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The Sickest Game You Can Play

It doesn’t take me saying it for you to clearly see that there are some pretty bad patterns that people can display, especially in relationships. Today I want to bring your awareness to one of the worst patterns that I keep seeing consistently played out… A pattern that is being fueled by society itself. It may just be the sickest game that a person can play.
Here it is in a tiny little nutshell… A person does something to cause pain to someone else. That person they caused pain to reacts to it. And then, the person who was hurt is made the problem specifically for their reactivity. It is easy to understand how terrifyingly ill this behavior is if we play it out on the physical level. Let’s imagine that someone was to walk up to you with a baseball bat and smash it into your leg and by doing so, to break your leg. And then, when you were writhing around on the floor yelling at them and crying, imagine that they came at you with “My god, something is seriously wrong with you. Maybe you need a therapist because you can’t control your own emotions. You need to learn to respond, not to react. I can’t be around this behavior… my boundary is that I only spend time around people who don’t raise their voice to me."
The thing is, we like to make a big divide between physical and emotional or mental pain. Guess what? That divide does not actually exist. Emotional pain registers in the brain and body as physical pain, often even worse. And people do this to each other on an emotional level to a degree that should make you sick to your stomach. People just currently have a harder time seeing this dynamic on an emotional level. We are in the emotional dark age. People don’t perceive emotional harm yet… In the same way that in the 1500s we didn’t see the harm of physical torture chambers. We are ignorant to the emotional harm we cause each other.
So that you can see this pattern better, I’ll give you some examples. Janet is married to Doug. Janet is a single mother. Doug came into the relationship as a super active, protective, responsible man who was competent and super attuned. Over time, this changed. Doug now super irresponsible. He behaves as if he is passive and not particularly competent. He fails to protect Janet on account of the sudden development of conflict aversion. He is also no longer attuned and as a result, he keeps creating conflicts. Janet is grappling with feeling like she has either been duped into the relationship by Doug or that Doug has had some mysterious personality transplant. The disappointment and grief and stress that comes with that have pushed her to the breaking point, especially since Doug can give her no answers as to why he has changed.
Recently, when they were out at dinner with someone who did not know Janet, but whom none the less started accusing Janet of things that were not actually true about her, Doug sat there silently watching it happen, leaving Janet alone to defend her own character. He had already decided that there was no point in fighting with someone who had already made up their mind about Janet. This passiveness and failure to set the person right; and decision to not protect her and instead let her fend for herself, was wildly painful to Janet. As a result, they got in one hell of a fight in the car on the way home. Janet was really angry at him. But, instead of see that she had a very valid reason to be reacting like she was reacting, Doug decided that the problem was her anger. The problem was her aggressive body language and her raised voice and the fact that she was triggered. And when they stopped at a gas station and other people noticed they were in a fight, what they saw is Doug sitting still and silent, getting yelled at. So, the other people agreed… They thought “wow, that’s a bitch… she’s just tearing him apart. Obviously, she is the problem.” Essentially, Janet was expected by other people to be hurt in this way and not to react, most especially not react with anger. She is expected to behave in a loving manner no matter what is done to her or what her partner fails to do.
Another example is Dylan. Dylan is 15 years old. Dylan’s mother is extremely unpredictable in her moods and in the way she sometimes meets and sometimes has no interest in meeting her children’s needs. She has created an insecure attachment in Dylan. She expects Dylan to entertain himself and cater himself to her consistently fluctuating needs. When he has a feeling or an emotional need that does not fit in perfectly with hers, she immediately shames him and treats him like the family problem. Dylan’s mother is not an advocate to Dylan. In fact, she is more of an emotional adversary. Needing to see herself as a good mom to the degree that she is unwilling to examine her own approach to mothering, she often makes his reactions the problem instead of what she is doing to evoke those reactions. Last week, when she decided that she was sick of dealing with dog hair all over the house, she decided to get rid of the family dog by taking it to the pound while her kids were at school. That dog was the only thing Dylan could rely upon for connection. When Dylan came home to find the dog gone, he had a complete emotional melt down and got furious and smashed all of the family pictures on the mantle. As usual, Dylan’s mother made his outburst the problem. And as a result, she decided to ship him off to a behavioral correction center for boys. He walked into that correction center being seen as the problem for his reactivity. And the reality is that this is full blown abuse that everyone is participating in. It is full blown abuse to do things like this to a person, much less a child, and then put their head in a noose whereby if they react to it, they are condemned as the bad guy.
To give you another example, Rose is a spiritual healer who writes a popular blog and who teaches seminars at a local healing center for people looking to make positive changes to their life. Scott is a man who is attending one of these events. He has huge issues with authority and he sees himself as a healer and spiritual advisor. From the minute he enters the room, he is in a competitive power struggle with Rose. On a subconscious level, he is not attending the event to change anything about himself. He is attending to challenge Rose and to get all the other people at the event to see him as the truer spiritual teacher. He derails the seminar to contradict everything that Rose is saying and directs the entire conversation towards questioning her character and insulting her over and over again in front of the rest of the class. During the course of the conversation, Rose becomes flushed red. A look of frustration comes across her face. Though not yelling, she is visibly angry with him and starts arguing against his accusations. The conversation gets heated. Scott of course sees Rose’s reactivity as the problem, not himself and his behavior towards her. And not only that, he and the rest of the entire class make Rose’s reactivity not only the problem in the scenario, but decide that because she reacted at all, she is not truly as spiritually developed as they thought. Their subconscious expectation is that if she is really awakened, she should be able to be emotionally un-affected by and therefore unreactive to anything that anyone does to her. Hmmm… That seems fair.
This form of abuse, where reactivity is made the problem, instead of what caused it, is a huge problem in our anti-reactivity culture. Currently, what is expected is that a person does not get emotionally aroused or dysregulated, is not phased or affected by anything someone else does or does not do, does not blame anyone for what they do or don’t do and does not defend themselves. What is glorified in society is emotional neutrality/numbness… Not having emotions. And as people, we tend to have an issue with anger most of all. No other form of reactivity is disapproved of and is scapegoated more than anger.
You will hear everywhere that circumstances don’t cause our emotional reactions. That they are a choice. But guess what? For people, they aren’t a conscious choice. They are primal. That only changes as a result of a process of learning what to do about the reactions when they occur. And of changing one’s perception. The emotional system is something that can be developed. But it will never develop to be non-reactive. It will just react differently. This is where the door opens for what people call “response” rather than reaction.
A question that I want to ask you is: Where are we going to draw the line? Do you think it is fair to say to someone whose spouse died… “Hey… it isn’t the fact that your spouse died that caused you to get all emotionally aroused (ie reactive). It isn’t the circumstances that cause your emotional reactions. It is a choice you make to feel that way.” Or “Hey war vet… it isn’t the fireworks going off that caused you to react by your heart racing and by having to hide at home. Circumstances don’t cause emotional reactions… they are a choice.” Or “Hey… it isn’t the fact that I just cheated on you that is the cause of your emotional reaction. You can choose to feel however you want to feel, no matter what I do or don’t do to you. That’s called emotional responsibility.” In case you want to learn more about this, watch my video titled: Am I Responsible for How Other People Feel?
 This form of abuse, where reactivity is made the problem, instead of what caused it, is an especially rampant problem amongst spiritual people and in spiritual communities because, reactivity has been made the big bad wolf. It is seen as bad and wrong and especially un-evolved.
When we make reactivity the default problem, we are opening the door super wide for abuse. Both perpetrating it ourselves and enabling it in others. To get out of this pattern, we need to start to recognize the pain we cause other people. We can’t stay blind to the harm we cause, especially emotionally to other beings. We also need to keep in mind that we can do serious harm to someone else by what we fail to do, not just by what we do.  And we need to ask ourselves and answer honestly: What do we seriously expect? If someone gets hurt emotionally or mentally, is it right to expect them not to react? Is it right to expect them not to defend themselves? If you say you expect them to respond rather than react, what do you think the right response should be when someone is hurt? What should their next response be if they have an open, honest conversation so as to make someone aware that they were hurt and the other person says, “I’m not responsible for how you feel!” What type of emotional relationship do you want to have with other people? What emotional responsibility are you taking for ensuring that you do not harm other people emotionally?
Obviously, there is a place within consciousness and self-development work for caretaking and finding better strategies to work with our own emotional arousal and dysregulation. That is not something that is up for debate here. What is important is to know that it is all too easy to scapegoat someone due to their reactivity. It is all too easy to use someone’s reactivity as the smokescreen for someone else’s incredibly damaging behavior. And it is a sick, sick game to harm someone on any level and then as if that is not bad enough, to make them the problem for reacting negatively to being harmed.

Mankind’s Greatest Strengths and Weaknesses

One of the questions that I have received the very most over the years is: What are mankind’s greatest strengths and greatest weaknesses? I’m going to answer that question for you today. And I’m going to do so with the hopes that by gaining this awareness, people will take ownership of what they need to appreciate and amplify as well as what they need to change. I am going to tell you the top three negative things (weaknesses) and top three positive things (strengths) of humans, therefore mankind.
If a person were to disidentify with human kind enough to be able to objectively look at it from the outside, the top three weaknesses are the following:
Negative Manifestations of the Ego (Self Concept).
Mankind has developed self-concept. A self-concept is an idea of the self that is constructed from the beliefs that a person holds about themself and from their environment, including the responses of others. Contrary to popular thought, the Ego is not something to be gotten rid of. It is something to be owned and integrated. It is in fact a beneficial tool for awareness and awakening. For lack of a better way of putting it, there is such a thing as a healthy state of Ego and an unhealthy state of Ego. But to the negative, humans are a perfect example of unhealthy Ego. They fall prey to all of the potential negative manifestations of the Ego. Such as: A sense of separateness and therefore disconnection and aloneness from everyone/everything else. There is a huge issue if we live on a planet with 8 billion people and the reality is that most everyone feels alone. 
Some other negative manifestations of Ego include but are not limited to: Only being concerned with one’s own best interests, unhealthy identification, control, manipulation, unhealthy pursuit and use of power, unhealthy pursuit and engagement with pleasure/desire, unworkability and the refusal to change, seeking and creating conflict, denial, fear, greed, illusion, avoidance, negative competition, envy, superiority and inferiority, dysfunctional patterns, dysfunctional relationships, fear of death, survival focus, and ironically, lack of self-awareness. To understand more about this, you can watch my video titled: Self Concept, The Enemy of Awakening.       Narcissism and with it, the Failure to Create Healthy Relationships and Symbiotic Win-Win Scenarios.
The term narcissism, as we are using it in this context, means to perceive oneself and therefore one’s best interest as separate and divisible from the best interests of all that is “other”. And to act in one’s own best interests regardless of the negative impact on others. Mankind is in a very severe state of Narcissism. Individual people demonstrate this relative to one another and humanity demonstrates this relative to the other species of the world, indeed the very system that they live in.
People have wildly dysfunctional relationships with each other and with other things. In fact, dysfunctional relationship is the norm. They play zero sum games, which means they have an I win, you lose approach to their relationships with all things and they believe erroneously that there is no consequence for this.
Because of this Narcissism, by far the single biggest source of suffering for people on the planet is not some external threat, it is other people. Relational trauma is the biggest source of human suffering on earth. And by far the greatest source of suffering for many other species on earth is also humans. It is only natural for someone to want the source of their suffering to vanish. And so, what do we find?  We find that there is a desire emanating from many species of earth for humans to vanish.
To hit you with a very harsh reality check, a cancer cell behaves narcissistically in the physical system. People are currently behaving like cancer cells within the greater system of earth. A cancer cell has disconnected from the rest of the system and is doing its own thing, regardless of the negative impact on all other parts of the system. And this may lead to death. So too, this extreme state of narcissism exhibited by the human race may just lead to the extinction of the species itself, as they are destroying each other and they are destroying the very system upon which they depend. If you need proof of this Narcissism, look no further than the hurt in your own life. Look no further than the never-ending list of wars throughout history and even now. Look no further than the practice of interspecies slavery that is all around you, only most people call them ‘pets’ and ‘livestock’. Look no further than businesses caring more about financial gain than the actual wellbeing of those who they are supposed to serve. Look no further than the destruction of the environment. Look no further than the agenda of the media and its impacts on the collective mind. Look no further than how hard it is once you become conscious of all of this to live in a way that does not add to suffering on this planet. It is as if the entire society is set up to perpetuate pain. The manifestations of this narcissism are all around you, creating suffering for all on a daily basis. Lack of Awareness; Especially Self-Awareness.
Mankind is a very complex species. It is a species with undeniable intellect. However, that intellect is not coupled with awareness. Instead, it is often coupled with ignorance. Mankind lacks information and knowledge and awareness that is crucial. They especially lack awareness of themselves. Much of which is due to the human ego. This is why they can do things like create weapons, having no awareness of the actual implications of doing so. Or farm in a way that is uber productive, but that ultimately depletes the soil to the point where human health and even survival is at risk. They can do amazing things, but without seeing the impact or ripple effects of doing those things.
The human ego protects a person from seeing anything ‘bad’ about themselves, which is why almost everyone will watch this very video and agree that “people” are this way, but not see themselves as this way. It hasn’t occurred to people that if humanity is this way, individuals are this way. And that means you may be this way without realizing that you are this way. There is a great deal of hypocrisy amongst humans.
People lack awareness of what is not working and of what is a problem, often defending the problem instead. You can’t fix what you don’t realize is broken. People normalize and justify and maintain what isn’t working, succumbing to complete ignorance that it is working. If you need proof of this, look no further than the coping mechanisms that people maintain. Look no further than so much of the dysfunction in relationships. Look no further than the way people parent. Look no further than the lack of empathy and lack of change people display on account of how unaware they are of what the experience is like on the other side. Look no further than people eating what they eat today and then being confused about why they are growing increasingly more and more unhealthy. Look no further than the disease-based model of medicine. Look no further than science claiming that things of a “spiritual” nature do not actually exist on account of not being able to prove it. Look at people behaving in ways that create the very problem that they feel a victim to. What all of this adds up to is the fact that currently, humans create pain. They create massive amounts of suffering for themselves, for each other and for other beings that are part of the system that they are a part of. And the worst part is, most people still don’t realize it. In fact, they defend the very things that are bringing about that pain in themselves and others. They defend the very things that are bringing about their own demise. And now, perhaps you understand why the focus of spiritual leaders throughout history has been what it has been.
And if a person were to disidentify with human kind enough to be able to objectively look at it from the outside, the top three strengths are the following:
Creator Nature, The Ability to Bring Forth and Actualize New Thought.
People, more so than any other species on earth, are creators. They have tapped into and become manifestations of Source’s creator nature. They can conceptualize of what does not yet exist. And they can bring it into physical manifestation. Because of this, they are truly inventive and innovative. They are endlessly creative. They have used this creator nature to compensate for their shortcomings in ways that are advantageous for them. And this creator nature makes them future oriented in such a beautiful way. People are focused on what could be and on bringing what could be into existence.
One of the best ways to conceptualize of this incredible strength is to imagine another species, say a crocodile. If you watch the species over the course of history, not much has changed in the life of the crocodile. In contrast, when you look at humans over the course of history, so much has changed in the life of a human, because of what they, themselves create. In fact, the physical human itself can hardly keep up with it. People create rich stories. They create tools and strategies. They mold the earth and everything in it to suit themselves.
It is this trait that enabled them to farm instead of to gather. To tame animals so as to ride them. To craft clothing and move into new environments on earth. To build more and more complex structures to withstand the elements and make it so that they no longer have any true predators anymore. To create art. To invent ways that despite possessing no wings, they could fly. To create ways to scientifically understand the world that they live in. And the list goes on and on. The Individuality from which Free Will Arises and from which a Person Chooses his or her own Meaning in Life.
Many of us are familiar with the story of William Wallace that was immortalized in the movie titled: Braveheart. He was a national hero who fought for his country’s independence from England. What we see in this character is the power to exercise his free will to make a choice for what personally mattered most to him, regardless of what other people were doing and regardless of the pressure that was put on him to conform. With the power of his free will, he chose meaning for his life and it was something that mattered enough to die for.
The reality is that this character trait is inherent within all people. Some people are simply more in touch with it and exercise it more than others. The capacity for self-concept and self-awareness brings the gift of individuality. The human can powerfully exercise personal choice. And by doing so, use his or her own will, regardless of what others are doing or are not doing. Having this individuality, including this personal choice, brings with it the truth that a person chooses what has importance and meaning for themselves. This can lead a person beyond the simple cycle of pleasure seeking and pain avoidance. It can lead them to the truth that some things have more meaning than one’s own survival. And with that comes great bravery and also great power. It makes one person truly capable of greatness. It makes one person capable of changing the collective. Some of you may have heard about the concept of the hundredth monkey, when a new idea or behavior spreads to the collective. The hundredth monkey depends on this human strength.
This strength is part of what makes people so complicated. And also confusing to other species. If you look at people through the eyes of an elk for example, one person wants to hunt and kill you. Another would stare at you in awe for an hour and protect you from the other person with their own life.
There are so many examples of people who were able to positively alter their own lives and also the lives of others because of their choice and ability to think and speak and act in alignment with what was meaningful to them individually, regardless of what everyone else was doing or not doing. You could say that every great social change came about because of some person or many exercising this strength. Curiosity… The Quest to Understand, Learn, Find the Truth, Gain Knowledge and Find Meaning.
People are so curious that it is precious. It is a strength that is as adorable as it is deeply commendable. It has been said that curiosity is the engine of achievement. And it is curiosity that has led people to the knowledge that has enabled them to bring about their various creations as well as to achieve what they have set out to achieve. Curiosity accounts for a great deal of the human intellect. This insatiable curiosity causes people to expand and expand and therefore facilitate so much universal expansion. You might be able to go so far as to say that curiosity is the essence of human existence on earth.
People don’t just exist in the universe; they strive to comprehend the universe that they live in. They want to know. They want to understand. They have a thirst for learning. And people have an innate drive to find meaning. People must find meaning in everything that is and in everything that happens. And when they cannot find it, they make up and add that meaning to the things that exist or the things that happen. Human beings have the capacity to extract the most out of their life experience because of their curiosity and their zest for learning. The universe’s mysteries have a way of revealing themselves to the curious mind. Great learners also always end up teaching others what they have learned. In this way, the collective mind of mankind keeps growing and growing and growing. And it is truly correct, what Einstein said, that a mind that opens to a new idea, never returns to its original size.

Santa Clause Complex

Many of you, depending on which country you live in, “know” that Santa Clause lives in the North Pole. He is white bearded, dresses in a white fur cuffed red suit, he is chubby, jolly, friendly, gift oriented, energetic, benevolent, gentle, he does not discriminate on the basis of economic status, loves children and can’t get enough cookies. But how do you know that this is how Santa Clause is? Have you ever met him personally? Who have you adopted your idea of who he is (and thus what to expect) from? Imagine that you met him for real and he was not like this at all?
Imagine that Santa’s ability to deliver all of those presents to the children around the globe meant that he had what some people would call a type A personality. Imagine that when you met him, you realized that he was a workaholic perfectionist who rarely ever sat still because of his sense of urgency. Imagine that you discovered he was driven by achievement, impatient, reveled in competition, had a dominating attitude, demanded high quality results from his elves and lost his temper when they didn’t deliver. How would it change the way you thought and even more importantly, the way you felt about Santa? Most people would experience disillusionment.  There would be a sense of let down or disappointment. Maybe you would think the real Santa is not how Santa should be. The real Santa would fall short of positive expectation because you would have discovered that he is not as good as you had imagined him to be.
What happened in this example, is the dismantling of a positive overlay. An overlay being a fantasy that we are convinced is real, but that in fact, we are projecting over the reality of someone or something else. If you want to learn more about this, watch my video titled: Overlay, What Prevents You from Having a Real Relationship.
Many years ago, I coined a phrase: Santa Clause Complex, to describe the dynamic where a person has created a positive overlay of what someone is like and what they should be like, one that they project onto and over top of what that person is really like. 
 When we have created and projected an idea of what someone is like, or what someone should be like, finding out the reality of what they are actually like can be a painful process of disillusionment. Similar to the experience that most of us went through when we discovered that Santa Clause did not exist, at least not in the way that we originally thought he did. That pain can also cause us to turn against the person or thing that we created an overlay about. Rather than see that it was you, yourself that created the overlay, you will have a tendency to blame the person or thing for the discrepancy between your own overlay and the reality. You will feel deceived by them. You may accuse them of being fake or a fraud. People are especially prone to doing this with people that they idolize or admire, but do not personally know. 
Perhaps you have heard the phrase “the higher the pedestal, the further the fall?” This phrase is actually about this very dynamic. People who put someone high up on a pedestal, are often in a relationship with their own overlay of that person. And when the person that they have put on that pedestal doesn’t conform in some way to the overlay, disillusionment occurs. Suddenly, the person that they put on a pedestal experiences a fall from grace. They are devalued, depreciated and even turned against. In fact, haters often come about as a result of this dynamic.
I’ll give you an example, Adalee had been completely taken with a pop star since hearing one of his songs on a playlist years ago. She could tell from his lyrics and interviews and the way he moved on stage and the way she saw him interact with his fans at concerts, that he was a wonderful man. He was exactly the kind of man she wanted to marry. In fact, she knew from the minute she saw him the first time that she was meant to be his wife. She knew that if she could only get into the room with him face to face, he would feel it too. She played out elaborate fantasies in her head about the romantic interludes that would absolutely ensue when that time came. When she listened to the lyrics of one of his love songs, she knew that one day he would tell her that he wrote those words for her, he just didn’t know it at the time. Adalee would confidently tell anyone that he was super conscious and conscientious, moral, full of honor, all heart, kind and generous, super spiritual, devoted and loving in relationships and everything a real man ought to be. The reality is that Adalee did not know this pop star personally. She had never met him or spent any time around him. So, she was in fact in a relationship with her own overlay about him.
One day, after many years, Adalee actually did manage to get invited backstage. This pop star was friendly, but totally out of alignment with her overlay. He did not act like she was anything special to him. Definitely not like he recognized her as his future wife. He had a lot of pretty girls backstage with him and seemed to revel in the attention he got from all of them. And on the table, she saw a syringe. She realized that they had all been doing drugs backstage. That night, Adalee’s overlay came crashing down. The lyrics in his songs were nothing like what she had experienced backstage. The interaction definitely didn’t fit in with her idea of what a good man should be like. And her dream of them together was in ruins. She slipped into an anxious depression. She decided that he was a fraud. She had dedicated years to the thought of him and their life together in the future. Because of this, she felt taken advantage of by him and misled even though they had never met. But keep in mind that Adalee still did not really know him.  Instead, she simply slipped into a new overlay about him, this time, a negative one.
As a leader in the spiritual field, I experience this all the time. People have a very strict idea of what a spiritual figure should and shouldn’t be like. And people create elaborate overlays about what I am like from the hours that they watch me doing only one thing… teaching.
But you don’t have to be famous for people to build an overlay about you and fall into Santa Clause Complex when it comes to you. Santa Clause Complex doesn’t have to be about someone famous. We run the risk of falling into Santa Clause Complex whenever we create a positive overlay about anyone. The disappointment we feel when we meet someone in person vs. what we saw on their dating profile online is an example of this. Actually, the beginning of a relationship itself can be like this. We may spend weeks with someone and feel like we have found “the one” because so far, they have perfectly matched our overlay. But then, one day, the way they act does not match our overlay and we feel disillusioned and feel as if they are no longer “the one”.
We can experience this disillusionment with more than just people. We can fall into it when we create a positive overlay about anything. Any of you who have gotten really excited about a trip, only to find that the experience of it is worse than the idea of it, know what it is like for the reality of something to not live up to your own overlay.
Santa Clause Complex, really any positive overlay, is a set up for the person or thing that is the object of our positive overlay. It is an unfair set up whereby they, or it, will disappoint us, lose our favor, experience a fall from grace, be devalued and be seen as less by us. It is a set up for them to experience pain because of us.  
People are prone to overlays because they are creators. They dream up what they want and then seek to bring about what they desire so that it becomes manifested. You will come to see that the contents of someone’s overlay always reflect what that person is deeply wanting.
People are also prone to overlays because we tend to form very rigid ideas of how things should be. The contents of someone’s overlay also tend to reflect that person’s idea of how something should be. 
If you have a positive expectation of someone or something, chances are, you have built an overlay. The contents of this overlay represent what you want and how you think they or it should be. This means you are projecting rather than perceiving reality. Wipe the mental slate clean of expectations and intend to be open and curious instead. Question your ‘shoulds’. And remember, you can never compete with the idea that someone has about you in their own head, be it good or bad.

How Trauma Plays a Role in Purpose

When you come into this physical life, you do so with an intention or many. That intention is a big reason why you incarnate into the specific set of circumstances that you call your life. For example, that set of potentials in terms of lifepaths, that astrological arrangement, that city, those parents, at that time and all of the dynamics that each of these things gives rise to. Your ‘purpose’ is in perfect alignment with this original pre-birth intention. Keep in mind that purpose may or may not be about a career you are meant to have.
We like to think that trauma is an oppositional force to purpose. That it derails a person from their purpose. And trauma absolutely can and does sometimes derail a person from their purpose. But something that is critical to understand is that trauma usually plays a huge role in shaping a person for their purpose. In fact, many beings that incarnate into trauma that derails them from their purpose, do so specifically to become lost. Because this gives rise to the desire to find themself. Which sets them on the path of self-exploration, which ultimately leads them to the experience of using their free will to choose their life according to the personal truth they find.
A person’s purpose is born of both shadow and light, both trauma and joy. As people, we love to make trauma wrong. As a result, we make anything that comes from trauma wrong. Trauma doesn’t only play a role in the dysfunctionality, weakness and problems of people. It also plays a role in the functionality, strengths and advantages of people. So, it can be said that trauma is often at the root of people’s failures. It is also often at the root of their success. To understand more about this, you can watch my video titled: What Is The Trauma Healing Paradox? You may also benefit by watching my video titled: Can You Hold Dichotomy? Objective thinking.
When we make anything that comes from trauma wrong, we jump to the automatic conclusion that if trauma played a role in why we are doing whatever we are doing with our lives, that it isn’t what we are meant to be doing. Essentially, if we realize that trauma plays a role regarding why we have a certain career or a certain goal or a specific need or a specific desire or a specific purpose, then we tell ourselves that we shouldn’t be doing that career or aiming for that goal or we need to heal so that we don’t have that need or desire and it isn’t our actual purpose, it’s just a coping mechanism. And when we do this, we can get things terribly wrong. We assign the wrong meaning to our realization. To understand more about this, you would benefit by watching my video titled: You Can’t Heal Yourself Out of a Desire. 
You will be hard pressed to find anyone whose purpose simply comes from joy and natural talent and spontaneously generated interest. And those who say that’s all it is, have usually not explored themselves or their past deeply enough. So, it is better to accept that Trauma is an ingredient that you will find in the recipe of a person’s purpose. In fact, for some specific purposes, extreme trauma is the only thing that creates a drive strong enough to propel a person through the challenges that they must overcome to achieve their goal. Challenges that quite frankly are beyond most people’s limits and that others with less drive would say no to. 
When we discover trauma at the root of what we are doing with ourselves and at the root of our goals, we must become aware that there could be big shadows inherent in what we are doing or the way we are doing it. Thus, when we discover trauma at the root of what we are doing, we must begin a process of becoming aware of that trauma and with the awareness of it, we must then decide what to do with it and how to go about healing it directly. It is in the healing of the trauma that we purify ourselves into alignment with our purpose. If we heal the trauma at the root of what we are doing, either:
We will discover that the only reason we were doing something is because of a trauma and that in the healing of that trauma, we no longer have any intrinsic motivation to do what we were doing. And we will quit. Therefore, we have a different calling all together. OR We will heal the trauma and discover that we still have intrinsic motivation to do the thing that we were doing. We will continue, but in a different way. It will feel as if the doing of it comes from a different place inside of you, and from a different energy. You will purify yourself into a state of deeper alignment with your calling. And often, people become more successful at their given purpose as a result. So that you can understand this on a deeper level, I have two examples for you. 
Gatik is an actor. This purpose has made him lots and lots of money and granted him lots and lots of significance and attention. Gatik has recently had a crisis relative to his career. He realized that his thirst for fame began when we was a child. It was the result of growing up with parents where nothing he did was ever good enough. Parents that shamed him for needing their attention. They had their own expectations about what he should do and didn’t really care who he was. As a result, Gatik never had space to figure himself out. All he knew is that when he went into a role of someone else, he felt relief of being immersed in a different story and a different life.  And he had an insatiable desire to prove himself. Acting was an obvious way for him to find this relief from the emptiness of selfhood within and from the pain of insignificance and lack of attention.
When Gatik began to unravel his past and find his own personal truths and heal to the degree that he no longer needed the relief of escaping himself and got into a relationship with friends who were supportive of him living an authentic life, he found that he had no motivation to act. In fact, he hated so many elements of the career itself. Though he was thankful for that chapter of his life, the thing he once considered to be his purpose in life, now seemed much more like a “so that”… Something he didn’t like, but that he was doing only because of the things the trauma had made him so desperate for. All that seemed to remain was a desire for attention. Intrinsically, he felt a huge passion for cooking. It was an interest that he had ever since he was a child. So, in his exploratory phase, he enrolled himself in cooking school. He found a passion for preserving and growing cultural foods, such as strains of beans that were going extinct. Some years later, he had created a cooking show to star in and opened up two restaurants. He felt truly in his purpose. Kathy is a therapist who specializes in marriage and family therapy. Recently, she has become all too aware that the dysfunction in her own family of origin played a huge role in her decision to become a therapist. Her trauma was that she always felt super confused and afraid of all the conflict. The family dynamics created huge instability and all the gaslighting made her feel insane. Also, when her parents split up, she could not get over needing to figure out how to have been able to prevent that. When she found psychology, she found a promise of being able to figure it all out. There were methods for establishing sanity and stability. By helping people to get out of the very patterns that caused her so much pain, she felt safer in the world.
When Kathy first realized how much her own childhood pain and unsafety was playing into her decision to be a therapist in the first place, she started to doubt how “pure” her practice was. So, she took some time off to really face this element of her profession.
In this process, Kathy found that underneath that trauma was a genuine love of working through problems. And a love of the intimacy and deep conversations that she could have with people. And a deep intrinsic interest in understanding people and all the research around the human mind. She found that without her own past, she would not have anywhere near the grasp for the subject that she has. As a result, Kathy realized that her trauma had been an integral part of her purpose, which she knows in her heart is: to be a therapist. However, some things have changed. She notices when she is projecting her own need to establish safety and stability onto her clients and finds ways to meet those needs for herself directly, rather than needing them to do something specific so that she can feel stable and safe in the world. She also spends far more time on marriage therapy because she enjoys it so much. And if she gets a client that she is too personally triggered by or that she can’t figure out, she refers them to a colleague rather than getting sucked back into the old distress of feeling like she has to be the one to figure it all out herself; because if she can’t, she and they are doomed to be stuck in pain.
Kathy is even more in alignment with her purpose now. But the way that she goes about doing it is different, more in-alignment and more successful because of it. Seeing as how trauma is an integral part of purpose, make a conscious decision with your own free will about what to do with it. When it comes to trauma and to resolving and healing your trauma, scrap what isn’t working for you. Let go of what is detrimental or at odds with what you really want. And powerfully own what is working for you and what is beneficial and what is bringing you to what you really want.
The way to go about it when you find the trauma that is at the root of what you are doing, is to focus on healing it. Don’t tell yourself that it automatically means you shouldn’t be doing whatever it is that you are doing. Instead, get open and get curious. No matter what direction this process takes you, it will be towards something that feels better to you. The process of doing so will in and of itself make you aware of what you are not yet aware of. It will force you to separate out what is and isn’t ultimately in alignment for you. It will reveal to you if you are meant to go in a different direction and towards a different purpose all together. Or if your purpose is what you are already doing and therefore, if instead, it will take on a different form and come from a different place within you. And will in fact deepen as a result of this process.

THE ‘HOW TO MAKE A DECISION’ EXERCISE

Let’s not beat around the bush, making a decision can be really hard. This is especially true when the stakes are high. This is also especially true if you struggle with indecision in general. When we are facing a decision, we really want to make the right decision and we are really afraid of making the wrong decision. Afterall, there are negative and positive consequences for any decision that we make. But what most people don’t know is that the key to making the right decision is to make the decision specifically according to your values and more importantly, according to how you prioritize those values.
A value is what you consider from your honest, authentic core to be most important. For so many people, there is an inconsistency between what they value doing and what they are actually doing. The reason this does not work is because satisfaction with our own life can only happen when the things we do and the way we behave in the world towards others and towards ourselves match our values. And at the end of the day, we need to be able to powerfully prioritize our top value.
If you are currently struggling with a decision and would like additional information related to this topic, you would benefit by watching three of my videos. The first is: The Secret to A Happy Life. The Second is: Indecision (Decisions and Indecisiveness). And the third is: Why You Should Consciously Choose Consequences. 
But today, I’m going to share with you a priceless exercise that will help you to make the right decision. To do this exercise, you are going to take whatever situation you are in and figure out what making any of the choices involved in the situation would give you. It’s best if you come up with at least five things per choice.
When you do this exercise, you will find that the things that each choice would give you are essentially values. So, by doing this exercise, you are becoming aware of what values you would be in alignment with and what values you would be making a decision for in any choice. 
For example: Imagine that a person has been invited to go on a vacation with friends and that they are having a really hard time deciding whether to go or to stay. This person would create one column for the values that they would be in alignment with (or get out of) going on the vacation. Then this person would create another column for the values that they would be in alignment with (or get out of) staying. It might look something like this:
Going on Vacation                    Staying Home
Inclusion                                      Security
Connection                                  Thrift
Excitement                                   Responsibility
Spontaneity                                  Duty
Memories                                     Rationality
From there, you are going to arrange all of these values in order of priority… Most important to least. 
For example, when the person in our example arranges these values in order of absolute priority. It might look something like this:
Inclusion
Connection
Security
Thrift
Memories
Responsibility
Duty
Rationality
Spontaneity
Excitement 
Make the choice that is most in alignment with the highest value you selected! Doing so is currently the best choice for you. 
Using our example, based off of how this person arranged their values, it is clear that they would be more in alignment with their top values by choosing to go on the vacation with friends. And so, this is the decision that they should make.
This exercise is an epic one for literally any decision you may be facing. It is especially useful if you have exhausted all of your options for trying to find a third option or a choice that does not require you to choose between two or more of your top values. These are situations where you are most likely facing a really hard choice.
When you do this exercise, and you make your decision based off of your top value, you are making your decision based off of what is most important to you. Doing so makes it so that whatever you decide to do has worth, is beneficial to you and has meaning to you. And that will help you to handle any of the consequences that come with that decision. You will be making the decision that is truly right for you.

What Is Success?

Success is the accomplishment of an aim or of a purpose. It sounds simple enough as is. If someone’s aim is to get a college degree and they get a college degree, we can say that they have succeeded. If someone’s purpose for writing a letter was for the other person to feel loved and the other person actually felt loved by reading the letter, we can say that they have succeeded. But we need to simplify the idea of success even further by looking at a more objective, universal perspective. The reason for this is that we may accomplish an aim or purpose that we don’t truly want.
Let me explain. A person may not actually want a specific job, but they may apply for it and set it as an aim anyway. If this is the case, they may succeed in getting that job. But doing so will do very little for their wellbeing or for their personal sense of accomplishment. To simplify it further, from an objective, universal perspective, to succeed is to achieve what one wants.
And this is why no one can actually agree upon what is and what isn’t a success. No one can agree upon the picture of success. And this is because 1. People disagree about what aim or purpose is good and right. And 2. Not everyone wants the same thing because people have different values, needs and desires. 
For example, many people in the western world feel that having a mansion and a penthouse and multiple businesses and 5 luxury cars and a closet full of designer clothes and constantly traveling on your private jet means that a person is experiencing success. However, if you were Amish, you wouldn’t think so. You would believe that living a modest and simple life is good and right. Therefore, your picture of success might look like a simple home with no electricity, home cooked meals, a horse and buggy, spending quality time with family, friends and community and enjoying the natural world. 
Or for example, one person might really want and value quality leisure time. They would see success as someone being able to have lots of enjoyable, zero pressure “down” time. And another might really want and value achievements. They would see success as someone who is proactive and busy so as to produce and to rack up awards and reach goals. 
A person’s picture of success changes over the course of their life. It changes because desires change and perspectives change and beliefs change. Never the less, we love to think that other people should have the same estimation of “right” and “good” that we do, want the same things as we do and have the same values as we do. Therefore, we think our own picture of success is superior and therefore, everyone else should have the same picture of success. When they don’t, we tend to feel superior to them and try to convert them to our picture of success. 
For humanity to progress, we need to be able to recognize all forms of success rather than minimizing or negating some while exalting and revering others. Regardless of whether or not we, specifically want that aim or purpose and therefore type of success. Imagine a world where you have two people. One is a thespian who is usually short on cash and who moves to whatever city has a part in a show to offer. One is a lawyer with tons of money to burn and who will not take any real risks in life. It is obvious that these two people have different desires and values. Their picture of the success they want is different. But imagine that the lawyer can genuinely recognize the thespian’s ability to tell stories and confidence in front of a crowd and dedication to ruthlessly following their passion as success. And the thespian can genuinely recognize the financial security that the lawyer has built up and the business they have built up and the legal knowledge they have attained as success.
When we say “I can’t recognize that person as a success” what we really mean is “that person has not achieved anything that I want and that I value”. This being said, it is especially hard to recognize something as success when it is obvious that the way that someone goes about attaining what they want harms someone or something else. In which case, we could say that this person has succeeded at their aim or purpose, but has not succeeded at harmony or at creating safe relationships or at creating system health or at enhancing the wellbeing of the other. But this is not going to matter much to a person unless what they want is safe relationship and harmony and system health and the well-being of the other. And what we are left with is being desperate for them to want that, so as to treat it like an aim and incorporate it into their picture of success.
Now that this has been said, and you understand how many forms of success there can be and how individualized the picture of success is, it is important to know something else. For people to accomplish something together (to succeed together) they have to agree upon the picture of success. If they do not, it is inevitable that at some point, their values and desires will clash. As anyone who has been part of a team can tell you, it is a huge issue on a team when everyone’s picture of success is different. 
One’s picture of success is a big element of compatibility in relationships. Also, people may share the same values, but in what order? Life has a way of ensuring that our values will be tested against each other. When this is the case, we may need to prioritize between two or more of our top values. And if someone else that we are trying to accomplish something with would prioritize those same values in a different order, it is a guarantee that they will not agree with the decisions and actions we take and vice versa. Suddenly, their values and our values will be juxtaposed. This is a recipe for conflict.
So that you can understand this, I’ve got an example for you. Max and Richard own a business in healthcare for seniors together. Both of them love financial success and both of them really care about helping people that need care. So, starting a business in healthcare was the best of both worlds. A few years back, their company got sued. As a result, they needed to make enough money to afford the court case. This situation caused both of their top values to be tested against one another. Max decided that because his top value in life is financial security, money was the bigger value and therefore, should be the priority. Meanwhile, Richard has always had family money. He decided that helping people who need care, regardless of money should matter most. Both simply assumed the other was on the same page instead of directly communicating. 
Suddenly, they were disagreeing on everything. Max wanted to sever relationships with insurance companies that were difficult to get pay outs from and discontinue some of the programs they had for seniors on low incomes and consider merger deals with much larger competitive companies. Richard wanted to bleed their accounts dry for the court case and even do fundraisers if necessary so they could continue business as they had always done; especially their programs for seniors on low incomes. You may look at this conflict and immediately jump to the conclusion that Richard is the better and more moral person in the situation. But even the accountants agreed that Richard’s course of action could put them out of business altogether, meaning that not only would Max and Richard personally suffer, every last one of the seniors under their care would no longer have care and would have to start over from scratch with a new provider. The point of this entire story has nothing to do with morality. What it is about is values and a picture of success and whether two people’s values and picture of success are compatible, especially when situations arise that force people to prioritize.
When you are trying to establish compatibility so as to achieve anything with someone else, whether that is a good relationship or a business goal, it is important to make sure that you are on the same page with them about the picture of success and also, should the need arise, the prioritization of values.
Long story short, success is to achieve what one wants. We could argue all day over whether someone is or isn’t a success based off of whether they have or haven’t achieved what we value and want. If I were to give you my picture and therefore definition of success, it would be about what I want. Even the universe’s more objective picture of success is about what the collective universe wants. But to make it more grounded, if someone wants to be traveling the world, traveling the world is successful to them. If someone wants a millionaire lifestyle, a millionaire lifestyle is successful to them. If someone wants to be awakened, being awakened is successful to them. If someone wants a close family, having a close family is successful to them. And our picture of success will evolve over our lifetime as our needs and perspective changes. The most important question is: Is this way that I am thinking, are these decisions that I am making and are these actions that I am taking actually helping me to achieve what I really want?

The Truth About Finding Yourself in a Repeat Situation

To be completely honest with you, most of us are still operating from an oversimplified, primitive mentality regarding the Universe that we live in. Part of this primitive mentality is that we expect the Universe at large (or that which many people call Source or God) to be all knowing and able to control everything that happens; as if all of us were just chess pieces being played in the name of some greater plan that has already been decided upon. 
If you think about it, the relationship we have with the universe is rather like the relationship we have with our parents when we are three. And growing up to find out that the truth of our parents is different is scary for many reasons. The same can be said about finding out that the truth of the Universe is different than we thought.
When we imagine that the universe can control everything that happens or doesn’t happen, we imagine that if the Universe loved us and wanted the best for us, it would sense our desires and simply make them happen for us. And that similar to our parents, if it doesn’t, it means that we have displeased the Universe and are being punished in some way. 
Essentially for the sake of today’s conversation, I need you to recognize in yourself the expectation that if you have experienced something unwanted and therefore, you have a desire for the opposite experience, the Universe can and will bring that opposite, wanted experience to you. This is especially true for things we, ourselves feel powerless to bringing about. For example, if you have experienced people betraying you, you may think that the Universe can and should simply bring people to you who will never betray you. Or if you experienced failure, the universe can and should bring you success. Or if you experienced being taken for granted, the Universe can and should bring you a life where instead, you are deeply valued and appreciated. 
Because of this expectation, we become very upset when instead of finding ourselves in the opposite, wanted experience, we find ourselves in yet another repeat of the painful, unwanted experience. And guess what? Each and every one of us will find ourself in repeat situations. This is especially painful when those situations were unwanted in the first place and therefore, we desire to never experience them again. This happens because of the nature of the law of mirroring, which is one of the principal laws governing this time-space reality that we call life, and also due to the nature of expansion.
This is not happening because you are bad and wrong and are therefore being punished. It’s not happening because this Universe (What so many call God or Source) could make something different happen, but simply isn’t for some reason. It is happening because you are a fragment of the Universe and that means, you have free will. You are a creator, whether you are a conscious creator or an unconscious creator. And if you have any way of thinking or behaving that feeds into creating the unwanted experience in any way, that way of thinking or behaving has to be changed for the unwanted experience not to happen.
 It is easy to see this concept with other people. Imagine that a person wants a relationship, but they withdraw from a partner every time they get close to them. This behavior will keep feeding into the creation of the failure of their relationships. The Universe cannot control them into being intimate and close and not withdrawing. It also cannot create a relationship for them without them changing because there is no real relationship if one party in the relationship refuses intimacy. And that is not what this person really wants. What the universe can do is to be in a relationship with them. To the degree that it lends its energy (which is massive) to them getting what they want. To their expansion. This means helping them to become self-aware so as to change patterns that are not serving them so that they can align with their desires. At the same time as helping to align them with the people, places, circumstances and things that are a match to what they are wanting. Therefore, using our previous example, this person who keeps withdrawing in relationships has to recognize their own behavior and choose to change it with their own free will in order to be a match to the relationship they want.
I have said before that to heal is to experience the opposite. Therefore, it is tempting to think that the most healing thing is to simply BE in the opposite experience. But sometimes the most healing thing is to be in a repeat of the original experience, and to see a different perspective, make a different choice and/or take a different action.
When we have a pattern… a way of thinking or behaving that lends its energy to creating what we don’t want, it is likely that we will find ourselves in a repeat. A variation of the same situation all over again. And that it is not meant to re-traumatize us. Instead, it is a huge healing opportunity. And the most healing thing is to become more aware and by doing so, to change a pattern, a way of thinking or behaving that is in fact lending to the creation and therefore repeat of that very unwanted experience. And that getting to the healed state (the opposite, wanted experience) is contingent upon US changing that way of thinking or behaving. So, we could say that the way we are thinking and behaving is lending its energy to the re-creation of that unwanted experience. AND at the same time, the most healing opportunity could very well be the repeat of that experience.
So that you can understand this better, I’ll give you an example. Jane grew up in a dysfunctional family dynamic with non-religious parents in a southern Baptist community. Jane was not only made the scapegoat of her family; she was also made the scapegoat of the community. She longs to be a part of a close-knit group of people who see her goodness and take responsibility for their own insecurities. We could say that for Jane, such a group would be the healing experience. But what if I told you that it would be vibrationally impossible to bring Jane into that experience because of the way that she thinks and behaves. And what if I told you that if it was possible to simply give Jane that experience, despite the way that she thinks and behaves in relationships, that it wouldn’t be the best thing for her. There would be zero free will, conscious creation and personal empowerment in it. Therefore, Jane finds herself in a nightmarish repeat of her childhood scenario. 
Jane formed a very close-knit group of friends who all decided to live together in an artist’s colony. One of the other women in the colony, Beth is very intimidated by Jane. She feels Jane is a superior artist. She hates the way that her boyfriend acts around Jane. As a result, Beth started to see Jane as a threat. Because of this, she began to triangulate the other members of the colony against Jane. It worked. It worked because one member of the Colony knew that Beth has been there in the colony longer than anyone and so, not aligning with Beth created insecurity around their living situation. It worked with another because they had a huge insecurity around sexual infidelity. This person’s own parents were torn apart by infidelity and Beth chose to triangulate against Jane by suggesting that Jane was trying to seduce her boyfriend away from her. And so on and so forth. Each member of the community had an insecurity that they did not take any personal responsibility for. Instead, they simply decided to preserve the image of their commune being wonderful, except for Jane. And soon, Jane’s character was under attack. It was a repeat of the situation in her childhood. 
Without going too far into the process she went through to get there, Jane realized that her pattern that fed into the creation of becoming the scapegoat is a totally dysfunctional relationship with pressure. She realized that whenever she finds herself in a situation where someone tries to put pressure on her for something that isn’t her responsibility, she has no boundaries around it and she just takes the pressure and takes the pressure, which means taking responsibility for things that are not hers. Of course, she is a magnet for people who don’t want any responsibility for themselves or others. And once a person learns she will do this, they eventually make her responsible for everything in their life. And if she refuses to take it, she is immediately made the bad guy and the consequences of the responsibility being dropped come down on her. 
For just one example, it is the responsibility of her roommate Jess to come up with her own rent. Chronically, each month, Jess is short on rent. Jess cries about it and Jane takes the pressure to make up the extra rent. The reason being that if she doesn’t, no one else will and they, not just Jess, will get in trouble with the landlord and possibly be kicked out. Jess loves to use this consequence as leverage for getting Jane to pay for her.
Jane realized that she takes pressure for others chronically because this is what was expected when she was a child and this is what it is to be a scapegoat. When the Baptist community treated her poorly, her father didn’t defend her, he made it her responsibility to try to not take it personally. When her mother made her the problem in the family so that she could avoid facing the fact that she was unhappy in the life that she had chosen and changing something, Jane actually took the pressure and tried to act in a way that pleased her mother. When they expected Jane to caretake her younger brother, Jane took that pressure and resentfully watched him as if he was her son every day after school. 
Jane realized that she was in a repeat situation so, she must do something different this time than she did the first time, and that if she succeeded, it would be a healing experience. Jane decided to not take the pressure and for the first time, to put the pressure back where it belonged. So, after really deeply looking at her actions to make sure that nothing she was doing was actually something she should not be doing. As well as sorting through what actually was her responsibility and what wasn’t, she set a firm boundary with Beth. She had a conversation with her about how she has to face her insecurities relative to her own art and her own looks and her own relationship with her boyfriend. She told her that if she fears that someone can threaten the relationship, who she really distrusts, is her boyfriend. And Jane set the boundary that beyond ensuring Beth that she will never cheat with him, she would no longer be made responsible for keeping their relationship secure, that was their job. 
Despite the relatively amicable nature of the talk itself, Beth was still subconsciously benefitting too much from Jane being the bad guy and not facing her insecurities, so this only escalated her tactics. Beth decided that she would threaten to move out of the community and convinced another roommate to go with her. Normally, Jane would have taken the pressure and been so intent on avoiding all the consequences of that happening that she would have taken responsibility for doing whatever it takes to make Beth de-escalate and feel good to be in the house again and to come across as good to the other roommate. Instead, she said “Ok. That’s really sad, I wish you wouldn’t go, but I can see if your insecurities are just too big to be in the house with me, then leaving might just be the best option.” Beth was flabbergasted and furious. She and the other roommate packed their stuff into a car and left that night in the middle of the night. 
That same week, she also told Jess she couldn’t pay for her rent and after only one month of someone else having to pay for her so as to not get kicked out of the place, the rest of the community asked her to leave to make room for another person who would make the rent. Long story short, they couldn’t find enough artists to move in to come up with rent. But everyone agreed that it was not Jane’s fault that they didn’t take responsibility to do so. And so, all the remaining roommates got evicted from their little artist commune. The thing is, Jane felt like the consequence, which was very painful, was still worth it. She could see how unhealthy the responsibility dynamics were. And she felt better because she was not under as much pressure and could see how to avoid being a magnet for irresponsible people and how she could avoid getting into a dynamic where she would run the risk of being scapegoated again. She wasn’t stuck in a social system where she was the scapegoat anymore. She also didn’t run away from that social system only to end up the scapegoat all over again in a new one. Her new healing practice was: Only taking pressure and responsibility that was actually hers to take and outside of that, only taking pressure and responsibility that she actually wanted.
When we find ourself in repeat situations, we immediately think “this shouldn’t be happening”. And why wouldn’t we think that? It isn’t what we want. It’s the opposite of what we want. But from a more objective perspective, we haven’t gone backwards. And it is what should be happening. We have re-manifested/been put in a healing experience where the healing thing (whether we recognize it or not) is to change the thoughts, behaviors, habits and actions that make us a match to and bring about that unwanted thing in the first place. We are meant to learn what it takes to lend our energy to the creation of the opposite, wanted thing. And to employ our free will to change those detrimental patterns so that the next step is to actualize whatever it is that we are truly wanting.

Throw The Idea of Work-Life Balance Out the Window

In today’s world, you probably have heard a lot and probably will hear a lot from other people about the importance of work-life balance. But is it really necessary?
The idea of work life balance is the idea that it is only possible to have a healthy lifestyle if you separate your work from the other elements of your life, such as your personal life. And after doing so, seek to establish a state of equilibrium where you equally prioritize the demands of your career and the other elements of your life.
Right off the bat, there is a problem with the philosophy of work-life balance that is easily visible in the term itself. It suggests that your work is separate from and not part of truly living. That truly living is everything else outside of work. It suggests that living is the time you spend with loved ones, your home, your hobbies, the vacations you take etc. 
If we look back over the course of history, there are too many reasons to list for why a person in any era decided to take a specific job or perform a specific task; not because they felt intrinsic motivation to do it, but because it was a “so that”. It got them something else they valued. Over the course of history as society evolved and experienced so many changes and different revolutions, societal needs and values changed. And with it, so did the lifestyle of its citizens. This was especially true when the whole of human society began to operate on the exchange of money. This was especially true when religions began to govern how people should live. This is also especially true in countries where societal evolution meant beginning to view a citizen as a part of a machine. 
In the life philosophy of these industrialized societies, one’s profession was divorced from one’s talents, values, intrinsic motivation and passion. Instead, it became the societal norm that you have to work (even if it is a job you don’t like) so that with the rest of your time, you can have money to have a home and personal life and have what you really love and do what you are really passionate about. In these countries, the idea of work-life balance originated as a key element of health. The main reasons that it was seen as a key element of health is that 1. It didn’t take much time to realize that if all a person’s time in a day is spent meeting the demands of a job that they don’t like, they will very quickly become depressed and their wellbeing will decline. And 2. These societies were set-up on the structure of a nuclear family. And if a person’s work is separate from their family and yet they work all the time and don’t have any time to dedicate to their family, the family falls apart. This spells instability of the societal structure. So, the short-sighted solution that arose was the idea of work-life balance.
We need to throw the idea of work-life balance out the window. It is an outdated concept that represents nothing more than a symptom fix. And it instills the wrong mentality in people’s minds about work. As a replacement for the idea of work-life balance, we need to focus on what any specific individual person needs to achieve a state of health and wellbeing. And this means there will be a TON of variability regarding how they manage their time, how they organize their life and how much energy and time they put into what in their life. People need to customize their life. 
Regarding the place that work fits into someone’s overall life, I want you to think of a scale. On either side of this scale, we have an unhealthy extreme. On one side, you have someone who has complete resistance to work and who believes that work is not life and who refuses to get a job or work because of it. On the other side, you have a workaholic. A person who spends all their time working as a coping mechanism and as a method of avoiding other elements of life. Everyone falls somewhere on this scale. For example, one person may do a job they hate only so that they can have money to have the basic necessities of life. Another person may not work for a livelihood because their livelihood is provided, so the only work they do is intrinsically motivated and for pleasure. Another may do a job they like and are intrinsically motivated to do some of the time, but they make sure to limit the time and effort they spend on it because of their other priorities. Another person may feel such deep purpose and meaning in their work that the vast majority of their time is dedicated to it and all the other elements of their life are integrated into it and organized around it. Keep in mind that where a person currently falls on the scale may not actually be the right place for them on the scale.
The vast majority of people who believe in the importance of work-life balance are coming from the paradigm on this scale that either: Work is only a thing you do so that you can do the other stuff, which to them feels like really living. Or work should be something you like, but you need to prioritize other things equally to or more than work. And they are arguing for work-life balance so as to defend the rightness of their place on the scale as well as to project what they think is right for them onto other people. Keep in mind that the place that is right for someone to fall on this scale is a big factor when it comes to compatibility in relationships.
The way to know if someone has arranged their life correctly for themselves with regards to how much time and energy they dedicate to what in their life, is that they will be thriving. Their life will feel good. If a person is feeling distressed because of how much time and energy they are putting into their career, that is your indication that more time and energy needs to be put into something else, such as leisure time. If a person is experiencing conflict in their relationships because they are so focused on their career and their partner or friends want them to prioritize quality time together, it is time for a re-evaluation. This indicates that a person needs to re-assess their own priorities. This could mean that an adjustment towards decreasing focus on work and increasing it on something like leisurely social interaction would lead to greater life satisfaction. Or it could mean that there is incompatibility between the two people regarding values and lifestyle choices. 
The concept of work-life balance tends to cause people to globalize about what is right for all people and by doing so, to lose sight of how individually customized life must be for people to experience satisfaction. I’ve got three examples for you to help illustrate this. The first example is Joe. Joe is a doctor who is passionate about solving endemic diseases. He is currently working for doctors without borders as well as a few other humanitarian groups. He finds so much meaning and purpose in his work that it is his absolute priority. As a result, anyone who enters into a romantic relationship with him cannot rely on him staying in whatever city or country he is currently in because he may be transferred. And they can’t rely on him to not cancel on things he has agreed to being present to, because he is always on-call. For Joe, his work is his life because for him, it is the most important thing in his life. 
For joe, the other elements of Joe’s life and his other needs have to be organized around his work. And we need to seek to customize his relationships to his work. He needs to seek compatibility with a woman who shares Joe’s values and who can support his career. For example, this woman might be someone who is very independent and thrives on having her own time away from a partner. Or this woman might be someone who wants to sign up to do this work with him, so that she can derive her own sense of purpose and togetherness from supporting Joe’s purpose and being together in the cause. In this case, she would go wherever Joe is stationed and lend her energy towards supporting Joe so that he can help people. 
If we approach Joe with the idea that Work-Life balance is important, we would make the mistake of encouraging him to reduce his work and by doing so, take him away from his purpose, his meaning, his passion, his motivations and his values. We will also lead him into an incompatible relationship with a woman who has other values and wants him to cut back on work to be with her doing other things… A relationship where the best he can hope for is mutual compromise. And Joe will feel miserable in his life because of it. 
The next example is Gabe. Gabe is feeling really insecure about the fact that despite incredible pressure to do so, he feels no drive to get a career or to settle down with a wife and kids. Nothing about the traditional life suits him. He feels passionate and lit up inside and motivated to learn new languages and to explore new cultures and places. He is an explorer and a traveler at heart. In fact, this is his reason for being in this life. His life-purpose if you will. People often look at Gabe as immature. They put pressure on him to settle down and find a career. They talk about the importance of work-life balance. Although they don’t mean to suggest that Gabe should cut back on work. He doesn’t really have a career. He simply takes a temporary job in a location to make a bit of living money and then goes onto his next location. Instead, what they mean to suggest is that they think that Gabe will only be fulfilled if he gets something productive and permanent to do for work and gets serious in his work building a family and reduces his level of ‘play’ around the world. But this is actually wrong for Gabe. Gabe was never meant to live a traditional life and Gabe is actually meant to make his life about traveling and exploring. If Gabe is honest, he does not really need predictable financial security. Part of the excitement that causes him to feel alive is trying out so many different things and experiencing so many different lifestyles through the opportunities he comes across for work around the world. Gabe should not try to find a relationship with a person who wants a traditional life. And the concept of work-life balance does not even apply to him and his life purpose.
Lauren is a human resources administrator. She also has a partner and two kids and three dogs and a mortgage and friends and extended relatives that she cares about. Lauren is living what we might call (in today’s world) a more traditional life within society. Lauren is currently distressed because it seems that by working eight hours a day, five days a week, the demands of her work and the demands of her personal life are in competition with one another. She is experiencing burnout. If Lauren were honest, she likes to do her job. She likes the security of the pay. She likes the tasks she performs. She likes her colleagues. But her work is consuming so much of her mental energy and time that she doesn’t feel she has enough to dedicate to the people in her personal life that she cares about. She is thinking about work even when she is at home. She doesn’t care so much about her work that this feels good. She really wants to be present and have energy to be a good partner and mother and friend. If we take the traditional approach to Work-Life balance, we may encourage Lauren to cut back on her work hours and work part time. Or if she can’t, to learn techniques to leave work at work when she goes home. However, what Lauren really needs is not balance. What she needs is the flexibility to be able to organize the many priorities in her life so that she is satisfied with her ability to give enough and to resource enough from each one of these priorities throughout the week. The actual solution to this conundrum is for Lauren to be able to telecommute. She is a self-disciplined person whose issues would easily be solved by working from home, even if that were only on certain days of the week. If she had control over what hours of the day she was working, she could organize her work around her personal life rather than organize her personal life around her work. And as a result, she would thrive.
Humanity is out of alignment with work. Work being an activity or task involving mental or physical effort that is done in order to achieve a purpose or result. Sit with that definition of work for a moment. It is as much work when someone plays a game of tennis as it is when someone pours concrete for the foundation of a house. A person may or may not engage in a specific activity or task regularly in order to establish a livelihood. A person may or may not be in alignment with their values when they engage in an activity or carry out a task. A person may or may not enjoy that activity or task and therefore may or may not enjoy expending the effort inherent in it. A person may or may not do an activity or task because it is meaningful or purposeful. But it is the meaning, purpose, value and level of enjoyment that a person finds in carrying out a task or doing an activity that dictates whether someone is in alignment with what they are doing. Therefore it is the meaning, purpose, value and level of enjoyment that a person finds in carrying out a task or doing an activity that dictates whether a person is happy doing what they are doing. 
Where the progression and expansion of humanity is headed, is towards each person’s purpose for being and place in society, being dictated by what their intrinsic talents, interests, motivations, values, and enjoyments are. When this happens, every person’s work will be purposeful and meaningful. Work will become play. Only one person’s play will look very different from another person’s play. One person’s play and therefore work may be cleaning things. Another’s may be designing rockets. Another’s may be caretaking children. And someone’s work may or may not be something that they do in exchange for money. 
Not every person’s purpose for being is about a “career” they are meant to have. But some people’s purpose for being definitely is. On top of this, the amount of time and energy that a person dedicates to one thing vs. another will be customized. This means for example that for one person it will be right for them to dedicate 80 hours a week to their career and the remaining time to sleep and spending quality time with a loved one. For another, spending the majority of their time connecting with people and only some time on other things will be right for them. For another, their life might look a lot more like the “balance” that we traditionally associate with work-life balance. And each person’s relationships will look different based on what life element prioritization is right for them specifically. There is no cookie cutter approach to human happiness. This includes how much time, focus, energy and effort is dedicated to a person’s career vs. the other elements of their life. How to know whether the prioritization, time and energy someone dedicates towards the different elements of their life is right for them is that the person will like their life and they will be thriving.

The Danger of Negating Negatives with Positives

Polarity is an integral element of life. Contrast is a reality in this universe. This means that both positive and negative co-exist. Both positive and negative are inherent to reality. To have a full picture of reality, one must be able to recognize both in anything. But the ability to recognize both the positive and the negative in anything is, for lack of a better way of explaining it, an unbiased, impartial, objective skill. We get into trouble when we become bias towards either aspect of reality. 
People become heavily bias towards the negative or the positive. They lose their objectivity and their perspective becomes subjective. They start to manipulate their perception of reality in whatever way serves them. For example, a person will start to ignore positive elements and only notice negative ones if they have been traumatized by disappointment enough to decide to never get their hopes up again, and keep themselves expecting the worst; so as to not be let down ever again. Or for example, if a person does not trust in their ability to feel negative emotion without experiencing huge consequences or trust in their power to see a negative and do something proactive to exact change upon it, a person will start to re-frame every negative they see into something positive instead.
Metaphorically speaking, we can get into trouble when we only wear rosy colored glasses through which to view reality and we can get in trouble when we only wear dark glasses through which to view reality. And today, we are going to talk about one dysfunctional behavior that is rampant within human society and that occurs when we slip into a bias towards the positive polarity inherent within reality… Negating negatives with positives, which is a form of toxic positivity. 
When we negate negatives with positives, what we are actually trying to do is to make the negative thing un-real. We are trying to convince ourselves or other people that it does not exist. We are nullifying it, abolishing it and making it either un-true or less true. It is a form of denial. It is a direct and deliberate invalidation of the negative thing. We do this because we feel we cannot handle it being valid, true or real. Because the behavior of negating negatives with positives belongs to the coping mechanism of denial, you would benefit by also watching my video titled: How to Call Bullshit on Denial. 
So that you can understand this behavior better, I’ll give you an example. Amy was ecstatic to find out that she was pregnant. But at three months along, she suffered a miscarriage. Amy was absolutely devastated. So much so that she became depressed and developed serious anxiety attacks. Amy’s heart was broken, so was her faith in the future that she wanted. A few of the people in Amy’s life did not know how to deal with their own painful emotions and thoughts that crept up when that happened. As a result, they did not know how to hold any space for Amy’s painful thoughts and emotions. And so, the coping mechanism they reached for and encouraged Amy to reach for was negating the negatives with positives. They wanted to make the negative invalid so they did not have to deal with it. They said things like: “Now you have an angel looking out over you”. “At least it was early and you didn’t get to know your baby”. “You got pregnant and so you know you can always get pregnant again”. “If it happened, it was probably for the best, there must have been something wrong”. “Well, the upside is that you and your husband can focus on each other and do some more traveling in the meantime, there won’t be space for that when there is an actual baby in the home.” Needless to say, these perspectives only compounded Amy’s trauma. As a result, she felt totally not understood, isolated and alone with her pain and made wrong for her perception of the experience, therefore she started questioning her own sanity.
There are several dangers inherent in negating negatives with positives. I’m going to list some of them for you.
When you negate a negative with the positive, you are actively stepping out of reality. You’re trying to cancel out the negative element of reality, so that you can convince yourself that it doesn’t really exist and you can feel better because you are in an illusion that the positive is the only thing that is real. Reality is actually your only axis for power. This means any action you take is not one that is exacted upon what is real. It will not lead to the intended results. Therefore, you have rendered yourself not only out of reality, but also powerless. This can get you into some real trouble. To understand this, I’ve got a real-life example for you.  Jen was a single mother who really needed a partner. She met Nicholas and got attached to him quickly. They started living together after a few months of dating. Jen started seeing a lot of red flags and negatives about Nicholas. For example, Nicholas definitely fostered an emotional dependency in her. He seemed intent on convincing her that no one in her life actually knew, valued or cared about her and that to the opposite, he was the only one who did. Nicholas had no friends his own age whatsoever and whenever they would go to a social gathering together, he would not engage in adult conversation with her, instead he would seek out the company of whatever children were there and she would find him wresting with them and tickling them. Often, Nicholas would get up in the middle of the night and make any number of excuses as to why he needed to do something other than stay with her in bed for a bit. She couldn’t shake the feeling that he had some kind of double life. Nicholas was unexplainably nervous about police officers and if there was ever a police car parked somewhere that he made plans, he would immediately change plans and keep driving. Sometimes Jen felt that Nicholas was more interested in her daughter than he was in her. He would often suggest that Jen should go on vacation or go to the gym and let him do her the favor of watching her daughter.  He was always offering to spend time with her and to drive her to ballet practice. Often, because of this, Jen felt left out of their little “club”. Well, as it turns out, Nicholas was a child sex offender who had established an incestuous relationship with Jen’s daughter about one month into them living together. 
The problem is, Jen uses positivity as a coping mechanism. And she especially employs the technique of negating negatives with positives. So, with every negative, she had a way to negate it. She told herself he cared so much about her that he was so afraid of losing her that he felt threatened by her being close to other people. She told herself that it is amazing that he is so good with children, that it was a sign that he was young at heart and was repelled by the impurity and pretense in adults. She told herself that the good thing is that she found a man that is so interested in her daughter and so willing to step up and be an integral part of her life too, unlike other men. She refused to get up when he got up at night to snoop on him. Instead, she told herself that some people are night owls and being up at night is integral to their creativity and that her ticket to being a good partner by loving him the way he is, is to allow him the space to be that way. She told herself that Nicholas’s avoidance of the police was proof that he was being protective because as we all know, there is so much corruption in the police force, they are simply legally supported criminals. Jen put herself out of reality and into an illusion that felt good to her. Unfortunately, by being out of reality, she could not act upon reality and therefore, she failed to keep her daughter safe in such an extreme way that neither of their lives will ever be the same. You cannot make the right choices or do the right thing in any situation if you are not willing to see the full picture of reality, including the negative elements of reality.       
When you negate the negatives with the positives, you run the risk of mentally and emotionally abusing yourself. You gaslight yourself when you invalidate the part of you that sees a negative reality. It is to suggest to that aspect of yourself that what you see, you didn’t see, what you feel, you have no good reason to feel and that you should doubt your estimation of reality. You emotionally invalidate yourself when you do this. You dismiss and reject your painful feelings and thoughts. This is to send the message that those thoughts and feelings are unimportant, unacceptable, inaccurate, insignificant, irrational and not real. When you do this to yourself, this is how you are making a part of yourself (or many parts of yourself) feel. When you invalidate the part of you that sees the negative or that is in pain because of it, you are refusing to see, hear, feel or acknowledge it. Therefore, you are condemning it not only to isolation. But to being alone and in pain. It makes you doubt your own sanity and feel like you are going crazy, which will make you afraid of yourself. It also denies you the authentic support you need in order to deal with what you are facing.          When you negate the negatives with the positives, you run the risk of mentally and emotionally abusing other people. You run the risk of gaslighting them, making them feel like something is wrong with them for what they think and feel, dismissing and rejecting them, making them feel like what they think and feel is unimportant, unacceptable, insignificant, inaccurate, irrational and not real and condemning them to being not only alone, but in pain alone. It makes them doubt their sanity and feel like they are going crazy, which makes people afraid of themselves. It denies them the authentic support they need in order to deal with what they are facing.      When you negate the negative with the positive, you are in a coping mechanism. To cope with something is by definition to make a specific alteration mentally, emotionally or physically so that you can manage or adapt to something that is causing you stress. By definition, we only cope with a situation when we perceive that we cannot change or eradicate it. But the thing is, we often cope with something that we can change or can eradicate. And so, when we negate the negative with the positive, we are often keeping ourselves in detrimental situations unnecessarily and failing to change things we should change. We have succumb to false powerlessness, albeit disguised with a positive façade. Metaphorically speaking, instead of realizing we are in jail and getting out of the jail, we are making ourselves ok with being in jail by convincing ourselves that it isn’t jail. To understand more about this, watch my video titled: How To Let go of a Coping Mechanism.   When you negate the negative with the positive, you are in a state of avoidance and resistance. You are misusing recognition of the positive elements of a thing by turning it into a tool of avoidance of the negative and a tool of resistance against the negative. You are trying to shut part of reality and anything associated with that reality down. In a universe governed by the law of mirroring, whatever you resist, persists. Also, it is an invitation for the reflection to get bigger. If you refuse to see a reflection and are thus unresponsive to it, it will escalate until it becomes something you literally cannot deny. So, it is a set up for future disaster.  When you negate the negative with the positive, it prevents growth and it prevents expansion. Growth comes from facing the unwanted, gathering insight regarding it, letting it define what you want instead and the process of alchemizing oneself and one’s life so as to create improvement and ultimately, to achieve what is wanted. Recognition of the negative is what creates movement and change. Without it, stagnation occurs. For example, imagine that a family has many dysfunctional patterns. Patterns that have caused real harm to the individuals in that family and that have set them up for failure in their other adult relationships. That dysfunction will never change, it will simply be perpetuated if the members of this family refuse to acknowledge the negatives inherent within their family dynamics and patterns. If each member of the family only recognizes the positive in the family and uses positives to negate every negative about the family, they are in an illusion about their own family. They are creating an overlay and expecting every member of the family to buy into that overlay. Anyone who tries to make the family system improve, by bringing up and trying to change the dysfunction, will then be ostracized. The consciousness of this family has then stagnated and is not growing and progressing and expanding. The dysfunction simply passes from one generation to the next. And believe me, the universe has some serious tricks up its sleeve for shaking up families like this. When you negate the negative with the positive, you thwart progress. You thwart it in yourself, others, the world and the universe at large.    Toxic positivity, in its many forms, is often very subtle. We are normalized to it in our current society. Because we don’t recognize how detrimental it is, we still think all forms of positivity (including negating the negative with the positive) are good. But don’t forget that we once thought that heroine was a fabulous cough medicine. So, we need to recognize when we are doing this and when other people are doing this and put an end to the misuse of positivity.                          

The Biggest Lie the Self Help/Spiritual Industry Sells You

If you are reading this, chances are this is not your first rodeo. You have probably spent considerable time reading self-help books and consuming both spiritual and personal growth material. No matter what role someone is in (whether they are the one teaching and producing and selling content or whether they are the one consuming it) the vast majority of people involved in self-help, personal growth and spirituality, have the same subconscious or conscious aim… To get to a point where life only feels good. 
And here is where some serious confusion needs to be cleared up. The biggest lie that the self help/spiritual industry perpetuates is that there can be an end to contrast. That it is possible to get to a point where life only feels good with no negatives and where no unwanted things happen anymore. It’s at this point that I have to tell you that just because we say we are spiritual but not religious, doesn’t mean that we haven’t carried over the same religious beliefs and given them a makeover. The self-help/spiritual industry is selling you the idea of heaven, just like so many religions have. Only this time, it’s had a makeover. Now, instead of reaching heaven (an end state of positivity) after you die by doing things right and good enough while you are alive, it’s all about reaching heaven (an end state of positivity) while you are alive by doing thing right and good enough while you are alive.  
If many people were honest, this is their actual expectation for doing things like workshops, conscious manifestation exercises, therapy, shadow work, self-help processes, meditations, breathwork and health regimes etc. And so many people suffer because of this hidden expectation that they have either generated or been directly sold.
Contrast is one of the integral elements of this time space reality. What I mean by contrast is the existence and the perception of polarities such as positive and negative, wanted and unwanted, dark and light, pain and pleasure. Contrast is the root of both personal and universal expansion. A physical human is meant to sort through the wanted and unwanted elements of this time space reality so as to give rise to desire. And then, to line up with that desire with their thoughts, words and actions. Doing so, causes a person to actualize the expansion. But this improved state of being will come with a new set of contrast. And so, the process starts all over again, propelling the person into the ever-expanding state of being. For example, let’s say that a person really wants to have a life in nature on a self-sustainable farm. By actualizing their desire, they may have things like a sense of independence and freedom, the peacefulness of the natural world, a life that is wholesome, high-quality food and simplicity. But they may also experience things like inconvenience, lots of labor that needs to be done personally in order to maintain things, a feeling of disconnection from the rest of society and a decrease in financial income. To understand more about this, you can watch my video titled: Want To Succeed? What Pain Will You Say Yes To?
All this is not to say that you should simply give up on life being good and give up on joy and give up on aiming for the constant improvement. It is the desire for life to be good that causes personal expansion. And it is the process of lining up with (so as to actualize) the things that you desire that makes life a process of ‘the better it gets the better it can get’. But this is very different than expecting that you can and should get to a place where there is no more contrast. To understand more about this, watch my video titled: The Ticket to an Empowered Life.
What you are after by chasing a state of heaven while you are alive is a state of ended-ness. No desire and therefore no progress or movement or expansion is born from a being who has everything they could ever want and is only ever experiencing the positive. And you came to this time space reality specifically because you were able to see the value of expansion. To have committed to this time space reality and to seek an end to expansion at the same time, is a contradiction. 
Aside from all of this, there are some main reasons that it is so important to not be doing self-help processes or spiritual practices with the expectation that eventually, if you do them good enough, you will get to a point where you never feel or experience anything negative and life will only feel good.
You will fail at it no matter what you do. And you will fail at it through no fault of your own. You will not fail because you are not doing something right. You will fail at it because the reality of life and how this time space reality was designed is in direct opposition to a state of ended-ness. Because of this, not only will you be out of reality (which only ever leads to unwanted results), you will also feel like something is seriously wrong with you and like you are not doing something good enough or right. This will cause you to suffer unimaginable levels of pain. Some of you who are watching this are already in this pain I am speaking about. Imagine that life is an ocean. In this analogy, the contrast of life is like the waves in the ocean. To master life is to master the art of surfing. To operate with this expectation of getting to a point where life only ever feels good and only wanted things happen is to think “If I just surf good enough, the waves will stop coming”. No person who actually attained enlightenment is teaching anyone how to stop the contrast of life. They are teaching you how to develop a different relationship to the reality of contrast (to the waves of life), and this in turn changes your life experience for the better. If you engage with self-help, personal growth and spiritual things so as to reach a state of positive ended-ness, everything you do is a ‘so that’. You will be doing a great many things you hate so as to get to a reward you want. But this means that you will hate the process of life and never achieve the reward that you are trying to get to. This is a recipe for burnout, powerlessness and despair. You will especially get into trouble if you are using lots of shadow work to try to reach a state of heaven while you are alive. The here and now experience of life itself will not only be painful, it will not be worth it because the reward for doing painful things (which you think is a life where nothing ever feels negative and you never experience something unwanted) will not come. To understand more about this, watch my video titled: If You Want to Be Happy, Don’t Do This! If you approach life in this way, you will never live life in the ‘now’. Instead, you’re on a rat wheel trying to get to a perfect future. There will be no actual appreciation of the now. Because even if you engage in the practice of appreciating the now… even that practice is a ‘so that’… something that you are only doing in order to try to have a better future. You will fail to fully commit to the adventure of life and to mastering the process of expansion. Instead of really committing to playing the game of life and extracting the benefits from it, you’re going to be in resistance to it, trying to get out of it and transcend it. You will not be fully committed to life. You’ll have one foot in and one foot out of life. And you cannot truly manifest if you don’t put all your energy into life. Also, you will be in resistance to both pain and desire. For this reason, it would benefit you to watch two of my videos. The first titled: The Meaning of Pain and the second titled: Are You Afraid of Desire? The Truth about Desire.      You will walk around with an attitude that if you or someone else is in pain or experiencing negative or unwanted things, you or they are doing something wrong/bad and that it means something about you or them. By the way, this is simply a modern facelift that was done on the idea that if someone doesn’t get to heaven when they die, it is because they did something bad or wrong. What you will most likely make it mean when you experience negative or unwanted things is something that causes you to feel inferior to others who you think are more right and more good than you are because their life is better than yours is… That they are more enlightened than you are.
And walking around with this attitude will cause you to hold a person in less esteem if they are experiencing pain and unwanted things. You may tell yourself that you’re the more successful or enlightened one. You can often hear this insinuation in people’s voices when they ask “How are you a match to that?”. As if reaching a state of positive ended-ness, a heaven in life, is a measure of how good and right someone is. This belief and this expectation puts you into a state of narcissism and in a personal bubble reality built for one. At its root, the expectation that one should get to a place in life where nothing negative or unwanted ever happens, arises because a person is desperate to get away from pain. When people are in pain, they tend to be very narcissistic. It’s very hard to care about the wellbeing of others when you are in pain.  And so, even if you have been sold on a practice such as taking the other person’s best interests as a part of your own best interests, you will ultimately only do that because you think that it will lead to you, yourself experiencing no more pain in relationships. And you will only seek to attain a state of oneness because you believe it is the ticket to you feeling good and no longer separated. Again, it is the attempt to manifest a heaven... an ended state of positivity for yourself. Unfortunately, many teachers as well as the self- help/spiritual industry itself has sold you the lie that there can be an end to contrast. That the goal is to actualize heaven, a state of positive ended-ness, while you are alive. And that if you are not there yet, you need to do something different and better. Because of all of this, you are chasing a goal that you will not reach. You have used your degree of happiness in life as your measure of your own goodness and rightness. You have turned your life into a “so that”. Joy in life is not dependent on there being nothing negative and on never experiencing unwanted things. Contrast is not an oppositional force to joy. You can love your life and still experience contrast. You can do everything right and good and you will still experience the contrast that is inherent to life. Otherwise, the second any being became enlightened, all homeless people would suddenly not be homeless anymore and no animal would eat another animal and no one would ever lose a loved one because death would not be a part of life. So, either no being has ever achieved enlightenment or contrast is inherent to life, whether a being has achieved enlightenment or not. 
With this in mind, I want you to ask yourself this question: If I accepted that there will never be an end to contrast. That no matter what I improve or what desire I attain, there will always be both negative and positive, wanted and unwanted inherent with it… what would I do differently in my daily life today?
And remember, there is no difference between working your ass off to get to heaven after you die and working your ass off to reach a state of heaven while you are alive!

Why Something With a High Vibration May Make You Feel Bad

We tend to make the basic assumption that if we are around something positive or that holds a higher vibe, that we will begin to feel better. But this is not necessarily the case and today, I’m going to explain why. 
First, let me explain what I mean when I use the word vibration or “vibe”. Everything in the universe is made of energy that vibrates, and energy that vibrates imparts information. The amplitude and frequency of energy is what determines how (in what form) that energy will express itself. We call this a "vibration". It is a term you will hear often in spiritual circles. You may hear someone say that something has a “high vibration”. This means that it has some positive quality and effect that is beneficial to a person in some way. For example, we may say that rose quartz has a high vibration because it is nurturing and mood lifting, it enhances warmth and connection with others and helps people feel compassion towards one another. Or we might say that a person has a high vibration because they are so awakened or intuitive or fun or confident or open. 
We live in a universe that is governed by the law of mirroring, also often called the law of attraction. In a universe governed by the law of mirroring, things that share the same time and space must be a vibrational match in some way. Because of this, we see things like entrainment occurring. How this applies to vibration is that when two energies are in the presence of one another, they will come into resonance with each other. Usually, the less dominant frequency will change to match the more dominant frequency. And to generalize, the higher frequency is usually the more dominant frequency. Therefore, if we are in a less than loving mood and we are around rose quartz, it will cause us to come into a more loving state. 
Because of this, it is tempting to think that if we are around something that has a high vibration, it is a given that we will feel better. This is the case often. But as you might have noticed, this is also often not the case. Sometimes, being in the presence of something with a high vibration may make us feel worse. And here are the top reasons for this: 
You may feel worse around something with a high vibration because of resistance. Resistance is any oppositional force. When entrainment starts to occur with something high vibe, any part of us that may be against that positive state will kick into strong resistance. It may be confusing why any part of us would be in resistance to something positive and beneficial. But it happens all the time. Here is an example. Imagine that in your childhood, your personal power was seen as a bad thing. Any time you demonstrated personal power, it led to negative social consequences. If you spend time around someone who has a lot of personal empowerment (a higher vibration than you hold) this is likely to cause the part of you that has the negative association with (and therefore resistance to) personal power into resistance. As a result, you will feel negatively towards that person. And your body will register them as a threat. To understand more about resistance, you can watch my video titled: Urgent! Deal With Your Resistance Before You Do Anything Else!  For things with a lower frequency to entrain with things that hold a higher frequency, they need to release anything that is keeping their vibration low. Anything that is not a match to that higher vibration. For this reason, high frequency things and people are famous for causing a kind of “detox”, “purging” or a “coming up to be cleared” process to occur within lower frequency things. For example, shamanic medicines that hold a very high vibration often cause vomiting and extreme emotional releases and a purging of the subconscious mind. Or for example, let’s say that we are experiencing a safe, loving relationship. Being around that high vibrational experience may cause us to re-sensitize to and no longer normalize the fear we feel socially and it may cause all the accumulated grief about all the abusive relationships we experienced to surface. Thus, causing us to feel worse.  Being around something that holds a high vibration may make you acutely aware of what you lack or of where you aren’t. When this happens, it is common to feel bad about yourself and about where you are. Many of you have experienced this when you are feeling really terrible and you spend time with someone who is having a fabulous time in life. Suddenly, the contrast between where you are vibrationally and where they are vibrationally makes you feel even worse. It’s as if their happiness makes you feel even more miserable and sorry for yourself and feel even more like a failure. Or for example, if we visit a group of people that are higher vibration in that they are open and honest and intimate and committed to each other, it may cause us to feel worse about our own social circle. Suddenly, because we have the comparison, we start feeling even more alone and surrounded by distant, dishonest people who only have relationships of convenience. If we subconsciously slip into negatively comparing ourselves with whatever holds a higher vibration, we will feel worse about ourselves and our life.   When we are exposed to something high vibe, it naturally induces a process of healing. And healing is not always a feel-good process. When we heal something, we change a pattern that is unwanted into a pattern that is wanted, usually into some form of its opposite. For example, if we feel demeaned, to heal is to feel valued. Or if we are lonely, to heal is to achieve togetherness. But this process often entails us becoming aware of and experiencing painful things.  There is a big difference between something that is simply pain relief and something that is healing. For example, imagine that someone is suffering because of their inauthenticity. And imagine that they share the same space with someone who is authentic and who also supports their authenticity. The process of healing so as to become authentic may involve things like becoming aware of how inauthentic they are, being willing despite fear to enter into conflicts instead of avoid them, changing or even ending relationships that were not created from a place of authenticity, seeing the pain they caused others by entering into those relationships on an inauthentic foot. Leaving the familiar and creating whole new life for themselves etc. None of that feels good, but you can see that it is good for this person to go through that process. You can see that definitely it is better than if this person simply found a way to feel good, even if it meant staying inauthentic.
It may sound counterintuitive, but even though the fact that something feels good to you can be an indication that something is good for you, that doesn’t mean that anything that feels bad is bad for you. Also, something that feels good to you may very well not be good for you. There is a definite limit to knowing that something is good for you because it 'resonates' with you.
For example, it doesn’t always feel good to exercise. But exercise is good for you. Cocaine makes you feel good. But it isn’t good for you. Physical affection is good for you, but it won’t feel good to you if you have trauma around intimacy. Having your ego stroked will feel good, even if getting your ego stroked in a situation will keep you blind to something dysfunctional that you are doing, and thus keep you stuck in a detrimental illusion. 
When we are around a high vibrational thing and it causes us to feel bad, it does not mean that high vibrational thing is bad for us. It is simply an indication that we have something negative or painful that needs our attention on the road to raising our own vibration or healing or finding improvement.
Raising your frequency may cause negative side effects and may cause you to feel worse before it makes you feel better. But even though it may not always feel like sunshine, gumdrops and roses, it is good for you!

The Ticket to an Empowered Life

Jack is 47 years old. Even at 47 years old, he has never had a real career. He is still working temp jobs. Because of this, he is always struggling financially and has never been able to buy his own house. Instead, every year he has to go through the process of finding a new apartment to rent. And because the prices keep going up, but his pay checks don’t, his lifestyle keeps going down and down. And when it comes to relationships, it seems like every woman who he commits to, eventually wants a better lifestyle. More than he can currently give them. But they feel like if they want to improve their life, it will be on their shoulders alone to do so and to drag Jack along, since he has no motivation and thus, provide that lifestyle improvement for Jack as well. Because of this, his relationships always devolve into him feeling like he is not good enough.
Jack is not fighting against this reality. He has accepted it. But having accepted it, Jack has slipped into powerless about it. Jack has decided that he can’t change it. Because he has decided that this is the reality and he can’t change it, he has decided that life sucks and that it is just going to keep sucking. He doesn’t want to put any effort into trying to make it different because he can’t face the idea that he might do that and nothing will change, enhancing his pain. So, telling himself that he can’t do anything to change it, prevents him from putting what little energy he has towards something and it creating no results. But the problem with this is that he has slipped into apathy. By the way if you want to understand more about apathy, you can watch my video titled: How To Cure Apathy.
Jack is passive to his own life. He does the bare minimum to get by and he spends most of his time escaping into video games and amateur league sports. He does absolutely nothing to try to change the reality that he is struggling financially and has no career and cannot offer a woman anything other than his company. He flips the polarity dynamic on every woman who he gets into a relationship with and makes her carry and provide for him, while he does nothing except show up to his temp jobs, play video games and sports. He has accepted the negative reality of where he is. He has added the meaning “I’m screwed then and can’t do anything to change it”. And he has stopped trying to bring about what he wants.
Blaine is 47 years old. Because he went into medical debt, he is currently working temp jobs. Because of this, he is struggling financially and he is living in his parent’s basement. The woman he is with has a stable career, but is always too stressed to be happy and is carrying more weight that he is financially. Because of this, she often says she feels like she is his mother rather than his woman. She is deeply unhappy about their life together. On a subconscious level, Blaine does not feel like he can handle facing any of this reality. It would make him feel so powerless, he might become like Jack. So, Blaine refuses to see, acknowledge or accept the painful reality of his life. Instead, he focuses only on positives. He reframes anything bad or negative that happens. And he acts according to the reality that he wants to see, rather than the reality that is. He wants the reality to be that he is not working at temp jobs because he knows he’s better than that. But he acts like this IS the reality and so, he tells himself and other people that he is a crypto currency trader by profession and despite making almost no money by trading, often turns down temp jobs he is offered.
He wants the reality to be that he can afford anything, so he charges things to his credit card and lives above his means. He wants the reality to be that he has his own apartment, so he finds one and lies about his income to get it. Of course, by doing all of this, he increases his debt. He wants the reality to be that he and his girlfriend are in a wonderful relationship. So, when she complains about their life together, he decides that she has just had a hard day at work and he settles her down by rubbing her feet. Because this usually puts her in a better mood, he does not think their relationship is in trouble and is absolutely shocked when one day, she breaks up with him and moves all of her stuff out.
Blaine will not see or accept any reality that causes him to feel bad about himself or his life. And so, he makes decisions and takes actions according to what he wants to see and wants to be real, as if it is already the case. When he does this, he is so out of reality and is living in such a fantasy world that only he occupies, that not only does he seem mentally ill sometimes, he also keeps hurting himself and other people. He makes the wrong choices and does the wrong things because he is not responding to what is real.
What you saw showcased in these two examples is the human tendency to go one of two ways when it comes to unwanted elements of reality. When it comes to the topic of reality, people make the mistake of either:
Accepting an unwanted reality and then sinking into powerlessness about it, so as to let go of what they want to be the reality instead. And so as to do nothing to change it into something better.  Refusing to see the unwanted reality and instead, acting according to the reality they want to have be true.  Both of these pendulum swing strategies get people into big, big trouble. The first strategy causes a person to give up on what is wanted and decide that life is pain and slip into the illusion of powerlessness. By doing this, you are no longer able to see what CAN be done. For example, the time that Jack puts into video games could be spent on learning a skill that might make him more money or on looking for and applying to different jobs. It is obvious to everyone else in Jack’s life that he is absolutely not powerless to making good money. They are constantly frustrated by his passive, apathetic behavior. 
By using this strategy, you are in fact out of reality because you are not seeing the wanted or beneficial elements of reality that you could draw on and use in order to bring about a change. And you are not in reality relative to what you CAN do to create whatever it is that you are wanting. You are no longer an active participant in personal expansion. Expansion must then happen to you and despite you, which is a dangerous invitation. If you want to learn more about why not actively participating in expansion is a dangerous invitation, watch my video titled: Why it’s Dangerous to Stay in Your Comfort Zone. 
The second strategy causes a person to slip into a narcissistic bubble reality. When a person is in their own reality, acting as if what they want to have be true is true in the here and now, they are alone and they make the other people in their life alone too because of it. This creates parallel perceptual realities, which destroys relationships. On top of this, it is to slip into not only denial, but also a form of mental illness. A person starts to behave in a scary way because they don’t perceive anything negative, such as dangers or risks or reality. It’s guaranteed that with this strategy, the person has no actual power because when they make decisions or take actions it is not a decision or action exacted upon what is real and so it will not have the desired effect. 
Unfortunately, many modern spiritual beliefs have contributed greatly to this negative coping mechanism. Especially amongst those spiritual communities that are centered around the Law of Attraction. There is an idea floating around that to deny or not acknowledge the unwanted, so as to merely focus on what you want to have be true (as if it already is true) is how to manifest. This is not true. This is the way to become mentally ill and slip into a narcissistic parallel perceptual reality. Tools that help you manifest what you want to have be real (including visualizing things as if you already have them) must come with the willingness to also see reality and to see what is. To live an empowered life and to be able to create things in reality, you must be able to acknowledge what is (including the unwanted elements of what is) and also practice focusing on and taking action towards what you want instead.
Imagine someone came into a hospital and the reality was that they were internally bleeding, but you didn’t want that to be true, you wanted the reality to be that they are well. Now imagine that because of this, you acted as if they are well. You told yourself that their dizziness was because they drove to the hospital and just got motion sick. You told yourself that their swollen, tight abdomen was because they had gas. And you gaslit the crap out of them by saying that they are ok, sending them home with a Lolli Pop and a smile on your face. It’s easy to see that you are not mentally well. Not only that, because you were not in reality, you could do nothing to change the reality and thus were making yourself unnecessarily powerless. And not only that, you made the wrong decisions and did the wrong things and there were huge consequences for it.
If you use the strategy of pretending that what you want to have be real is real, you will make yourself unnecessarily powerless, you will make the wrong choices and take the wrong actions and there will be serious consequences to you and everyone around you. If you find yourself slipping into this second strategy, you would benefit by watching two of my videos. The first titled: Reality. And the second titled: The Most Dangerous Parallel Reality.
Both of these strategies find their roots in our early life experience. When we are young, and when we experience unwanted things, it is necessary to learn that we can do something about them, so as to have a better experience. When we see our parents doing something to actively change unwanted elements of their own lives as well as experience them acting as allies regarding changing the things that are causing us pain, we learn that reality does not imply that we are powerless to unwanted things. We learn a sense of empowerment about the things we don’t like in our life. And this empowerment gives us bravery to look at the unwanted aspects of reality and do something proactive to change them. 
When we don’t have these early experiences, we often learn that no one can do anything about the unwanted elements of reality. We have a sense of powerlessness relative to things we don’t like about our life. So, we decide to cope with this sense of powerlessness in whichever way is less painful to us specifically… We either cope with this by accepting unwanted realities and succumbing to a false sense of powerlessness about them so as to focus on something other than creating improvement. Or we cope with it by refusing to see and accept unwanted realities and living in a dangerous fantasy as if what we want to have be the reality, is already the reality. 
In this life, the ticket to an empowered life is to see and accept the reality… what is. This includes both the wanted and enjoyable elements of reality and the unwanted and painful elements of reality. One does not negate the other. And from there, to actively participate in the process of expansion by capitalizing on the wanted and enjoyable aspects, while proactively changing the unwanted elements into what we want instead. We are meant to see the reality (what is) and to actively bring about what we want to have be the reality (what we want). This causes not only expansion for ourselves, but also the people around us, human society, the world and the universe at large. 
This process of continuously sorting through the contrast of this time space reality so as to transform the unwanted into what is wanted, means that we are constantly in the process of appreciating what is, while also continuing to create improvement. We let go of the idea that the goal is to get to a place in life where there is an ended-ness; because everything is perfect and there is nothing more to improve upon. We enjoy this game of exploration and change around consistent improvement. We begin living with the attitude of the better it gets, the better it can get.

Do You Only Feel Loved When Someone Doesn’t Ask You To Change?

Most of us reach adulthood with a burning desire… To be approved of, liked and loved exactly as we are. Those of us that grew up in dysfunctional families tend to struggle with this dynamic the very most. In dysfunctional families (and remember that most families today fall somewhere on the spectrum of dysfunction) the parents exhibit a behavior or many that are detrimental to themselves and to other members of the family. But they display an unworkability when it comes to changing that behavior. This puts every other family member in the position to continue to try to get them to change that thing about themselves and face consequences for doing so, or to accept and adapt to the dysfunction by enabling it. When they accept and enable it, leaving this person exactly as they are, they receive approval and positive feedback for doing so. The parent or caregiver feels loved. As a result, they learn that the definition of loving someone is appreciating a person exactly as they are and not asking them to change anything, even if what they are doing is detrimental to themselves, to the person and to others. 
When we have to change ourselves so that someone else in our family doesn’t have to change and so that they approve of and love us, we feel bad about ourselves. We feel unlovable for who we authentically are. And we set out on a lifelong quest to be loved exactly as we are, without having to change anything… including what is dysfunctional about us. Ironically, we set out on a mission to unknowingly become the very thing that hurt us. We become inflicted with the very same wound that made our parents unworkable. And because that wound then makes us unworkable, we inflict the very same pain on the people in our lives that our parents inflicted on us as children. We damage them with our un-changeability.
Because our subconscious definition of love is to appreciate a person exactly as they are and to not ask them to change anything (even if what they are doing is detrimental to themselves, to us and to others), this is what we are looking for. We are looking to finally be able to be in the position that our parents were in with us when we were growing up… Where we have a person who demonstrates their approval and love of us by not ever disapproving of us. And by not ever asking us to change anything. We have decided that this is how to know if we are supported and loved. We want to be in a feel-good relationship the way we are, even if our behavior is not conducive to a feel-good relationship. We want our partner to make themselves compatible to us, even if they are not actually compatible to us. And we often decide that the ultimate testament of love is if someone is willing to be in pain so that we can have this experience. To understand more about this, watch my video titled: The “Suffer So I Can Feel Loved” Relationship Dynamic.
When we have this pattern, this desire gets in the way of self-development, personal expansion and making necessary changes that would make our relationships and life better. If we want to be loved exactly as we are and without changing anything about ourselves, seeing anything about ourselves in a negative light and consequently making changes to anything about ourself, seems to take us in the opposite direction from what we really want. So, we stay as we are. And by staying as we are, we become a new link in the chain of the same dysfunction that runs through our own family line. And our relationships become a repetition of the same dysfunction. This pattern is one of the hardest for people to put an end to. 
So that you can understand this pattern better, here is an example. Weston grew up in a home with a father that was passive and took the back seat to his mother. His mother was super into control and got everything her way. In her home, everything had to be the way she wanted. This included how Weston dressed, behaved, when and how his needs were met and what his interests were. Weston was in a lot of pain about this. He was hungry, but couldn’t get food because his mother decided it wasn’t time for him to eat. He wanted attention, but couldn’t get it because his mother decided she didn’t want to give it and put no energy into finding someone who could give it to him instead. He hated the preppy outfits she made him wear. They were uncomfortable and he always had to keep them clean. He longed to wear lounge clothes. He loved to spend time exploring, but his mother put him on a regimented schedule. He loved music. But his mother thought that was a useless interest and enrolled him in academic interests, where he didn’t excel. When anyone had conflicts with her, there was no win-win to be found, she would simply get rid of the person. Weston watched her do this with his older brother, who was sent away from home to a behavioral modification boys camp when his behavior displeased her. And this led to Weston becoming conflict avoidant. Weston conformed to what his mother wanted. He felt he was not loved exactly as he is. But, as a result of changing himself to suit her, he became the golden child. He demonstrated his love for her by approving of her exactly as she is and changing himself, because she was unworkable. She would not change anything. In her mind, if her children were good and loved her, they would do exactly as she says. 
Because of all of this, Weston is on a subconscious mission to find love. But not real love, his dysfunctional definition of love. He is on a mission to be loved exactly as he is and not have to change anything about himself and his behavior, even if it causes the other person pain. Recently, Weston moved in with his girlfriend Sahara. And Sahara is suffering. There are things that Weston is doing that is detrimental to himself and to her. When conflict arises, he refuses to engage and leaves the apartment. He spends all his free time listening to music and exploring places he hasn’t been to in the city instead of finding ways to improve their financial situation, leaving her to be the primary provider for the two of them. He leaves piles of things everywhere in the apartment because he hates to clean. His ill-fitting lounge clothes have holes in them and he wears them everywhere, even when it is totally inappropriate to do so. And she is pretty sure they don’t want the same things in life. Many of these things don’t only hurt Sahara. 
Many of these things are actually sabotaging Weston’s success and preventing him from getting what he wants. There are negative consequences he is experiencing as a result of them. People don’t take him seriously or see him as professional because of how he dresses. He is stuck in a crappy financial situation and in an apartment he hates. He can’t have good relationships because he doesn’t handle conflict well. He is distracted and unfocused because of the clutter everywhere and is constantly losing things. And instead of finding a compatible relationship arrangement with Sahara, he is simply keeping things as-is, which means the emotional tension in their relationship keeps rising to the point where the relationship is mostly negative now.
Sahara is being more loving to Weston and one could argue, more in alignment with his own best interests than he is by recognizing that certain things that Weston is doing are working against his best interests, and by drawing his attention to the need to change them. But Weston refuses to entertain this notion. In his mind, if she truly loved him, she would stop creating conflicts, approve of him spending time on music and exploration, stop getting upset about finances, stop getting upset about the apartment being clean (or simply clean it herself) stop caring about what he wears and start focusing on all the ways they are compatible instead of harping on the idea that they might be incompatible. 
Because Sahara gets upset with him about these things, he doesn’t feel valued or loved. He keeps insisting that if she valued and loved him, she would value and love him exactly as he is and would not ask him to change any of these things. He is being unworkable because of it. He refuses to change anything about himself. Weston has slipped into a withdrawn, surly attitude because he feels Sahara isn’t a good person because she keeps trying to change him. And he thinks that because she wants his to change, Sahara doesn’t really value and love him. Of course, this just serves to make the relationship worse.
Whenever Weston gets negative feedback about anything he does, he feels harmed, unseen, shamed and unloved. Recently, Weston attended a self-development seminar. And he hated it. When the speaker suggested that in order to get what he wants, he has to change himself, he disagreed and he felt insulted. He decided the speaker is not a good person. He thinks that the advice he got is the opposite of what he needs to do. All he was really looking for was validation. All he really wanted was advice about how to get what he wants while staying exactly as he is. All he really wanted was to be told how to get the experience of being valued and loved the exact way he is and without changing. When the speaker explained that to get different results, you have to be willing to change, he decided that the seminar wasn’t for him and simply didn’t return after lunch for the afternoon segment. Weston is thwarting his own self development. He is looking to stay the same. He is looking in the wrong places for validation and he is simply looking for people to approve of him exactly as he is and enable his dysfunction. But he is stuck in the illusion that this is progress and this is love. Weston doesn’t see things about his behavior as being dysfunctional and will not recognize them as being detrimental to himself and others, even though much of his behavior is dysfunctional and is detrimental to himself and to others. So, he feels it is self-hating and against himself to change them rather than self-loving and for himself to change them. He has become just as unworkable as his mother was. And now, Sahara is in the same position with him that he was in with his mother. 
When we fall into this pattern, the reality is that we have decided on a subconscious level that someone only loves us if they support our dysfunction. We also fail to really make a conscious choice about what things we want to change about ourselves because they are detrimental to us and others and which things we want to stand for and embrace because they are beneficial to us and others. And in turn, this makes it impossible to properly assess compatibility in our life. We can’t assess our compatibility with places, jobs, situations, things or people. To understand more about this, watch my video titled: Incompatibility, a Harsh Reality in Relationships. When it comes to life, knowing (a) what you are willing to change (and why) and (b) what you are unwilling to change (and why) is critical. You need to know where you can and where you can’t be pliable in order to create the life you genuinely want.
To love yourself is to act in alignment with your own best interests. Changing something about yourself that is detrimental to yourself can be a profoundly self-loving act. To love someone is to take them as a part of yourself. When you do this, their best interests become a part of your best interests. You cannot be ok with them being in pain for your sake. And so, you want to either (a) change the thing about you that is causing them pain or (b) recognize that you are unwilling to change what is causing them pain and thus, must acknowledge incompatibility and act accordingly, so as to not keep them and you stuck in the pain of that incompatible situation. The more compatible we are with someone, the more they will approve of us exactly as we are. But love is something entirely different. Both love and self-development imply some degree of making changes to ourselves.

The “Last Words” Letter (A Relationship Exercise)

To generalize, even though death is an inevitable part of everyone’s life, people are terrified of looking directly at the reality of death. It is a subject we want to avoid. This attitude that we have towards death is detrimental to us in many ways. One of those ways that it is detrimental is that it prevents us from seeing life clearly. What anyone who has had a near death experience or who has lost a loved one will tell you is that death changes your perspective towards life and towards all the different elements of your life; most especially the people in it.
To view life and to view relationships from the context of death is both profound and meaningful. It has the capacity to change the way we relate to life and the way we have relationships. The sad thing is that we often wait for an actual death to confront us in some way for this way of looking at things to be forced upon us. We wait until either someone is on their death bed to communicate from this perspective or we end up too late and someone in our life has already died and because of it, we were unable to communicate to them from this perspective.
Today, I am going to present to you one of the most powerful relationship exercises you can do. Here it is: You are going to pick someone in your life. You can literally pick anyone such as your friend, a co-worker, a cousin, an aunt or uncle, a grandparent, someone who really impacted you either positively or negatively in your childhood, one of your siblings, your partner or one of your parents etc. I will tell you that this practice can create particularly profound shifts when you do it with one of your parents.
From there, put yourself in the perspective of either you being about to die or them being about to die. Pick whichever option puts you in a more lovingly, open objective perspective. Either way, know that just like when someone is on their actual deathbed, this is the last time you are ever going to see them in this lifetime. It is your very last opportunity to communicate to them. And from this place, you are going to write them a letter or speak a message to them… As if these are your last words to them. Let this letter flow intuitively from the core of yourself. But in order to help you with this practice, here are some things you might consider:
Who are you writing to? What is their personality? No two people will need or appreciate the same message. Personalize your letter according to who they are and their specific personality and needs. This will allow your unique relationship with them to shine through the letter. How do you want them to feel? What is that lasting imprint you wish for them to carry with them regarding you and your relationship to them? Let this set the emotional tone for the overall letter.  What is your intention for writing this letter in the first place? Let this intention serve as the guide for how you write or speak it.   What tension between you needs to be resolved and what might you say on your end to resolve it?  What painful thing between you needs to be acknowledged? And what might you say on your side to reduce that pain between you?  What conflict needs to be put to rest or what closure needs to be created and what might you say to put it to rest or create that closure without denying any of your own needs?  What might you need to acknowledge regarding their pain relative to you or apologize for? What might you need to explain so they understand it, without justifying yourself?  Do you have any cherished memories or moments you want to remind them of?  What do you love, admire and approve of about them authentically and honesty? How would you want them to feel about themselves, you, your relationship and their life at the end of their life or yours? And what might you say to evoke that feeling within them? What might you want to thank them for? Might you want to communicate the objective story you are going to tell other people about your relationship with them in retrospect in order to give them a taste of your perspective about your connection over the course of time together?  What have they taught you or what did you learn from them?   What is it that they deeply need or want to hear from you? How might you give them what they want to hear from you in a way that is authentic and that does not hurt any aspect of you to express?  Can you see their vulnerability? How might you speak directly to and answer to that vulnerability in a safe and caring way? Is there any question you want to ask them that would bring you closer to truly and compassionately understanding them?  Is there anything you need to reassure them about regarding themselves, you or your relationship? What is left unsaid that must be said? What could you authentically say that might bring them peace and solace? Is there any way you could let them off the hook for something in a way that does not hurt you in any way? Make sure that nothing is left unsaid. And once you have written this letter, take that leap to be vulnerable by giving or sending it to them.
If you find that you are in a super angry or disapproving or negative mental and emotional place when you sit down to write this initial letter, and feel the need to confront them on their wrongdoings or make them see how much they hurt you, know that you can write several versions of this letter. There may be more than one layer to work through in order to reach the full truth of your sentiments about and to them. That being said, when someone is on their deathbed, at their most vulnerable, it tends to strip away these top layers and what someone is left with is what is deeper and what is more objective. It leaves you in a place of love. Love is not an up-beat, all positive state of affirmation. It is a deep, truthful, expansive state of closeness. This means, if you really genuinely put yourself in this perspective of having only this last chance to communicate to someone before you never see them again, this deeper more objective perspective about them and you and your relationship will surface.
I’m going to challenge you to not lie in this letter. One thing I notice when people are on their death bed is that people get emotional and want the other person to feel good and so, they lie just to make the other person feel good. They totally bulldoze parts of themselves when they do this. For example, a person may have been disowned or physically abused by their dad and say “You were a really good dad at the end of the day”. When that isn’t true. At the end of the day, they were not a good dad. However, that doesn’t mean that he was all bad. For example, this same person might say “I loved so much when you used to take us in the back of your Cadillac to the corner store to get candy.” And that is totally true and also not damaging to any part of themself to say.
The purpose of this letter is the same as it would be for you communicating a last message to someone right before they die. In general, what you are looking to do is to reduce tension, conflict and pain rather than to create it. It will surprise you how freeing this letter will be not only for them, but for you. And the profound impact and importance of communicating at this level when someone is still IN your life and alive, cannot ever be overstated.

The Underdog Effect

In English, we call someone or something the “underdog” when they are the ones with less personal power than the other party involved in a situation. Because they have less power, they are thought to be at the disadvantage, have smaller status, have smaller chance of succeeding and are perceived to be the victim in the situation.
Human beings naturally support and root for the underdog. There are many reasons for this. For example, many of us feel vulnerable in the world. Many of us feel like we are at the disadvantage and like the odds are stacked against us. This makes us identify with the underdog and internalize them. Therefore, rooting for the underdog feels like rooting for ourselves. People love unexpected triumph. We love when people win against the odds. It gives us hope for ourselves.
 Another reason is that power tends to threaten us. When someone has power, we fear that they might use that power to oppose our own best interests. We feel like they don’t need us. It also makes us feel less than them, all of which hurts our self-concept. So, we tend to want to see people with power lose that power. On the other hand, when someone does not have power, we feel both empathy and sympathy for them. We feel they need us and this enhances the sensation of there being an emotional bond between us and them. We feel morally good about ourselves for supporting them and we feel subconsciously above them. It makes us feel both right and good to support someone who is at the disadvantage. This boosts our self-concept. So, we tend to want to see people without power, gain it… just not too much of it that it then threatens us.
Another reason is that we subconsciously experience pleasure at the misfortune of others when envy is involved. We tend to envy the person who has more power, advantage, status, success and is perceived to be the victor. When we see that person lose their power, advantage, status or success, it decreases the pain we feel about what we lack and about our self-concept. We perceive the situation to be fairer, regardless of whether this is the case or not.
On top of all of this, one of the defining features of our species is care. This includes support for those of our species that are disadvantaged. A direct affront to survival of the fittest, we care for and support our weak, starting with our completely relationally dependent babies. It is not common to see the young, disabled, ill, weak or old of other species being picked off by predators, attacked by their own kind or left to die. When we hear this, we feel horrified. It’s not how we do things and it’s not what we believe is good and right to do. This species trait played a role in our species evolution. It is wired into us on a biological level.
In principle, there is nothing “wrong” with our natural affinity for the underdog. What we need to be aware of is that our natural affinity for the underdog leads to a kind of underdog effect whereby we become blind and fall prey to some pretty big shadows. And today, I’m going to list some of them for you.
First, we know that people root for the underdog. We can exploit this tendency. The fact that people root for the underdog gives us huge incentive to come across as the underdog in any situation where we want people to get behind us and support us. A person can act like the one who is at the disadvantage and is the victim, regardless of whether this is actually the case or not and others will fall for it. Any of you with siblings have probably experienced this one in action. A younger sibling acts the villain and initiates some kind of misbehavior. The older one, who is actually the victim in the situation, reacts to it. The younger one starts crying and yelling to come across like the victim to the parents in the house, because they know the parents will see them as the underdog. And they do. The parent comes in the room, immediately sides with the perceived underdog, which is the younger child, and takes action to guard the younger child and punish the older child without any attempt to assess what is actually going on. No doubt some of you have experienced the younger sibling taking a break between sobs to triumphantly stick their tongue out at the older one. This child knows they have won. And they have done so by exploiting this tendency in people to support the underdog. You may feel this kind of childhood behavior is fairly benign. But take that same behavior on into adulthood.
This behavior becomes a manipulation tactic that people use to try to stay safe socially and to try to gain the support of others. It is especially exploited when someone is trying to gain support for themselves at the same time as rally people against someone else. This is when the underdog effect becomes your biggest ally in your game of victim control. You can use the underdog effect to deceive others. You can do this to such a degree in fact that you can have all the power in a situation and you can do all kinds of terrible things to someone else in that situation, but as long as you don’t appear to others to have that power and as long as you appear to be at the disadvantage, you can deceive other people into seeing the other guy as the top dog and the bad guy. And so, people start to enable and support the person that is actually creating the problem. In layman’s terms, they unknowingly have been deceived into supporting the villain and going against the true victim in a situation.
So that you can get a clearer idea about this dynamic, I’ll give you an example. Joelle just recently moved into an intentional community. The intentional community was started by Tegan. Tegan is a healer by trade and is for lack of a better word, the matriarch of the intentional community. Joelle doesn’t like authority and thinks that everyone should be on equal ground. As a result, she immediately started getting into power struggles with Tegan. She started triangulating other community members against her, arriving to community meetings late, refusing to do the tasks that Tegan assigned her, taking every opportunity to compete with Tegan’s knowledge about healing, helping herself to Tegan’s essential oils, asserting that she had something better to do when she was invited by Tegan to socialize, and giving Tegan ultimatums regarding her needs.
One day, when Tegan was hosting a healing retreat, she was called away to take an emergency telephone call. When she came back to the group, Joelle had taken the liberty to take over the group and was answering questions and leading them through a yoga exercise. Later that night, Tegan, who was furious and at the end of her rope, confronted Joelle about her usurping behavior in front of the whole community. Joelle played the underdog card.
First, Joelle started tearing up and denied that she was in any power struggle with Tegan and in fact, asserted her deep respect for Tegan instead. In other words, she started by actively gaslighting. Then, she went on to explain how she had taken over the group as a favor to Tegan and thought she would be grateful for it because she had left them high and dry. And then she started crying about how hard it is to live in the community because she is new and doesn’t know her place yet and is always doing the wrong things by Tegan. The tactic worked. Most of the community members started feeling empathy for Joelle and started feeling like maybe Tegan was being unfairly hard on her. When she saw this new tactic working, Tegan snapped and yelled at her for pulling a victim control drama. But that only served to hand Joelle the win. The rest of the community members defended Joelle against Tegan and some of them started seeing Tegan in a different, more negative light. Joelle had succeeded in acting like the underdog to the degree that not only did she get away with everything she was doing to Tegan, she also managed to manipulate Tegan’s intentional community out from under her as well and rally them around her instead. Of course, they were all pawns in a power game that was just won by Joelle against Tegan. But they were too blinded by the underdog effect to see it. They thought they were protecting Joelle, the underdog and victim from Tegan, the top dog and villain. When the reality was the other way around. To learn more about the way that people use the dynamic of victimhood to their advantage, watch my videos titled: The Victim Control Dynamic (Escaping Control Drama in Relationships). And Anger and The false Villain Dynamic.
  The underdog effect enables us to let ourselves and other people off the hook, when we and they should not be let off the hook. And at the same time, put all the pressure and accountability on the shoulders of whomever we perceive to be the one with more power. There is a tendency for people to give others a pass when we perceive them to be at the disadvantage, weaker, have smaller status, have smaller chance of succeeding and/or when we perceive them to be the victim. We don’t hold them accountable for what they do or don’t do. We have a soft spot for perceived weakness. It is a psychological fact that the more mistakes someone makes, the more likable they are perceived to be. And the weaker someone is perceived to be, the more people tend to develop a protective affinity for them. Because of this, we feel compassion for them and relieve them of accountability in a situation. We put all the pressure and accountability on the other guy. And we enable dysfunction when we do this.
So that you see what I mean, I’ll give you an example: Miriam is married to Dirk. Dirk is a very aggressive man with a rage streak. He regularly beats his kids. Miriam is terrified of conflict and doesn’t feel capable of leaving Dirk and living out in the world alone. So, she stays and tries to make her kids behave in a way that prevents Dirk from getting angry. Most people will give Miriam a pass because of her weakness and fear and lack of character strength. But her actions had severe negative impact on her children. She enabled and acted as an accessory to their abuse for years. She was a bystander. She kept them in an unsafe environment. She actively supported and maintained dysfunction to the detriment of everyone involved.
I’m going to ask you the following questions and I want you to seriously think about them: Is someone accountable for their weakness? For their limits? Is someone accountable for their lack of personal power? For the character strength they lack? For their failures? For their mistakes? Or are these things an automatic pass?
If the answer is yes, then people will keep using them as an excuse both for what they do and for what they fail to do. We have to seriously consider this because there are VERY real consequences for these things. We can definitely have compassion for someone who hurts other people with these behaviors. But should that absolve them from their responsibility and accountability and should it absolve them from the consequences of their actions or inactions? Consider that to take responsibility for one’s own weakness and limits and mistakes is to not put oneself in a situation in the first place where that weakness or limit or mistake is going to have real consequences for oneself or others.
All too often, we fall into the trap of letting a person off the hook (who is the one that is actually accountable) because they are perceived as weaker and therefore the underdog. And with that, we fall into the trap of placing the accountability on literally any other person around him or her that is stronger, more capable and who seems to have more power.
  The underdog effect can cause us to run the risk of making the people around us and our own human society weak. If other people’s power threatens us to the degree that we want people to stay just powerless enough to not be a threat to us, we keep other people down. We keep them small. If we experience pleasure when people who are at the advantage experience misfortune, we subconsciously wish for each other to experience hardship and we slow the progression and advancement of our own species. If we enable and defend weakness, lack of character strength and failure, we are ensuring that it will not only continue, it will grow. If we fail to see other people’s power and fail to reflect it to them, we will fail to help them to step into their power. We are condemning them to powerlessness. If we see the person who lacks power as the automatic good guy, there will always be incentive to stay the victim, to stay powerless or at the very least, feign powerlessness and victimhood as a manipulative tactic. If we only identify with and internalize the underdog, we will remain disconnected from and ignorant of the aspect of ourselves that is more powerful and is at the advantage. The underdog effect can cause us to act as an oppositional force to our own expansion, the personal expansion of others and the expansion of society. It can cause us to thwart our own progress as well as the progress of others.  So when you root for the underdog, just make sure that the underdog effect doesn’t get the better of you!

Do You Base Your Relationships on Compromise or Compatibility?

In today’s world, people operate from two different paradigms in their relationships. Either they build their relationships on the foundation of compromise. Or they build their relationships on the foundation of compatibility. 
To compromise is to settle a dispute/conflict or reach agreement or alignment by way of mutual concession. Remember that to concede is to yield, give up or give away something you value. To compromise, by definition, is to accept something that is lower than is desirable. In any relationship, there will be times when for example you say: “I want to eat at a Mexican restaurant” and the other person says “I want to eat at a Chinese restaurant” and you agree to going to Chinese, because in that moment, what genuinely matters more than what you eat is that the other person feels happy or because in that moment, you’re really hungry and what you eat is not really that important to you. But these kinds of every day concessions aren’t really compromise because in that moment, relative to things like this, you are not giving up something of value and you are not accepting something that is undesirable. You will not feel pain when you do this. 
When we build our relationship on the foundation of compromise, we believe that it is loving to concede relative to the big things. Things where we are accepting lower than desired and we are giving away something of value. You will feel pain when you do this. But you will think that the pain of compromise is how you know you love them. And you will think that the pain they feel as a result of compromising is them loving you. And often, if people are particularly conflict averse, they will give in and expect others to give in like this for the sake of maintaining harmony in the relationship. 
When you build a relationship on the foundation of and around the belief in compromise, you believe that while it’s great to have compatibility, love and will power can make most relationships work. This means that when it comes to the big things (such as what other people might consider serious incompatibilities) you truly believe that if a person loves you and in order for them to be right and good, they must give in to some degree and take a little pain for the sake of the relationship and your happiness. And you expect the same thing from yourself as well. There is a lot of give and take in your relationships. You may believe in meeting other people halfway. And you genuinely believe that compromise is necessary for a healthy partnership, rather than having your own singular happiness at heart. You believe in mutual sacrifice. 
Compatibility on the other hand is when two things are able to exist or occur together in a state of harmony and without conflict. If two things are compatible, their co-existence is beneficial and ads to the wellbeing of each of them. Whereas incompatibility is when two things cannot exist or occur together without creating conflict and without being a detriment to one or to both of them. Compatibility is not about sameness. Sameness could spell compatibility or incompatibility. Compatibility is about creating the right arrangements with people and putting people in the right place in your life according to their boundaries (personal feelings, thoughts, desires, needs, behavior, truths etc) and your boundaries (personal feelings, thoughts, desires, needs, behavior, truths etc). Compromise is about agreement and alignment being reached by finding a win-win scenario for both parties, where neither must give something of value away or take pain for the other’s sake. 
When you build your relationships on the foundation of compatibility, you don’t believe in giving in when it comes to anything in a relationship that will cause you to feel resentment, frustration or pain; or that will compromise your sense of personal wellbeing. You don’t believe in mutual sacrifice. You don’t believe that balance in a relationship is about meeting half way. Instead, you believe that loving someone means making sure they are not in pain. And them loving you means making sure that you are not in pain, even if that means that you cannot be with a person in a certain relationship arrangement because of it. Therefore, you also don’t believe in having your own singular happiness at heart. But you don’t believe in sacrificing your singular happiness for the sake of the other person’s happiness either. And you believe that in order for a person to be right and good, they must be willing to look at the incompatibilities that are causing pain and be willing to find a different, more compatible arrangement for you both. You believe in symbiosis rather than give and take. 
When people build their relationships in two different paradigms and base their relationships on two different foundations, it spells disaster. The disaster of one person’s relationship paradigm being based in compromise and the other’s being based in compatibility, can be seen in conflicts in every kind of relationship. Two siblings might base their relationships in these two separate paradigms. So might two partners, two friends, two colleagues etc. And it leads to a very similar pattern every time. It leads to one person feeling like they are in a relationship with someone who only cares about themselves (because that person expects them to accommodate and sacrifice and be in pain and oppose their own best interests for their sake). And the other person feeling like they are in a relationship with someone who only cares about themselves (because they are totally unwilling to meet them halfway or concede and have to have it their way and are willing to end the relationship instead of give in a little).
For the sake of enhancing your understanding, I’m going to give you an example. Tom and Melissa had been dating for three months. They have now entered into a committed relationship. Melissa bases her relationships in compromise. Tom bases his relationships in compatibility. But neither of them knows it consciously. There is trouble in paradise as you would say. Melissa and Tom are having issues because Tom is a flirt with a very rich social life. At every opportunity, he meets up with his friends and attends social events. When he enters the room, he is the center of attention and he is smiling and laughing and chatting everyone up. He is in entertainment mode. Melissa feels she may as well not even exist. Melissa is much more introverted. She wants a partner that wants to be with her one on one. She doesn’t want Tom to look at, much less talk to any other women. She is happiest when Tom is with her at her home, with her dog and just having quiet, intimate time together. Because of this, the resentment and frustration between them is growing.
Tom sees this as a serious incompatibility. He has tried several times to suggest different arrangements so they can reach a win-win. For example, he has thought about reserving two days of the week to be with her at home one on one, which isn’t a sacrifice for him because he would like that. Any more than that however, and he would start to resent her. He has thought about getting her a e-course on how to overcome social anxiety. He has thought of every possible way to make her experience when she is socializing with his friends and networking more fun for her. He has thought about having an open relationship so that she can have an introverted man who will stay with her at home, but they can still meet each other’s needs and benefit from each other’s romantic company. But Melissa told him that this is not an option. She would simply end the relationship with him for that other man. And now, Tom is at the point where he has told Melissa that they might not be right for each other as partners at all and may need to just be friends. Tom feels like Melissa wants him to prove how much he loves her by choosing to give up what make him happy for what makes her happy. The fact that she would feel pleasure as a result of him giving up something important to him makes Tom distrust her and question whether she is a good woman or emotionally dangerous.
Melissa can hardly believe what she is hearing. She feels like she might just be waking up to the fact that she is in love with a narcissist. She sees Tom as totally inflexible. She yells at him that he is a ‘my way or the highway’ kind of person and that he will never be able to have relationships because of it. She thinks that Tom continues to show a lack of flexibility and an uncompromising nature. She does not understand why it is so hard to just meet in the middle. Her idea is that she will accept the idea of him going out half of the week if he promises not to flirt or talk to other women. And the other half of the week, he can be home one on one with her. And what makes Melissa furious is that unlike Tom, she has already made all kinds of compromises to make him happy. She left her dog at home alone on several occasions to go out to some social gathering or other with him. She made food for him a bunch of times when she didn’t feel like it, so that he would feel satisfied. She didn’t see her family on Christmas because she gave into going to his parent’s place instead. To her, this is feeling like a one-way relationship where the universe revolves around Tom and where everyone else is expected to concede, but he never will. Besides, Melissa believes that a good man does not flirt with or talk to other women or fail to pay attention to their own girlfriend at social get togethers. She firmly believes that he needs to heal out of this behavior.
Tom and Melissa are operating from two totally different relationship paradigms. Tom has no idea that Melissa is compromising in the relationship so often. He doesn’t actually expect that and he wouldn’t actually be ok with it if he knew she was doing this. In his mind, he is trusting that if she says yes to something, it is because she is genuinely happy with the decision she is making, otherwise, she would not go along with it. Melissa has no idea that Tom does not even believe in compromise. He will not give up anything that is important to him. He will not do anything that might cause him to resent her. And this is why he is being like he is being. In her mind, it is obvious that compromise is what makes a relationship work. And if she knew that he didn’t see this and therefore planned to never compromise, she would second guess their entire relationship. One thing is for certain, it is a waste of time arguing over the specifics of the conflict they are having around their social lives when the real issue is that they don’t even operate from the same relationship paradigm and therefore, are looking in two totally different directions for the solution.
Often in conflicts that have their roots in this dynamic, you will find that someone who is operating from the relationship paradigm of compromise will come across like a codependent and someone who is operating from the relationship paradigm of compatibility will come across like a narcissist, regardless of whether this is actually the reality or not.  It’s important to separate out these relational styles from these two relationship paradigms. A person could very well be either and adhere to either relationship paradigm and a person could very well be neither and still adhere to one or the other relationship paradigm.
If you are curious to learn what I think about compromise and compatibility in relationships, you might want to watch two of my videos. The first titled: Why You Should Never Make Compromises in a Relationship. And the second titled: Incompatibility, a Harsh Reality in Relationships.
If it seems like you are in any kind of relationship with a person who is operating from a different relationship paradigm, set aside the conversation about the specific conflict you are having. And instead, switch the attention to a conversation around the fact that you are operating from two different paradigms. One of you believes in compromise and the other doesn’t and so you are pulling in different directions for a solution, thereby only enhancing the feeling of unworkability on both sides. It is time to examine and question your own relationship paradigm as well as the other person’s so as to consciously arrive at a relationship paradigm you can stand for, hopefully together. It is so important to get into the same relationship paradigm with your partner. If you don’t, every argument you have with them will be fruitless because you don’t even agree upon the way to go about having a successful relationship in the first place. You will be unknowingly fighting for two different outcomes. All this being said, can you recognize which relationship paradigm you operate from?

The Human Hyphen Pattern

Over the course of our lives, we develop a sense of self. We discover what we like and don’t like. What we value. What we think and feel. What we really want. What other people think about us, etc. We form our self-concept. But sometimes this process of development is interrupted. And when this happens, we never form a strong sense of self. It is as if our core is missing. And this creates all kinds of problems in our life, most especially in our relationships.
In childhood, some people grow up in environments where the reality is to have a self that differs from others is unacceptable. It implies unsafety, rejection, disapproval, isolation, the withholding of needs, punishment etc. They adapt to this environment and cope with it by giving up any aspect of themselves that is in conflict with the person they need to feel aligned with. They suppress, deny, disown, reject and try to change these parts of themselves so as to establish confluence with that specific person… Usually the one who holds the power regarding their needs. 
To imagine confluence, think about two separate streams of water coming together to flow together as one stream. As the waters mix, you can no longer tell which stream is which stream. In this state of being, the two waters are relaxed, in accord, in harmony and are flowing in an easy-going kind of way. The opposite of conflict. Confluence is a blissful state of being. A profound togetherness. And to generalize, people desire and seek confluence. But not no matter the cost. When confluence becomes dangerous is when it becomes a coping mechanism or social strategy that a person uses, no matter the cost to themselves. They develop the pattern of feigning confluence where confluence does not actually exist, simply to avoid what they fear will be the result of conflict. They become inauthentic and give up their personal thoughts, feelings, desires, needs, preferences, values and whatever else for the sake of achieving confluence. Which is not true confluence. And it is by doing this that they slip into the Human Hyphen Pattern.
The Human Hyphen Pattern is when a person is so committed to confluence as a coping mechanism and relational style that their persona changes in accordance with whoever their primary attachment figure is. Therefore, you will see many different versions of them and not know what the truth of them actually is, separate from whomever their current primary attachment figure is. They are like a living breathing hyphen. For example, if Justin exhibits this pattern and he is with Rachel, you will not be meeting Justin. You will be meeting Rachel-Justin. And if he is with Sarah, you will be meeting Sarah-Justin. And Rachel-Justin and Sarah-Justin are VERY different men. Because each is simply a reflection of the specific woman he is with. Each is what she wants him to be and what he must be in order to be in confluence with her, even though he will fight you that each new version of him is the “real him”.  The reality is, with the Human Hyphen Pattern, the only access a person has to a sense of self is when they are alone. The minute they are with another person, especially someone they want togetherness and harmony with, their lines between ‘me’ and ‘you’ begin to blend.
So that you can understand this pattern better, I’m going to give you two examples. Brody grew up in a household with an incredibly domineering mother. She had mirrors and paintings that she had drawn of herself all over the house. She had no interest in children. In fact, the reason she had children was to secure the specific man that she wanted. Brody grew up knowing that the universe revolved around his mother. It was her way or the highway. She ignored Brody. The reality is that the only way he could ever get her attention or stay safe was if he was doing something that met her needs or enhanced her ego. As a result, he wore the clothes that she picked out for him. He behaved exactly how she wanted him to behave. He adopted her views on everything. He stopped doing anything he liked that she didn’t approve of. He validated her, even when a little voice inside said that he didn’t agree. He said yes, even when he wanted to say no. He made himself into a male version mini-me, despite considerable pain to himself. But as a result, unlike his brother who failed to find a way to please her and who committed suicide, some of his needs were met by her. It was his only chance at emotional survival. 
Subconsciously, Brody has learned that he has to choose conformity to have a relationship. And he does this so naturally, it is terrifying to watch. But to Brody, the belief that conformity is what is necessary to have a relationship is so painful, he lies to himself. Each time he ends up in a relationship with a woman and he changes like a chameleon, he tells himself and everyone else that the new version is who he really is. That he is getting more authentic to who he really is with this new woman and that anyone who can’t accept that, can’t accept the real him. But his friends have been through this with him so many times, they know it is BS. 
Brody was in a relationship with Tori. Tori was a very driven girl. She was obsessed with self-help and had big goals for herself. She was a super social go-getter with leadership qualities who loved skiing and cooking. When Brody was with Tori, he was business oriented. He wore his hair short with no facial hair and dressed in business attire. He spent time self-reflecting and figuring out his own patterns. He was a very positive and easy-going man. He was very social and spent lots of time in the kitchen and reveled in living in the snow. 
When Tori ended the relationship with Brody, he ended up in a relationship with Jocelyn. Jocelyn loved travel, leisure time and horses. She had a strong sense of right and wrong, should and shouldn’t. She believed that people should be approved of exactly as they are, not changed. She had a small group of friends, but preferred to spend most of her time one on one with him. When Brody got into a relationship with Jocelyn, he grew out his beard, gave up his business attire for outdoor clothing, cut off all his friendships to focus solely on her and her friends, started looking after her horse, despite having a severe allergy to horses, quit his business-oriented job to start his own business in the travel industry where he could take weeks off at a time to do leisure activities with Jocelyn. He started suddenly expressing strong ideas of what is right and wrong, despite having been such an easy-going person before. And he suddenly got into intense conflicts with the people he knew from his time with Tori over their belief that life is about growth and change. Suddenly, his new belief was that he should be loved and approved of exactly as he is and that personal development was both abusive and a waste of precious time on earth. He told himself that because they kept trying to tell him that this new version of him was not ok, they never really loved him and he never really belonged with them. In fact, his time with them was abusive to himself. Seeing them as the bad guys with Jocelyn and himself united against them only served to further enhance the feeling of confluence he so desired to have with her. 
Brody has paid a heavy price for that confluence. And of course Jocelyn has no idea that he is so lost in a detrimental and inauthentic relationship pattern that one day, she herself will fall victim to. Instead, she thinks she has finally found a compatible man. Brody becomes some version of whomever he is in a primary relationship with. So no one, including himself, really knows what the actual truth of Brody is.
Cindy grew up in a very large family. A family with so many siblings and with such busy parents that life was chaos. And there was no way to feel like she mattered and no way to gain a sense of intimacy with anyone. She had no reflection and so, she did not develop a strong sense of self. As a result of all of this, she was emotionally deprived. When she was seven years old, she finally met a friend and for the first time, she had someone who cared about her. This friend wanted to be close to Cindy and wanted to make Cindy just like her. This friend encouraged Cindy to get the same hair cut as her, to get into girl scouts just like her and to become obsessed with cats just like her. Cindy did so and felt a kind of heaven in being just like someone. She modeled her movements and mannerisms and speech patterns and interests and everything after her friend. She finally had someone to do this life with. She had figured out how to be able to get someone to be intimate with her and be together with her and pay attention to her. She had figured out how to matter to someone… Be just like them. 
Cindy now exhibits this pattern in her relationships with men in her adult life. Derek was a red neck from Nevada. When she was with Derek, she was a proper red neck woman who got into spin fishing, wore camo pants, a trucker hat and bleached the tips of her hair. She picked up smoking. She listened to country music and she temporarily gave her daughter over to her mother’s care. 
Then, Cindy got into a relationship with Camden. Camden was a good Mormon boy from southern Utah. When she was with Camden, suddenly she was dressing in conservative blouses and skirts. She died her hair a tasteful blonde and curled it to make herself look classier. She moved into a family-oriented neighborhood with him and didn’t just start going to church. She decided that her life revolved around relief society meetings. She no longer listened to music. She brought her daughter to live with her again and modeled her behavior after the perfect stay at home mom. Baking cookies and doing crafts and making sure to teach her daughter about morally appropriate behavior. 
Then, Cindy got into a relationship with Seth. Seth was a Harley rider from Colorado. When she was with Seth, suddenly she had died her hair black. She wore tight jeans and midriff shirts. She went from adhering to Mormon values and judging everyone who didn’t, to being a self-proclaimed beer connoisseur. She quit her job and started working for Seth at his garage brewery. She used to be a volleyball player. But her volleyball team learned they could no longer depend on her showing up because she was busy riding motorcycles most nights and, on the weekends, instead. And her daughter found herself alone in the house with her new step sister (Seth’s daughter) while their parents were out of the road.
Cindy’s family has distanced themselves from Cindy. She doesn’t have any long-term friends. Her entire social group gets replaced every time she is in a new relationship. And her family has learned that there is nothing you can count on with Cindy. It is better to just watch the charade from a distance. Cindy loves to tell herself that every man she gets into a relationship with is a Narcissist because she always ends up feeling like she can’t “be herself” with them. But the reality is that they aren’t actually Narcissistic. And all a man has to do to be considered a Narcissist by Cindy, is to have a solid identity. Because Cindy immediately conforms to any man she is with so as to feel a sense of confluence. But then later blames them for having lost herself, when they never pressured her into changing in the first place. They simply reveled in how compatible to them she initially appeared to be.
The reason that the Human Hyphen Pattern is so difficult to break free from is because of this: When you develop a codependent relational style, which the Human Hyphen Pattern is part of, you genuinely want that sense of closeness and harmony and confluence with someone. That is authentic. You want it so badly that you are willing to be inauthentic to get it. Therefore, when you are inauthentic, but get what you authentically want as a result of being inauthentic, your internal guidance system will tell you that you are in alignment with your authenticity, even if you are lying. To understand more about Codependency, watch my video titled: The Truth about Narcissism and Codependency.
Relational styles are so second nature to us, they are difficult to change. They become a kind of default for us and we slip into them without really realizing it on a conscious level. But realize it we must. Because staying stuck in the Human Hyphen Pattern will prevent us from every truly being authentic and honest with ourselves and others. It will make finding a truly compatible partner impossible. It will make it impossible to create a life that is right for us. And it will make it so that we will leave a trail of tears in our wake. 
Consider that if you are giving something up or are suppressing, rejecting, denying or disowning something in order to feel that sensation of confluence with someone, you may very well be slipping into the Human Hyphen Pattern. You may be setting yourself and other people up for pain. The confluence that you feel, is not true confluence. It is illusion. And it is deception. And your relationships will only progress if you learn how to have yourself and have other people too.

Do You Make Love the Pre-Requisite for Getting What You Want?

When we are children, we are completely relationally dependent. What I mean by this is that we are dependent on other people to get what we need and what we want. We are born into a social system where we learn that our best chance of getting other people to meet our needs and fulfill our wants is to create incentive for them to do so. We learn that we must please them. If the people in our lives are displeased with us, if they don’t like us and don’t love us, they don’t act as allies to our wellbeing. They either ignore us or act as adversaries to our wellbeing. Because of this, we adopt the subconscious belief very early on in our lives that being approved of, liked and loved by others is the pre-requisite for getting what we need and want. 
The process of socialization trains us that the most important thing is to be perceived as good. If we are perceived as good, we will be approved of. People will like us and as a result, we will get what we want for it. For example, being a good girl or good boy = getting that cookie you want. I like you = I will invest in your success by giving you the support you need to succeed at that goal you have.
By the time most of us reach adulthood, the concept of being liked and the concept of getting what we want is so linked in our heads that we spend a lot of our energy in our adult life trying to be liked by other people, specifically so that we can get what we want. But a key step we must take in order to succeed, is to separate these concepts from one another.
So that you can understand what I mean, I will give you an example.
Jake is an aerospace engineer. He is so interested in aviation that his entire existence revolves around it. Many years ago, Jake was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome. He struggles to understand emotional situations and tends to say the wrong thing whenever someone is upset. People don’t find him empathetic. He is also very hypersensitive and controlling about his environment and this uptight behavior means they can’t relax around him. Jake is not what many people would consider to be a generally likable person. 
Since Jake was 12 years old, he has always had his heart set at getting a job as a propulsion engineer at NASA. At his current company, he works as team lead on a large team with other aerospace and mechanical engineers. Recently a team conflict has arisen around a new design concept. Jake acts no different than usual during this conflict. He starts acting robotic and spaces off instead of listens. He becomes argumentative and inflexible and starts throwing facts in people’s faces. In response, his entire team organizes to escalate the conflict and complain about Jake to Jake’s boss. They have a team meeting with his boss behind Jake’s back. When Jake is called in to talk with his boss about the way that the team feels about him, Jake experiences a complete existential doom. He feels like his future is suddenly bleak and he has a meltdown. He storms out of the building and rushes home and ends up curled up under the table in his kitchen wanting to die. 
What is happening with Jake is that the conflict made him feel like he will never be liked by people. And if he will never be liked by people, he will not be recommended to NASA and the people at NASA will never see enough value in him to say yes to having him on their team. He has adopted this belief from his life experience. Jake doesn’t realize that likability is not the pre-requisite for him being such a good aerospace engineer that he will be recommended and valued enough to achieve the position he has his sights set on. His desire to be liked must be separated from his desire to be a propulsion engineer at NASA. Separating them will make it so he can see all the ways for him to get what he wants, rather than sinking into the powerlessness of thinking that what he wants is at the mercy of other people linking him; which is something he does not excel at. If Jake realized that he could get what he wanted even if people didn’t like him, he would feel immediate, deep relief. 
Think about what you want in your life, especially think about that thing you want desperately. And I want you to ask yourself: Am I making being approved of, liked or loved the pre-requisite for getting that thing? What if being approved of, liked or loved is NOT the prerequisite for getting that thing? 
Being approved of, liked or loved and getting what you want are two separate things. There is the potential of course that what you want is to be approved of or to be liked or to be loved. And if this is the case, you can go directly for it, as a separate desire from the other things you want in your life. You can pursue it as if that is the end goal in and of itself. But so often, when you ask the question: Why do I want to be approved of or liked or loved, it is because you think that being approved of, liked or loved will get you something else that you want. You will find that you are making it the pre-requisite for that thing you want. So often, wanting to be approved of, liked and loved is a “so that”. To understand more about the problem with “so that” thinking, watch my video titled: If You Want To Be Happy, Don’t Do This!
You don’t need to worry that dropping the need to be approved of, liked or loved, as your venue for getting what you want, will make you a total asshole that no longer cares about being nice to others. That only happens if don’t care about other people and are only being nice to others so that you can get what you want, which is a totally separate topic. You also don’t need to worry that separating the concept of love from the concept of getting what you want will make you an unloving person. The practice of love is the practice of taking another person as a part of yourself. It has nothing to do with getting what you want. Love is also a whole separate topic.
There is an incredible freedom and empowerment to be found in questioning whether being approved of, liked or loved is the pre-requisite for getting what you want or not. Considering that it isn’t. If you knew that it wasn’t, how might you go about getting what you want instead? As a result of doing this, your options for getting what you want open up and multiply significantly. Trying to make other people approve of, like and love you ceases to be your only venue for the actualization of what you want and at the same time, it ceases to become the barrier preventing you from what you want. It starts looking like simply a bonus.

Teal Swan's Process

Hi there,
Let me take a moment to explain my process to you. In other words, my method for helping people to improve their life experience. It is my hope that by understanding my process, you can decide whether or not it is something that you are ready for and whether it is right for you.
Let’s say that someone wants to improve some aspect of themselves or their life experience. The first thing we do is to identify what the problem is. We identify what is not working for them. Usually this will be a thing that is creating pain or suffering in their life. Sometimes, it can be hard for people to identify and admit to what the problem is, even when it is causing them pain. Some people may even be in denial about it and attend my seminars and seek help despite saying things like “My life is fine. I have a great life.” When this is the case, I will help someone to admit to what the problem is and help them to come out of denial about it. And depending on the person, this may involve some confrontation. The first part of the process requires a person getting to the point where they are able to own what their problem is and look at it directly.
Next, we will identify the cause of whatever is not working for them. The cause of the problem. There is always an origin to our problems. There is a “when this started and why it started”. You can’t hope to solve a problem unless you understand when and how and why it started. I approach a person with the attitude of: It isn’t what is wrong with you, it is what happened to you. Usually, this process of identifying the origin of the problem involves a person looking deep into what happened to them over the course of their individual past histories and seeing clearly how these key experiences led to them making specific decisions and adopting specific beliefs and behaviors and taking specific actions. All of which may be contributing to their problem today. During this part of the process, we find the root of the symptoms that are manifesting in a person’s current life.
The root cause of the problems we face in our adult life almost always occur before we exit the time period of our childhood where we are operating from a state of felt perception and enter a phase where we begin thinking about the world. This transition happens for most children around age eight. So, this means that my process involves looking at your childhood experiences, and primary relationships, including the ones that are negative and traumatic. If you are afraid about the danger of false or implanted memory, I want you to be aware that you do not need to worry about false memory and you do not need to worry about implanted memory when you are engaging with my process. Memory can be extremely reliable, a veritable recording of the past. Memory can also be distorted, contaminated, constructed and destructed. Human memory is both more capable and more incapable than we would like to make it out to be.  It is incredibly complex. This is why, when it comes to my process, I encourage people to stop thinking in terms of true of false all together and instead, think in terms of VALID. Regardless of whether or not a memory is a perfect replica of what happened, it is valid. It means the mind is trying to communicate to us through actual memory or through symbolic memory about what is unhealed within us and what needs to be resolved either way. Memories don’t come up for no reason. Relative to your memories, it is no one else’s place to decide what is true and what is false. That is for you, yourself to come to terms with. But figuring out what your being feels is unresolved and bringing resolution to it is essential, otherwise, we remain stuck in the past, we operate from determinism rather than from our free will and our past will simply repeat itself in our adult lives until we resolve it.
Your past experiences are formative. They shape the structure of your personality, how you engage in relationships, how you behave in different situations and how you perceive and experience the world. When we are in pain because something is not working for us, we have to be willing to identify it and change it. To resolve the traumas and the thoughts, words and actions that we developed as a result of them that are keeping us stuck. And doing that changes everything.
All this being said, there is something important to understand. We live in a universe that is multidimensional. People are not straightforward. They are multifaceted. The process of identifying the root cause of a problem, so as to figure out how to fix it in a universe that is multi-dimensional and with a person who is multifaceted means that the problem someone is dealing with may be multilayered. It may be something we need to address in a specific dimension. There may be several elements feeding into one problem. And these elements may need to be addressed on many different levels as well.
For this reason, I use an unlimited amount of awarenesses, tools and methods and approaches to identify and gain awareness of the root of a problem. I also use an unlimited amount of awarenesses, tools and methods and approaches to solve that problem. This is because there is no “one size fits all” equation to a problem. What there is, is trends. So that you can understand what I mean, one person may have a problem that is the result of trans-generational trauma. Another person might have a problem that originated when they decided to adopt a specific protector personality in response to a trauma in their childhood. Another person might have a physical ailment that is manifesting because of a specific painful relationship pattern that is currently occurring in their life. Another person might be suffering because they simply lack a certain bit of information that would change the way they experienced life. If I approached each of these issues with the exact same tools and in the exact same way, it would lead to poor results. Some need to be addressed on a mental level. Some need to be addressed on an emotional level. Some need to be addressed on a physical level. Some problems need to be addressed on a spiritual level. The reality is that we are spiritual beings living a temporary, human experience. There may be problems that need to be addressed on a purely mental or physical level… Problems that don’t have anything to do with spirituality at face value. But there is no way to live an integrated life when we deny this entire dimension of our lives. And sometimes, the key to someone’s life improvement and healing can only be found on this level of reality.
To give you a very small taste of some of these tools and methods that I may choose to use to help someone either gain awareness of the problem or solve a problem, I may for example decide that they should use The Completion Process or any number of meditation techniques or shadow work exercises or somatic experiencing or parts work or breathwork or display work or The Connection Process or Trauma Release Exercises or core belief work or channeling or integration processes or work with subconscious patterns or stream of consciousness exercises or presence work or shamanic ceremony or therapeutic art or journeywork or discussion etc. etc. I offer many of these awareness’s, tools and methods to the public totally free through my free YouTube videos and also through my books, e-courses, products and workshops.
Once a person identifies what the problem is as well as the root cause, we identify what they want instead. This is like identifying point A and point B. It may sound hard to believe, but a lot of people struggle because they know what they don’t want. But they don’t know what it is that they do want. That is like having a map, but with no destination point, only a starting point. When people decide what it is that they want, there is a kind of gap between where they are now and where they want to be. I help people close that gap. And closing this gap implies identifying what it is that is preventing them from doing so. In my line of work, we call this ‘resistance’. I work with a person to help them to resolve their resistance to any part of this process of closing that gap between the current unwanted condition and their wanted state. At first, this may strike you as odd. When would anyone have resistance to what they want? The answer is: Any time you have not already achieved it. If a person has not already achieved something they want, there are oppositional forces at play. To give you just one tiny example, a person may say that they want a romantic relationship more than anything. But they may have a belief that they will lose themselves in a relationship and they may never really leave their house to socialize. In this case, the person’s belief and actions are in resistance to what they want. That resistance must be resolved and released for this person to actually be in a romantic relationship. During this part of the process, we look at the resistance to the change and resolve it, which is necessary to get from where they are to what they want. Doing this closes the gap between where they are and where they prefer to be via thoughts, words, and actions.
My process puts people in a point of conscious choice. They can choose to not change and to instead continue on as is, keeping their point of view, patterns, past dynamics, and the way they do things. Or they can choose to make a change and actually make those changes. Sometimes these changes simply happen spontaneously as a result of any step in this process. Sometimes, these changes require more conscious discipline.
We can use our awareness to make different decisions, change our beliefs, see the world in a different way, alter our behavior, and do different things. I don’t want people to engage in this process with the attitude that they must change themselves because something is bad or wrong about them. I want them to engage in this process of changing themselves and making changes to their life because doing so is self-loving. If something is causing you pain, it can be profoundly self-loving to change it. When done from this intention, changing things within yourself and in your life is something you do FOR yourself rather than against yourself. What all this means is that signing up to my process implies that you want to make a change to yourself and to your life and that you are willing to do so. If a person does not want to become aware of what their problem is and does not want to change themselves or make changes to their life, this work that I do is not the right choice for them to make. This process is only right for people who are willing to change themselves and who will own their choice to change themselves as being their choice. It requires you to take responsibility for what you want to change and what you are willing to change.
By making these changes, a person will then be standing in the improved state, having made different choices, seen a new perspective and taken different actions, thus changing themselves and their life for the better.
I want to mention that if at any point in this process, emotions come up, they are treated as valid, important and as messengers of personal truth.
Now that you have a better idea of my process, let me add a few things.
My process is a very deep healing process. It is not a process to simply make you feel good. Ultimately, we all want to feel good. But if you value feeling good above everything else, you will struggle with my process. The reason is, sometimes to get to a place of improvement, you have to face and do some pretty hard things. For example, imagine that a two people married each other out of obligation and their current life is miserable because of their relationship. A person may be able to come in and teach them a tapping technique to sedate their reactivity to one another or a therapist may be able to make them feel a little better by having them practice four positives for every negative. These are pain relieving techniques, a bit like Novocain. But there is a difference between pain relief and actual healing. For actual healing to occur, they would have to first look at the truth that they married each other out of obligation and that the marriage is what is making them unhappy. That is both scary and painful. Then, they would have to go through the process of deciding what to do about their relationship. Assuming that during this process they decided to evolve their relationship to something else rather than a marriage, there are several elements of their life that would have to change and that they would have to face. Things like dividing up assets, dealing with other people’s opinions and projections, stepping out into a different life etc. so that one day, they can officially say that they love their life so much more than they did before. Sometimes my process feels really good to do. But sometimes it is a hard and really uncomfortable journey to genuine improvement.
Another thing is, most people are smart enough to be able to change the things they see are not working for them. When people can’t seem to get improvement, it is because there is something that they don’t see and don’t know. There is something that is subconscious. My process requires you to venture into the realm of the subconscious. Deep into what you don’t know that you don’t know. Because of this, you will be challenged to consider things that you do not resonate with. For something to ‘resonate’ with you, it must be something that you are already somewhat conscious of. For example, imagine that a woman has deeply suppressed anger. Everyone else may be able to see that anger. But if I tell her that she is angry. She is likely to look at me and say “that just doesn’t resonate with me. I’m not an angry person.” She will feel like she is holding on to her sense of autonomy and personal truth by asserting that she is not angry. But by doing so, she doesn’t realize that she is forfeiting the opportunity to heal and get what she wants. It will feel scary, but to begin to explore anger when she gets this reflection from me, is to gain self-awareness and to come more into a place of consciousness and therefore free will and choice. It is for her to have the chance to actually heal.
My process is hard because it can challenge and change the narrative of yourself and your life. It can cause your worldview to change. It requires facing reality. It requires you to see things about yourself and your relationships and your life that may cause you to feel shame. The truth is not often easy to swallow or face. It causes you to see all the ways your current life has been built on inauthenticity. It implies changing yourself and your life, which is something that people naturally have a resistance to.
The reality is that everyone would benefit by this work. But that does not mean that everyone wants it. In fact, if you are not really wanting this kind of process I have described, engaging in it can feel traumatizing to you. If you are one of these people, who does not really want this kind of process, you can keep it on your list of options and try out other options instead.
All that being said, given that the process of genuine healing is different than pain relief, and is therefore sometimes painful before it is good, you may be asking why it is worth it. It is worth it because it will free you. It will make it so you are not stuck anymore. It will give you tons of awareness and knowledge, which will put you back on track and you can carry that awareness with you for the rest of your life. It will restore you to a state of congruence and wholeness. It will relieve you of the heavy weight of your past traumas. It will cause you to make changes so that your life is actually one you want to live, rather than one you need to develop coping skills to deal with. It will fill your life with meaning and cause you to live a life that is both real and in alignment with your values. It will line you up with the kinds of relationships you have always wanted to have in your life. It will cause you to create a life that is authentic to you. It will get you what you truly want in life and so much more.

A Major Misunderstanding People Have About The Law of Attraction

As soon as people learn about the Law of Mirroring (what many call the Law of Attraction) they begin asking the question: How am I a match to this? They begin to recognize that their own personal vibratory energy field and consciousness brings in certain people, places, things and experiences that vibrate at the same frequency. Essentially, your external life experience is a reflection of something within you. For example, imagine that as a child, you were abandoned and that abandonment is not healed within your consciousness. That means you are still a vibrational match to abandonment later in your life. Or for example, imagine that you are someone who does not consider other people’s best interests, only your own. You will be a vibrational match to other living beings that do not consider your best interests, only their own.
You will also see it happen that when someone experiences something unfavorable, a person who knows about the Law of Mirroring will automatically ask them “how were you a match to this?” Of course, when you do this to someone else, it is unattuned and also has a connotation that as if the pain of the experience isn’t bad enough, on top of it, they somehow brought it on themselves and is therefore their fault. But, the tendency for people to ask this question has revealed that many people have a huge misunderstanding about the Law of Mirroring (also called the Law of Attraction).
With this idea that you must be a match to something in order to experience it, comes the idea that the more conscious you become, the more control you have over your reflection and therefore, the less unwanted things you experience. Essentially, people seem to think that the day will come when a person doesn’t have any negative experiences and if they do, it suggests that there is something un-healed in them or wrong with them or that they did something to bring it on. There is also an idea that if you are conscious enough and control and heal and purify your vibration enough, you will no longer be a match to negative experiences, only positive ones. As if the contrast of life somehow no longer applies to you. And this is not true. 
Contrast is the breeding ground for expansion. With no contrast there is no expansion. And everything in life has contrast. What this means is, everything has an upside and a downside. Everything comes with wanted and unwanted elements. This does not change no matter how conscious you become.
At face value, the Law of Mirroring is simple. It’s just the principle of reflection at work. It is an exemplary construct for self-awareness and therefore awareness in general. However, people over simplify the Law of Mirroring by thinking that it is only one thing that is reflecting. For example, they think the only thing that is reflecting is what they, themselves are or do. When this is the case, when they say “how are you a match to this” they are implying that you are or you do the exact same thing as the other person does in whatever scenario you are in and are therefore ‘getting a taste of your own medicine’. Or for example, they think that the only thing that is reflecting is childhood trauma that is still active vibrationally speaking. When this is the case, when they say “how are you a match to this” they are implying that you have an unhealed childhood trauma that is un-healed and that is reflecting yet again in your adult life. Or for example, they think that the only thing that is reflecting is what they think and believe. When this is the case, when they say “how are you a match to this” they are implying that you have some core belief or way of thinking that is reflecting as an experience. 
Any of these things could be the case. In fact, all of them could be the case. So many other things could be reflecting or said another way, could make you a match to what you are experiencing. To give you a short list, some of the things that could be reflecting both positive and negative as a specific experience are: Your beliefs, what you are currently thinking, your resistance, your desires, your feelings, the reality of the choices you made, unresolved traumas, positive memories, ancestral patterns, personal truths, lies you tell yourself and others, things you are avoiding, pre-birth intentions etc. It may be of interest to know that universal orchestration and assistance is a match to you by virtue of your desires being reflected. But the reason that your life experience is so complex and varied is because so many things are being reflected at once. 
The intention for those who have projected into a time space reality based on the Law of Mirroring is that they use it to do a 1-2 step. The idea is that you look at and fully perceive these reflections and become more and more aware by doing so. And then with that awareness, decide what is consciously wanted and consciously create that. When this happens, the reflection changes. The problem is that you have a camp now of people who only use the Law of Mirroring construct to become more and more aware, but never use it to consciously create what they want and deprive themselves of happiness by doing so. And on the other side, a camp of people who ignore the reflection, depriving themselves of awareness and instead, only using it to create what they want to see.
And all that being said, you need to understand that having accepted that there will always be contrast that comes with anything, choices will make you a match to certain contrast whether those choices are conscious choices or not. And sometimes, the only way to ensure that you will not experience a certain contrast is to make a different choice all together. For example, making the decision to participate in life on planet earth, you are going to experience gravity. Or for example, making the choice to be a surfer means you are going to get cold and wet. Or for example, making the choice to be in the public eye means that you will experience projection, be critiqued and be judged. Or for example, making the choice to be a parent means you are going to experience the pressure of the wellbeing of another life depending on you.
I’m not saying that if you choose to be a surfer that you just need to accept that you will be cold and wet and leave it at that. In fact, expansion is so often about experiencing the specific unwanted thing that comes with a specific choice and working to alleviate that unwanted element. Meeting with the contrast that comes with a specific choice in this way creates improvement. 
 For example, this is why surfers have wet suits now. But a surfer should not get wet and cold and ask “why am I a match to this” as if it is expected that they could, if their vibration was high enough, still surf, but not get wet and cold. If this person decides they do not want to be wet or cold at all, it isn’t going to work to try to work on thoughts or beliefs or feelings or traumas or whatever so as to be able to surf and not get wet or cold. They must make the choice to no longer be a surfer. To understand more about this, watch my video titled: Why You Should Consciously Choose Consequences.
It is important to understand what so many people do not understand about the Law of Mirroring (also called the Law of Attraction) … Choices make you a match to certain things. And so, even though it would benefit you to consider any and all things that may make you a match to a specific person, place, thing or experience, recognize what contrast you are experiencing simply because you made a choice that lined you up with it. When this is the case, often the only way to not have that experience is to make a different choice entirely.
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