal consciousness, which we could call spirit or soul. When we use the word soul, we are referring to the core aspect of a person’s being. In the English language, soul and heart are interchangeable concepts. This is why someone, who is speaking from the core of their being, may say “I know it in my heart that (fill in the blank)”. What this means is that deep down, we know that the very heart of our experience in life is not mental and it is not physical, it is feeling and emotion. When we first come into this life, we experience the world entirely through felt perception. We feel the world before we see the world. Feeling and emotion is not only the heart of your life here on earth, it is also the heart of your relationships. Because feeling and emotion is the heart of relationships, it is also where the most damage is done.
Over the centuries, our ideas about good and bad ways to raise a child have changed. For example, in the medieval days, childhood did not really exist. As soon as a child could physically manage, they were put to work, often in roles that would be seen as slavery today. Children were not seen as pure, in fact they were seen as evil and the extraordinary corporal punishment used (which was of course considered normal and commonplace), was used to grant a child salvation and goodness. In this era, even in the most aristocratic households, instead of valuing and adoring their child, some parents took to despising their own children and deliberately belittling and abusing them, thinking it was for their own good. In the late 1600s, history saw the birth of the punishment and reward style of parenting. Instead of pure corporeal punishment, philosopher John Locke suggested that the better way of training a child to be good would be to withdraw approval and affection by “disgracing” a child when they are bad and to “esteem” the child by rewarding the child with approval and affection when they were good. In the early twentieth century, not much had changed. Child-rearing experts still formally denounced all romantic ideas about childhood and advocated formation of proper habits to discipline children. In fact, a 1914 U.S. Children's Bureau pamphlet, Infant Care, urged a strict schedule and urged parents not to play with their babies. John B Watson’s Behaviorism argued that parents could train children by rewarding good behavior and punishing bad behavior, and by following precise schedules for food, sleep, and other bodily functions. Who could forget the bible proverb that so many parents have lived by and still live by today “Whoever spares the rod hates their children, but the one who loves their children is careful to discipline them.” As if discipline and corporeal punishment are one in the same.
In the twentieth century, corporeal punishment began to fall out of favor in the western world. Many parents became conscious enough to see corporeal punishment for what it is, which is abuse. And so, today, while sadly there are still pockets of unconscious parents that still abuse their children in the name of discipline, the larger majority in the western world use parenting practices like timeouts as tools of discipline. It is easy to look back over time and say that we were living in the dark ages in terms of parenting. But I will tell you that in the years to come, that is exactly how history will see parenting today. History will see many of today’s common practices as barbaric and cruel. We now know how to create a healthy physical climate for our children and for each other. But I am here to tell you that we have no idea how to create a healthy emotional climate for our children or for each other. Of course there are rare exceptions to this rule, but over the course of human history, the emotional climate of a household, has not even factored into the idea of good parenting. Today, we are emerging from a new dark age. We are emerging from the dark age of emotions and feelings. And what we are awakening to is that it is possible to be a good parent to a child on a physical level and a terrible parent to a child on an emotional level. This has vast implication when we acknowledge that emotion is the core of our life and the heart of our relationships. In today’s world, most parenting advice ignores the world of emotion entirely. It focuses on how to correct misbehavior whilst disregarding the feelings that underlie and cause the misbehavior. Regardless of how far we have progressed, the goal of parenting is still to have a compliant and obedient child, not to raise a healthy adult. The goal is to raise a child who is “good”. Our justice system takes the exact same approach with regards to misbehavior. We are concerned with correcting misbehavior and creating good citizens whilst being unconcerned with the feelings that motivate such misbehavior. Good parenting involves emotion. Good relationships involve emotion.
Today, most parents make three crucial mistakes. 1. They disapprove of their children’s emotions 2. They dismiss their children’s emotions 3. They offer no guidance to a child with regards to their emotions.
The parent who disapproves of their child’s emotions is critical of their children’s displays of negative emotion and reprimand or punish for emotional expression. The parent, who dismisses their child’s emotions, disregards them as important, ignores their child’s emotions or worse, trivializes their child’s emotions. And the parent, who offers no guidance, may empathize with their child’s emotions, but does not set limits on behavior or assist the child in understanding and coping with their emotion. To give you an example of how this works out in practical terms, imagine that William does not want to go to school and begins to cry when his parent takes him to school. The disapproving parent might scold William for his refusal to cooperate. The disapproving parent may resort to calling him a brat or punishing him in some way with time alone, or with a spanking. The dismissive parent may brush off William’s emotions by saying “that’s silly, there’s no reason to be sad about going to school, now turn that frown upside down”. The dismissive parent may even resort to distracting William from his emotions by giving him a cookie or pointing out a cow in a field on their way to school. The parent who offers no guidance may behave in an empathetic way towards William by telling him that it’s ok to feel sad or scared but would not continue to help William decide what to do with his uncomfortable feelings, instead, they would leave him in a space where he feels as if his emotions are an all consuming force that he is powerless to. Children who are raised in unhealthy emotional environments are not able to soothe themselves. They also tend to develop health problems. On top of this, children who are raised in unhealthy emotional environments, fail to emotionally connect with their family. They often feel as if they do not belong. They fail to develop intimacy with their families and as a result, they feel isolated and alone. This of course carries on into adulthood. They grow into adults who are not capable of managing their emotion. They grow into adults who struggle to make relationships work. They develop powerlessly co dependent relationships and they develop a deep need whilst simultaneously an extreme fear of intimacy. In my opinion, the number one cause of sociopathic and psychopathic behavior in adults is the result of unhealthy emotional environments in childhood. Keep in mind that it is more difficult to recognize emotional dysfunction than it is to recognize overt abuse. Many of the serial killers and school shooters who reportedly came from “healthy homes” did not in fact come from healthy homes at all. They may have come from physically healthy homes, where they were fed and clothed and given many advantages, but underneath that lovely looking exterior, was extreme emotional dysfunction, emotional dysfunction that disabled them from connecting with other people.
Emotional dismissal and emotional disapproval are forms of emotional abuse. But the future will soon teach us to never underestimate emotional dismissal, emotional disapproval and emotional abuse. In my opinion, having experienced all the different forms of abuse, emotional abuse is the very worst and also the hardest to heal from. And now we come to the most damaging aspect of emotional dismissal and disapproval. When a parent disapproves of their child’s emotion or dismisses it, the child begins to accept the parent’s estimation of the event and learns to doubt his or her own judgment. As a result, the child loses confidence in himself. When emotional dysfunction rules the relationship, the child learns that they have no right to feel how they feel. They learn that it is wrong to feel how they feel. In short, they learn that it is wrong to feel the way that they feel. Now here’s the crux, the child believes that if it is wrong to feel the way they feel, but they feel that way, something must be wrong with them.
If I were to choose one single thing that is wrong with the mental health system, it is that there is an idea within the mental health system that there is a certain way that people should feel and if they do not feel that way, something is wrong with them. Psychiatrist offices are full of people who were raised in emotionally dysfunctional homes. These people grow up to believe that there is something wrong with them because they “shouldn’t feel how they feel”. When the actuality is that they should feel exactly how they feel. They have perfect and sound reason to feel how they feel and the idea that something is “wrong with them” is a fallacy. A fallacy that is the byproduct of having their emotions invalidated again and again. This is in fact one of the key causes of anxiety. Anxiety disorder is so often the result of extreme self- doubt and self-distrust. Self-distrust, leads to fear of the self, which is the result of being led to believe that you should not feel how you feel. When you fear yourself, you have constant anxiety. It’s like living with an enemy inside your own skin. Long story short, because this is how our parents taught us to treat emotion, this is how we treat each other’s feelings as adults. Our friendships and romantic relationships are painful because we do not know how to emotionally relate with one another. We fail to develop true intimacy with one another. We dismiss each other’s emotions. We disapprove of each other’s feelings. We tell other people how they should and shouldn’t feel. We have no patience for the emotional needs of others. We see emotions and feelings as weakness. We call people who display emotions, sensitive. And as a result, our adult relationships are emotionally unhealthy.
Here are three examples of adult relationships that are emotionally dysfunctional.
A woman goes to lunch with her friend. She is disappointed because she did not get promoted at work, like she thought she would. Her friend tells her she is just being negative. That she needs to look on the bright side and see that all she is doing, is creating more disappointment in her reality because she is so negatively focused. A husband gets home late from work, his wife starts crying the minute he walks through the door. The husband sees her crying and immediately says “you always overreact. I was only a half an hour late. Maybe you are just menopausal. You need professional help” and then withdraws to his office to watch television. A man is facing divorce. He tells his friends about what is going on and they convince him to join them at the bar. When he shows up, none of the acknowledge that he is going through a difficult time emotionally with his relationship. Instead they encourage him to not think about it, have a drink, watch the sports game and look at pretty girls at the bar. Regardless of whether it is a friendship or a romantic relationship, emotions and feelings are the heart of every healthy and meaningful relationship. Without a healthy emotional life, a relationship is not a relationship it is a social arrangement.
Intimacy is not about sex. Sex may be a byproduct of intimacy, but it is not intimacy in and of itself. Intimacy is knowing and being known for who we really are in all aspects of our lives. It is the bringing forth of the truth of who you are to the center of the relationship and being received for who you are and the other person bringing forth the truth of who they are to the center of the relationship and being received for who they are. It is a meeting at the heart center where empathy and understanding can then occur. I have said it before, but I’m going to say it again, intimacy can be broken down into “into me see”. Intimacy is to see into one another so as to deeply connect with one another and to know one another for who you truly are. And if the core of who you are is feelings, if the language of the soul is feelings, then the most important part of intimacy is emotional connection and understanding each other’s feelings. The bottom line is, emotions matter. We must see the importance and value in each other’s feelings. We must show respect for each other’s emotions. We must listen for the feelings behind the words. We must open ourselves to being understood and open ourselves to understanding others. Statements of acknowledgement and understanding should always precede advice. If you tell someone how they should or shouldn’t feel, you are teaching them to distrust themselves. You are teaching them that there is something wrong with them.
Because we struggle the most with negative emotions, the way we deal with negative emotions, dictates how healthy or unhealthy our relationship is emotionally. When we are dealing with negative emotions, there are concrete steps we can take to address those emotions, develop emotional connection with the other person and enhance our intimacy. This goes for our children as well as the adults in our lives. This is solid gold in a relationship when we are facing conflict.
#1. To become aware of the other person’s emotion
#2. To care about the other person’s emotion by seeing it as valid and important
#3. To listen empathetically to the other person’s emotion in an attempt to understand the way they feel. This allows them to feel safe to be vulnerable without fear of judgment. Seek to understand, instead of to agree.
#4 To acknowledge and validate their feelings. This may include helping them to find words to label their emotion. To acknowledge and validate a person’s feelings, we do not need to validate that the thoughts they have about their emotions are correct, instead we need to let them know that it is a valid thing to feel the way that they feel. For example, if our friend says, “I feel useless”, we do not validate them by saying “you’re right you are useless”. We could validate them by saying “I can totally see how that would make you feel useless and I would feel the same way if I were you”.
#5. To allow the person to feel how they feel and to experience their emotion fully before moving towards any kind of improvement in the way they feel. We need to give them the permission to dictate when they are ready to move up the vibrational scale and into a different emotion. We cannot impose our idea of when they should be ready or when they should be able to feel differently, on them. This is the step where we practice unconditional presence for someone and unconditional love. We are there as support without trying to “fix” them. Do not be offended if they do not accept your support at this time. There is a benevolent power inherent in offering, that is love in and of itself regardless of what someone does or does not do with it.
#6. After and only after their feelings have been validated and acknowledged and fully felt, help the other person to strategize ways to manage the reactions they might be having to their emotion. This is the step where you can assert new ways of looking at a situation that may improve the way the other person is feeling. This is where advice can be offered.
Now we come to one of the most important part of emotional health. The fact of the matter is that we are in a relationship with ourselves. This means, our own emotions must matter to us. This means we must acknowledge and validate our own emotions. This means we must not dismiss or disapprove of our own emotions. Therefore, the six steps I have outlined previously in this video, we must apply to ourselves.
Aside from the way you manage negative emotion, when it comes to creating a healthy emotional environment in a relationship, here is a list of some things you can do:
Express love to the other person. You can express your love to them physically by touching them if they are receptive to touch. Many people are touch starved in our todays’ world. You can express love verbally by complimenting them or affirming them. You can express love through service by doing something for them like the dishes or offering to help them with something. You can express love through gifts, which lets them to know that you care enough to think of them and secure a token of your affection for them. And you can express your love to them through quality time. Make sure to spend quality time where you are prioritizing time to be focused on them without distraction, doing something you both love to do, such as having a deep conversation or hiking together or going out to eat. Make sure that your expressions of love are done for the right reasons, because you genuinely want them to feel good, not because you want anything FROM them. Never ignore their presence. There are very few things that are more emotionally hurtful than being treated like you don't exist. Even if you're angry at the moment, it's no reason to give the cold shoulder to the person who loves you. This tip goes hand in hand with the last one. Do not physically or emotionally withdraw from them, especially during a conflict. People, who are afraid of intimacy and connection (and thus vulnerability) tend to cope with those feelings by becoming an island unto themselves. They become emotionally unavailable and disconnect from the other person as a defense. To withdraw in a relationship is to commit emotional divorce. And the #1 symptom of withdrawal is lack of communication. That being said, we are led to our next tip. Communicate, communicate and communicate. By engaging in a relationship, whether it is a friendship or a romantic relationship, we commit to connection. Communication is a huge part of connection. Communication takes place in many ways, not just verbally. In fact, most of our communication is taking place through our body language. Do not suppress your emotions and try to avoid, deny, dismiss or numb them away through distraction. We need to be willing to acknowledge our own emotion and communicate it in healthy ways to the other person. When we are confused about how to do this, a helpful tip is to take the thoughts we are having and imagine bringing them down to our heart space and then speaking from there. This technique is called speaking from the heart. When we do this, we tend to be more willingly vulnerable and thus, more authentic and less defensive and attacking in our communication style. Put your feelings into words. There is almost nothing worse for a relationship than remaining silent about how you are feeling. Not communicating how you feel creates a canyon between you and your partner. They can feel when you are emotionally upset. If you are not talking or if you are denying the way you feel, when they can feel that you are emotionally upset, it makes your partner feel crazy and confused. If you make promises, follow through. If you say you’re going to do something, do it. Make good on your words. Do not blow it off or forget about it. This systematically destroys trust in the relationship. And trust is a big part of emotional safety in a relationship. Admit to mistakes and commit to changing your behavior. Continuing to apologize over and over instead of changing a behavior sends the message that you don’t actually care about how the other person feels as much as you care about getting them off your back. But genuinely saying, “I’m sorry” when you recognize that you’ve made a mistake goes a long way. Get a handle on your priorities. If you want a relationship to feel good emotionally, you are going to have to value it enough to prioritize it. There is no such thing as a right priority or a wrong priority. But if your work or hobbies are a higher priority than your relationships, chances are your relationships will suffer because if you have to choose between them, you’ll choose work or hobbies. This will make the other person feel unloved and insignificant. It will also make the other person feel like it is unsafe to connect emotionally with you. When you are facing a conflict of interest between one thing and another thing, you need to be able to consciously decide what your priority is. In the healthiest relationships, the health of the relationships and the way your partner feels is the number one priority. Encourage them. When we get encouragement, we no longer feel alone. We no longer feel like it is us against the world. Encouragement, allows us to know that we have emotional support. Encouragement is the opposite of criticism and discouragement. It builds a person up instead of tears them down. This also allows people to be emotionally safe to share their dreams and desires with us. Express your wants, needs and expectations clearly in your relationship. This is a big part of developing healthy boundaries in a relationship and healthy boundaries are a big part of a healthy emotional relationship. If you feel confused about boundaries, feel free to watch my video on YouTube titled “Personal Boundaries vs. Oneness, How to Develop Healthy Boundaries”. It is not fair to keep the other person guessing about what you want and need. It is also not fair to expect them to read your mind by expecting things of them that that they are unaware of and have not agreed to. It is also important to take time to understand the other person’s wants needs and expectations. Ask for what you want and need and encourage them to do the same. And assuming that their wants and needs don’t conflict with your wants and needs, put forth energy to meet those needs and wants. Laugh and play together. Laughter and fun has the power to bond us with one another, in the same way that going through tough times together has the power to bond us with one another. It is also a powerful aphrodisiac. Prioritize doing things together that feels good and that are exciting. This also ensures that conflict and struggle is not the undertone of the relationship. Become an expert on the other person. Knowing as much as you can about the other person, who they really are and how they really feel (provided that you have good intentions for doing so), is the key to intimacy. It will help you to make the right choices about how to interact with the other person so that the emotional environment of the relationship is healthy and supportive. It also helps us to be experts at loving them in the way that they would feel most loved. Like all things, we need to apply these tips to ourselves. The one relationship we cannot end, except potentially through death, is our relationship with ourselves. This means that our relationship with ourselves is the most important relationship in our life. This also means that the heart of our relationship with ourselves is our emotions and how we take care of those emotions. Never be ashamed of how you feel. Your feelings are valid. If you feel an emotion, there is a good reason that you are feeling that emotion. Don’t let anyone tell you how you should or shouldn’t feel. You deserve a relationship where your feelings matter. And the fastest way to get to that relationship is to decide that your emotions matter to you.

To Help or Not to Help?

To help or not to help, that is the question. Contribution is one of the six basic human needs. We need to feel as if we are able to lend energy to others and as if that energy that we lend is of use and value to others. As people, we are inherently giving. If we cannot give our energy towards a collective creation, we feel as if we are living an empty life. Even the studies done on altruism in young children prove that we are driven innately to help each other. Over the course of our lives, sometimes several times a day, we feel called upon to help someone else. In fact, some of us consider helping others to be the central role and purpose of our lives. Society considers helping others to be a virtue that is synonymous with being a good person. And I am not doing this episode to debate whether helping is good or bad. We can all agree that helping in general is a very high vibrational endeavor. But helping others is not always a good idea, especially when we are helping people for the wrong reasons. When we are confronted with the opportunity to help others, we need to make sure we are doing it for the right reasons before we seize the opportunity. Natural helpers are people, people who we think of as selfless givers, even to the point of self-sacrifice, are people pleasing, empathic, warm hearted, sincere, sentimental and generous. Their most basic driving desire is to be loved. But there is usually great childhood sadness in them, a result of emotional neglect in their early relationships. They were often the "parentified" child in their family, the little adult or peacemaker that parents counted on not to give anyone any trouble. They learned that the way to be noticed and gain their significance was to be extra good and always be there for other people. Unfortunately, since the real meat of their empathy is based on the projection of their own emotional deprivation, they exaggerate the helplessness and neediness of others. And because emotional deprivation is rarely labeled as such, these people have no idea why they feel a lifelong, chronic sense of being overlooked. Deep down, helpers fear being unwanted and unworthy of love. And it is because of those desires and fears that the shadow side of the helper begins to show its face. The helper will often help purely to get love and to be wanted and needed. They can slip into self-sacrifice; play the role of the martyr and trap people in states of powerless dependence on them. An aspect of their emotional self has not evolved past their childhood experience. Beneath the surface, helpers fear that they are without value in themselves, and so they still think that they must be extra good and do things for others in order to win love and acceptance from others. Because of this extreme emotional deprivation lurking beneath the surface of the helper, their efforts to help in order to be noticed and loved often dead end and instead of being loved and accepted and appreciated for their help, they go unnoticed and are even resented for the help they try to give. When we consider ourselves to be natural helpers who dedicate our lives to the service of others, we tend to contain all of the shadow aspects of helping. But any and all of us, need to be aware of these shadow sides to helping before we help others or accept help from others. The shadow aspects of helping people revolve around helping for the wrong selfish reasons. We cannot actually ever help someone for unselfish reasons. Every motive in the universe is inherently selfish. This is because at our most basic, soul level, we know that there is no such thing as separation. Making the collective happy makes us happy. Making ourselves happy makes the collective happy. If we are honest with ourselves, seeing other people feel good, makes us feel good, so even though we may care about them, we are ultimately helping others to feel good because it makes us feel good. Ultimately there is no good and bad, but for the sake of understanding, lets say that we can help for the right selfish reasons, or the wrong selfish reasons. If we are helping for the wrong selfish reasons, we are using help to manipulate others.
The first shadow aspect of helping others is helping when the other person has not asked and then acting angry, resentful or passive aggressive when they do not show appreciation. It is tempting, when we want appreciation (which is a form of love) to leap on an opportunity to help someone. We are sure that the help will be well received. But we do not understand that our hidden motives can be felt by the other person. Our help does not feel genuine and when we are not appreciated for offering help, we become resentful and angry. It is easy to see how unfair this is from the outside looking in; to be resentful that we were not appreciated for something we were never asked to do in the first place.
If you volunteer to help someone, you are offering help where you see an opportunity to help, you have not been directly asked to help and so, gratitude is not a part of the arrangement. If you are shown gratitude as a result of volunteering, consider it a nice but unexpected bonus.
Be honest about whether you are an appreciation or gratitude junkie. If you are a gratitude junkie, like an addict, helping is just another way to get a fix. A good rule of thumb is that if you need or want appreciation for helping someone, do not help them in the first place because you are about to help them for manipulative reasons. Your reward for helping should be what you are getting out of the helping itself, not what other people give to you because of it.
On that note, the second shadow reason for helping is the need to be needed and likewise the fear of abandonment. When we need to be needed, we help people whenever we see the opportunity to do so, because our subconscious mind knows that it binds them to us. It forces them to become dependent on us and thus be unable to leave us. On the extreme end of the scale of this shadow, we see people who disempower others and who like to keep them sick or unhappy so that they have a guaranteed role in their lives. One example of the extreme side of this shadow is Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy whereby a person fulfills their need for positive attention by hurting someone else (usually their child) so as to keep them in the role of being “sick” so that they can gain support and personal attention by taking on a fictitious hero role. If we make people dependent on us, we can ensure that because they need us, they will never abandon us.
The third shadow reason for helping is the desire for leverage. Helping can be done in order to put people in a kind of prison, whereby we now have the power. We may help someone and thus consider him or her to be indebted. We may help people so that they can owe us. This is especially common if we want something from them. It is very common for people to help people because they want something in return. For example, a company may donate money to a politician, not because they actually want to help the politician, but because they expect the politician to help them pass a bill through government, which reduces their import, export taxes. One thing that we may want from others is their guaranteed alliance and compliance. We have all kinds of sayings in our society, such as “don’t bite the hand that feeds”, which reinforce the idea that if we help people, they are not allowed to oppose us. When alliance or compliance is what we want, we can use help to put people in a guilt trap. If they oppose us, we can use the help we gave them as leverage. We can use it to get them back into place by holding it over their heads and guilt them back into a place of gratitude, allegiance and compliance. We can even make them responsible for making us happy by reinforcing the idea that they owe us something for the help we gave them. The fourth shadow aspect of helping is self-sacrifice. People who self sacrifice, give up what is in their own best interests for the best interests of others. Many people would have you believe that self sacrificers are self less people. This is not the case. Self sacrificers are in fact some of the most self centered people around. Self Sacrificers are more addicted to getting love from other people than anyone. They play the martyr so that other people will see them as good and therefore approve of them and love them; they often times even play the martyr so that other people will pity them. Pity can feel like love to people who need badly to be seen as good. By being the victim, they get to be the “good one”.
Self sacrificers tend to feel used. They fall into the victim role of being used by everyone, sometimes because people are using them, but most times because they continually volunteer themselves to help, even when they are not asked to and feel put out as a result. The self sacrificer projects their lonely, deprived child-self onto others, imagining a neediness that may not actually exist.
The fifth shadow aspect of help is that those of us, who feel motivated to help, often have a hyper responsibility complex. We do not just take responsibility for ourselves; we also take responsibility for others. We tend to max ourselves out trying to be everything to everyone. We are eaten alive by guilt. We help people to absolve ourselves of this guilt. If we do not help, we feel as if we are being irresponsible and bad and we fear that we will be punished for it. We need to realize that it is not our responsibility to help others. But it is our capability to help others.
Nothing in this universe obligates you to help others. You are not even obligated to raise your own children. Nothing is forcing you to raise them. You technically could drop them off by the side of the road. I’m using this extreme example to demonstrate that if we choose to do something for someone else, it should be because we are capable of doing it and chose to do it willingly, not because we are obligated to do it because of some illusion of responsibility that we have invested in.
The sixth shadow aspect, which we have touched on previously, is that those of us who feel the need to help, are often projecting the need for help within ourselves onto others. Helping others serves as a distraction from our own dysfunction. If we are projecting our own problems onto other people and then helping them with those problems, we do not have to acknowledge them within ourselves. By exaggerating other people’s neediness and problems, we can ignore our own neediness and problems. Most of us with a helper complex are in denial of the fact that our childhoods contained deep levels of deprivation. We have an internal emptiness where love and significance should be, that needs to be filled up. We can feel this childhood aspect of ourselves within us that so badly needed love, approval, appreciation, support and connection, but was overlooked, disregarded, unsupported and conditionally loved. We want to get away from that inner childhood self. We want to gloss over it, deny it and make sure that no one else ever sees it. We project this overlooked and helpless, underdog childhood self onto others and then try to help that reflection. It doesn’t work. It’s like trying to clean the mirror to get rid of the reflection in the mirror. The internal anguish does not go away. There are of course more shadow aspects to help. I have merely listed the most common ones. Beware when you are exploring your motivations for lending a helping hand that motivation for helping can be mixed. It is possible to have pure conscious motivations for helping while also having shadow motives for helping. One thing that confuses helpers the most is why people have such bad reactions to being helped sometimes. Assuming that your motivation is completely pure for helping and that they are not reacting badly to you because they can feel your impure motives, one potential is that they are reacting badly to help because of the message that help so often sends. It is possible to help someone for the pure sake of love and because we want to see them achieve their desire. It is also possible to help someone because we see them as incapable. Often when we help someone, the subconscious message that we are sending him or her, is that they can’t do it. If this is the case, we disempower them by helping them.
Have you ever tried to help a five year old in the “do it myself” phase to tie his shoes? The notion of help most likely sent them into a fit because by saying, “let me help you tie your shoes”, you reinforced the fact that they were powerless to do it themselves. Disempowerment doesn’t feel good to anyone. Sometimes when we get help from other people, when we don’t ask for it, we are almost thinking, “way to tell me what you really think about me, thanks for the vote of confidence” (in a sarcastic tone).
People don’t want help sometimes because in order for them to ask for help or acknowledge that they need help, they have to acknowledge where they are, which can be really grim. Coming around to the realization that they are powerless or compromised is scary. Scary enough that many people would rather deny the help and believe that they are better off than they are. All this being said, when you are presented with the opportunity to help someone, question you true motives for helping. To do this, you will have to be brutally honest with yourself and capable of acknowledging your own shadows. It’s tempting for us when we want to help to go into denial and justify helping with the ever so popular “Because they need my help” or “because I love to see other people happy” excuses.
As far as when to help people and when to not help people, that is completely up to your own personal discernment. To enhance your own discernment, ask yourself these questions:
What do I want to see happen as a result of my help? Am I lending my energy to the problem or to the solution? What are the positive reasons I have for helping them? What are the negative reasons I have for helping them? Am I projecting my lonely, deprived child-self onto others, imagining a neediness that may not actually be there, or may only be partly true? Do they really need my help, or am I subconsciously pushing my own agenda onto them?” Once you have owned up to your motivation for helping, you probably already know whether it is a good idea to help or whether it is a bad idea to help. No one can make that decision for you. But here are 6 good tips that will help you to decide whether to help or not:
Is the person you are helping receptive to your help? Sometimes people will ask for help outright, other people (especially those who have a difficult time asking for help) will not. If it is not immediately obvious how you can help them, ask them how you can help. If it is obvious how you can help them, and you know they will be receptive to it, just do it. Do it without explaining yourself or expecting gratitude in return. The best kind of help empowers people. Is your help going to empower them or disempower them? Is the help going to make it easier for them to reach their own goals? The best kind of help puts tools in other people’s hands so that they can achieve what they desire. These are the gifts that last a lifetime. Get informed. Don’t automatically assume that you know what is best for someone. The more informed you are about the other person and what the other person needs and wants, the easier it will be to decide whether or not you can help them, and if you can help them, how to best help them. Assuming that you know what is best for someone, often causes us to lend help that is not helpful at all. Make sure that your boundaries are healthy before you offer to help someone or say yes when someone asks you for help. If you struggle with boundaries, watch my YouTube video titled “Boundaries vs. Oneness, How to Develop Healthy Boundaries”. A strong sense of self will enable you to know what is right for you and what is wrong for you; it will also help you to know whether helping someone is in alignment or out of alignment for you. Look yourself in the mirror. Acknowledge the aspects of you that “need help”. Acknowledge the aspects of you that feel like the underdog and that feel overlooked. Own up to the emptiness inside of you. Find out what you feel deprived of. Come out of denial. Be willing to see your childhood clearly enough to recognize what you were deprived of as a child. If you are thinking, “they need my help”, turn that thought around on yourself in two ways, the first is: “I need my help”. The second is “I need their help”. Open your mind to discovering how you need your help and how you need their help. And get help for that aspect of yourself. Your main focus should be healing the wound within you. If you do this, those wounds will cease to reflect externally in the world around you. Know that you can help someone just by being there and being supportive by offering your unconditional presence. The most damaging part of struggle is not the struggle itself, it is going through that struggle alone. Other people often do not need us to fix their problems. What they need us to do is to unconditionally be with them while they navigate their own problems. Think about it, when you were young, you did not need your parents to fix your problems. When they did try to fix your problems, the message you got was that there was something wrong about you. The message that you got was that you needed to change in order to be loved or approved of by them. What you needed was for them to be with you as you navigated those problems unconditionally. You needed understanding and empathy and their presence. And don’t forget, you can also help someone by connecting them with someone else who can help them better than you can. Contributing your energy to someone else in the form of help is an exalted demonstration of love. But this universe is all one, and because of this you are not helping someone if you are hurting yourself in the process.

How to Receive Love

One would think that receiving is as easy as someone giving something to you. Don’t we all wish we lived in a world as simple as that? The reality is that regardless of whether or not someone gives something to us, we cannot always receive it. All the various positive things that people give to us could fall under the category of love. Attention is a form of love, gifts are a form of love, help is a form of love and the list goes on. So when we recognize that we can’t receive, the thing we have to acknowledge is that the thing we really can’t receive is love. We can’t receive love because we were never loved unconditionally. There were always conditions placed on love and conditions placed on receiving. This makes love and receiving feel bad instead of good. The first ingredient to learning how to receive love is recognizing the barriers that we have to receiving love. For people who have a hard time receiving, the number one barrier to receiving is distrust of the giver’s motives. When we distrust the giver’s motives, we fear the consequences of letting down our defenses and so; we cannot open up to receive anything from them. For a thing to be given genuinely, the motive behind it needs to be pure. For so many of us who have a difficult time receiving, the people in our early lives did not give love freely and in pure ways. They hurt us instead. This makes it so we either do not see or feel love at all, or when we are offered love (instead of feeling good), we feel a sense of panic or vulnerability. To let ourselves be loved and valued for who we really are would be to violate our parents' verdict that we are flawed. Their belief that we are flawed (a belief which we adopted), justifies the way they treated us and helps us to believe that we were not victims and were instead loved to the degree that we deserved. To let ourselves be loved and valued for who we really are, we would have to admit to the reality that we were not unconditionally loved. To let ourselves be loved and valued for who we really are arouses our fear that if we do, feel, or think certain things, we'll be neglected and abandoned and in the most primal sense, left to die. "So to receive love is to both face a grim retrospective reality as well as to risk death"
People, who can’t receive, have an especially hard time with help. They don’t ask for help and they don’t get much help, not because no help exists for them, but because they feel like the world is against them. They feel as if to get what they want, it will be an uphill struggle alone. This belief blinds them to even seeing help when it is offered to them. And on the off chance that they do see help being offered, they distrust it, thinking that there is a dangerous anterior motive. In other words, they see help as nothing more than a drawback disguised as help. Deep down, they feel unworthy of help or as if help means that they are incapable.
All too often, our motive for giving love is selfish. We give because we want to get. In other words, giving is our way of taking from others. Selfishness is defined as concern only for ones own welfare, benefit and interests regardless of the impact on others. Selfishness is not a natural state. It only occurs when a person is focused on and convinced of the lack in their life. We often confuse self-love and selfishness. But there is a big difference between the two. Selfishness is created when a person, who does not know how to love themselves and meet their needs, feels that internal deprivation and then spends their lives trying to fill in that hole externally. It is very uncomfortable to spend time around a selfish individual because it will constantly feel as if that person is taking and taking from you. They do not know how to get or create what they want without taking it from someone else. They do not know how to love themselves, so their life depends on getting you to give them those things. If you don’t, they are at a loss of what to do, they feel powerless and they get angry because they are scared. But when we take a step back, compassion will show us that they come from a space of internal starvation. Expecting them not to jump at the opportunity to take what they are starving for is like expecting a starving child to not steal food.
Most of us who struggle with receiving love spent time around selfish people growing up. Now beware, the most selfish people will often pride themselves on being the most selfless. Self sacrificers, people pleasers and helpers will have you believe that they are doing everything for you; when in reality they are doing things for you only to get what they want. Maybe what they want is a sense of goodness or your indebtedness to them or something else they want you to owe them. Basically, selfish people have awesome disguises so you’re going to need to look beyond the façade. I’m going to give you one example of thousands that could create a person that can’t receive love.
Brian grew up with a mother who told him that she sacrificed everything for him. This caused Brian to feel a sense of guilt and debt to his mother. She would often use that guilt against him when she wanted him to do something for her or for the family. When Brian left to college, he was excited to start a new life. But a few months in, Brian’s mother called and said “I need you to move home to help us with the family business”. Brian did not want to. When he resisted initially, his mother retorted by saying “I fed you and clothed you and gave up everything so you could have a better life than I did, I did it all for you; why can’t you do this one thing for me, you’re so selfish.” Brian’s guilt and sense of debt forced him to quit college and go home to run the family business, where he was ultimately miserable, all in the name of love.
This example highlights a truth. Love that is given to get something back is not love. In fact when people teach us that love comes with a catch or an expectation, it makes us confused about love and it makes love a dirty thing.
There are five main barriers we have to receiving love. I’m going to list them now for you. All of them are the byproduct of being hurt.
We can have a barrier to receiving love because when people give us things, it feels like they have power over us and we are vulnerable to them. We feel this way when the people in our life used love as leverage. We have this barrier to receiving if love comes with a side dish of guilt, duty or debt. We saw how this plays out in the previous scenario with Brian and his mother.
You know the saying, “with strings attached”. This saying is exactly what we are talking about when it comes to our first barrier to love. When someone gives something to you with strings attached, it feels like entrapment. And in truth, even if it happened on a subconscious level, they gave something to you, so that they could have power over you and guarantee that they would have the upper hand. If you suffer from this barrier, let yourself feel a sense of compassion for yourself because the people in your world made love like a Trojan horse.
  We can have a barrier to receiving love because we feel unworthy. When our parents treated us in any way that was short of loving, we came to the decision that something was wrong with us. After all, unless something really was wrong with us, why would we be treated that way? Because of this, we do not feel good enough for someone to love. We do not feel good enough for someone to love enough to give their energy to us.
  This barrier goes hand in hand with the previous barrier; we can have a barrier to receiving if we think that we don’t deserve it. Those of us who have deserving issues when it comes to love think that we have to earn love or achieve something in order to be loved. We think that if we didn’t earn something enough to deserve something, we are bad and will get punished by the universe for it. If we do not understand what we did to deserve something that someone is giving us, we start to panic. For those of you who suffer from the deserving barrier to love, watch my videos on YouTube titled “Deserving vs. Entitlement” and “Strike Deserve From your Vocabulary.” And also ask yourself this question, “What is wrong with getting something you don’t deserve?”
  We can have a barrier to receiving if we are addicted to reciprocity. Reciprocity is the idea that something must be exchanged for mutual benefit. If you are addicted to reciprocity, you believe love must be equal. As good as it sounds for love to be fair and equal, it is a misunderstanding of how love works and it is not done for good reason. For example, for a person who fears that love is leverage, reciprocity guarantees that the other person does not have the upper hand and cannot guilt or entrap them later as a result of showing them love. We can know that have a barrier to receiving when someone gives us something and we automatically consciously or subconsciously think, “what can I give him or her in return?” or “what do I owe them in return?”
  We can have a barrier to love if we fear loss. A common reason for being unable to receive is previous experience with losing a loved one or losing someone’s love. Whether it is someone disapproving of you, or someone withdrawing from you, or losing someone you love to death, or experiencing a break up or something else, one of the most painful experiences we can have is having love and then losing it. This experience creates a scar and on a subconscious level, we believe that it is better not to have love at all than to lose it. We believe that it is better not to accept something at all, which could be taken back. If you distrust love, do not expect yourself to trust love when it is given to you. The idea of trust is a nice idea, but you can’t just decide to trust. You have learned not to trust because people have hurt you. If you say, “I trust this love I’m receiving”, you will be lying to yourself and a part of you will be saying, “You must think I’m some kind of absolute idiot”.
The rehabilitation process of receiving begins with total and complete transparency. Make it your practice to get people to OWN what they are getting out of giving and OWN what you are getting out of giving. This makes it safer to receive. It also allows us to be able to decide whether or not to accept something that is laced with motives other than love. Beware that mixed motives are a possibility. It is possible to do something because you really like seeing the other person happy, but also because you want something in return. Let me give you an example of how transparency works in a relationship.
Let’s say Graciela made me some homemade chocolates. If I asked her to expose her true motive for making them for me and asked her what she hoped to gain from the gesture, it would be tempting for her to just say, “I want you to be happy”. But if she was really honest, she would say, “I want you to feel good because you have been wanting chocolates all week and also, I’ve been jealous of how much time you’ve been spending with Lauren and I figured that if I did something like make you chocolates, you’d feel like I was a better friend than she is.”
Now lets say that I made breakfast for Graciela. If Graciela asked me why I did it and what I hoped to gain from it, it would be tempting to say, “I thought you’d like it”. But if I am totally transparent, I might say “I knew you would like it and I also have been feeling super guilty about the things you’ve been doing for me and so, I figured that by doing something for you, I could get rid of that guilt.”
Make a habit of exposing what people hope to gain from giving, what people want you to gain by receiving, what you hope to gain from giving and what you hope they will gain by receiving. Often, even if the motives are not completely pure, knowing those impure motives makes it so you are safe and able to receive.
We have to begin to recognize the specific ways that we turn away from receiving. Some examples of how we turn away from receiving are: I only get things from others by giving first, I get stiff when people hug me, I withdraw emotionally, and I deflect attention away from me by changing the subject. I assure you the list of ways that people turn away from receiving is endless. If you have a difficult time receiving, ask yourself “How do I turn away from receiving and love and support?” And “How do I undermine love?”
It is important to note that all people must get love in some way. If we can’t receive, we try to go through the back door to receive. We think we must give to get. So we may help others to get love or we may look our very best to get love or we may achieve to get love or we may act super nice to get love etc. What are you doing in order to get love?
Once we find out why we don’t recognize love, why we can’t take love in and why we can’t hold on to love; learning to receive starts with three basic steps, the first step is recognizing love, the second is taking love in and the third is holding onto love.
Recognizing love. Think about what love in its purest form means to you. Think about the ways that people show love to one another. For those of you who really struggle with recognizing love, I suggest reading the book “The Five Love languages” by Gary Chapman. Pretend that you are like a birdwatcher, but a birdwatcher for demonstrations of love. All day, keep on the lookout for love being given to you as if you have to count and keep track of it. Solicit the help of another person to help you recognize love. Sometimes, when we don’t recognize love, having a friend observe us in our lives and tell us, “this is love” or “that is love” helps us to become aware of it. Some time ago, I had solicited the help of a friend to assist me in recognizing love. That day, someone came up to give me a long hug. I unconsciously emotionally recoiled from the hug as usual. And my friend said, “that’s love” under her breath. Without her help, I would never have seen that gesture as love.
  Taking Love In. Once we recognize love being given, we have to consciously allow it in. To do this, we can practice feeling the somatic experience of it. Spend time in the feeling of it. I spend a lot of time talking about the value of feeling your negative emotions. It is also important to feel your positive ones. This means when someone shows you love, experience the feeling of that experience in your body. This can begin with the question “What might it feel like if I could feel (fill in the blank)”. For example, what might it feel like if I could feel that compliment or feel the feeling of having done a good job? Where in your body is there a sense of accepting the love being given as true or real? While your chest may have a resistance to it, your hands or knees might be wanting and accepting of it. Allow the feeling of acceptance of love to permeate your body. This means, once you identify that your hands feel wanting and allowing of the love, consciously imagine spreading that sensation all across your body. Spend time immersed in that good feeling, abundant sensation. The longer you experience that sensation, the more it becomes ingrained in your brain and the easier it will be to receive in the future. Another good way to take loving gestures in is to consciously imagine taking it in. If someone gives you a gift, close your eyes and imagine pulling that energy straight into your heart. If someone compliments you, take a deep breath in and imagine breathing that compliment into the core of your being, like a drag off of a positive cigar. If someone hugs you, imagine yourself softening to let that embrace go all the way through you. Chose to mentally dissolve your own barriers to let love in.
Another aspect of letting love in is to find your missing experience and allow yourself to get it. This begins with a universal truth. You can get what you need and want and you deserve to have your needs met. On a side note, one of the best things you can do for another person is to discover what experience in life they are missing and provide it for them. For example, I might be missing the experience of knowing that it is ok to be exactly as I am. Or I might be missing the experience of having my emotions validated or I might be missing the experience of being helped to achieve something or I might be missing the experience of play. My job is to take steps toward having that missing experience.
Spend time observing people who are good at receiving love. And remain open to hearing new and different opinions about love so that you can begin to see love differently. This will untangle love from what love isn’t. One of the best ways to learn how to receive love and gain insights about love is to watch children. Small children are still living in a state where giving and receiving love is natural and pure.
  Holding onto love. Once we take love in, we need to learn how to hold on to love. For some of us love is fleeting. It is as if there are holes poked in our being and the love leaks out the minute it is put in. When we feel unloved, we tend to withdraw. When we do this, we cap off our ability to receive love and all the reserves of love that were within us, drain way. Instead of withdrawing and isolating yourself when you feel negative emotion, seek out connection. Don’t lie and say, “I am fine”. Express yourself. Practice the art of allowing yourself to be vulnerable. This ensures your internal love container will not be like a water well in the middle of the Sahara desert. One aspect of holding onto love is developing self-support. Self-support is something that you can permanently rely on. Some examples of self-support are: Showing love to yourself, taking good care of yourself physically, being who you really are, processing, seeking insight, surrounding yourself with people who are loving and who increase your self worth and Initiating finding help. Remember that you are helping yourself by finding support. A good way to develop a long-term hold on love is to learn to love in another what you hate in yourself. If you begin to open your mind to approving of what you hate in yourself by approving of it in them, you will automatically feel more lovable and thus be able to take in and hold onto love. Keep reminders of love near you. Even if someone does die and even if you do break up with someone, the love between you was real. The love is not nullified by the passage of time or by changing circumstance. What reminds you that you are loved? Is it a picture, is it an item, is it a quote? Keep anything that reminds you that you are loved within plain sight. Look for proof that love is not scarce and is not going to go away. Is there love in your life that is permanent? Is it possible that if someone withdraws their love, someone else will fill their space and offer you even better kind of love? Those of us who have a resistance to receiving love live lives of desperation and deprivation. Even people who are perpetually starved of food and water do not suffer like those who are starved of love. You deserve to live a life free from deprivation. As the legendary Sufi mystic Rumi once said, “Your task is not to seek love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it”.

Using Orgasm to Manifest

The sexual response cycle is divided into four phases: excitement, plateau, orgasm and resolution. There is no distinct beginning or end to each phase; they are all part of a continuous process of sexual response. This article is going to focus on orgasm. Orgasm can be achieved through many means. Orgasm can even be achieved through modalities like visualization and through breathing, techniques that are entirely unrelated to masturbation or sex. Orgasm, also called sexual climax, is the sudden release of accumulated sexual energy. As far as the body is concerned, the orgasm is controlled by the autonomic nervous system, the same part of the nervous system that controls your heart rate, breathing, perspiration and digestion.
When Men Orgasm: First, seminal fluid collects in the urethral bulb. This is when a man may have the sensation that orgasm and ejaculation is certain. Next, semen is ejaculated from the penis. Contractions occur in the penis and pelvic region.
When Women Orgasm: The vaginal walls contract rhythmically every eight-tenths of a second. (The number and intensity of the contractions vary depending on the individual orgasm.) The muscles of the uterus also contract.
When Both Orgasm: Breathing, pulse rate and blood pressure continue to rise. Muscle tension and blood-vessel engorgement reach a peak. Sometimes orgasm comes with a grasping-type muscular reflex of the hands and feet. The orgasm activates the pleasure center of the brain; releasing endorphins it also causes our minds to temporarily “lose control.” One study from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands found that when men and women reach orgasm, the lateral orbitofrontal cortex temporarily shuts down. This is the region of the brain that is responsible for behavior control. We are essentially in a deep state of surrender to the experience. During orgasm, our brains are also flooded with oxytocin, which is the powerful brain chemical that inspires feelings of intimacy. Known as the “cuddle hormone,” oxytocin makes you feel connected to your partner. It bonds you to each other. Orgasms, especially the really good ones can sometimes consume the entire body, not limiting themselves to the pelvic region.
As far as your health is concerned, orgasm leads to feelings of euphoria and pleasure which reduces stress, depression and anxiety levels, it boosts the immune system, For those of you who like the effect exercise has on the body, orgasm burns calories, it promotes relaxation and release of tension which helps you sleep better, it increases circulation in the body and also the brain leading to increased mental sharpness, it helps alleviate pain, it helps the cells in the body regenerate and it inhibits the aging process.
All of these physiological happenings I have just briefly described are of course the physical translation of what is happening on an energetic and spiritual level. On an energetic level, the flow of energy is sped up within the body. The body opens up to a state of receptivity, whereby the meridians and chakras of the body are receiving an unrestricted flow of energy. Alignment is occurring between the vibration of your physical perspective and your non-physical perspective. And thus you experience a blending between the physical aspects of you and the non-physical aspect of you.
During orgasm, the awareness of the identity or ego is dissolved so you can touch your infinite nature. This is why sex and orgasm has been used as a tool in spirituality to reach higher states of consciousness. Orgasm is in fact one practice you can use to experience enlightenment. Tantra is the most well known example of sexual practice being used as a doorway to enlightenment.
There are two main types of orgasm, explosive and implosive. There are a great many theories on both types of orgasms. Some people think explosive is healthy because it releases energy and implosive is unhealthy because it builds pressure in the body. Some people think that explosive is unhealthy because it drains your energy and implosive is healthy because it builds energy. My opinion is that both can be healthy and both can be unhealthy. In an explosive orgasm, the energy moves out of the body like it does during an explosion. In an implosive orgasm, the energy moves inwards so that it is retained within the body. An explosive orgasm is the best kind of orgasm to use for manifestation. It also creates the greatest release and therefore decreases stress levels the best. But it can cause you to feel depleted and it is usually a shallower form of orgasm. The explosive orgasm is the one most natural to men. An implosive orgasm is the best kind of orgasm to use for healing or unity work. It pulls the partner’s energy into you. It is restorative because it nourishes the body and soul and increases your energy levels. Instead of exploding outwards from you, it expands you from within. The implosive orgasm is the one most natural to women. But it can boost energy levels to an uncomfortable degree and allows people who are contained and who fear extending themselves towards others in any way, to stay that way. It is best to be able to develop the ability to choose what kind of orgasm to have based on your current desires or needs. Every body is like a unique instrument. The time it takes and stimulation it takes to achieve orgasm is different from person to person. The only way to learn how to play an instrument with no manual is to experiment. I could do an entire episode on why people (especially women) struggle to achieve orgasm. But for the sake of this video, I will tell you that most of it has nothing to do with the orgasm itself. It has to do with the fact that some people struggle with their relationship to their own bodies so much and some people struggle with intimacy so much.
It is true that for many of us, the craving for orgasm is the craving for relief, relief in the form of release. This feeling of relief becomes it’s own addiction. This is a big part of what we are addicted to if we are addicted to pornography. But ultimately on a higher level, the progression towards orgasm and the craving for orgasm is the progression towards and craving for oneness. Just like love is the movement towards oneness. To love someone, is to include them as you. To orgasm with someone as a byproduct of love, is to become conscious of the experience of being one. It is to move beyond the physical world, which separates us from one another. Orgasm in and of itself unites us with our own infinite, multi dimensional soul. We find alignment between the physical and non-physical self. And orgasm with a partner we feel love for, unites us not only with our own non- physical self, but also with them. It is therefore an amplified experience of oneness. Love that is added to sex, transforms sex so that it is no longer sex. Instead it is a bridge to the great beyond.
You will forget yourself in the experience of oneness. For a moment you will touch the experience of unity. But beware, until you learn to maintain that unity through love in your day-to-day life, a vast division suddenly occurs. As you settle back into the experience of yourself, you will feel the contrast between the oneness and unity you just experienced and the separation that is currently the undertone of your life. You have gone to and from source. That's why, for many of us, after every sex act, a frustration, anxiety or depression sets in. We feel that we are so far away from the love. We are so very alone. We feel worse after sex than we did before. Orgasm involves the total self; mind, body, soul together. You are no longer in control; existence itself has taken possession of you and you don't know who you are. It is momentary enlightenment. It is a mini death so that you can experience being fully alive. Human life on earth is the byproduct of the orgasm. Orgasm and conception goes hand in hand. And so you can see that the orgasm has an element of extreme creative force to it. The question is, what are you conceiving? What does this mean for those of us who are practicing the art of manifestation? It means that the orgasm is one of the most powerful tools for manifestation that you can possibly imagine. Nothing matters more than what you are focusing on and feeling the experience of in the moment of orgasm. What you focus on, especially on a feeling based level, is what you will conceive.
Here’s what I mean, if I’m having sex or masturbating and focusing on my partner with my eyes, but focusing on insecurity about my body with my heart/emotions, I will begin to immediately manifest scenarios in my life that cause me to feel insecure about my body. If I’m focusing on a bondage type fantasy in my mind and feeling the feelings of being dominated, I will begin to immediately manifest scenarios in my life that cause me to feel dominated. This is a crucial realization because we live in an era where our sexual practices are becoming increasingly deviant. When our sexual and orgasmic practices become more deviant, so does our collective reality.
There is a very corny way to visualize what is occurring during orgasm. Think back to the old kids movies you used to watch. The fairy or wizard would focus intensely, repeating an incantation and with the wave of their wand and a huge energetic release, the thing they were trying to conjure would manifest before their eyes, usually in a cloud of sparking smoke.
In the minute of orgasm, the accumulated energy that is building up is released. And you can aim and lend that powerful burst of energy towards what you desire, thus manifesting it into reality. It is best that during orgasm (and if you can during the build up as well), focus your mind and emotions on whatever you wish to manifest. We can use sex to manifest loving relationships or deepen the bond with our specific partner, by focusing emotionally and mentally on the sensation of bonding, unification and harmony with them. We can also use sex and masturbation to manifest things that are entirely unrelated to sex. For example, some people like to use orgasm as a tool for career advancement. When it comes to sex, we are habitual. Once we relate something we have focused on to the feeling of climaxing, that becomes our modus operandi for achieving orgasm the next time. For this reason, many people use what turns them on already during the excitement and plateau phases of the sexual response. But right as they feel the inevitability of orgasm, they focus on whatever they want to manifest and maintain that focus throughout the course of the orgasm and resolution phases of sexual response. For example, a man who is masturbating (before he learns to gain sexual excitement and plateau from the idea of a job promotion) first focuses on scenes in his mind of a woman having sex with a man, after all this usually turns him on. But the minute that he feels the inevitability of orgasm, he switches his focus to the experience of standing in a boardroom, accepting his new promotion to the job position that he wants. He will allow the feeling of the climax to amplify the sensations of achievement and glory and relief and pride of promotion. He will allow the feeling of the climax to enhance and focus the image in his mind of the people that are there and the way the room looks and smells. He will use his orgasm to make the scenario as real as possible on all levels as if he is living it at that vey moment. And he will hold onto it as his mental and emotional focus as long as he possibly can, completely through the resolution phase. And if he drifts off to sleep, he has then added the state of allowing to the manifestation and amplified it further.
Another example is, a woman who is having sex focuses on the physical attributes of the man on top of her, enough to feel the sensation of sexual arousal within her body. She is conscious of the fact that she wants to have a deeply committed and loving permanent relationship with a man. So instead of worrying about whether he is the one, or focusing on the ceiling fan or thinking about whether her legs are shaved, she begins to focus on the feeling of him deep inside of her. She feels of the sensation of his energy reaching into her heart space. She closes her eyes and begins to imagine what it would feel like to be with a man who is utterly committed to her. She sinks into the feeling of security of having his energy fully and unconditionally invested in her. If she needs, for the sake of reaching climax, she can transition back to focusing on whatever creates arousal. When she feels the inevitability of climax, she shifts her focus entirely back to the feeling and experience of long-term relationship commitment. Maybe she looses herself in the feeling of the complete connection with the man she is with. Maybe she imagines the scenario of getting married in detail. The most important thing is that in the moment of orgasm, she emotionally experiences the feeling of emotional security and love and being wanted. She maintains that focus throughout the duration of the orgasm and resolution phase. Either this man she is sleeping with will become that partner, or the universe draws him away to make space for the one who is a match to that committed love that she has been wanting so desperately. We are energy. We can use that energy that is inherent in and of us and focus it so that the energy gives shape, form and substance to our desires. All that is left to say is be conscious of what you are wishing for.

Building Walls to Keep Pain... IN

It is common for people who have been hurt to build walls between themselves and others. These walls are designed to keep pain out, but the downside is that they also keep love and happiness out. Numerous experts talk about this kind of wall. But there is another kind of wall that is built by those who have been hurt even more. This kind of wall is designed to keep good feeling things like love and happiness out, but to keep pain in.
There are two kinds of people who erect walls to keep love out, the first have been hurt by their connection to other people. For this kind of person, things like enmeshment and unhealthy co-dependency and guilt traps made incoming love painful. They don’t want to let love in because letting people too close means getting used or hurt by them. They have suffered from incoming boundary violations. The second kind of person, who erects walls to keep love out, has been hurt by the withdrawal of love by other people and the loss of happiness. Their lives have been tormented by loss. They experienced the loss of love and support and happiness. They see happiness and love and support as transient and unpredictable, it taken away just as easily as it is given. And the trauma of losing it, makes it smart to not become attached to it at all. People, who are in this category, cannot receive love and cannot trust happiness. What I want to focus on for this episode is the other feature of this wall. The feature that lets and keeps pain in. Unlike traditional walls that are impenetrable to insults and injury and people who hurt you, this wall welcomes in insults and injury and people who hurt you. I know what you’re thinking, who on earth would build a wall to keep pain in? The answer is a great many people for a great many reasons. Multiple studies, including a very famous study from the University of Oslo in Norway, proved that pain is experienced as pleasant if something that is expected to feel worse (or more painful) has been avoided. The subjects in the pain studies that were prepared for the worst, felt relieved when they realized the pain was not going to be as bad as they had feared, In other words, a sense of relief can be powerful enough to turn an obviously negative experience as pain into a sensation that is comforting or even enjoyable. You can apply this idea to each of the following reasons why we would hold onto pain.
I’m going to list some of these examples for you now.
The most common reason why we would let and keep pain in is a dynamic that begins in childhood. When we are young, we are rewarded for being good and punished for being bad. We learn very quickly that the only way to be loved is to be good. Since we need food more than we need food or water, our very survival depends on us being good; but that there is the problem. What if we come down into a family with parents who show a great deal of love and support and even reward us when we are hurt emotionally or physically? We learn that pain is good. We learn that since love and support and reward goes to the person who is hurting, there must be goodness or virtue in pain. It is good to show support for children who are in pain, but this support goes sour when we are only shown support when we are in pain.
Some of us came into families where our parent’s statement “I want my kids to be happy” was just lip service. If we had parents that were hands off and ignored us when we were happy, if we had parents who were threatened by us feeling good, parents who would become irritated with our energy level when we were happy, or who would stop our play to make us do chores or who seemed perturbed by the fun that we got to have, or even worse who actively punished us when we felt good, we got the message that feeling good means being bad. We begin to feel shame and fear in association with happiness. Being bad means being unloved and thus ultimately dying and so we begin to see feeling bad as good and feeling good as bad. We think that without pain, we will be forsaken completely.
Now before you pin this entirely on faulty parenting, lets look at the real culprit for this damaging and faulty belief… Religion. Think about it for a minute, how many religions around the world propagate the idea that you have to suffer to be good or that there is virtue in suffering?
I want to give you an example of this pattern in real life. I had a client some years ago with this exact pattern. Her mother, who was a devout catholic, saw some degree of virtue in suffering, just like Jesus Christ had. When she would play and laugh, her mother would be consumed by the fury of not being considered. She would become aggravated and send her to her room or remind her of something that she had to do. However, when she skinned her knee or got sick or was bullied, her mother would hold her on her lap and give her a treat. Remember that our brains link being loved to survival. Needless to say, the only way for this child to remain loved and therefore alive was to be unhappy and hurt. She began to gravitate towards situations that made her unhappy and towards people who hurt her and even began injuring herself in the subconscious attempt to be good and therefore loved. All the way into adulthood, she believed that only hurt people deserve to be happy and be loved and supported. Her “good is bad and bad is good” wires were so crossed that she came to me, fresh from seven years spent in institution for self harm and multiple suicide attempts.
This pattern is especially common if we grew up in homes with a narcissistic parent. Remember of course that a narcissistic parent will never recognize him or herself as such and will almost always identify with the exact opposite, being a completely selfless giver and making you feel guilty for it.
  Another reason why we might build a wall that lets pain in or keeps pain in, is that we feel like we need it to remember the part of ourselves that we lost. When someone dies, moving on and being happy makes us feel like we are betraying them. When we feel like a part of us died or was lost, especially in childhood, subconsciously we feel like we are betraying ourselves by moving on.
  Another reason is that pain may feel like the only thing that you can count on. We all want stability and a sense of certainty in our lives. This is why as people, we are so habitual and like familiarity so much. We like it because it is predictable. The basic human need of certainty simply put is the certainty that we can gain pleasure and avoid pain. But if we get hurt so often and disappointed so often, we feel as if it is impossible to be certain that we can gain pleasure. So we turn the tables. We hold on to the only certainty that we have in our lives which is pain. In our lives pain is certain, so it feels more real than happiness or love. The very knowledge that we can count on it or predict it or even choose to consciously perpetuate it makes us feel a sense of relief. In other words it feels good to be able to predict and be able to count on the permanence of pain. How sad is that? The only certainty we have of feeling good is the feeling of the predictable certainty of pain. We see this pattern of pain retention so often in people who suffered from chronic disappointment. If we get disappointed enough in our lives, we avoid the shock and let down of disappointment by expecting pain. We keep ourselves low to avoid the climb and the inevitable fall. Pain is safe because you may be hurting, but you aren’t losing anything precious. You aren’t crushed by the loss of happiness or love. In this way, pain becomes a buffer or padding from further pain.
  Another reason we might build a wall to keep pain in is that we do not trust good feeling things, because they were used against us. And so, conversely we learn to trust bad feeling things. In our world, people have been trained to sugar coat pain. For example we may say, “I love my husband but…” Or “I think you’re a really great person, it’s just that…” Compliments are often used as primers for insults. This is sheer cruelty. The compliment opens a person up so that the insult gets in deeper. If we had people in our lives that maintained this habit, good was used against us. We started to distrust good. We learned that the good is not really genuine. I spoke about this pattern of good being used against us in my YouTube Video titled “How to Receive”. If the people in our lives used love as leverage, love and happiness comes with a side dish of guilt, duty or debt. For this reason, we feel the only thing we can trust is pain. Pain is our stable, reliable, true companion.
  I touched on this earlier, but I want to take it further. Often for those of us who suffer chronically, pain is our buffer. We are using it to keep ourselves safe. Not only does it prevent us from feeling loss and prevent us from feeling shock, it also acts like a cushion. Some time ago, I was trying to find out why I kept pain close to me and I realized that I was trying to use pain to keep me safe from further pain. Happiness and love made me feel exposed and open to more hurt. Many of the decisions we make on an emotional level, make no sense to us logically. But I emotionally decided that if I could only get myself to hurt bad enough, nothing else in the future would hurt. This is sort of like the idea that having a broken bone, makes a tummy ache seem less bad. The image that came to my mind relative to other people hurting me, was that if I caught all the pain sent my way and started to collect it, and pad myself with it, every new arrow sent in my direction would dissolve into the vast ocean of pain that was already there and wouldn’t penetrate as deep or hopefully wouldn’t be felt by me at all. Look again at the society we live in, we love the saying “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”. Let’s just say that some of us really take this to heart. We get hurt so bad that we try to accumulate pain to become stronger so we can try to prevent ourselves from being hurt in the future. We use pain to build up immunity to pain. Pain can also increase our self worth. Heroes have to endure extreme pain. So, we can keep pain in and propagate it so that others see us as a hero.
  Another reason we may keep pain in is because we are trying to get mercy from a world that hurt us again and again. If the universe at large feels like a perpetrator to us, we can use pain like a white flag. Here’ the logic, if I’m already hurt, you will be less tempted to hurt me. It’s like a yield card. Sometimes this technique worked with the people who were authority figures in our lives, and so now that our authority is the universe at large, we use the same strategy. If we hurt, it is like a “mercy” call to the world. We think if we cry mercy, it just might stop hurting us; in fact it might just show us a little love.
  Another reason we might let pain in or keep pain is if we want to avoid feeling the pain of blame or negative responsibility. If you are exhausted or alone and don’t want to take responsibility for yourself because of what taking responsibility for yourself might mean to you, pain can be used as a scapegoat for responsibilities. We might think we have to be in pain for others to help us or be kind to us or give us things or let us off the hook or take responsibility for us. Pain can be a powerful excuse. We feel terrible about ourselves when things are our fault, especially if we were punished for things that were our fault when we were young. When we don’t take responsibility for things that caused us or other people pain, we get to feel good about ourselves still. We can use pain as a good way to maintain our self-esteem by excusing ourselves from the responsibility of things we did to ourselves or others in our past.
  Another reason we might build walls that let in pain is that we find our good feelings through the removal of pain. Both general negative emotion and pain-induced negative emotion are processed in the same areas of the brain. This means that pain relief and emotional relief is essentially the same thing. The relief that occurs when something that causes acute, intense pain is removed is enough for those of us who are struggling with extreme levels of emotional or physical pain to deliberately let pain into their lives, or cause ourselves pain so that we can feel the relief of that very same pain. Self-injurers are particularly at risk for this attachment to pain. I’ll give you an example; pretend that someone called you to say that your house was being repossessed. And then fifteen minutes later, called you back to say it was a paper work mix-up. You would feel the relief not because you got good news, but because the painful stimulus was removed. Sometimes if we experience pain in our lives or let it in, the rest of our life seems to feel good by comparison. We actually feel the relief of experiencing what was previously experienced as painful because now it feels good by comparison. 9. Another reason we would let and keep pain in is if we were the Identified Patient in our family. The Identified Patient or “IP” is a person within a family group, usually a child, who is unconsciously selected by the other family members to play out the family’s inner conflicts as a diversion from their own pain. The IP is the split off carrier for the family’s disturbances. Simply put, the Identified Patient is the scapegoat of the family. They are the “family problem”. The IP is seen as the cause of the painful feelings of the other family members.
The IP child is usually the one whose personality is the least validating to the parents personality structure. In the face of the invalidating child, they either have to face the negative within themselves or turn against the child and make the child the problem. By making the child the problem, they get to see themselves as the victims and as the philanthropic helpers and thus avoid facing and dealing with their own problems. If you suspect that you may have been the IP in your family, I suggest doing some research about the Identified Patient dynamic.
If we were the Identified Patient, our earliest identity is that something is wrong with us. Our earliest identity is pain. Our family depends on us staying in the role of the Identified Patient because the family structure will unravel if we don’t. If they have to face their own shadows and pain and stop projecting it onto us, they will be miserable and in pain. We are the ultimate scapegoats. And our family wants to keep us that way. They quite literally will do anything including hurt you and abandon you to keep you in this role so they can avoid their own pain. So isn’t that funny? To keep their love and support, and keep the family together, you have to keep hurting and keep having problems. You’re hurting so you can be loved. You’re convinced that getting happy, means loosing them all, because often that is exactly what it does mean. If you are the IP in your family, you subconsciously feel like you need to let pain in and keep pain. You need to stay unhappy and hurting because you not only lose your own identity if you get happy, you also lose your family. If you suspect that you might have a wall that is impermeable to love and happiness and support, but that is allowing and even retaining of pain, ask yourself these questions:
Why do I need to be in pain? What would be so bad about being loved? What would be so bad about being happy or feeling good? If we have the kind of wall between ourselves and the world which lets and keeps pain in, the first thing we have to do is to recognize that we developed this way of being as a strategy to help us cope with pain. All pain strategies are created to keep us alive and functional. It actually suggests a high level of emotional intelligence to develop a way of coping with pain in the way that you did. Develop empathy and understanding for yourself and know that you do not deserve to berate yourself for building a wall like this wall. It was the most intelligent way to survive the trauma of your particular life. Just the awareness alone that we have built a wall that lets pain in and keeps pain in as well as the awareness of why we might have built this kind of wall, puts cracks inside this wall. Awareness, like a sledgehammer, destroys the strength and longevity of this wall. Part of the reason it was there for so long is because it was invisible. Now that you have seen it again clearly, it cannot function in your subconscious anymore.
The second thing we need to do is to begin to let love and positive feeling things in. I’ve mentioned it before, but my YouTube video titled “How to Receive” is a really good one if you’re learning how to let good feeling things in. Another good one to watch is my YouTube video titled “How to Raise Your Frequency and Increase Your Vibration”. If you begin to let in positive feeling things little by little, the positive emotion will begin to dilute the negative emotion within you so it doesn’t hurt so bad anymore.
The third thing we need to do is to make a choice. The choice is dependent upon whether we are ready to sink into our pain in order to find the origin of the trauma so that we can integrate it, or whether we are not ready and instead wish to dis-identify with the painful feelings. If you choose to integrate your painful feelings, I explain exactly how to do that in my YouTube video titled “Healing the Emotional Body.” If you choose to dis-identify with the painful feelings, you must become acquainted with the concept of the pain body.
In certain spiritual traditions, the pain body is essentially the collective manifestation of all of the emotional, physical and mental pain that a person has gone through over the course of their lifetime. It’s as if you could take all of your pain and put it together to create a separate person out of it. To see the pain as a different person (like a separate personality) you can separate yourself from your own pain and dis identify with it. Then, when painful feelings arise, you can become aware of it and dis identify with it by saying “That’s the pain body, not me”.
The fourth thing we need to do is to fall out of love with pain (by seeing what it is doing to us) and then to re-sensitize ourselves to our positive emotions and practice deliberately going in the direction of what causes us to feel positive emotion. Simply put, follow your joy. Develop strategies to help yourself feel safe. The pain has now become safety to you. To let go of it, you need to find other methods for making yourself feel safe. Make a list of things that help you to feel safe and pin it up in your house. When you feel unsafe, go to the list and pick something off of it to do.
Another thing we can do is to take advantage of somatic psychotherapy. If we let and keep pain in, we are desensitized to pain and we are disconnected from our bodies. In order to access our personal truth and become fully embodied and heal, we need to re-sensitize ourselves and reconnect with our bodies. Find someone you resonate with who offers somatic therapy.
The fifth thing we need to do is to dedicate our life to the practice of softness, softness with ourselves and with others. We need to do this with our thoughts, words and actions. Always choose what feels softer. For example the thought “I know I should do that” is hard. The words “I’m ridiculous” are hard. The act of doing something you really don’t want to do is hard. We have a choice relative to all things, softer or harder. Every decision we have to make can be made according to this question, “Is it softer or harder?” The immediate answer is the correct one. We need to recognize how we are keeping pain close to us by maintaining hardness towards ourselves and towards the world. And we need to make different choices, so that we can become softer instead.
The sixth thing we need to do is to look over this list of reasons that we built a wall that lets pain in and keeps pain in and try to discern what need is unmet in each scenario. If we can find different ways to meet those needs, we can let go of the pain strategy we are currently using.
Take your answers to the three questions asked previously in this episode and apply this same process as well. Look at those reasons and figure out what need is not being met and look for alternative ways to meet those needs so you can let go of the habit of letting pain in and holding onto pain.
If you are a person who can’t seem to stop suffering you probably feel like something is wrong with you. You have also probably heard people say that you must like being depressed or that you’re mentally ill or that you have bad karma. I promise you that none of this is the case. All that has happened is that your life experience has caused you to hold onto pain in order to prevent even worse pain. In your life you are driving forwards. You cannot help but do so, but if you are using pain to prevent future pain, you are driving with the parking brake on. It is cruelty to expect yourself to simply let go of the parking brake. After all, it is what has been keeping you safe for so long. But the energy it takes to keep the parking brake on is holding you back from a new life. If you can just gradually begin to release the hurt more and more, you will soon be living the life that you came here to live, which I promise you feels so much better than this.

The Great Rescue in Relationships

It is a common pattern for some of us in relationships to be rescuers. It is as if we are on the look out for someone who we can save or rehabilitate. A rescuer often feels a duty or obligation to maintain a relationship as it is even when we are feeling used. A rescuer often makes excuses for someone else's behavior even when it is self destructive or harmful to us. The rescuer, like everyone else, has needs. But rescuers don't feel worthy enough to ask for what they want. Instead, they convince themselves that if they give enough to others the recipient of their giving will clearly appreciate the rescuer so much that the taker will begin to give back to the rescuer, which is what the rescuer secretly wants all along. They want to be loved, nurtured and cared for. That is the hope and fantasy of the rescuer. But, because the rescuer has chosen someone who needs rescuing, someone who by definition takes and does not give, the rescuer never gets what he or she really wants, which is to be rescued. There is no such thing as a rescuer that doesn’t want to be rescued.
If we are a classic rescuer, we need to learn to expose our needs and wants to others in a straightforward way. As rescuers, we have a difficult time receiving and so it benefits us to examine the resistance we have to receiving and asserting our needs and wants. We can then begin to learn how to receive. Now if you are thinking, “Thank God that isn’t me, I’m definitely not a rescuer”, think again. I’m going to take you a little deeper and show you how most people are rescuers and they don’t even know it.
Attraction is simple. It is either there or it is not there and yet it is a much more complicated thing than you have been led to believe. Many things that draw us to a specific person are savory and many are unsavory. But it is to be understood that when we are searching for a mate, we are looking for a match, an equal. We are in fact looking for ourselves in another.
In the big picture, opposites do not actually attract. One could say that the fact that males attract females is evidence that opposites attract. But the male and the female are both human. Humans attract humans, so same attracts same. In many ways it could be argued that duality and non-duality is just a matter of perspective. However, as it applies to humans, the way people usually deal with pain is to swing to one extreme style of coping or the other. But the baseline vibration beneath the surface expression is exactly the same.
For example, take two people, both of which have social anxiety. They both want to hide. One hides by becoming a wallflower; the other hides by creating a persona and becoming the class clown. If they fell in love with each other, we could say “opposites attract” but it wouldn’t be accurate because if we look deeper, the vibration inspiring their personalities is exactly the same. It is social anxiety.
Most of the process of attraction is happening on a subconscious level. We are looking for the person who mirrors us the very best. This is the way that the universe or collective consciousness ensures the most expansion. Self-actualization is facilitated by our relationships. Because of the law of attraction, the universe draws us to the person who mirrors us the best. It feels great when our partner mirrors good feeling things within us, like our caring or our depth or our intellect. But that is not the only vibration that is resident within us. We also have bad feeling things within us as well, like our inability to receive or our self-centeredness or our closed mindedness.
I have yet to meet a person who has not experienced some kind of trauma in their lifetime. Even if parents were capable of providing a perfectly loving experience for their children, the very experience of being born into a self that is separate from the whole is traumatizing. So, we have all experienced varying degrees of good feeling things and varying degrees of traumatizing things. These traumatizing experiences cause wounds in us emotionally and mentally and even physically. And sometimes these wounds go unhealed. Your number one desire (whether you are conscious of it or not) is to become fully healed. Rather than healed, lets say whole and fully integrated. But if you are not conscious and aware of these wounds because they happened so long ago, you attract partners who make you aware of those wounds because they mirror them. And by mirroring them, they exacerbate them.
In other words, the people we are inexplicably drawn to have the same wound that we do. And because they have the same wound that we do, it causes a flare up in the wound we both share.
Here’s where the rescuer dynamic comes in. On a subconscious level, you have always wanted to heal your wound. But you are unconscious of that wound. And so the only way to see it is to step in front of a mirror. The mirror is your partner. And when you step in front of your partner and recognize the wound, you then start to try to heal the wound in the reflection. Thinking subconsciously, “If I can just heal that wound in this other person, I’ll have healed it in myself.” You are insatiably attracted to people who provide you with the opportunity to become aware of and heal that wound, thus becoming a rescuer to that hurt aspect of them and you.
Those of you who have recognized painful patterns in your relationships would benefit by becoming especially aware of this dynamic. Chronic painful patterns in relationships suggest that a deep unhealed wound is resident that you keep trying to unconsciously remedy through your relationships. You are trying to love yourself through them.
Take a very objective look at the patterns inherent in what you are attracted to about the people you have been in a relationship with or are in a relationship with. What are you drawn to again and again? Rather than get lost in how any of them were different, begin to look for what they had in common with each other. Then ask yourself, “What am I drawn to that keeps causing me problems?”
For example, a woman might have dated a great many men, all of whom were very different at face value. But when she asks herself “What am I drawn to that is common among all of the men I’ve been with?” she might realize that she is attracted to athletes who are loners. She notices that is insatiably attracted to outcasts who are lost with nowhere to belong.
She recognizes that the fact that they are athletes does not cause her pain. But the thing that she is attracted to that is causing her problems is that they are loners. The reason it is causing her pain is because she has found out the hard way that loners are often loners for a reason. They keep people at arms length and are emotionally unavailable. As a result, they make her lonely.
You see, the reality (if this woman was to look deep enough) is that she, herself is lonely. Her wound is that she feels like a loner who is lost with nowhere to belong. She is attracting men with her exact same wound. She is subconsciously convinced that if she can get a loner who is lost and doesn’t belong to feel lovingly connected to her and feel like they belong with her, she has solved her own loneliness problem. When this woman thinks about the prospect of being with a man who is not lonely and who is not lost and who feels as if he belongs in the life he is living, she feels as if there will be no space for her in his life. She fears that he will only make her feel like she does not fit in and thus feel lonelier and more outcast than she already does. This woman is trying to rescue herself through the men she is with. She is trying to rescue and heal the parts of herself that need healing through him. We look for others who have the same wound that we have so that we can heal our own wound externally. We are rescuers. But we are trying to vicariously rescue ourselves. Here’s another example, a man might discover that all the women in his past, though different in many ways, were all very beautiful and were unstable and dark and negative. Also, every one of them wanted desperately to be famous. Which means that they all lacked a sense of significance. He is not caused pain by the fact that they are beautiful. But the problems arise for him as a result of the fact that they are unstable, dark, negative and attention seeking. The reason it keeps causing him pain is that these common personality traits in the women he has been with always end up making him feel emotionally unstable, hopeless and like he is sinking into a dark space. You see, the reality (if this man was to look deep enough) is that he, himself is emotionally unstable, dark, negative and lacks a sense of significance. That is his wound. He is attracting women with his exact same wound. He is subconsciously convinced that if he can get an unstable, dark, negative woman who lacks a sense of significance to feel stable, light, happy and self confident, he has healed his own problem. When this man thinks about the prospect of being with a woman who is stable, light, happy and self confident, he feels a sense of panic. He feels as if he will be exposed and cannot hide his dysfunction. He also feels like he is ultimately not good enough for her. This man is trying to rescue himself through the women he is with. He is trying to rescue and heal the parts of himself that need healing through her.
If your relationships are chronically painful, chances are that what you have in common with your significant other is your wounds. You are trying to save yourselves through each other. And as the other person exacerbates your wounds, you will beg them to solve the problem and make you feel better. But the pain just gets worse. The more time you are with them, the bigger the mirror becomes. I will give you a hint that the thing we most often try to rescue in others is the very deepest pain within ourselves. I made a YouTube video a while back called “Find your Negative Imprint, Find your Life Purpose”. We usually try to rescue ourselves by finding people who mirror our negative imprint. So watch that video to get deeper awareness of what you might be trying to rescue in yourself through others.
Once we become aware of this pattern, we can go to work on the real issue… the wound within ourselves. For example, the woman in the previous scenario can take steps to feel less lonely and begin to let love in. She can also choose different partners who do not up the chances of her ending up lonely within a relationship.
The man in the previous scenario can change his life in ways that cause him to feel stable. He can work on cultivating positivity and building his self-confidence to the degree that he feels his own significance.
Awareness causes integration and healing to occur spontaneously so sometimes awareness of the wound within you is all it takes to stop being attracted to people who mirror that wound. So now, all that’s left to do is to ask you a question… What is within you that is in need of rescue?

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