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Teal Swan Articles


Tired of All The Drama?

Drama is a word that originally meant, “to act”. This is why the word made its debut in the world of performance art or theatre. As it relates to emotional life, drama is a state, situation, or series of events involving intense conflict. Put these two things together and you have the definition of a person who is dramatic. A person who is dramatic is a person who acts as if they are in a state of intense conflict. There is a perception that a person who is dramatic or who is a drama queen, is either over-reacting or is acting for the sake of attention, much like a performer on stage. A drama queen acts as if things are much worse than you think they actually are. Because of this, there is stigma associated with drama. You will often hear people say “I’m done with all the drama” or “he or she is addicted to drama” or “he or she is a drama queen.” So, lets get this out of the way right off the bat… When it applies to the human emotional experience, there is no such thing as drama. And when you make the judgment that someone is creating drama or is a drama queen or is being dramatic, you minimize and shame them for their feelings, which I assure you are very real.
No one overreacts. There has never been a person on earth that has ever overreacted. People react exactly in accordance with the reality that they alone perceiving. And our perspective and realities are not the same. For example, let’s pretend that you are married and that you have the tendency of forgetting to wear your wedding ring. Lets say you left it on the counter after you got out of the shower and forgot to put it back on. Lets pretend that your spouse gets really upset about it and spends the next twenty minutes straight vacillating between crying and yelling at you about it. You may look at your spouse and think, “this person is really dramatic”. After all, you still love them and it is just a ring. All you did was forget to put it back on. Your perspective is that your spouse is either acting for the sake of attention or is overreacting and thinking the situation is worse than it actually is. But lets jump into your spouse’s perspective for a minute. Let’s pretend that your spouse is attached to wedding rings as a visual symbol of love. When you forget your wedding ring, their reality looks like this: My partner has forgotten me or doesn’t love me. This can be compounded if negative memories are involved. Let’s pretend that your spouse was married once before and one day they came home to an empty house with their x spouse’s wedding band sitting on the counter top after they left for good. They now associate a wedding ring left on the counter with being left. So the only reason they seem dramatic is because you do not recognize that right at this moment, you are living in two different realities. You are living in a reality where you forgot to put on a piece of jewelry because you took a shower. They are living in a reality where you don’t love them anymore and are going to leave them. Does their reaction seem so dramatic anymore? No… it seems perfectly called for. You’d most likely react the same exact way if you thought you were unloved and going to be left by your spouse. When we think someone is being dramatic, we have a habit of telling them to be reasonable or to take a reality check. But to ask someone to be reasonable or “look at reality” is to ask them to conform their perspective to your perspective. It is true that sometimes offering them your perspective will help them to feel better. But it doesn’t mean that your perspective or your grasp on reality is correct. When it comes to perspective, truth is subjective.
When someone is acting as if a situation is worse than you think it actually is, that means the situation they are imagining is worse than the situation that you are imagining. Another way of saying this is, the meaning they have added to a situation is more painful than the meaning you have added to the situation. Everyone acts perfectly in accordance with the reality that they are perceiving. In all actuality, a person who is being "dramatic, is currently interracting with a reflection of past trauma that they have experienced and are now projecting onto the current situation. Once you realize that, you will no longer have the resistance you have to the ways that other people act. You will stop minimizing and invalidating their feelings. You will stop shaming them for feeling the way they feel, it will no longer seem like people are overreacting and you wont take their behavior so personally.
People who say “I don’t want anymore drama in my life” usually mean they are sick of the dramatic people in their life or they are sick of the conflict that they have with other people in their life. But drama isn’t about other people, it’s about ourselves. If I experience conflict with other people, I have conflict within myself. I am at war with me. If you are surrounded by drama, you will not be able to take an action step to cut all the drama out of your life because you are the one attracting it. If you cut dramatic people out of your life, more dramatic people will fill their place. What’s more than that, you’re failing to see that you have a way of thinking that attracts conflict into your life. If you are “done with all the drama” or find that you continually end up surrounded in drama and surrounded by dramatic people, here are some questions to ask yourself… Am I a chronic worrier? Do I tend to go to the worst-case scenario? Do I secretly love dramatic situations and therefore want it because I usually feel numb and drama causes me feel something? Do I secretly love dramatic people because being near them helps me to feel more sane, stable and rational? Do I have the tendency to become bored, so I attract drama to entertain myself? Did I grow up around emotionally unstable people and experience conflict as love? If this is the case, has it caused me to expect it in others and only recognizing love when there is conflict? Is there an internal conflict in me, which causes me to feel emotionally unstable, that I am unwilling to admit to or look at and so it keeps mirroring itself through my relationships? Am I unwilling to validate and admit to my own feelings, so not only do they have to mirror themselves through other people, but I treat others like I treat myself by invalidating their emotions?
We need to release our resistance to drama and find a way to approve of it if we are to reduce the amount of drama that we have in our lives. Drama is not a bad thing. It is contrast. Those who have the most drama in their lives have the most contrast and therefore expansion in their lives. No one deserves to have their feelings invalidated by being told that they are being dramatic. Most likely if you invalidate other people’s feelings by telling them that they are being dramatic, you have learned over the course of your life to invalidate your own feelings. You impose this expectation on others as a result of it. Even though you wish you didn’t feel how you really feel, it is time to admit to how you truly feel and not be ashamed of how you really feel. Feeling deep levels of shame for feeling the way you feel is the real reason that you want to deny and invalidate the way you feel. It is also what is causing you to invalidate how other people feel by making the judgment that they are dramatic. If you have a resistance to drama, it is crucial to remind yourself that no one overreacts, including you. You always act in perfect accordance with the reality that you are perceiving.

Be Open

You came to this life as an extension and expression of source consciousness in the physical dimension. Because of this, it could easily be said that you are a creation or an art piece of God’s. But as an extension of god, you are god. So, you are both the creator and the created. And neither creator nor creation is meant to be suppressed. When you live in a state of openness, you are allowing the art piece of you, to be painted across this world. You are not restricting yourself. You are also not restricting Source itself. Because of this, it is by far the more “in alignment” way to be. And it can easily be said that walking the spiritual path, is walking the path of complete openness. When a child is born, the child has no thoughts of suppressing itself. The child has no secrets from the world. The child does not seclude itself or exclude people from its heart. The child is honest. The child is like this because it is the most natural way to be. The child follows it’s emotional guidance system up until the point where it is taught not to, and when you follow your emotional guidance system, what you find is that the state of constriction is painful and therefore, it is not natural. What you find is that the state of openness feels emotionally good and therefore, it is our natural state. We can think of constriction as the opposite of openness. But a whole range of things fall under the category of constriction. We are constricted when we keep secrets. We are constricted when we “tone ourselves down” in order to be accepted by others. We are constricted when we do things we do not want to do. We are constricted when we close our minds and are no longer open to new ideas and new possibilities of truth. We are constricted when we are not honest. We are constricted when we do not share. We are constricted when we isolate ourselves, we are constricted when we see love in terms of finite quantity and so we reserve it for only some people and not others. We are constricted when we do not allow ourselves to admit to and go after our needs and our wants. We are constricted when we do not express our emotions. We are constricted when we try to fit ourselves into a life dictated by society, instead of carving out a life to fit ourselves. These are just a few examples of thousands of examples of constriction. To live in a state of constriction, is to not let the light of your being shine through your life. A person cannot live like that for long. In fact, living in any way that is constrictive, gives rise to illness quickly. First, your emotions will suffer. Your life will cease to be enjoyable. Then, your body will suffer. The part of the body that perhaps suffers the most from constriction is the heart and lungs. Many of the heart and breathing problems that we experience, are ultimately the result of restricting the self. But constriction can also give rise to a whole host of other ailments such as, stomach disorders, acne, allergies, eating disorders, arthritis, baldness, blood pressure problems, bowel problems, yeast infections, varicose veins, cancers and tumors, speech problems, prostate problems, ovarian problems, and joint problems to name a few.
At some point in our lives, we begin to think that there are consequences for being ourselves and that there are consequences for being open. We begin to fear exposure. We start to feel like victims and the only power we feel we possess, is the power called “self containment”. We feel powerless to just about everything in our lives except for our own choice to hide or expose ourselves. We chose to hide ourselves instead of expose ourselves and sometimes we hide ourselves from ourselves. Doing this allows us to exercise our own sense of free will and it helps us to feel like we are not powerless victims. But it is a decision that will kill us in the end. You came to this earth with the intention of becoming the full expression of your true self, unrestricted. You came here specifically to expose all of yourself. To contain yourself and not expose yourself is to defy and deny the purpose for your life. And so, we must learn to exercise our free will by choosing to expose ourselves and be open instead. When we keep secrets, we feel powerful instead of powerless. But to be secretive is to be exclusionary in a universe that is more than all-inclusive; it is a universe that is ONE. Your secrets do not actually belong to you in a universe that is all one. Your life is everyone’s life. Your stories are everyone’s stories. Your pain is everyone’s pain; your joy is everyone’s joy. To be exclusive, is to go against the flow of this universe that we live in. When we are not open, and honest and do not share, it makes us feel safe instead of unsafe. People think they are safe when they are invisible. But to live your life at the mercy of fear is no kind of life. It is a half-life. We may find that we fear what others will think of us or we may fear that what we tell others will be used against us. But if you were comfortable with being yourself fully, you would not care what they think about you. It would not be possible to be embarrassed if you had not first been indoctrinated with the idea that there is a good way to be and a bad way to be. People, who fear exposing themselves, without exception, were raised in environments where there was a heavy atmosphere of shame. It would be impossible to be embarrassed if you had not first become ashamed of yourself. And a person only becomes ashamed of himself or herself if someone gives them the idea that they should be. As our spiritual practice progresses, we become more aware that anything other people could do to us as a result of us being open is not as bad as the pain and consequence of constriction we impose on ourselves.
There is an old Chinese poem that explains that only a person, who resists the arrow, can be pierced by the arrow. But if one becomes like water, in a state of total openness and non-resistance, the arrow cannot injure them. It would be absorbed into the expanse of them. To live in a state of constriction, especially when we live a secretive life that is closed to others, is to resist the arrow and thus, to become a match to being pierced by it. If we are completely open, we give all of our ammunition away, and by doing so, it cannot be used on us. We become too expansive for other people to make a dent in us.
Some people feel as if being open and sharing themselves with the world completely, is a tasteless form of public exhibitionism and deeper than that, it is a form of narcissism. This is a profoundly out of alignment point of view from source perspective seeing as how, you came to this planet in the first place to uniquely express yourself fully. The only way we can achieve self-awareness, is if we are open with ourselves and if we open ourselves to the world.
What’s more than that, our only way to learn from one another is to express ourselves. People who hold this belief, were raised in environments where the only socially acceptable way of being was conformity to a social ideal. Social etiquette often calls for extreme measures of self-constriction. But we need to understand that if we have an idea of how someone should behave, we are letting our standards be dictated by someone who came before us. Someone who had power over others and who decided that if others behaved in a certain way, it would make them feel happier. It is a form of social control that we have bought into and that we now reinforce. We need to ask ourselves, who decided what was tasteful and what was tasteless? And why? Why is public exhibitionism not ok, especially in a universe where we came into physical life specifically to be the unrestricted expression of our true selves? Why should we act in a certain way? And who decides what that certain acceptable way to act is?
The idea that sharing oneself completely is a form of narcissism is especially sad. You came into this life as one person, and that is you. In physical life, you are restricted to that one perspective. And the only relationship that is guaranteed for the rest of your life is your relationship with yourself. You will be with you until your dying day. This means, you are the love of your life. Most of us just don’t know it yet. The idea that it is virtuous to forget yourself and that it is selfish to care about yourself and to think highly enough of yourself enough to be driven to show yourself off to others, is an idea that is not backed by source itself. It is an idea that was imposed on us by other people who believed in the virtue of selflessness and who rejected us for who we were. These people believed in humility. A kind of humility called lethal humility. They spent a good deal of time trying to make us believe that to be selfish was to be bad and that to be bad was to not deserve love. So our only way to get love was to deny ourselves and restrict ourselves and to become constricted.
The bottom line is, to live a life that is in alignment; that enables us to stay emotionally and physically healthy and to love ourselves, openness is the order of the day. We have a choice at all moments of the day; the choice is to be open or to be closed. This is why one of the most beneficial exercises you can do is to ask yourself throughout the day “how am I being closed right now? How am I constricting myself or letting myself be constricted?” and make the necessary changes in favor of openness based on the answer you receive. A state of openness is the real state of freedom. Everything we do is a creative expression of our inner selves. To be constricted in any way, is to prevent the energy of our being from flowing through our bodies and into our lives. If we are committed to the spiritual path, we must commit ourselves to the state of openness.

A Message For The Bleeding Hearts

When we look at something across the world that causes suffering or when we look at something in someone else’s life that causes them to suffer, we feel powerless. Being empathetic, we want desperately to do something to improve the situation. But we don’t know how. This is even more true when the suffering is causes by a large conflict, such as a war. We get to a point where we feel utterly powerless to all the suffering in the world. But what are we going to honestly do? Are we going to get on a plane, fly to the country where the war is taking place, get off the plane, walk right into these killing zones and try to talk terrorists or soldiers into stopping the bloodshed? Some of us might be inspired to do that, but for most of us, we know the answer to that question is no. As a result, we are paralyzed to improve anything. We begin to feel if the world is forsaken.
The most crucial thing for a bleeding heart to understand is that we will never feel good about the world we live in, or about ourselves until we stop addressing suffering in terms of specific, isolated incidents. We will only reduce suffering if we treat suffering on this planet as a whole. We can only make an impact on suffering if we feel empowered instead of powerless. We can only make an impact if we believe we can make an impact. If you want to believe you can make an impact; and what’s more, if you want to start actually making an impact, look at suffering only as a whole instead of in parts. Instead of focusing on that one war that you feel like you can’t do anything about, focus suffering in and of itself or at least on collective human suffering. Look at the big picture of suffering (which is something we can have a direct, tangible impact on) instead of focusing on isolated incidents that cause suffering (which we often feel removed from to the degree that we feel we cannot have a direct tangible effect on them). We, bleeding hearts of the world, need to take a vow to reduce collective suffering by adding to collective wellbeing every day in the ways that we CAN add to collective wellbeing. How do we reduce suffering by adding to wellbeing? There are an unlimited number of ways. But here are some examples: Eat a plant based diet, open the door for a stranger, smile more, pick up litter, help someone reach a goal, compliment someone, give someone a gift, give someone a hug, spend quality time with someone, adopt a homeless pet, inspire others, quit killing the bugs in your house and set them free outside instead, stop using pesticides, encourage someone, donate money, and look for and create beauty in the world. There is an enormous difference between focusing on and resisting the problems and focusing on and going in the direction of a solution. You will know you are focusing on the solution when you feel emotionally empowered. You will know you are focusing on the problem if you feel emotionally in pain. When you look at suffering as a whole, you will soon realize that your suffering is a part of that collective suffering. It will then become apparent that the most important thing we could do to reduce suffering in the world is to reduce our own suffering as individuals. You are contributing to world suffering when you suffer as a result of focusing on the suffering of others. Because of this, it can easily be said that the single most important thing you will ever do for world suffering, is to do whatever it takes to enable yourself to be happy.

Narcissism

Narcissism finds its roots in Greek mythology. Narcissus was a man who fell in love with his own image when it was reflected in a pool of water. In today’s terms, narcissism means to derive gratification from vanity or egotistical admiration of one’s own attributes. It is seen as a form of self-defeating pride. But I, for one completely disagree with this view of narcissism. There is nothing innately wrong with a Narcissus. Adoring one’s own reflection, deriving gratification from admiring oneself is in fact healthy. It is much healthier than being critical of oneself or striving to be self less (which is actually not possible). But our culture, which has been heavily influenced for thousands of years by biblical Christianity, recognizes self-love as vanity and ultimately as pride, which is one of the original seven sins. And so, sadly, narcissus has become the poster child not only for self-love, but also for pride. As a result, we confuse self-love with selfishness, when they are drastically different things.
The most important thing when it comes to understanding narcissism is to first separate self-love from selfishness in our minds. Most people think that narcissism is an extreme form of self-love. It is not. In fact, narcissism has nothing to do with self-love. It has to do with someone who perceives an extreme lack of self-sustaining resources, like love.
Self-love is defined as deep devotion or affection for yourself. You committed to your own identity upon coming into this life. In the end, the only person who will always be there for you is you. So you should be your number one priority. Selfishness is defined as concern only for ones own welfare, benefit and interests regardless of the impact on others. Selfishness is not a natural state. It only occurs when a person is focused on and convinced of the lack in their life. We often confuse self-love and selfishness. But there is a big difference between the two. Selfishness, is created when a person who does not know how to love themselves and meet their own needs, feels that internal deprivation and then spends their lives trying to fill in that hole externally. It is very uncomfortable to spend time around a selfish individual because it will constantly feel as if that person is taking and taking from you. They do not know how to get or create what they want without taking it from someone else. They do not know how to love themselves, so their life depends on getting you to give them those things. If you don’t, they are at a loss of what to do, they feel powerless and they get angry because they are scared. But when we take a step back, compassion will show us that they come from a space of internal starvation. Expecting them not to jump at the opportunity to take what they are starving for is like expecting a starving child to not steal food. People who are considered selfish such as the narcissist and people who are considered self less such as those who self sacrifice, are both coming from the same mentality of lack. That is why they seem to always find each other; they are a perfect vibrational match. They see the energy in the world; especially love, as a finite resource that can be used up. They do not recognize it for the eternal stream of energy that is infinite and always flowing. The self less person feels as if they must surrender love and other resources because of the belief that giving it to themselves means that they are depriving someone else of that love and those resources. As if there is only so much to go around. The selfish person also thinks there is only so much to go around, but they feel no deep connection or affinity with other people and so, they think they must take love and other resources from them; otherwise, they will not have enough to survive. When you are completely in alignment, there is no way for anyone to take enough of your energy that you would feel a deficiency because your own source stream, is an infinite stream.
Honestly, narcissists are not likely to identify themselves as narcissists or seek healing. The reason is, to recognize the problem in themselves and to seek help, they have to remember the deeply repressed trauma within them and re experience the pain of their early lives. The two most crucial steps for a narcissist to take is:
changing their thoughts about the hostility of the world and themselves, so they can develop the capacity for intimacy. This enables them to have a connection with and relate to others others deeply enough that they begin to care about the wellbeing of others as well.
And Developing an abundance mindset about every resource in life, from love to money, so they do not feel the need to take resources from others. Even though there are always exceptions in this world, narcissists are created in a very specific way. The narcissist was a child who was unable to conform to the fantasy that one parent or another held for the child’s personality or behavior. They could not figure out how to please the adult. As a result, the child was treated as if they were willful and difficult. They were “the problem child”. The parent personalized the child’s behavior, developed resistance to the child and punished the child for it in covert or overt ways. It is very likely that this child was called selfish and ungrateful growing up. The primary caregiver resented the child on a deep level. As a result, the adult saw the child as a threat on a subconscious level. The environment between the child and this primary attachment figure was therefore a hostile relationship on an emotional level and perhaps even on a physical level. As a result, this child cannot attach to his or her primary attachment figure. They do not attach to adults because they don’t trust adults. They develop a selfish and hostile worldview because they feel unloved. They believe that the world is the same way as their relationship with their parent is; that the world is without warmth, acceptance and love. They close down emotionally. They believe that the world is unsafe and that everyone is out for their own. The lose hope for being lovable. They feel completely unworthy and embark on a mission to feel good about themselves. Shame, distrust, rage and neediness accumulate over the child’s life into adulthood. In an unloving world, where they do not deserve love, they cannot get love and they cannot get their needs met freely from others. They have to manipulate people to get what they need. This is what creates the foundation of narcissistic personality disorder. A lot of people who seek fame, seek it because they grew up in environments like the one I have just described and their lives have become nothing but a perpetual search for self worth. And the real reason that so many people in Hollywood can’t make relationships work long term is because this is their life story when it comes to love. Narcissism is not a disorder, it is an adaptation. Narcissistic parents (whom are in denial about their own narcissistic tendencies) breed either narcissistic children or powerlessly co dependent, self less people. Compassion is necessary when interacting with narcissists. Narcissists hold some of the most painful beliefs and therefore live some of the most painful lives you can find on this earth. People often think narcissists have a high level of self-esteem. They do not. In fact, their life is a perpetual search for self worth and self-view gratification because they are very insecure. But what should we do if we have attracted a narcissistic person into our lives? If we attract narcissistic people into our lives, it is time to look at our own personalities and past traumas.
Many people who attract narcissistic people into their lives, just like the narcissist, had self-centered parents or caregivers growing up. They felt unloved by their parents because they grew up feeling like their parents were constantly trying to take from them instead of give to them. Narcissistic parents tend to treat their children like extensions of themselves; as a result they use their children as a self-gratification tool. Their children are used to achieve something for themselves. Pageant moms are a very good example of this. Their children do not feel seen and valued for who they really are. As a result, this becomes a trauma. The mind and heart desires to heal trauma and so, when this child grows up, they will find themselves re-creating the relationship with their parents either with friends, bosses or significant others. They do this in order to try to solve the original trauma. If they can get someone like mommy or daddy (who is just as selfish) to love them, then in a way, they can heal from their past because they conquered that trauma. They can feel like mommy or daddy loves them. If they can’t get someone like mommy or daddy to love them, then it means they really are unlovable and that their parents were right about them.
We attract people into our lives that are on the same emotional level that we are. This is why narcissists and selfless people are such a perfect vibrational match. That is good news though. It means the more we heal, the more we attract healthy people that are capable of reciprocal love into our lives. Now you are probably wondering how to tell if you have attracted a narcissist into your life. In order to determine if you are dealing with a narcissist, ask yourself these questions:
Is there reciprocity in the relationship? Or is one person always the giver and the other the taker? Are you able to be yourself in the relationship? Do you feel like you have to play down your talents to make them feel less threatened? Or does this friend celebrate you and allow you to shine in your own right? Is there a sharing of vulnerability on both sides, meaning that you can both discuss your real feelings with each other? Do you trust this person with your feelings or do you find yourself on guard? Have they ever used your feelings against you? Can your friend give you empathy and understanding, or do they give you sympathy which makes you feel less than? Does this friend bring out the best in you? Do you feel good about yourself in the presence of this person? Do you get to be your real self both in good times and bad times? When issues come up that need to be discussed, is this friend accountable for their own behavior? Are they capable of self-awareness and self-evaluation? Are you allowed to have healthy boundaries with this person? When setting boundaries, does it cause problems between you? Do you feel like setting boundaries would mean losing them? Or are your needs and wants understood and easily worked through between you? Do you care about each other for who you are as people, rather than what you do in your accomplishments? Does the friend exploit you for his or her own ends, or value what you bring to the relationship? If you find that you have the tendency to attract narcissists into your life, it is time to learn healthy boundaries. The most important thing to understand about boundaries, is that you can very easily develop healthy boundaries by honoring what you feel. To learn more about boundaries, look up my video on YouTube called “Personal Boundaries vs. Oneness, (how to develop healthy boundaries)”. You’re not going to be able to cause a narcissist to heal. They need to desire healing on their own, for themselves first. So all we can do is focus on healing ourselves. But beware, when you begin to honor your own boundaries, you will see much less of the narcissist. True narcissists have become energy vampires out of necessity. If you do not let them feed off of your energy, they will leave to find another person to feed off of out of necessity because they do not yet know how to generate energy within themselves. You do not want to be fed off of by an energy vampire, so let them go and let their place in your life be filled by people who have the capacity for love and intimacy and reciprocation. If you are dealing with a narcissist who has recognized their problem and has initiated their own healing, the best thing you can do for them, is to help them change their worldview. Changing their beliefs about love and, their own self worth and relationships is crucial. Unconditional love does have the capacity to rehabilitate narcissism, but we need to be honest with ourselves about whether it is self-loving for us to practice unconditional love with a narcissist right now, or whether it is self-loving to set our boundaries by instead surrounding ourselves with people who can reciprocally love us. If you are a person who attracts narcissists, it is crucial that you figure out your own needs and wants and begin to honor them. It is also crucial that you examine your own outdated beliefs about selfishness and self-sacrifice. Learn to have realistic expectations of a narcissist. Think of them like a starving child. Asking a starving child to share food is an unrealistic expectation. But this is what we are doing when we are expecting reciprocation for a narcissist. If you adjust your expectations of them and get your needs met elsewhere, it will be easier to let them be how they are and not take their behaviors so personally. Remember that you cannot love a narcissist enough to love them out of their narcissism. Do not expect to be able to please this person. Their belief is that there is never enough for them. This means, no matter how much you give them, they are still stuck in scarcity and are unlikely to wake up to the abundance of love they have as a result of you.
The other crucial thing is that we recognize what the narcissist is mirroring in us. To do this, assess the emotions you feel relative to them. Do you feel worthless, invisible, used or exhausted? If so, we need to get into an attitude of pre-manifestation by understanding that this person is nothing more than a mirror for those feelings, which were already inside us. Those feelings were what attracted this experience with this person into our lives in the first place. Where did those feelings really begin? We need to make it about ourselves instead of about the narcissist and realize that if we find improvement in those areas, they will not reflect into our life experience. We will stop attracting narcissistic people to mirror the issues within us that need to be healed.

Disabilities and Spirituality

Genetic coding is seen as the “cause” for many disabilities. That is no different that saying that light comes from light bulbs. We know that the story of light began way before the light bulb. Genetic abnormality is a physical symptom that is caused by the focus or by the intention and yes, even on occasion by the resistance that is held in thoughts and focus of consciousness of the non-physical being creating a specific body. A great many times, a being that incarnates into a disability, has chosen to activate that disability within genetics or within their body or brain specifically because of the special and different perspective that choice offers to them. Each disability offers a very specific kind of contrast; therefore each disability offers a very specific kind of expansion. The lessons learned from that space, are quite unique. For example, a person may choose prior to even incarnating, to incarnate with cerebral palsy. This decision gives rise to all kinds of contrast, things like low self esteem, feeling isolated and cut off from their peers, being unable to fit in, being unable to control their motor movements, or being dependent on other people. This contrast enables them to learn interdependence. It allows them to learn the freedom of consciousness separate from the body. It allows them to discover their true self, and the value of nonconformity. If someone develops a disability after they were already here in the physical environment, it means they gave themself the opportunity to learn from the contrast of loss. Losing an ability that you did in fact have once is it’s own kind of contrast. If you have lost an ability that you once had, such as the ability to walk, you will feel the limitation even more than if you were born without an ability, and in that experience, you desire the opposite of limitation (like freedom) and thus, if you keep following the thoughts and actions that feel good, you will inevitably discover and experience real freedom.
The thing that causes pain relative to disabilities is not the fact that people with disabilities have limitations. Everyone has limitations and everyone has different abilities. Those limitations cause only a certain amount of contrast. What causes people with disabilities and people who interact with disabled people real pain and suffering, is the fact that their specific limitation is seen as “Inappropriate”. The focus placed upon it, is that something is or has gone wrong. Comparing your physical experience with other beings on this planet is what causes the majority of pain in the lives of people with disabilities. It causes a gap between themselves and their desires. That is what causes them to perceive a disability in the first place. Think of it this way, the fact that most of us humans cannot fly, does not cause us a lot of pain. We don’t even think about it most of the time. But if we were to meet a person who could fly, we would suddenly begin to feel disabled and that disability would cause us to feel negative emotion. We are comparing ourselves to how we think we should be. And when we fall short of how we think we should be, we suffer.
Can disabilities be improved? Yes. But it will never happen while you are resisting and trying to change or improve the disability. If this life experience has caused you to desire to live without the disability and if you can line up with being a joyful person with the “disability”, if you can line up with gratitude for the disability, you will have released enough resistance that you will see an improvement in the experience of the disability. This alignment is ultimately what causes blind men to see and paralyzed men to walk. But do not make a test out of lining up with the disability instead of resisting the disability specifically for the sake of seeing if you can improve the physical condition. That is resistance towards the disability and thus, it is counterproductive and will cause no improvement whatsoever.
For many of us who do not have what society calls a disability, we feel very sorry for people with disabilities. When we see someone living a life experience that we don’t want to live, we often get confused about why anyone would ever chose that experience. When we feel that hit of sympathy, it is an indication that we are out of alignment. We are recognizing their limitation. We are feeding energy to the limitation. If you want to see a disability through the eyes of truth, you must look for the value of the choice they made (even if they don’t know it was a choice). You must look for the person’s abilities instead of disabilities. You must focus on their capabilities, often-unique capabilities that would not be possible without the experience of the “disability”. Sometimes you will see someone with a disability defend and argue for their limitations and for their suffering. Some even develop a sense of entitlement because they believe no one on earth is suffering like they are suffering. They sink into victim consciousness. The world feels like the enemy to them. It is important that we have compassion for this reaction to incarnating with a disability. Why do people argue for their limitations? It is because they feel condemned, less than or powerless and they are looking for some kind of relief. They are looking to find relief by giving themselves some kind of permission from others to be where they are in a world that says that where they are is wrong. If you want to be happy and you also have a disability, you have to begin to try to find happiness with what is now, and what is now, is the disability. This is the only way to come into alignment with your inner being enough to allow yourself to access the knowledge about why you chose the experience of the disability in the first place. When it comes to disabilities, you will always feel emotionally bad when you are focused on what you cannot have or cannot do. When you focus on lack, you will suffer. When you focus instead on your capabilities and the special gifts that have arisen out of the experience (especially capabilities that you would not have if you did not have the disability), you will feel positive emotion. The bottom line is, when it comes to living with a disability or living with someone else who has a disability, we need to practice looking for what has gone right instead of what has gone wrong.

Want to Be Happy? Give Up on Happiness!

Happiness has become the new enlightenment. It has become the new heaven. An unattainable goal, a finish line that we keep chasing. When spiritual teachers (including myself) emphasize the importance of happiness and god forbid say that the purpose of life is happiness, the automatic assumption is that if you aren’t happy, you are doing something wrong. That only adds to the unhappiness. There is a kind of shame that arises within us when we are unhappy. This is especially painful when we identify with being unhappy. Some of us don’t have any idea what happiness really is, because we have never felt it. We feel the very worst about ourselves because we can’t seem to “get life right and be happy like other people can”. We begin to feel like we are karmically destined to suffer. This issue of attaching to happiness is just another branch off of the tree I like to call “trying to get life right”. We believe that if we are happy, we are getting our life right and if we are unhappy, we are getting our life wrong. We are holding onto the painful thought that we should be happy, even when we are not. This reaction to being unhappy only makes us unhappier. A lot of times, when we think we should be happy and we aren’t, we develop great resistance to our own negative emotions. We become resistant to suffering and to unhappiness. When this is the case, the desire for happiness doesn’t feel good. Instead, it feels desperate because we want something we don’t think we can have. We want happiness, but we don’t think we can have it. So we are focused on suffering and on unhappiness. Whatever we resist persists because by resisting it, we are feeding it with our energy, and we are feeding it with our focus. So what is the best thing we can do? The answer is… Give up on happiness. I know the idea of giving up on happiness may sound very odd coming from me because I have dedicated my life to teaching people how to find happiness. But many contradictory teachings are in fact quite complimentary. This is one of them. If you give up on happiness, you are releasing resistance to suffering and/or unhappiness.
Imagine that you lived your life in a continually flowing gale force wind. When you are resisting something, it is as if you are turned face first into the air current. It is hard to breathe, it’s hard to move because you are pushing against a strong air current. It is exhausting. When you stop resisting something, you allow the gale force wind to blow you wherever it wants to take you. Now imagine that this gale force wind has one prerogative, and that prerogative is to take you to what you have always wanted. Now do you see the benefit of releasing your resistance and going with the wind? The thing is, the universe is this gale force wind! Have you ever heard of a person who wanted a job promotion for years. They wanted it desperately, until it got so painful to keep desperately wanting that promotion that they gave up on it and started looking for another job, only to get a phone call hours or days later that they got the promotion? This is not the universe playing a cruel, ironic joke. What happened was, in the giving up of their desire, they did not get rid of the desire all together. After all, you can’t un-want what you want, but they did release resistance to what they didn’t want and thus, unconsciously allowed themselves to go with the wind and flow in the direction of what they did want, which was the promotion. The universe already knows you want to be happy. That is the only thing you really ever wanted. Everything else, such as that promotion, that boyfriend or girlfriend, that house, or that car, is just a means to that end, which is happiness. Not only does the universe know that you want happiness, the universe is pushing you, like a gale force wind you towards it. It is arranging all necessary conditions for your happiness. The only way the universe can achieve more expansion through your perspective is if you manage to go in the direction of and experience your own desires. The universe will facilitate your happiness every step of the way. So what happens if you let go of your resistance to being unhappy? What happens if you let yourself go with the wind? You will allow yourself to flow in the direction of what you want, which is happiness. The beliefs that perpetuate unhappiness, such as the belief that we are karmic ally destined to suffer, turn us against the air current of the universe and thus in the opposite direction of what we want. There are many beliefs that cause us to suffer, but sometimes it is the desperate quest for happiness that causes us to resist happiness and suffer the very most. When we become desperate for something, we feel that deep sense of need arise within us. When we feel that deep sense of need arise within us, it means that our desire is coming from an acute awareness of the lack of something in our life. We cannot be focused upon the lack of happiness and feel happy at the same time. Sometimes our awareness of our unhappiness and desperate desire for happiness is so strong that the path of least resistance is to release our attachment to happiness all together.
When happiness ceases to be your goal, where you are cannot be wrong or lacking in any way because you cannot compare your now to your imagined future happiness. You cannot feel bad because you aren’t there yet when there isn’t anywhere in particular to get to. You cannot cause yourself to not want happiness because you cannot cause yourself to not want something that you want. But you can shift your focus so you are not focusing towards the now as if the now is unwanted. The best way to let go of the destination we call happiness, is to fall in love with what is. Fall in love with the now.
The only reason that any being suffers is because they are currently believing a thought that contradicts what is. The “should” thoughts are the best example of this. If I am thinking “I should be happy” and I’m not, I’m believing a thought that contradicts what is. I am in resistance to myself in my current state. Our stress in life is caused by arguing with what is. We can use should to our advantage by embracing the idea that what happened should have happened and was supposed to happen. Embrace the idea that nothing can go wrong, that everything that happens to us is actually happening for us. The reality is, no one wants to lose their job or have an argument with a loved one or to get in an accident. But these things happen. None of us maintains our vibration at a level where nothing ever happens to cause us to feel negative emotion. And so it isn’t helpful to mentally argue with the things that happen by thinking “that shouldn’t have happened”. Or “I should be happy right now even though this is happening to me”. It is much better to begin switching your focus to embracing what is right here and now. Besides, if none of us maintains our vibration at a level where nothing ever happens to cause us to feel negative emotion, perhaps that means no one is meant to maintain their vibration at a level where nothing ever happens to cause us to feel negative emotion. Focus at what is, with the intention of looking for what is right about what is. We have to begin to look for positives within every “unwanted” thing that is currently occurring. Not only does this cause us to feel better, it increases our vibration and causes us to release resistance to what is occurring. When we release resistance to what is occurring, we often find that we are no longer a match to what is occurring, so it ceases to be our experience. One day, I was on my way to a date that I had been looking forward to for days and my car broke down. At first I was very stressed and unhappy because I was believing the thought “my car shouldn’t break down, this shouldn’t be happening right now.” Two strangers pushed the car to the side of the road after about thirty attempts to re-start the engine. I called a tow service and sat there waiting for them in a downward spiral, feeling as if the universe was picking on me. I wanted to feel better, so I opened my positive aspects journal and wrote, “the car broke down” at the top of the page. I made myself write a list of positive aspects about the car breaking down. I tried to look for proof that the car breaking down was right instead of wrong.
Here are some examples of what I wrote that day: I broke down right next to a pull off on the side of the road. The model of car I am driving is simple to fix. The electricity in the car still works so I’m listening to good music. There are tons of people willing to help in the city. This is an opportunity to practice being flexible. I’m happy that I am focusing positively instead of negatively right now. I have no way of knowing that the date would be enjoyable or in alignment with my highest good. The leaves blowing around on the street are artistically beautiful. Etc. Somewhere in the middle of the exercise, I felt my mood lift. I felt relief. I did not have the resistance that I had to being broken down and guess what happened because I had released that resistance? The car miraculously started as if it had no problem in the first place. We can take this one step further when we have developed resistance to being unhappy because we desperately want happiness so badly. By looking for positives about being unhappy, we find approval for unhappiness. We start to look at being unhappy as if something has gone right instead of wrong. How is it right for me to be unhappy? I will give you some examples:
I suffered a big disappointment; anyone in my position would be feeling this way, or worse. Being unhappy causes me to know strongly what I don’t want and thus strongly what I do want. Strong desires = big expansion. It gives me clarity on my preferences. I am facilitating universal expansion by allowing the universe to know through my eyes, what it is not. If we only experience happiness, we don’t know what happiness is. Experiencing unhappiness leads us to self-exploration and self-discovery and introspection. It facilitates self-awareness. Unhappiness causes us to question the meaning of life itself. Being unhappy helps me to relate to other people that are unhappy. It can bring people together so there is an opportunity for collective healing. It causes me to have to figure out how to get happy. As a result, I can teach other People how to move in the direction of happiness. Being unhappy makes for some really poignant art. Unhappiness is very grounding and it puts into perspective what really matters. Being unhappy makes you so uncomfortable that it forces you to have to move forward and get un-stuck one way or another.
Another thing we can do to let go of happiness so as to find happiness is to set a more attainable goal than happiness, which is on the way to happiness. Happiness is your birthright and it is attainable, but most of us don’t believe that and so happiness feels unattainable. When we feel like happiness is unattainable, we have to set a more believable goal for ourselves. It is up to you to decide what desire feels attainable for you. One example of a more attainable desire is the desire to have three moments of contentment per day. Another example of a more attainable desire is the desire to feel a sense of fulfillment at least one time each day. You will find that it will be much easier to facilitate this goal, because you believe it is reachable.
Another way of letting go of happiness is to realize that you see happiness as a goal. Because happiness is a goal to you, happiness is like a receding finish line or horizon line that you will never cross. The closer you move to what you think happiness is, the further it recedes off into the distance. When happiness is about attaining your desires, and your desires will never cease expanding, you will never truly achieve happiness. Sometimes realizing that you will never achieve the goal of happiness helps you to stop chasing it in the distance and find contentment with where you are. It doesn’t make you lazy or passive or apathetic, it just helps you to be able to enjoy the process of life instead of obsessively chase the promise of future happiness. When you are feeling stuck in negative emotion, you do not have access to purely positive states like happiness. Happiness seems so far away and unreachable, that all focusing on happiness does, is to remind you of how happy you aren’t. This is why it is good idea to begin to live your life according to the feeling of relief instead of happiness. No matter where you are vibrationally and emotionally, you always have access to the feeling of relief. Relief is the byproduct of release. Release causes relief. When you are feeling guilty, thinking something that causes you to express anger will cause you to release your attachment to guilt and thus you will feel a sensation of relief in the body. Any release of a lower vibration and movement into a higher vibration will feel emotionally like relief. So chase relief instead. Perhaps the best way to do this is to become aware of the only choice that exists for you in the present moment; better or worse. At all moments of the day, you have one option, better or worse. Does the thought I’m thinking feel better or worse? Do the words I’m speaking feel better or worse? Does the action I’m taking feel better or worse? Begin to live your life thought-by-thought, word-by-word and action-by-action according to what feels better. Choosing what feels better, will feel like relief where as choosing what feels worse, will feel like stress. By doing this, you are following your emotional guidance system and by following relief, you are using the feeling of relief to steer you in the direction of your happiness. Thoughts are what cause us to feel unhappy, but a thought is powerless and painless until we believe it. Have mercy for your thoughts. Meet them with understanding. They are not out to get you; they are not hell bent on hurting you. If you can stop believing the thoughts you think, by withholding your commitment to whether they are true or not, they will have no power over the way you feel. You are not your suffering, you are not your story, and you are not even your identity.
Nothing has gone wrong if you are suffering. You cannot make suffering wrong without making learning and expansion wrong too. Our attachment to happiness and our striving towards happiness makes us resist unhappiness and thus, perpetuate unhappiness in our lives. Happiness will not be possible for us until we realize that happiness is not something that can be created or achieved, it is an ever present essence which must instead be allowed.

Strike "Deserve" From Your Vocabulary

When it comes to manifestation, or the achievement of our desires, nothing stands in our way quite like the concept of deserving. We feel as if we must deserve to have our desires manifest. We feel as if we must deserve to have our needs met and our wants met. That is a problem when very few people, if any actually feel deserving.
The word deserving originated in the 1200s from the Latin word dēservīre, which meant to devote oneself to the service of. The word then evolved to mean: To merit, be qualified for, be worthy of or have claim to something (such as a reward or punishment or a desire etc.) because of actions, qualities or situation. Herein lies the problem. The very concept of deserve implies that one must first serve, qualify or earn to receive.
Deserving is a concept, which did not originate from source consciousness; it is an idea that originated from human consciousness. It originated from “out of alignment” authority figures. We gain this concept from our primary caregivers. Love is our very first and last desire. It is after all, the desire, which keeps us alive as babies. If someone doesn’t love us enough to care for us, we will starve to death. When we act in ways that are deemed “bad”, love is withheld from us. We are punished or sent to our rooms. When we act in ways that are deemed “good”, love is given to us. We are rewarded with cuddles or kisses or gifts or praise. From the very early months of our lives, we begin to notice that love must be earned and that it is earned by being good. Being good in essence, qualifies me for love. It is not long after this that we learn that love isn’t the only thing that works this way, in fact all things that we want work this way. We must be good in order to deserve presents from Santa Claus. We must behave in order to deserve a cookie. We must do chores to deserve allowance. We must work to deserve money. We must be philanthropic to deserve good things to happen to us etc. But it gets worse, when I think I deserve something, I see myself as entitled to that thing. But in society, entitlement is seen as a bad thing. An entitled person is seen as selfish, ungrateful, un-thoughtful and therefore “bad”. So we believe that we must deserve something in order to get it. But that if we think we deserve something, we are entitled and therefore bad, and therefore don’t deserve it. Talk about a lose-lose belief. Our entire society is built upon the concept of qualifying for our desires. We must deserve in order to receive. This is because the social order of the family and the social order of this human society is based on the concept of punishment and reward. What’s more than that, it is based upon the concept of earning.
The minute we think we must earn what we desire, it puts us in a subservient position relative to what we are trying to get our desires from. We were subservient to our parents when we were trying to earn the cookie from them. We were subservient to our boss when we were trying to earn money from the company. We were subservient to the government when we were trying to earn our freedom and avoid prison by following rules. This list goes on and on. But now, when it comes to manifestation, we think we are in a subservient position to the universe itself (otherwise known as Source or God) when we are trying to earn or qualify for what we have asked for. We feel like we have to be worthy of the universe meeting our needs and manifesting our desires. But in order to qualify for the manifestation of those needs and desires, we feel as if we must do something to be worthy of those things. This is a major issue when few of us in this world feel worthy. We are Source itself manifested through a physical human body. This means, we are an extension of that which we call the Universe or God. We are indivisible from it. When we appeal to the Universe or God for something that we desire, we are appealing to our true self. We are not appealing to a judgmental authority figure, which decides whether or not we have qualified for what we want. Our desires are the very things that enable expansion. Every time you have a desire, the universe matches the vibration of that desire exactly. It adopts that vibration because it is in the process of achieving self-awareness. And when a being desires something, it is as good as saying “universe, this is what you are”. This is why the universe or God, knows it is love above all other things. It knows it is love above all else, because love is the most unanimous desire above all other desires that has emanated from every being in existence since the first separate being was thought into creation by source consciousness. The universe wants you to desire, it benefits by your desire. What’s more than this, it cannot expand or become self aware without your desire. And unless you “line up with” (manifest) your desire, you cannot achieve a new point of perspective and therefore you cannot desire more and therefore you cannot evolve and therefore the universe cannot evolve. The universe’s desire for self-enlightenment is dependent upon your individual desires coming to fruition. What does this mean? The universe receives, when it gives to you.
The universe is not an authority figure; it is just the less condensed version of you. It is by far the larger part of you. So when the universe gives you something, it is you that is giving to you. And you cannot be subservient to yourself. So let me ask you a question, Do you have to qualify for your own creation? If you create something, like art, do you have to deserve that art before you see it manifest on the canvass? How worthy are you of your own creation? Do you have to qualify for your own creation? NO!!! Our life, our manifestations are our own creation. They are creations of our consciousness. In reality, they are not granted by anything or anyone. Once they are created by our consciousness, they are either allowed or resisted by our thoughts, words and actions here in our waking physical life. What does this mean? It means that your deserving was never in question. You are in essence entitled to everything you could ever desire. You deserve everything you could ever desire and nothing you could ever do could make you unworthy of what you desire. Not murder, not selfishness, not pride, not abuse, not anything.
To deserve, in essence means to prove yourself worthy of what you need and what you desire. And you know what? That idea in and of itself is ludicrous. It is an idea that is not supported by the universe at large. It is an idea that is designed to maintain social order and it has done a pretty good job of that. For the most part, we have maintained social order in the family and in the society at the cost of killing our individual sense of worthiness. Well done! Today, I want to turn the concept of deserving upside down and make a bold statement… Deserve should be stricken from our vocabulary. I suggest that we replace the word deserve as it applies to manifestation (or the attaining of our desires) with a new word that does not yet exist in the English language. The word is “inown”. It is a portmanteau of inherent and ownership.
Everything you want is already yours. It belongs to you. Regardless of whether you realize that yet, or have manifested it yet, it is already yours. Therefore, you own it. And it is within you; it is not granted to you by someone or something else. Therefore, it is inherent. There is an inherent ownership of everything you have, do or will ever desire. The trick to manifesting is to recognize that inherent ownership. Which is to instantly recognize yourself of worthy and therefore deserving of what you want. To “inown”, is to recognize this inherent ownership of what you desire. To ask someone, do you feel as if you “inown” that thing you want? Is to ask if they are recognizing their inherent ownership of that thing they want. It is to ask if they recognize that they do not have to be deserving of it, because it already belongs to them.
The power of a new word is that it does not come with attachments or pre conceived beliefs. We can invent it’s meaning. So I put forth today the suggestion that we begin to use this new word, “inown” in place of the corrupted word deserve. So that it may bring us closer to the truth that we do not need to qualify for what we want. Everything we want, we are worthy of, because it is already inherently ours. We just need to recognize it.

What is the Merkabah?

The Merkabah was thought to be a divine light vehicle (a spiritual space ship of sorts) that transported people from one dimension to another and thus enabled people to access, connect with and communicate with beings of other dimensions. It is counter-rotating fields of light in the shape of two interlocked tetrahedra, where one point of the tetrahedra points up and the other points down, forming the shape of a star tetrahedron. This is why it is referred to as the chariot of ascension. When viewed, it looks like a three dimensional Star of David. Why doe it look like the Star of David? Because the Star of David, came about as a result of people observing the merkabah phenomena. This is why the Star of David among other things, represents the idea of the soul transcending the temporal world. Even though mankind has witnessed the merkabah since spiritual curiosity arose, the merkabah made its major debut in human consciousness before Jesus was born amongst those who practiced early Jewish mysticism. It showed up in their visions. They began calling it merkabah, which means “to ride” or “thing to ride in” depending on its usage. They believed it to be a spiritual chariot of sorts. Amongst religious scholars of that time, it was hailed as a chariot of the gods.
The merkabah became a secret doctrine, only known to few. A few rabbi, mystics and philosophers preserved the knowledge while many others forbid its study. Over the years, scholars and prophets and spiritual leaders have come up with their own separate ideas about what the merkabah is and about how to utilize it. Many of them of course have never seen the merkabah and so they believe that it is more of a metaphor rather than an actuality. Fast forward and now, here we are in a world where no one agrees about the merkabah.
 
HOW DOES THE MERKABAH WORK
It has long been thought by believers in the actuality of the merkabah that this inter-dimensional light vehicle is located in each person’s base chakra that when activated, it expands to encompass their body. It is thought that the merkabah can be activated through the use of breath work techniques or spinning techniques, or certain eye movements or mudras. The average human brain does not believe that consciousness can exit and enter this dimension at will with no “vehicle” because it understands travel only in terms of physical movement. It understands travel to somewhere else, only in terms of a vehicle or craft. So the human brain has interpreted the merkabah as a vehicle when it is nothing of the sort. It is a geometric pattern that can move either like a torus or like counter rotating light fields. The energy field of a person, which is always present, takes on this pattern when their consciousness is no longer purely focused physically and is now able to travel or is traveling through other dimensional realities. We can take this one step further though. A fully activated merkabah indicates that a person is able to take their body through star gates and to other dimensional realities, instead of simply take their consciousness to other dimensional realities whilst leaving their body behind.
The fully activated merkabah indicates that a person is able to transform the entire body into light. It is a form of light travel. In other words, in the final stages of merkabah activation, through a shift in consciousness, the triad of the mind, spirit and body completely integrates into one pattern of light and is then able to transcend the limitation of the physical time space reality. The concept of the merkabah was brought to the attention of early mystic scholars by the Annunaki beings that had relocated to the area of our universe that we call Sirius. There was no other way for these early scholars to conceptualize of extraterrestrial beings or space travel. They saw the rest of the universe as heavens and these beings as gods. And so, the merkabah was seen as a chariot of the gods. Here’s the problem; human beings began to think that the merkabah was a pre requisite for “ascension”. It is not; it is the result of ascension. Ascension is nothing more than the process of altering your perspective to a perspective that takes in more of an objective point of view of the universe we live in and of life itself. And there are a billion and a half techniques that aid a person to shift their perspective. It is thought that prohibits a person from experiencing anything more than the physical dimension. It is thought that enables a person to experience more than the physical dimension. Thought is the inter-dimensional vehicle. This is why the most beneficial teachers of ascension, are focused on one primary thing, and that is to help people to develop a flexibility and an openness of mind. That is to helping people to commandeer their focus. He, who plays with thought, plays with the very matrix of this universe. You cannot activate the merkabah so that the merkabah itself can assist you to reach other dimensions or ascend. Instead, the merkabah “activates” on it’s own as a result of shifting consciousness. It is a symptom of increasing the vibration of consciousness, not a cause of increasing consciousness. The merkabah “becomes alive”. And it becoming alive, means the energy field of a person reflects the fact that they have developed a pattern of consciousness that enables their perspective to be unrestricted by the limitations of the vibrational density of the physical dimension.
 
INTER-DIMENSIONAL TRAVEL
The triangle is a pattern we see that emerges as a result of directed consciousness. Directed consciousness is experienced as movement. The triangle is also a pattern that emerges as a result of the desire to merge the body, mind and spirit. These are the two primary reasons that the merkabah takes on the interlocking triangular structure that it does.
If you continue your spiritual practice by continuing to expand with the natural progression of spiritual learning, it is inevitable that your merkabah will activate. In other words, it is inevitable that your merkabah will become alive. You do not have to “go anywhere” to travel inter-dimensionally. That is the physical understanding of movement and travel. When it comes to inter-dimensional “travel”, the process depends on two principals, intention and attention. It’s a three-step process using these two principals. First you set your intention and then you place your attention on things related to that intention. And then you merge attention and intention by focusing the energy of your intention towards the end result of your desire. In summation, the merkabah is the pattern and structure that the human light body takes on when one’s consciousness is ready for, or is participating in, inter-dimensional “travel”. This pattern, once activated, begins to appear near the base chakra and emanates upward forming a torus around the body, which then gradually transforms into the star tetrahedron shape that we call, the merkabah.
 
 
 

Faith

To have faith is to have positive confidence or trust in something. It is to think something is true, even without proof. But then, the question stands, how can one have confidence or trust in something with no evidence to back up that faith and trust?
The famous philosopher Bertrand Russell once said, "Where there is evidence, no one speaks of 'faith'. We do not speak of faith that two and two are four or that the earth is round. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence." Unfortunately for Bertrand Russell, he is forgetting something, the first person who believed the earth was round (enough to be motivated to set out to prove that it was round) had to go on faith before there was proof to back up that belief. And science cannot yet prove that emotion is not proof or evidence.
Every single thing in existence begins as a thought first. When that thought is thought enough, it becomes a belief. Proof is the manifestation of a thought that you think often enough that it becomes part of your physical reality. You look at that physical manifestation and it reinforces the thought so that now you have confidence in the truth and validity of that thought. Having confidence in the truth and validity of a thought based on manifested proof is called a belief.
Faith is the step or the bridge between thinking and believing. It is the confidence in the truth or validity of something positive before the proof has manifested physically. The person who does not value faith, values the idea that there is an external world that exists separate from us. The person, who does not value faith, believes that we merely interact with and observe this world. This is not a person who believes that thought creates reality. This is a person who belongs to the religion called science. And science does not yet recognize the observer as the creator of what is observed. Fortunately for us, science is a religion that is always evolving. Having read the previous paragraphs, do you notice how I have not once said that faith is knowing the truth of something even before the proof that it is true has manifested physically? Faith in our modern society is synonymous with ignorance because so often, individuals use faith to establish a sense of certainty and cognitive closure. It is the excuse people use to make a claim of the certainty of a certain truth, which closes them down to all other possibilities. In other words, it is pretending to know something that they do not know. A good example of this is heaven. Most people have never seen heaven for themselves. They have no proof other than the promise of the words belonging to other people to back up the belief that heaven is real. Words in a book called the bible, words coming from the preacher’s lips, words coming from their direct family members etc. And so, most people do not actually believe heaven exists or know that it exists (even though they may say they do). Instead, people have faith that heaven exists. They mistake faith for knowing. And by closing their minds down around the truth of knowing, they become unable to experience other potentials and other realities. They become selectively ignorant. To close one’s own perspective down to possibilities and to latch onto the knowing of one specific truth is to live in a state of ignorance. To have faith is to have confidence in or trust in, but to not know. People only confuse faith for knowing. This is the shadow side of faith. And, it presents a problem.
When we observe other people who have faith, we are jealous of their certainty. We are jealous of their ability to create cognitive closure. Because we do not recognize that all they are doing is mistaking faith with knowing. After all, the only certainty in our universe is uncertainty. And the highest of objective truths is that truth is subjective. Faith is ignorance when faith becomes proof of “knowing”. To have confidence in something or to hope for something is not to know something. Instead it is a kind of living bravery. It is the bravery to walk openly into the world of the unknown based on emotion and intuition. Emotion is like the tether between your soul and your physical life. He, who has faith, is brave enough to follow that tether into the unknown.
Faith can only happen in the absence of knowing. Not one scientific discovery, began without a scientist first having faith. After all, he did not yet know. After all, he did not yet have the proof he needed to be sure. The average scientist does not yet recognize his inner urgings and hunches as emotion, intuition and ultimately, as faith. Many critics of faith claim that faith is only used in the absence of good supporting evidence. And that is true, because if faith had good supporting evidence, it would no longer be faith, instead it would be a belief that you would call a “truth” or “something that you know”. But faith is a bridge between thinking and knowing. Faith should never close a person down to possibilities. Faith should never be confused with knowing. Most of what a spiritual person is, is a person who is full of faith. It is a person who is willing to live with confidence and hope in a universe full of the unknown. To have faith, is to be brave.
Many people believe that faith is the absence of doubt. This could not be further from the truth. We only think that faith is the absence of doubt when we confuse faith with knowing. To doubt is to have uncertainty about something. Faith cannot exist in a universe of certainty, certainty is knowing. Faith is not required when we know. And so, if doubt is uncertainty, doubt is a necessary condition of faith. If we take doubt a step further (and let doubt mean what it means emotionally to most people), to doubt is to consider something unlikely. To consider something unlikely is to act as if you know. It is to pretend you know something that you do not know. It is to bring a sense of certainty to a universe of uncertainty. For this reason, doubt in all actuality, is the flip side of faith. Doubt is only another kind of faith. It is faith in the negative instead of faith in the positive. Like the shadow side of faith, to consider something unlikely (doubt) is to act as if you know. People use doubt to gain a sense of certainty and cognitive closure in the same way that people use faith to gain a sense of certainty and cognitive closure.
If you are a person who doubts, you have a great capacity for faith. The only difference between you and a person, who is full of faith, is that you have endless confidence and trust for negative instead of positive outcomes and things. Like faith, doubt is a bridge between thinking and believing. It is best to burn this bridge down when the bridge does not benefit your journey. It is best to only build the bridge of doubt between thoughts that feel bad to think and things you don’t want to believe. It is best to build the bridge of faith only between thoughts that feel good and things you want to believe. When we begin to experience pain, is when we build the bridge of doubt between thoughts that feel good to think and things we want to believe.
So how can someone manifest what he or she wants without faith? They can replace doubt with curiosity and maybe. They can let go of the need for certainty and cognitive closure by welcoming the state of uncertainty. To do this, they can move into the space of curiosity, which is a joyous state of not knowing. They can pull their teeth out of the idea of truth and reality. The reality is, no one knows what reality is. To commit to curiosity, is to release resistance to the painful things we have confidence in or that we think we know. And so, when we do manifestation exercises or look for proof for something we want to believe, we do so without an attachment to whether it is true or not. This is a state that true scientists can teach us to uphold. It is to take on an attitude of “wouldn’t it be nice if”, or “maybe”. If you visualize what you want, make it a game instead of a matter of life and death. Do the visualization out of curiosity about the potential that mind could create reality. Remain open to all possibilities. Also, allow yourself to prove things you yourself. Deliberately go looking for proof to back up what you want to believe. Quit expecting yourself to have the same level of faith that other people have. Quit expecting yourself to know. There is no earthly reason, given your experience, that you should know or should have faith. In fact, the main reason that the thought “I don’t have faith” hurts us, is because we think we should have faith. Why should we have faith when we have come to expect negative outcomes? We have learned that having faith when we expect negative outcomes, only ends in disappointment.
He, who lacks faith, has been victimized and now sees himself as a victim; he sees himself at the mercy of an external world. When we are victimized, we lose trust and faith in ourselves. Faith is corrupted within the human system when we do not trust ourselves. Ultimately, we recognize that the world at large is a reflection of us, so if we do not have confidence in or trust something “out there”, there is something inside us that we do not trust. We need to figure out what it is about ourselves that we do not trust and we need to learn to trust ourselves again, because faith is the organic result of trusting ourselves. Having positive confidence and trust in something is the result of trusting ourselves to create positive outcomes for ourselves.
No one can fake faith. But deep down inside all beings, however subconscious it may be, there is the recognition of one’s own infinite being. A being that is a creator at its core. And thus, deep down there is a faith (however faint it may be) that one can create and therefore can have confidence or trust not only in positive outcomes, but also in oneself.

False Selves

The inability to establish real intimacy is the root of all relationship issues today. Including the relationship you have with yourself. Intimacy is knowing and being known for who we really are in every aspect of our lives. You can think of intimacy as me being able to bring the truth of who I am to the center of our relationship and you being able to bring the truth of who you are to the center of the relationship and both of us being received, acknowledged, accepted and loved for who we are without needing to fix each other. There’s one major problem though. I have to know who I am before I am able to share all of myself with you and you have to know who you are before you are able to share all of yourself with me. Most of us have no idea who we really are because we are shamed out of our true selves as children growing up in dysfunctional families in this dysfunctional human society. In order to adapt to our families and to society, we have created false selves. We have created false selves that are so good at what they do; even we have mistaken them for ourselves. We have a major problem differentiating between our false self and our real self. We know something feels “off” about our life, but we don’t know what because we have forgotten who we really are.
Because we have forgotten who we are, we have built our relationships upon everything except intimacy. We have built our relationships based on the fact that we find each other sexy. We have built our relationships based on the fact that we both like football. We have built our relationships based on the fact that he or she would make a good husband or wife. We have built our relationships based on what we do for each other. And so, something is missing from our relationships. They feel empty after the initial excitement has worn off. We want someone who will understand how we feel, but we do not understand how we feel. We want trust, but we don’t trust ourselves. We want honesty, but we can’t be honest with ourselves when we don’t even realize that we are being dishonest with ourselves in the first place.
Society has many mantras. Mantras such as, family is everything, nothing that’s worth having is easy, pink is for girls, money is the root of evil etc. These mantras are part of society’s programming. They are designed to control our actions. They are designed to override the emotional guidance system because we are convinced that ‘everyone following their own emotional guidance system = social chaos’. This programming works in a very straightforward way, it tells us from a very young age that what we saw was not what we saw, what we heard was not what we heard, and most of all, what we felt was not how we felt. Before you get defensive about your own upbringing, look at this very seemingly innocuous, commonplace example: The toddler falls and bumps their head. They are crying and everything in them is saying, “I’m not ok” but the parent says, “you’re fine, it’s only a little bump”. At that moment, the child’s feelings are invalidated and the child learns that they cannot trust their emotional guidance system to relay accurate information; after all, their body and emotions are saying one thing, “I’m not ok”, and their parent (who is the god of their world at this age) is saying another, “I’m fine and shouldn’t be feeling this way.”
In order to fit into our families and society, we have to adapt. We have to become a certain way. For example, a naturally free spirited and tomboyish girl is born into a prestigious southern family. If she were to adhere to her own emotional guidance system and stay true to who she is, life would get very hard for her. She would be the disgrace of the family and her parent’s disapproval of her would mean that from her perspective, she would lose their love. So, she begins to create a false self. She creates a false self that likes pink, and loves Jesus and collects dolls and has perfect social manners. She structures her life choices around the values of the family. She structures her relationship choices around the approval of the family. Now, as an adult, she is dying inside. But no one would ever know it. When you ask her who she is, she will tell you that she is a person with southern values and good manners, who owns a doll collection and likes pink but loves Jesus. Her life has turned into the very picture of success that her parents and that her society had in mind when she was born. She does not know that who she really is, is not who she is. She does not recognize that her personality is nothing more than an adaptation. If we do not know how we feel, what we like and don’t like and what we want and don’t want; we cannot be in a relationship. We cannot be in a relationship (romantic or friendship etc.) because we are not actually present for the relationship. Instead, our false self is present. Our only hope of finding intimacy, having good relationships, living a life that we enjoy, feeling free and not dying inside every day, is to let our false selves go. Our only hope is to find out who we really are. Most of us have been too afraid in the past to question everything we think we know about the world and most importantly about ourselves. We have been so convinced that there will be an unbearable consequence for being our true selves, that we have not taken the risk to be ourselves. We have not yet seen that being ourselves completely is worth any consequence, even losing our families and friends.
This is a crossroads for many of us. It is a crossroads we must come to when we have committed to spiritual practice, or even just to improving our lives. Do we keep up the façade, or do we find out who we really are and admit to it? For the sake of self-discovery, we need to pretend that we have just come out of a coma and that now we know nothing about ourselves. Act as if it is the first day of your life in this body. You do not know what you like and don’t like. You do not know what you believe and don’t believe. You do not know how you feel. Now, reassess your life. When you take a bite of that food, do you like that food? What do you like about it? What don’t you like about it? When you pick out your clothes, how do they make you feel? If this was your first day on earth and you had no pre-conceived notion about other people’s perspective about those clothes, what would you think of those clothes? Do they reflect who you really are? When you spend time with that person, do you like them? It doesn’t matter if they are family and you have always thought that ‘family is forever’. Why do you like them? Why don’t you like them? When you look at yourself in the mirror, who are you really? Are you an artist? It doesn’t matter if you’ve never painted a picture or danced a dance in your life. Are you an artist? Are you a mother? Doesn’t matter if you are actually a mother or if you have no children at all, are you a mother? What do you believe about this universe or God? Throw away your religion and your beliefs for a minute. It doesn’t matter if you have said “I’m a Christian, or “I’m Islamic” all your life, what do you believe about this universe or God? It is ok if the answers to these questions are “I don’t know”. Because at least “I don’t know”, is better than pretending that you do know. It means you have a kind of openness to know the truth about yourself.
As of today, your job is to explore. Your job is to re assess the old things and most especially, to try new things. Cut other people out of the equation. Listen to the way you feel when you think things and say things and do things. You may think you have liked something all your life, only to discover that you don’t really like that thing at all. You may have thought that you believed something all your life, only to discover that you don’t really believe that thing at all. You may have thought you hated something all your life, only to discover that you actually love it. You were just so afraid of the consequence of admitting to how you felt and what you liked and what you believed and who you were, that you have misled yourself. You have built a false self and most likely, you maintained that false self with extreme conviction. You tried to convince yourself and other people around you that you were one way, when you were another. We need to be willing to question absolutely everything we think we know about ourselves in order to really know ourselves. And it will feel groundless and anchor-less in the beginning. It will feel like you are losing your life vest. But this time spent in the unsteady, unknown of the ocean of our lives is worth the experience of landing squarely in and of our true selves. No more torture of pretending. No more trying to be perfect. No more being loved for someone that we aren’t. No more emptiness, no more meaninglessness. It doesn’t mater whether you are 10 years old or 20 years old or 40 years old or 80 years old. Now is the time to be brave. Now is the time to be brave enough to admit to the possibility that you have no idea who you really are. Now is the time to question everything you think you are. Now is the time to let the person you think you are, go. Now is the time to reveal to yourself and to the world, who you really are.

Spiritual Bypassing

Spiritual bypassing is the cancer of the spiritual world. It is a disease that has run rampant in both religious and non-religious circles. Spiritual bypassing (or whitewashing) is the act of using spiritual beliefs to avoid facing or healing one’s painful feelings, unresolved wounds and unmet needs. It is a state of avoidance. Because it is a state of avoidance, it is a state of resistance. I personally, consider Spiritual bypassing to be the shadow side of spirituality.
The spiritual beliefs of any spiritual tradition, be it Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, New Age, Islamic, or even Self Help, can provide ample justification for living in a state of inauthenticity. They can all provide justification for avoiding the unwanted aspects of one’s own feelings and state of being in favor of what is considered to be “a more enlightened state”. Even the non-affiliated and unanimously beloved saying “keep calm and carry on” is in fact a glorification of spiritual bypassing.
Some examples of spiritual bypassing include anger-phobia, exaggerated detachment, emotional numbing and repression, blind or overly tolerant compassion, weak or too porous boundaries, using cognitive reasoning to escape emotional feelings. Debilitating judgment about one's negativity or shadow side, devaluation of the personal relative to the spiritual, avoidance of physical day to day life, delusions of having arrived at a higher level of being and my personal least favorite, overemphasis of and attachment to the positive to the degree that there is a high level of resistance to anything negative. Every religious practice propagates its fair share of spiritual bypassing. For example, Catholic confession, which is expected to just wash away sin and effortlessly alter someone’s negative behavior. Buddhist premature transcendence, which is to act as if one is above and beyond the messiness of life’s drama, when the truth is, one is not. Christian unconditional love, which is to espouse love that is false. It is to say, “I love them” when in truth, one harbors prejudice and resistance to them and only wishes they could learn to love them. Meditation is also frequently used as a form of spiritual bypassing. It is used to avoid uncomfortable feelings and unresolved life situations. For those in denial about their personal feelings or wounds, meditation practice can reinforce a tendency toward detachment, disengagement, or interpersonal distance. Spiritual drugs can be a form of spiritual bypassing.
The use of spiritual drugs can be a tool to avoid getting ones’ hands dirty in the work of resolving emotional issues. It is easier to spend time in an altered state of consciousness than to spent time facing the pain of one’s current state of consciousness. And in the spiritual community, no form of spiritual bypassing has become such a widespread disease as “positive focus”. Here is a prime example of positive focus spiritual bypassing; person A is really struggling with grief because their romantic relationship just ended. Person B feels incredibly uncomfortable about the fact that they are suffering and so, they wish to help the person A avoid those painful feelings. Person B tells person A that she creates her own reality and that she should therefore just quit thinking about what she is thinking about and “be positive” instead. Not only does this condemn the thoughts, which are being thought by person A (and therefore shame them), it also requires them to do something that they are not actually capable of doing. It requires them to jump from a purely negative thought to a purely positive thought; and that cannot be done. It is too far of a vibrational gap to jump. The result is, Person A feels shamed and powerless to their own thoughts. They feel as if where they are, is not ok. There is a big difference between being authentically positive and forcing positivity in order to try to avoid negativity. In today’s world, we have little tolerance for working through our pain. We much prefer instantaneous solutions that involve numbing out pain. Low and behold, Spirituality itself has become it’s own avoidance strategy. When we turn away from our pain or away from “wherever we are”, we abandon ourselves. We resist the very thing we are trying to avoid and so, we guarantee that it will come up in our realities again; only it will come back bigger next time.
Authenticity is the highest state of being for the spiritual practitioner. In fact in the years to come, authenticity will become the replacement for enlightenment as the true goal of spiritual practice. When we use spirituality to whitewash over our issues and try to avoid them, we use the goal of spiritual transcendence to try to rise above the raw and messy and real side of human life before we have fully faced and made peace with it. This can be seen as premature and false spiritual transcendence. It is one of the major pit falls or occupational hazards of walking the path of spirituality. Spiritual bypassing isn’t just an annoying facet of spirituality. It is in fact very dangerous. Why is spiritual bypassing dangerous? It is dangerous because it sets up a major division between the physical self and the higher self. It creates a definable split between where one really is and where one thinks they should be. It enables us to lie to ourselves and delude ourselves and live our lives through the projection of a false self. We cannot heal unless we are willing to admit to where we are and who we are. Spiritual bypassing is like breaking your leg, but being unwilling to admit to it, putting a band-aid over the compound fracture and trying to continue forward anyway. You can easily see how much harm would come to someone physically if they did that. That is exactly the same amount of emotional damage we do to ourselves when we use spirituality to bypass the truth of our emotional self. We need to take time to face and move through and heal our emotional pain in the same way that we need to take time to face the fact that our leg is broken, re-set the bone and spend time healing the leg before we are truly able to move forward.
Spiritual bypassing also leads to a one-sided form of spirituality where one aspect of life is elevated at the expense of its opposite. For example, objective truth (being valued more) is used to invalidate subjective truth. Non-physical is valued over form, 5d is valued and 3d is devalued. Transcendence is valued over physical embodiment, and detachment is valued over feeling. This behavior of valuing one side of polarity over the other gives rise to extremely damaging experiences. For example, one might, try to practice emotional detachment from others by suppressing one’s need for love and becoming independently self loving, but this only drives the need to be loved by others underground, so that it often becomes unconsciously acted out in covert and manipulative ways instead. Being a good spiritual person can become a substitute identity that covers up and defends against an underlying deficient identity. The spiritual idea we have of ourselves is used to whitewash over the truth of our true concept of ourselves, which is that we feel badly about ourselves. We feel that we are not good enough. We feel that we are innately Bad. Then, although we may be practicing diligently, our spiritual practice can be used in the service of denial and defense. And when spiritual practice is used to bypass our real-life human issues, our spirituality becomes compartmentalized. Our spiritual life and practice remains separate and un-integrated with our day-to-day life and our overall functioning. We feel like we have split personality disorder. We can never truly become the embodiment of the higher self, because we are still thinking of our lower self as our lower self, or as our unwanted self. Our spiritual practice cannot ever fully penetrate our life and make us feel good if we are using spiritual principals to avoid ourselves or avoid pain. Ask yourself these questions: Are you avoiding the fact that you feel like you are deficient and not good enough or bad by creating a “persona” of a spiritually transcendent person? Do you use spiritual beliefs to avoid your pain or problems? Do you feel like the spiritual you is different than the embodied you? Do you use spirituality to justify an insecurity within yourself? Do you use spirituality to avoid looking at things in your reality that you would rather think didn’t exist?
Now I’m about to make a bold statement, most of us alive today struggle with spiritual bypassing. Do you want to know how to know if you struggle with spiritual bypassing? You struggle with spiritual bypassing if you espouse, “I create my own reality” and then you worry. You struggle with spiritual bypassing if you espouse unconditional love and feel emotional resistance to someone. You struggle with spiritual bypassing if you espouse the idea that the universe is benevolent and good but then demonstrate distrust for others or the world at large. You struggle with spiritual bypassing if you espouse loving kindness and then berate yourself. If there is any kind of split within you between spiritual principal and the actuality of how you feel or act, then you struggle with spiritual bypassing. And if you struggle with spiritual bypassing, the order of the day is authenticity. We are not just physical beings waking up to our spiritual essence; we are also spiritual beings waking up to our physicality. Physical life is not clean. It is messy. Physical life is a life of contrast. It is an experience that involves both what is wanted and what is unwanted. Spirituality is not an excuse to run away from physical life. The soul is not a justification to deny the human side of ourselves. Spiritual principals are not an excuse to avoid the unhealed aspects of your psyche and your pain. Spiritual principals are not meant to serve as a justification to support your defenses.
In order to avoid the trap of spiritual bypassing, we need to be brave enough to admit to how we feel, what we want and don’t want, what we like and don’t like. We need to be willing to risk admitting to where we are and who we are, even if we think that where we are and who we are isn’t good or ok. If we want to avoid the pitfall of spiritual bypassing, we must express and allow our emotions, wounds, traumas and pain to surface healthily and with compassion.
Make a conscious effort to allow instead of suppress your emotions and not judge them when they arise. We often turn to bypassing to cope with our internal pain and suffering. Examples include addictions to food, drink, drugs, shopping, sex, work, focusing on others and diverting attention away from yourself etc. Make peace with being uncomfortable. If you are numbing yourself inside out this energy lingers and creates a breeding ground for other issues to arise and manifest. Get down to the root of your problems. The journey through life is not always one of bliss. And you haven’t gotten life wrong if you are not in perfect bliss. Sometimes the path through life leads you to breakdowns where you are curled up on the floor in tears.
In order to avoid the trap of spiritual bypassing, we need to apply what we learn to our life. Spiritual and Self help information is relatively abstract. Attending workshops, talks, reading books, going to yoga and meditation classes, etc. are good tools. However, tools are of no use if they aren’t used. Take action by applying what you are learning from these modalities consistently. Integrate them into your life daily. If these ideas remain abstract and merely intellectualized, they aren’t going to help you to create long lasting and permanent change.
If we are to avoid the trap of bypassing, we need to let go of the idea that something must be terribly, “wrong,” or dysfunctional about us if we have problems of negative beliefs or negative feelings or negative thoughts. Everyone has personal, “struggles,” to work through. I mean EVERYONE. When we judge our problems or feelings or negative-ness as wrong, we suddenly have a motive for spiritual bypassing. We make where we are “not ok”. We want to be good and right but we can only achieve that goodness or rightness by being inauthentic. We put on a false façade because of it.
You cannot avoid your pain because you cannot avoid yourself. Anything you try to avoid will haunt you. It will return again and again until it is so large that you cannot avoid it. The thing about spiritual practice, is that we turn to it because we are in pain and we want to feel better. But then all too often, we wind up using spiritual practice as a substitute for facing our psychological issues. When we do this, our spiritual progression is halted. We cannot move forward on our path of spirituality by lying to ourselves any more than we can reach our destination on a map, if we are unwilling to admit to where we are first. For this reason, true spirituality must incorporate the practice of shadow work and if we want to progress, we must face our psychological wounds. If you want to feel better and enjoy your life more, dare to face your pain. Dare to be… Authentic.

Self Trust vs. Independence

All of your relationships are a reflection of your relationship with yourself. The way you feel in your relationships is a reflection of the way you feel in your relationship with yourself. Self help gurus and Spiritual Teachers often teach their disciples this lesson and then proceed to guide people towards total responsibility for the state of one’s own life and relationships. But then, extending this responsibility further, they guide their disciples towards the state of complete self-sufficiency and independence from others. They tell you that everything you need from others, you must provide for yourself. This expert advice tells you that happiness and love should come from within and should never be dependent on what anyone else does or does not do. It tells you that your well-being is not anyone else’s responsibility, it’s your responsibility. It tells you that every person needs to look after himself or herself and that we need to learn to distance ourselves emotionally from others so that we can remain undisturbed by other people.
This modality teaches us that if we can’t keep an even keel, remain emotionally detached from them and be completely independently happy, something is wrong with us and we are enmeshed with others or “codependent”. All forms of dependency are seen as deficiency. Need for other people, is seen as an addiction to other people.
Following this traditional model, one begins to build a model of the world that is for lack of a better word… lonely. We begin to feel as if we are in this life alone and like it is inappropriate to ask others for what we want and need. We begin to believe that it is wrong to rely on other people or depend on them in any way. We are told that if we need other people, it is codependency. From a biological perspective, dependency is not a preference it’s a fact. Putting the fact that we depend on the earth and it’s resources for our survival aside, lets take a look at the biology of relationships. When we become attached to someone, the two of us now form one physiological unit. In truth, we have this relationship with all that is. But it is now proven that our partner is able to regulate our heart rates, breathing and the level of hormones in our blood. Our partner’s availability and proximity to us, influences our stress response. Our sense of differentiation is reduced, even on a biological level when we develop a relationship with them. This reduction of differentiation is the reflection of the fact that when we are in a relationship, we come closer to understanding and experiencing oneness. There is also a psychological phenomenon called the dependency paradox. We act more independent when we have the security of depending on someone else. If you observe a two year old in a new environment, they will crawl around and explore as long as they are assured of the presence of their primary caregiver. If the primary caregiver leaves the room, they will become distressed and insecure and stop exploring. As soon as their primary caregiver returns, they are back to independently exploring the environment. Adults are no different it turns out. If we feel secure that we can rely on the person or people that we are attached to, we are able to take risks, be more creative and pursue our goals. The self-help community and the spiritual community is littered with people whose needs were not met by their primary caregivers and by successive relationships in their life. After all, look at the word self-help. One only turns to self-help when there is no one else there to help them, but themselves. And one turns to spirituality for solace, when that solace is not being provided for them by the physical dimension or by the people in their physical reality. These people already operate under the unhealthy belief that their needs cannot be met by others because they have never known a day when their needs were met by others. They have had to grow up in an atmosphere of survival. And they have figured out that the only way to survive was to disconnect from others, turn inward and become completely self reliant for everything. This is a problem when they still desperately crave intimate connection and symbiosis with others. They must convince themselves not to want what they want and to ultimately avoid what they want. Contrary to popular opinion, these people do not actually trust themselves fully. There is a big difference between trusting oneself and distrusting others. It is very easy for people who have been forced into a position of self-sufficiency to use spiritual truths to bypass this original pain in their lives and use that suppressed grief to justify a state of avoidance to attaching to and depending on others. This belief blinds them to the truth of interdependence and it prevents them from seeing the bigger picture. A bigger picture where the universe is trying to provide us with the opportunity to heal our relationship with ourselves by mirroring the pain contained within our relationship with ourselves through our relationship with others…instead of trying to push us into a state of independent self-sufficiency.
It is also very easy for people who were convinced early in life that they could not trust themselves or rely on themselves, to use spiritual truths of interdependence and oneness to justify a state of turning the responsibility of their lives, over to other people and becoming completely powerlessly dependent on others. They, having abandoned themselves over the course of their lives, are constantly looking for someone to heal the internal loneliness and grief that they feel and “adopt” them. They too, have grown up in an atmosphere of survival. They have figured out that the only way to survive is to completely hook into others, and become completely reliant on others for everything. This is a problem when they still crave an intimate connection with themselves and still crave an empowered state where they can trust themselves. This is a problem when they continue to abandon and avoid themselves when they look for someone else to be there for them. The universe will mirror your resistance to yourself by turning you back towards yourself. The universe will mirror your self-distrust and lack of self-reliance by putting you in situations where you cannot rely on others and must only rely on yourself. We misinterpret this mirroring to mean that the universe is telling us that we cannot rely on others and that it is inappropriate to get our needs met through others. It makes us believe in independence instead of in self-trust. Independence is a hardened state that is closed to others.
Self-trust is a soft state that is open to the self. Independence is a state of resistance to others and resisting the relationship with others. Self-trust is a state of allowing of the self and allowing the relationship with the self. It is not wrong to get your needs met by other people. But when you do not trust yourself and when you are resisting yourself or the way you feel, you will run into the reflection of that. The universe will seem to push you towards self-sufficiency and towards being alone with yourself. You will probably begin to feel like the message is that you are alone and that you can only rely on yourself. It is trying to help you heal by mirroring that you can’t trust others to meet your needs so that you are forced to re-establish the relationship with yourself, be completely with yourself and the way you feel, release resistance to yourself, be there for yourself in your grief or anger or fear, feel empowered in and of yourself and begin to trust yourself.
If you don’t trust yourself, you will continually try to get other people to take responsibility for you and for your life. You will constantly try to get them to “adopt you” by taking up the void that exists where you abandoned yourself. But you are not a match to a person who can do this, if you are in resistance to (and therefore focusing on) running from yourself and resisting the responsibility for yourself. All you will manifest is people you can’t trust and can’t rely on. This forces you to heal the relationship with yourself. If you were running from yourself and resistant to yourself and didn’t trust yourself, and you could manifest a person to take care of you and take responsibility for you and make you feel better and who you could rely on, you would remain incomplete, un-integrated and unhealed forever. That defeats the purpose of life completely.
If you continually try to get other people to take responsibility for you (especially by asking them to make you feel better), you are perpetuating a state of powerless dependence, self-avoidance and self-distrust. The universe doesn’t hate you. You are not alone and the universe is not telling you that you can’t depend on others. The universe is merely trying to put you in a position where you can learn that you CAN trust yourself, be completely present with yourself and depend on yourself. It is trying to help you heal your relationship with yourself by leading you towards a relationship with yourself that is good. To do this, it must lead you away from your current pattern of avoiding yourself by powerlessly depending on others. It is trying to lead you into self-trust and empowered symbiosis.
When it seems like the message that the universe is trying to cram down your throat is that you can only rely on yourself and that you cannot get your needs met by others (which is a message that feels lonely and like the weight of the world is on your shoulders alone), remind yourself that this is not the universe’s message or intention. It is simply the reflection of the fear (and early life experience) that you are alone and that your needs can’t get met by others and that the weight of the world is on your shoulders alone. It is simply the reflection of your resistance to yourself, your resistance to the truth of how you feel and your self-distrust. From there, begin to take more of a proactive and engaged role with yourself (this is what society calls taking responsibility for yourself), not because you are your own burden to bear and you must bear that burden alone and not because the universe values independence, but instead because you will live a happier life if you begin to show yourself that you can trust yourself. Instead of using people to feel better, take time to be completely with yourself and with the truth of how you feel right here and now without trying to change how you feel. Your emotions are valuable. They always have something important to convey. If you avoid your emotions, you avoid the truth of yourself. Taking responsibility for yourself in this way reunites and reintegrates you with yourself. It is only meant provide proof that you can trust yourself. It is not meant to reinforce the belief that you are “in it alone” and “can only rely on yourself”.
It is difficult for people to remove their own pain, fears and negative beliefs from the perspectives that they offer to the world. Sometimes an entire group of people who have had similar painful experiences, propagate a perspective that reflects more fear and pain than love and joy. This is the case with many of the people in the self-help and spiritual community that teach independent self-sufficiency instead of self-trust and symbiosis. The truth is, this is an interdependent universe. When we feel as if we need other people to meet our needs, because we can’t meet our own needs, that means we want to escape ourselves or we do not trust ourselves. If this is the case, it is healthy to learn to reunite with ourselves and take responsibility for ourselves and thus learn that we can meet our needs. When we hate ourselves, and resist ourselves, it is healthy to learn to give love to ourselves. When we are powerless in our dependence on others, it is healthy and empowering to learn that we can be self-sufficient and depend on ourselves. But this has nothing to do with other people. It has nothing to do with whether we can or can’t rely on other people to meet our needs. If we have the tendency to avoid intimate relationships with others and resist interdependence with others, it is healthy to learn that we can depend on others. It is healthy to learn to ask others for what we need and learn that other people can meet our needs if we let them. When we distrust others and resist others, it is healthy to learn to trust others and allow others into our hearts and our lives. When we are ‘independent’ it is good and empowering to learn that you can depend on other people and develop symbiotic relationships with them. The sweet spot of health in this universe rests squarely in the center of two seemingly opposing truths. We live in an interdependent universe, where our needs come to us through other people and things; because in a universe that is one, those other people and things are ultimately US. But because they are us, we are not powerless to those people and things. As creators, we attract those people and things into our lives in the first place. Our relationship with them, is a reflection of our relationship with ourselves and so, we can ultimately trust and rely on ourselves. We are at our healthiest when we have a loving and trusting relationship with ourselves. We are at our healthiest when we are integrated and whole in and of ourselves. We are at our best when we feel enough self-love and self-trust to feel empowered in our own lives because we trust ourselves and our relationship with ourselves to reflect out in our reality as symbiotic relationships with people who are loving, dependable and trustworthy.

The Emotional Body

In truth, there is no high or low in this universe; but for the sake of our understanding, lets say that at the highest level in this universe, all is integrated. All is one. At a lower level however, there are different dimensions and facets of this universe that is ‘one’. And you, like the universe, are also multi dimensional and multifaceted.
At your highest level, all is integrated. Your physical, etheric, feeling, thinking and spiritual bodies are all one. They are all just energy expressing itself. At a lower level, these aspects of you are like different dimensions of you. They are overlaid upon one another. They are different expressions of the same consciousness. Your feeling body (what most people call the emotional body) is the truth of who you are at a feeling level. This layer of you contains the imprints of the emotional aspect of your memories as well as your current emotional state. It is the bridge between your physical self and our thinking self. The feeling body interprets and translates the thoughts projected forth by your eternal consciousness perspective and also by your human perspective into feeling states or “feeling signatures”. This translation is the first step that takes place in order to enable a being to have a first hand experience of a thought. This enables the thought to be actualized instead of remain abstract. This actualization of thoughts enables us to learn and gain awareness better and faster and this in turn enables personal and universal expansion. Because of the emotional body, man is able to experience their own thoughts. The thoughts are converted into feeling impressions. The physical body interprets those feeling impressions and as if translating the message, converts those feeling states into the neuropeptides and hormones that cause the physical reactions in our body that we call “emotions”; emotions ranging from fear, anger and stress to love, compassion and happiness.
The feeling body specializes in feeling. Feeling is not only about emotion. It is about sensation and perception. Even though emotion does not exist beyond the physical body, feeling does. An emotion is a physiological experience of a feeling. A feeling is a sensation-based perception/form of awareness. The feeling body is not an actual body. It is etheric in nature. But it can be understood and visualized symbolically like an actual body (in fact it often is both out of body and in dream time). You can ask to be shown the visual representation of your feeling body in meditation of you like. With practice, you will no longer need to facilitate an altered state of consciousness like meditation to switch your perspective in order to see the layer of a person’s emotional/feeling body at will. You could observe it as energy, or you could observe it as the representation of an actual body. Here’s an example of one such experience: I have a male relative that is stoic, has a confident, independent heir about him, who belongs in hard work and has a “got to break some eggs to make an omelet” attitude about life. When his feeling body revealed itself to me, it was grey blue in color. It has hunched over at the shoulders. It was leaning lopsidedly to it’s left. Its gaze was towards the floor, its movements were constricted and most shockingly of all, it was covered (especially the left side of it’s face) disfiguring raised scars, scars bad enough that it was as if they had been caused by a meat grinder. Its energy was the energy of suppression and deeply imprisoned grief. Inherent in this experience is a general tendency that has become more and more obvious since then. When there is ‘damage’ which weakens one of the levels of ourselves, another level compensates. This compensation leads to a severe a lack of integration within the self. The self becomes fragmented and fractured. The
Physical body and spiritual body are the ones that most often compensate for the emotional body. For example, say someone’s emotional body is weak and fearful and appears to collapse in on itself, often that person will exaggerate their physical posture to seem strong, confident and outward moving. Or that very same person might instead be particularly spiritually developed with a great talent for withdrawing their consciousness and perceiving things from a more objective perspective.
So why is the feeling body so important? For starters, the feeling body is the translator between physical experience and non-physical experience. It is the translator between the observer-based consciousness of the mind and the first person physical experience based consciousness of the person. It is what makes us able to experience thought as “real”. In fact without your feelings, nothing about your physical reality would seem real. Your sense of life and feeling based conclusions about life are a part of the feeling body. Your interpretations are a part of the feeling body. Your emotional trauma is a part of the emotional body. If your interpretation of life is experienced as painful and if your sense of life is painful and if the feeling based conclusions you’ve drawn about life are painful and if the feeling state of your memories are painful (and your feelings dictate what is real and what is not), your feeling body will continue to convey those painful messages to the body, which will be interpreted as unpleasant emotion within the body. This leads to an unhappy life. This leads to addiction. This leads to failed relationships. Basically, this leads to the physical reflection of any of those painful emotional states. And the worst part is, you cannot stop living and re living that original trauma. You cannot be in the present moment because the emotional trauma keeps coming up over and over again in an attempt to integrate itself. In other words, if I felt like Dad abandoned me in some way when I was young, I will keep manifesting situations that make me feel abandoned over the course of my life.
If healing must occur on the emotional and feeling level of your life, you must address the emotions and feelings themselves. You must address the causation of those emotions and feelings. Here’s the catch. The minute you say, “I need to heal” something, this implies that you have to change or fix something, which means that you disapprove of something. The best way to damage yourself emotionally is to look at yourself through the lens of ‘something needs to change’. You know how painful it is to have someone tell you that you are not ok the way you are and that you have to be different. This is how the feeling body feels when you convey that it is not ok and that it needs to be different. If you approach your feeling body with an attitude of “I need to fix you”, you have just taken a serrated knife to a wound. You have not healed anything. And so, what is the alternative?
The alternative to trying to fix or heal the emotions is to embrace the feelings and emotions entirely, no matter how painful they may be. Be with the feelings and emotions instead of trying to change them. Listen to them and what they need you to know. We can call this process integration instead of healing. Every day for 20 minutes at least, as well as any time you have a particularly intense emotional reaction to something, find a quiet and comfortable place to completely be with how you feel. Observe the sensations and feelings and emotions in your body. They will intensify as you focus on them. Breathe continuously without unnecessary pauses between breaths. Breathe in and out of your nose. Notice the way you feel. Your entire goal is to be with your feelings, which is to fully be with yourself. If you like, you can repeat this one sentence to your emotions like a mantra… “I am completely here with you now”. Keep in mind that this process is not only for negative emotional states. It is also for positive emotional states. Some people in fact find that they are much more comfortable being with their negative emotional states than with their positive emotional states.
After you have been with the emotion completely no matter how uncomfortable it is and you feel like you want to know more about the causation of the emotion, ask yourself three questions:
How do I feel? This is your opportunity to bring the feelings to your conscious awareness and name what is occurring within you. When did I last experience this exact same feeling? Without looking for the answer, allow your being to offer up the answer, like a stream washing something downstream to you  When did I first experience this same feeling in my life? Again, without looking for the answer, allow your being to offer up the answer, like a stream washing something downstream to you. If nothing comes, be patient with that. Trust the process. Trust that you will receive the exact experience you need at this time. If you find yourself experiencing an emotionally traumatic memory, observe the memory and then mentally alter the memory in a way that feels emotionally positive. This is what they call “inner child work”. For example, if you are taken into a memory where your father left you, imagine the adult you approaching the child you, consoling the child and finding a way to meet the child’s needs. For example, you could become the stable parent for your inner child. Or you could give the child a reliable father figure of their choice. Or you could explain the whole situation objectively to the child and help them to not take the action personally. Altering the memory in this way changes the causation of the trauma. This alteration ensures that all that has transpired as a result of that trauma is altered as well. You are affecting the very blueprint of your emotional life.
Writing about your experience of ‘being with your feeling body’ is a good idea because it will not only make your emotional body feel as if you care about it, it will also help you to understand and integrate the experience you’ve just had. Keep in mind that trauma which took place before you developed the capacity for language, is not likely to be something that you can verbalize. Just remember that you do not have to verbalize it or conceptualize of it in order to integrate it.
When we have a strong emotional reaction to something, the strong reaction means that our past trauma has been triggered. This practice of being with the emotion allows us to take our attention off of the “messenger” which is the physical event or person or thing that is triggering us. It allows us to step back from the story that is urging us to react so strongly and detach mentally from the trigger. And it allows us to place our attention on how we are feeling so that we can recognize what deep unresolved past wound is unhealed within us and is thus continuing to mirror itself in our lives. It enables us to integrate our emotional body with ourselves. This is true “emotional healing”.

Humility

Humility is one of mankind’s most widely loved personality traits. Social groups, whether they are religions or cultural, nearly all preach the necessity of humility. It is a widely held belief that to be humble, is to be good. Being good is crucial in a society where those who are good are rewarded, whereas those who are bad are punished.
Humility is defined as a modest or low view of one's own importance. Modesty is defined as the quality of not being too proud or confident about yourself or your abilities. Looking at these definitions, silence should fall upon you. What you should be thinking is… are you freaking kidding me? Take a good look at this definition and try hard to come up with a justification for how humility and modesty could possibly be a good thing.
Humility is not a natural state. Children are born inherently feeling their own importance. Children, who are naturally self-loving and whom naturally take pride in themselves and their abilities, must be educated into humility. And this “education” into humility, is an emotionally barbaric practice. It’s like the emotional version of Chinese foot binding. How is a child educated into humility? They are shamed for being proud of themselves, they are shamed for having wants and needs if they conflict with other people’s wants and needs. They are told things like “The world doesn’t revolve around you” and “who do you think you are”? A child’s self-esteem must be corroded in order to become humble. Humility is in fact a contradiction to one of the six basic human needs, the need of significance. This means that for someone to become humble, they have to deny a basic human need. People, who lack the primary need of significance, live in a perpetual state of covert self-hatred. They live unhappy lives, which they think they deserve. People who lack the primary need of significance are in fact at high risk for suicide.
When we are afraid of someone feeling important, it is because we don’t think it is possible for someone to feel important without simultaneously feeling more important than others and thus causing problems for other people. This is the main reason (besides cultural and religious programming) that parents humble their children. When children have all of their needs met by their parents in their first years of life, they become habituated to this arrangement. Until one day when the child asks the parent to do something for them that the parent doesn’t want to do or that the parent thinks the child can do for himself. This imposition makes the parent feel as if the child has become entitled or self-important. This makes the parent feel like the child thinks he or she and what he or she wants is more important than the parent and what the parent wants. And the shaming begins. The child then wonders why his or her importance has been downgraded. The child personalizes the way they are being treated. The child begins to think “maybe there really is something wrong or bad about me”.
Years of humbling does exactly what you would expect, it creates a humble adult. But at what cost? It creates the epitome of a self-defeating person. It creates an adult with a perpetual internal conflict, who will probably fit into society well and who will not affect others and who will maintain emotionally abusive relationships, who will self sacrifice and who will accomplish a fraction of what they truly wish to accomplish in their lives. But yes, you can bet that everyone will like them! Everyone will treasure how kind and humble they are.
Humility serves three kinds of people...
Those who are already in positions of power, whom want to maintain power over others and who want to remain in positions of higher importance than others. Those who want you be modest about yourself so that they don’t have to feel bad about their shortcomings. People whom would rather you had low self-esteem than to actually be pushed by your self-confidence to admit to and work on their own shadow of low self-esteem. Those who believe this is the only way to ensure that keeping everyone in a place of lowered self-importance, maintains social order. Many of the people in this category, seek to stay comfortable and avoid change no matter what the cost. And here we see the birth and origin of humility as a virtue… RELIGION and SOCIAL ORDER
If I want other people to behave in a way that allows me to maintain my level of importance and maintain my power, what should I do? Convince them of their unimportance and teach them that the only way to be good (and therefore loved) is to not be too confident about themselves or their abilities. Punish them when they act self important or proud about themselves. And scare them that a punishment awaits those who think highly of themselves after this life. Humility is not a virtue. It is a beautiful but thin, sparkling sugar coat for Servility. Servility is an excessive willingness to serve or please others. Excessive willingness as it applies to servility, means that the servile person is a self-sacrificer. Servility serves those who wish to maintain positions of higher importance than you. Servility serves the government and it serves religious institutions because it maintains social order. Servility serves parents who wish to maintain the seat of power over the household. Servility serves those who do not feel capable of feeling good about themselves; people who want you to behave in a way that makes it easy for them to feel good about themselves without doing the work on their own self defeating tendencies.
Every single atom of this universe is an aspect of God itself. It is an expression of God. You are not only God’s masterpiece. You are also God itself. Do you think that God should or would be in a place where it had a low opinion of its importance? If the answer is no, then you should not either. Guess what? Seeing as how you are not only a creation of God, but are also indivisible from god, humility and modesty are in fact true blasphemy. Any act that is not self-loving is true blasphemy. What is importance? Importance is the state or fact of being of great significance or value. Importance has nothing to do with comparison. Importance doesn’t have anything to do with being more or less valuable or significant than anything else. Are you not important? Do you not have significance or value? Think of a baby that has just been born. Is that new life not important? Does that new life not have significance or value? Why not be confident in yourself and about your abilities? Why not be proud of yourself? You have been taught that being confident in yourself and your abilities hurts people, but it doesn’t. It only hurts you when you do not value yourself and your abilities. It keeps you small forever. It means that you will live half of the life you came here to live, if you are lucky. The truth is, you have more significance and more value than you could ever know. There has never, is not and will never be another you. You are like a unique angle of colored glass in a stained glass painting. The picture could not be complete without you. The universe depends on you for it’s own expansion. The universe depends on you to know itself. To say that you are a child of God is an understatement because you are indivisible from God. But how important are your children to you? What if you are as important to God (this universe) as your children are to you? Your point of perspective is completely unique. It cannot and will not ever be replicated. And it’s about time that you knew it.
Strike humility from the record. It never did anyone a crumb of good. It only kept you from yourself and prevented you from knowing your own divinity. Replace humility and modesty with significance and self-confidence. Watch what happens to your life when you become aware of your own significance. Watch what happens to your life when you allow yourself to feel as important as you really are.

Dive Deep

All of you have heard the statements “I’m tired of all the drama” and “he/she is a drama queen”. Drama is a word that is used to invalidate the validity of an emotional experience or of an overly extreme reaction to an experience because the onlooker thinks it is blown out of proportion, unnecessary or uncalled for. Drama is a word that originally meant, “to act”. This is why the word made its debut in the world of performance art or theatre. As it relates to emotional life, drama is a state, situation, or series of events involving intense conflict. Put these two things together and you have the definition of a person who is dramatic. A person who is dramatic is a person who acts as if they are in a state of intense conflict. Why do they act as if they are in a state of extreme conflict? Because they ARE in a state of extreme conflict.
No one overreacts. There has never been a person on earth that has ever overreacted. People react exactly in accordance with the reality that they alone perceiving. And our perspective and realities are not the same. When it comes to the human emotional experience, there is no such thing as drama. There is a perception that a person who is dramatic or who is a drama queen, is either over-reacting or is acting for the sake of attention; much like a performer on stage. If this is the case and they are over-acting for the sake of attention, they are in a state of extreme conflict because deep down, they feel desperate for attention. Deep down, they feel unseen, unheard and un-loved. Deep down, they distrust and dislike themselves and so there is no inner peace. Deep down, they are screaming for other people to save them from themselves. So the question must be asked, are they really overreacting if what they are really doing is playing out their desperation to be saved from themselves and to be seen and heard? Most likely if you invalidate other people’s feelings by telling them that they are being dramatic, you have learned over the course of your life to invalidate your own feelings. You impose this expectation on others as a result of it. Even though you wish you didn’t feel how you really feel, it is time to admit to how you truly feel and not be ashamed of how you really feel. Feeling deep levels of shame for feeling the way you feel is the real reason that you want to deny and invalidate the way you feel. It is also what is causing you to invalidate how other people feel by making the judgment that they are dramatic. If you have a resistance to drama, it is crucial to remind yourself that no one overreacts, including you. You always act in perfect accordance with the reality that you are perceiving; but now let’s go deeper. For the sake of understanding, lets call drama the state of being on an intense roller coaster ride of perpetual conflict. When we can’t seem to break free from drama, it is because we are stuck on the surface of our conflicts. We need to dive deep within ourselves internally to see the true cause of our emotional pain instead of arguing about the surface “triggers” of that pain.
When we want to feel better, we try to change the surface circumstances of our experience. We end the relationship, we move to a different city, we put ourselves on a diet, we sign up to a gym, and we take a medication. But by doing only this (by looking for and taking a physical action to feel better), we can never escape the conflict. It simply resurfaces in the new relationship, in the new city, regardless of our diet change or how much we exercise or what medication we take. We perpetuate drama in our lives if the changes we try to make focus on changing the physical effects of a problem instead of the root cause of that problem. For example, let’s say that I’m overweight. Emotionally, I feel terrible. The fatness I’m experiencing, is an effect of the root cause. It is in essence, a surface symptom of the problem, which is much deeper. If I dive deeper into myself and my pain, I will find that I feel a deep sense of shame and that as a child I could never live up to the demands of other people. I will find that my body tried to protect itself by walling itself off to the demands of others by putting on fat. If I change my perceptions surrounding the demands of others and begin to replace the shame with self-esteem, there will be no need for the fat anymore. Then, I may feel inspired to get a gym membership or eat better, but those changes will be inspired from a shift that was made on a much deeper level. However, if I simply started going to a gym and put myself on a diet from the get go (without being aware of and integrating the blocked emotions of the shame), there would be no end to the internal conflict causing the fatness in myself. There would be no end to the drama in my life. I would be trying to change the physical, surface effect of my problem instead of impacting the causality of the problem. How do we “dive deep” within ourselves? We start by recognizing triggers. A trigger is a reminder of a past trauma. It is called a trigger because like a trigger on a weapon, once it is pulled (shows up in our reality) it sets off an instantaneous and immediate emotional response within the body. We can call this response an “emotional charge”. We witness triggers most often in conjunction with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The return veteran from war jumps under the kitchen table in a state of panic because the “trigger” of Fourth of July fireworks reminds them of the past trauma of fighting for survival in a gunfire shootout in Iraq. But triggers are not solely experienced by people with PTSD. In fact, everyone on earth has triggers. You have triggers regardless of whether you have been diagnosed with PTSD or not. Let’s look at another trigger to understand what we mean. A woman gets into a new relationship. Everything is going great. The relationship is full of promise. Until one day, her partner decided to go see his friends after work at a bar instead of “checking in” with her and prioritizing seeing her in his off time. Upon discovering that he prioritized his friends over her, she feels instantly overwhelmed with feelings of anger and powerlessness. She feels neglected and worthless. She doubts the relationship and lashes out verbally at him. The event itself was a “trigger” for a deep unhealed grief within her. At face value, it would seem that she overreacted. In fact, this is exactly what her partner thinks that she did. Her partner thinks she is a drama queen. And now, he starts doubting the relationship as well. If she was to recognize the extreme emotional charge as evidence of a trigger and use the trigger of the event to dive deeper within herself, she would have discovered that the reaction to the event was a surface symptom of her deeper unresolved and un-integrated grief. If she had used the trigger to dive deep, she would have discovered that she felt neglected and worthless when her father would prioritize everything else over her when she was a child. She would discover that he was disconnected from her and that the disconnection and perceived lack of love that she felt from her father was a deep wound within her. It was in fact the thing that caused her to feel worthless and powerless in the first place. When we experience a trigger, we will instantly feel extreme negative emotion. For example, we feel instantly enraged to the point where we want to smash something or kill someone. Or instantly panicked to the point where we want to hide. Or instantly so overwhelmed with the feeling of powerlessness and sadness that we can’t hold back the tears. Drama, being a state of intense internal conflict, is in essence a reactive projection. It is designed to get the attention from others that we do not yet feel capable of giving ourselves. We can end drama in our lives by using our “triggers” as flags to dive deeper within ourselves to find the root of our emotional reaction. We can use them to dive deep to find our buried, unresolved and un-integrated grief. Once we find the causality of our emotional conflict, we can adjust that. In fact, finding the causality of our conflict changes it. Think of it like digging up a buried corpse. Just ask an archaeologist, similar to exposing a buried corpse to air, exposing your buried grief to the air of awareness, changes it forever. The surface behaviors, appearances and circumstances of our lives will automatically shift as a result of adjusting the causality of our buried emotional pain. This leads to permanent relief and change, instead of temporary relief and temporary change.
I am not saying that we should stop taking any kind of physical action to change external circumstances. What I am saying is that if we take action to change the circumstances surrounding a trigger before we use the trigger to dive deep within ourselves and alter the original cause of that trigger, we are in essence “skipping a step”. The trigger will always hold the same emotional charge and if the trigger holds the same emotional charge, we will continue to feel as if we can’t escape drama in our lives. We can’t stop suffering. When we experience a trigger, we feel an intense emotional charge. An emotional charge might bring up different emotions but those emotions are always perceived as uncomfortable. Step one is to recognize our extreme emotional reactions as “triggers”. And name them as such. Recognizing “I am triggered”, instantly causes us to take a step back emotionally from the event and the reactivity the event is producing within us. It enables us to observe ourselves reacting instead of simply react.
Next, we need to ask ourselves three questions…
How do I feel? Name the feelings and emotions and sensations within you. Allow yourself to feel the aspects of your experience that you’ve long suppressed. When did I last experience this exact same feeling? Let yourself visualize that experience fully so that the emotional state becomes very real When did I first experience this same feeling in my life? Let yourself go all the way back, even if it makes no sense whatsoever to you. What images do you see? What feelings? What smells? What sensations are taking place within your body? Why are you feeling what you’re feeling? What is the circumstance? If nothing comes, be patient with that. Trust the process. Trust that you will receive the exact experience you need at this time. When we are taken back to the memory in which we experienced that original trauma, we are provided with an opportunity to alter the original experience. The adult us can help the child us. We can remedy the situation. We can observe the memory and then mentally alter that memory in a way that feels emotionally positive. This is what they call “inner child work”. For example, if you are taken into a memory where your father left you, imagine the adult you approaching the child you, comforting the child and finding a way to meet the child’s needs. For example, you could become the stable parent for your inner child. Or you could give the child a reliable father figure of their choice. Or you could explain the whole situation objectively to the child and help them to not take the action personally. Altering the memory in this way changes the causation of the trauma. This alteration ensures that all that has transpired as a result of that trauma is altered as well. You are affecting the very blueprint of your emotional life. The circumstances of your life will change on their own as a result of altering the cause of those circumstances, which is always past trauma. This practice allows us to take our attention off of the “messenger” which is the physical event or person that is triggering us. It allows us to step back from the story that is urging us to react so strongly and detach mentally from the trigger. And it allows us to place our attention on how we are feeling so that we can recognize what deep unresolved past wound is unhealed within us and is thus continuing to mirror itself in our lives. We need to start treating drama (otherwise known as intense states of charged negative emotion) as what they are… as triggers asking us to dive deeper.

The Answer You've Been Looking For

All of your spiritual practice up to now has led you here. In fact, all else is in fact just a preparation for this one thing. Spiritual practices and principals are designed to wake you up from the dream of time and physicality a little bit more and a little bit more until you are really ready to fully wake up from the dream called life; until you are ready to wake up to your true state of being. Most people are not ready for a true state of being. That is why this answer does not show up in their reality. And it is why even when it does, most people do not take the next step and apply it to their lives consistently. What I am about to share with you is the true Holy Grail. It is the answer, which all of your questions have been leading to. I cannot tell you the answer with my voice. But I can tell you exactly where this answer is hidden. I cannot tell you the answer with my words because this answer cannot be conveyed through mental concepts. It can only be told to you organically as an experience. I can lead you to the door. You have to be the one to walk through it. It will feel like you are walking through this door alone. But on the other side of this door, you will see that it is not possible to have ever been alone and so all you really did, was walk head first through an illusion.
What does it feel like to walk through an illusion you ask? It feels like all unnecessary aspects of your being are scraped and burnt off in a violent furnace. It feels like walking straight into the eye of the storm. This process is not something that you do. Rather, it is something that you undo. We have one spiritual truth to lead us through this process of undoing and that is: The way out is in. The way out of our negative emotions is into our negative emotions. The way out of our illusions is into our illusions. The way out of our suffering is into our suffering. We spend our lives in a state of resistance. This is why we suffer so much. We resist what is, with a fervor that guarantees that we will not ever really live. We resist the thoughts we think, we resist the feelings that we feel and by doing so, we resist our own spirit. We are at war with ourselves. We resist ourselves even with processes that we think are good for us. In the beginning of our practice, coming out of the sheer powerlessness that has us all in this state of sleep, we wake up a little bit by realizing that we have the capacity to help ourselves to feel better. We feel as if we have been set free. Our entire spiritual practice is designed to help us feel better and think better. And there is nothing wrong with this. In fact, it just may be a crucial first step. We fall in love with manifestation. We chase what we want; we chase our bliss. And by doing so, we allow ourselves to come into alignment more and more. We want to heal ourselves because we know that something about us is in need of fixing. And for the very first time, we feel capable of doing that. The Spiritual Apex we pursue is still this external thing called enlightenment. Enlightenment is an idea that appeals to our minds when we live in linear time.
And then something astounding happens. We are confronted with the fact that the very thing that liberated us is now the thing that holds us prisoner. We realize that in wanting to feel better or think better… We are asking ourselves to feel and think and be different. We discover that by trying to feel better or think better, or be better, we are resisting ourselves. And then, the whole game changes. We leave behind the desire for manifestation. We replace all wants for the want for oneness with ourselves. We stop wanting to heal because it no longer feels good to think that something about ourselves is broken. Instead, we begin to crave integration. The spiritual apex we begin to pursue is authenticity.
Authenticity is an idea that appeals to us when we begin to live in the present moment. We fall in love with what is. We realize that the reason we have wanted what we have wanted is because we are fractured. We are walking around with open wounds that have never healed. The criticizing and ostracizing we experienced has made us want fame. The abandonment has made us want companionship, the conditional nature of the way we were loved, has made us want unconditional love. And we have chased those things and maybe even attained those things externally, but the feelings never changed. And so, we trade the practice of going in the direction of what we want and chasing our positive emotions for the practice of going the opposite direction. And we begin by dropping into our wounds. We spend our time being with those unpleasant emotions and sensations and feelings and memories with a listening and caring ear. We are present with ourselves with absolutely no conditions. We do not want to change the way we feel. We do not want to make the negative sensations and feelings better. We simply give them the attention that we never gave them before, back when we were so busy running from them with numbing drugs and distraction and endless self help techniques. We stop arguing against them. We become present fully with them and by doing so, these aspects integrate into our being. We learn that the reason we suffer so badly from anything, is not because of the thing itself, but because of our resistance to it. We learn that when we no longer resist any aspect of our being, when we let ourselves fully feel our feelings and fully think our thoughts, and thus we let ourselves fully be ourselves in this very moment. As a result, we become whole. If we resist any part of our experience, we are not whole. We become whole and complete in this moment and the whole of the universe joins us in this moment. The illusion of separation is torn down. This is the real reason that the Buddha experienced what he did beneath the Bodhi tree. He stopped resisting himself completely. He did not try to change anything about the experience. He did not try to feel better. Instead, he was fully present with himself.
This path is not for the faint of heart. This path is the path of feeling what you never let yourself feel. And this path is for the brave, because this path cannot be walked for you. You must walk into the storm of your own being for yourself. This is the art of allowing 2.0. The answer you have been looking for will be revealed to you like this: Stop trying to feel better or trying to get what you think you want. Do nothing to change your thoughts. Do nothing to change the way you feel. Instead, when you think a negative thought, let your focus rest up that thought. Watch that thought roll into another similar thought and another. Bring the presence of your being there with it. Be with that thought without trying to manipulate it in any way. When you feel an unpleasant or even excruciating feeling, whether that feeling be physical or emotional, while breathing continuously with no unnecessary pauses between the in breath and the outbreath, drop into that feeling and be with that feeling completely. Do not run away from it. Do not try to change it. Do nothing to make yourself feel better. Instead, be with that feeling completely. Explore it. Breathe this feeling into your being. It is in and of you. It is your current truth. Be with yourself exactly how you are with no conditions. It’s what you’ve been asking for from others all of your life. The day you betrayed yourself completely, was the day that you decided you would only be with yourself based on the condition that you felt good. So you have been trying to feel good all your life, so you could be with yourself and feel whole again, without realizing that you could just decide to be with yourself here and now, regardless of how you feel. You do not need to go looking for insight so you can understand the way you feel. You do not need to go looking for wisdom so you can understand life itself or the universe at large. Insight and wisdom is the automatic byproduct of being fully present with ourselves. Feel free to ask questions of yourself, and allow your being to offer you the answer without you mentally searching for it. The capacity to understand is all too often, the byproduct of resistance to the confusion that we feel. When you stop running from yourself, (which is what you never knew that you were doing), you will see things as they really are.
We have not been willing to feel life. In fact, we use the present moment to try to distract us from the way we feel! We try to focus on our physical surroundings right here and now, to distract us from the fact that we feel badly. This is a trapping of the ego. It is an escape from presence disguised as presence. True presence, is a presence that embraces the fire and thus, cannot be burnt by flame.
These thoughts and emotions, like dying children, are begging to be mothered and fathered. They are begging to be heard and sat with. They, like you as a child, do not want to hear that they shouldn’t be the way they are. They don’t want to be changed. They want to be given permission to be the way they are. They want to be loved exactly as they are. And we love them by being willing to think and feel them. This is the key to finding the answer you have been looking for.

Resensitization

People don’t know any better than what they do. They follow in the footsteps of what did not work for their parents, because no one knows what else to do. And then comes the “hundredth monkey”; the one that changes the game for everyone, the one that spreads a new idea. For thousands of years, we have all had one reaction to things that cause a negative feeling reaction in us… We have tried to desensitize ourselves to it and we have done anything we could to feel better about it. We have tried to lessen the impact of those feelings by getting ourselves to feel differently about it. We have made a practice of escaping our feelings. As a result, we infuse our children with the idea that “feeling negative emotion is not ok”. This is why we call it feeling bad. We believe as a society that feeling anything other than positive emotion is not ok. I was two years old the first time I came across a deer carcass strewn across the side of the road. I remember every last detail down to the sickly sweet smell of death on it. I remember vividly the sinking, constricted, powerless feel of tragedy as the feeling signature of that sight impacted my body. I remember the feeling of horror. My father’s response in a sad sounding tone of voice was “don’t cross the road deer”. I was shocked into a kind of buzzing numbness at the response and at the sight of people driving by as if nothing was out of place. I was shocked into the realization that I was “supposed to” feel like this was all in perfect order. This was “supposed to” feel normal and I was perhaps even supposed to understand that this was a fair consequence for having crossed the road. My mother, being a highly empathic person who also could not cope with the insensible cruelty did what all caring mothers do and attempted to explain the scene to me in a way that would make me feel better. She tried to help me “make it ok” so that I did not feel so bad about it. She explained that the deer’s spirit was not there anymore and that the deer’s body will feed other things so that the energy is recycled. Today I find that this event at two years old has become an imprint within me… as all suppressed emotion does. That same feeling signature of tragedy and horror has played itself out across my lifetime begging for integration. Now, I attract road kill everywhere I go because ever since two years old, I have been trying to not feel the feeling I encountered that day.
It is very dangerous to propagate the idea that it is not ok to feel negative emotion. I’ll use myself as an example of why. The day my parents tried to help me feel better about the deer carcass instead of allow themselves to (and encourage me to) feel the full impact of it (as if that feeling was correct and valid), a harmful belief was born within me. And the belief was this: “If this is supposed to feel ok and if this is normal, when what I actually feel is that this is so not ok, that means there must be something seriously wrong with me and I am not equipped for the brutality of this world.” The whole world felt like a horror film to me in that moment. I started back pedaling from life itself. Think about this for a minute, we all do this to our children! Even I have tried to “make it ok” for my son when he has felt badly because I cannot stand to feel the way that I feel when I see him upset. I have been manipulating him into feeling better so I can escape the negative emotion that arises within me when I see him upset. We invalidate and desensitize our children when we try to make them feel better instead of helping them to feel like it is valid and ok to feel exactly how they feel. We do an immense disservice when we teach them by doing this to resist their own negative emotions. Anything we resist persists, and so we trap our children in their negative emotions when we try to help them avoid negative emotion by showing them how to run in the direction of positive emotion. We need to validate (mirror) their feelings and allow them to befriend the way they feel entirely before any action is taken to improve a situation or the way they feel.
This is why we live in a desensitized world. This is why we have created a society full of people that are so out of touch with the way they feel that they are capable of killing each other. To survive in today’s world and really feel everything, takes immense bravery. If we really let ourselves feel, this entire world would be different. It could not stay the way it is. To survive in today’s world the way it is, one practically needs to “shut down” their feelings. And so we do. We numb our feelings out with prescription drugs. We try to change our feelings with endless self-help techniques. We try not to feel our feelings by indulging in our porn addictions and liposuction surgeries and televisions. We are running from our authenticity. We are trying to not feel life.
No one really feels equipped to live in this world. This is the secret we are all keeping from each other. We are under the impression that we have to desensitize ourselves to live in this world. We have to make ourselves feel like things are ok that don’t actually feel ok. We are anything but authentic. We are afraid to feel. We are afraid of what will happen when we let ourselves feel exactly how we feel with no conditions. What we find when we allow ourselves to feel how we feel is that our feelings are valid. What we find is that nothing is wrong with us. A deer carcass on the side of the road is tragic and it is completely appropriate to feel horrified. Just because something is commonplace, does not make it “fine”. It is easy to allow our positive emotions. The real art of allowing is the art of allowing our negative emotions.
In the west, Uinta ground squirrels are considered crop and lawn pests. They are poisoned and shot with shotguns and ripped apart by farm dogs. We have been raised with the idea that this is normal and therefore should feel ok. But it does not. I am watching them graze and dig and roll in the dirt and enjoy the morning sunlight and affectionately rub up against one another. These are sentient beings. These are infinite creators just like you and me. Their birthright is to be allowed to carve out their lives here on earth in accordance with their value to the universe. Humans need to learn that humans are not the only species with value. Humans need to learn that humans have no more value than the weeds they pull out of their front yards.
We have made the look of manicured lawns more important than the entire lives of other sentient beings. I find it painful to see the hypocrisy in people. We lock the sociopath away for the rest of his life in a state of punishment for not feeling any connection with or empathy for his fellow human beings. When this is how the natural world and many extraterrestrial species see us. We breed animals and imprison them in pens specifically to kill and eat them. We decide what plants are worthy of life and which one’s aren’t. We call them weeds and we rip them up by the root. We see a spider and we step on it. We see a bee and we swat it to death with our fly swatters. Never mind the fact that the bee is responsible for the food on our dinner plate. We use animals of all shapes and sizes to test our cosmetics and pharmaceuticals on before we wear and take them. We drain the blood of the earth to power our cars. We are entertained by films and video games in which we steal from and injure and kill each other. And to live in today’s current society, there seems to be no way to escape participating in this sociopathic escapade. We participate whether first hand or second hand. All of us, including me are part of this horror. And these children who shoot their fellow students in their schools are not freak anomalies. They are symptoms of society’s greater illness; they are created by us all. They are byproducts of suppression and desensitization.
Our world will not change and people will not begin thriving until we are willing to re-sensitize ourselves. We must start with ourselves. We need to be willing to feel life and make adjustments to society as a result of really feeling it. It is painful to feel this world in its current state. But it is more painful to spend your life running from feeling the state of the world. To do so, is to run from and abandon yourself. You will find that suffering is not the result of feeling pain; it is the result of resisting feeling pain. The world will remain as brutal as our level of desensitization to its brutality.

School Shootings

I am asked often to share my opinion about mass shootings directed at peer groups. I want to begin by saying that there are victims on both sides of the gun. This is always the story without exception. We must cultivate understanding for the internal hell that causes such a person to behave in such a way. Without this understanding, we cannot alter the causation of such events; we will simply go on tinkering with effects. Without proper understanding of causation, we will simply increase our gun laws and can crack down on threats. This will change nothing. The real change must happen at a much deeper level. The way we raise our children must change and the world we are bringing them into must change. These “mass shooters” have specific elements in common. They are intellectual outcasts. They are involved in violent media (like movies or cartoons or video games) as a way to both escape and express the suppressed rage that is covering their deeply suppressed grief at being rejected. The question is, rejected by whom?
These shooters will often explain who they want to kill and why. But they are doing so from a place within them that is unconscious of who they really want to kill and why. The target of their rage is in fact only a reflection of a deeper wound within them, their relationship with their primary caregivers. Our relationship with “people” and with “the world” is nothing more than a reflection of our relationship with our primary caregivers. All of us are children who never grew up. We are all un-integrated children. These mass shooters are in fact reacting against the pain of the rejection they felt from one or more of their primary caregivers. They did not get the affection or attention they needed. Because of this, they lack two of the most primary human needs, loving connection and significance. This painful emotion within them was invalidated and they could do nothing about it and so it was covered over with rage and it was suppressed. They spent the rest of their lives (especially from the onset of external orientation at puberty) trying to gain approval from other people. The mind does this to try to gain closure and resolution for the old wound. The subconscious motivation goes something like this: “If I can get a girl to love me then mom loves me. If I can be significant to a girl, I am significant to mom”, If I can get a girl to pay attention to me than mom pays attention to me etc.” But the buried emotional pain is what needs healing. That pain needs to be allowed and fully felt, like it wasn’t when they were a child.
And so, the universe continues to match the vibration of the pain in hopes that they will one day integrate it. In their reality, this takes the shape of continuing to be cast out by the peer group. They copes the same way they coped as a child. They indulges in the “cover emotion” of rage and revenge. They become preoccupied with violent video games and movies and fantasies because we all know it feels a lot better than the time stopping grief of rejection. Each time they engage in this cycle of suppressing the pain and grief, the pain and grief gets bigger and louder and they get rejected a little bit more until they find themselves at a crossroads of no return. They have only one option, to reject what rejected them. The “void” look you see in the eyes of these mass shooters is the look of realization that they will never get the loving connection they need. Their connection with love is severed. Their connection with the human race is therefore severed. Because love is the closest vibration to source energy itself (otherwise known as the soul), when they reach that point where they give up the search for affection and submit to their disconnection with love, they now hold a vibration that is so vibrationally different than source itself, they appear soul-less. Instead of the presence of source consciousness that we are used to seeing in the eyes, we see void. Because one cannot remain disconnected like this from their own soul and remain alive, they now become a match to death themselves. But they still need significance. And it occurs to them that the way to get this significance (if they can’t get it through being loved) is through being feared. The best way to become significant to someone if you can’t become the object of their affection is to take their life. The best way to become significant to the world if the world wont love you is to make the world fear you. The ego (identity is being threatened and so it becomes preoccupied with the feeling of superiority that occurs when you are capable of controlling a person and the world to such a degree. The ego (identity) is sick and tired of how insignificant and inferior it feels because of the painful relationship (or lack thereof) with it’s primary caregiver(s). Because the ego (identity) sees the world vertically, it sees only inferior and superior. It seeks to escape inferiority by becoming superior and having power over others. The rage that is the result of this suppressed pain mixed with the loss of hope for love mixed with the drive for significance (to be noticed) mixed with the relief that is felt when one seeks revenge, mixed with that relief being provided by violent media, leads to a definitive decision… To kill the reflection of that suppressed pain. In most cases, an offending peer group. By doing so, they are in fact killing their primary caregiver and/or anyone else in their family that got the attention that they did not get. And in fact, some mass shooters do kill the parent that they felt rejected by as a part of their killing spree, though they are not consciously aware of why. These events are not isolated. They are happening more and more often. These events are not even surprising. In a society like the one we have today, our collective suppression of awareness will result in outbursts like this. Consider these incidents eruptions at the weakest point. And until we understand human emotion fully, we will still be telling the lie that some people are just born this way. The question we should all be asking is, how do we structure our society so that all children have access to their primary emotional needs, especially love, connection and significance regardless of what their parents do or don’t do?

Parenting 2.0

Your child is the progression of your consciousness. A child’s consciousness comes into life as the culmination of the consciousness accrued at that time of both its mother and father. This is one way that consciousness expands in our universe. The purpose of children is not just the expansion of universal consciousness; it is also the expansion of our consciousness as parents. We are prevented from expanding when we are emotionally stuck in our own childhood. All adults still have an inner child. If we have not re-parented our inner child yet, we are at the mercy of our childhood needs and impulses. Our emotional selves never grow up. Our emotional selves are always children, so the leaders of our world are essentially angry, fearful 5 year olds with nuclear weapons. A child gives us an opportunity to externally parent our own inner child. Our children will reflect us specifically so that we can heal ourselves. Except instead of heal ourselves (because that implies something is wrong), let’s say integrate ourselves. Having a child give us the opportunity to parent the child within ourselves externally through our child. Love becomes distorted if we do not address out own pain. For this reason, we need to be willing to address our own childhood wounds. We need to be willing to “integrate our emotional body” in order to ask ourselves the question “what did I need from my parents that I did not get?” It is easy then to see the mistakes that we are making with our own child. It is easy then to see how to parent instead. If you parent in the same way that your parents parented you (which is the way you’ll parent unless you become more conscious) there is no progression of consciousness. It is in fact a state of ended-ness.
The number one most important thing we will ever do for our children is to dive into our own emotional pain, integrate our own un-integrated inner child; and parent that child in a more loving way. If we do not, we will pass those wounds on to our children. We pass the baton from generation to generation until someone decides to use the presence of their consciousness to become aware of themselves and integrate the inter-generational trauma. Pass only the baton you want to pass to your children! If you are not brave enough to sink into your pain and move through it and become conscious of it, you will not see how much trauma was caused by your parent’s treatment of you and so you will treat your child the same way. You will default to raising your child the exact same way that your parents raised you. This means, you have passed on the wound. Wouldn’t you rather say “the buck stops here” and be the one to deal with intergenerational wounding then to hope your child figures out how to do it? We project our own wounds onto our children and externalize our pain this way, making it about what is wrong with the child instead of recognizing our own projection. Fiddling with and trying to “fix” the child is like trying to fiddle with the reflection in a mirror, it changes nothing because it never addresses the cause of that projected image. It never addresses the source of the reflection, which is you. I demonstrate a process to use in order to do this in my YouTube video titled “Healing the Emotional Body”. If I had my way, all parents would incorporate this process into their daily routine. The truth is, when you shift, your child will shift. This is why I do not do work with children. If a child has a problem, I work with their parents. I understand how hard it is to hear what I have just said; it makes you feel immediately defensive. But think about this for a minute, if you blame your child for your child’s behavior or problem, what kind of an environment do you think they are growing up in from their perspective? What kind of self-image is this growing within them? If you have an issue with your child, it is nothing but a mirror of what is unhealed within you. If the parent shifts, the child shifts immediately. There are no exceptions to this rule. When we are approaching parenting from the angle of “parenting our own inner child, if your child is upset, it is easy then to ask yourself “what did I want from my parents in this same scenario when I was a child? I’m going to give you a hint though. As a child, you did not really want anything other than unconditional love. You did not want to have your parents become obsessed with trying to make things better or different, you wanted them to be with you unconditionally no matter how you felt. This brings us to the next important part of parenting, which is (as far as I am concerned), the pillar upon which parenting stands. Validate emotions. One of the worst things you can do to your child is invalidate their emotions. This is sad of course because it is a super common behavior amongst parents. A lot of it stems from the rather selfish fact that we cannot stand to see our children upset and so we try to do everything to make them not upset. We do this not because of love and consideration for them, but because of a drive for self-preservation. We do it because we don’t want to feel upset when we see them upset. Just like we need to be fully present with ourselves no matter how we feel, we need to be present with our children no matter how they feel. Here’s a common scenario. A child experiences negative emotion because his parents decide he cannot have something at the store. The child is crying, mom or dad gets angry and then proceeds to repeat “no” or start arguing with the way the child feels by saying things like “stop that crying right now, there’s no reason to do that. Money doesn’t grow on trees you know. We already got the pop sickles you wanted” etc. In this scenario, the child is being taught that how they feel is wrong. The child is being forced to suppress the feeling they are feeling. The child is not allowed to experience and move through the feeling and so the feeling is stuck in them. That feeling will now become an imprint in the child’s emotional body, which will mirror out into his adult life as situations that make him feel guilty or situations that make him feel poor. The parent has in that seemingly small moment set up the child’s future in a negative way.
Every emotion a child has, no matter how extreme it may be, is appropriate. Even though an action taken as a result of an emotion may not be a healthy way of expressing that emotion, an emotion is always valid. If you have just come from a perspective of unconditional love and unlimited abundance, coming into a world where love is conditional and abundance seems limited, is like being locked in solitary confinement. An extreme reaction is appropriate. It will never work to impose your adult perspective (with all of your years of experience and all of your years of suppressing your own emotion) on your children. You will not be able to get them to see things your way. The point is not to alter your child. The point is to be there with them for their experience unconditionally. Unconditionally means no matter if they feel good or bad. In the previous child in the store scenario, the thing to do would be to kneel down at their level and express genuine empathy. By saying something like “I know lovey, it’s ok to feel really upset. I feel that same exact way when I want something that I don’t feel like I can have.” And then you can encourage the child to express to you verbally how they feel or where they feel that feeling in their body. By doing this, you allow them to have feelings and not suppress them. You allow them to move through that feeling. You cause them to know that no matter what, you will be there with them and for them through everything. They are not alone. You are raising an emotionally intelligent child instead of disfiguring their emotional capacity. Notice we did not rush to make the emotion better by giving the child what the child was asking for? We didn’t try to rescue them from their emotions, thus causing them to believe that negative emotions are bad or wrong or to be avoided. We didn’t immediately buy the child what they wanted and give in. The child did not become a dictator of the household who everyone is now a slave to. Instead, the child was treated as an equal member of the household. In this exact scenario, It may be good to explain to the child while you are on one knee that “mommy doesn’t have the best abundance mentality and mommy also isn’t the only source of your abundance.” Depending on the child’s age, this may even be the perfect time to explain manifestation. Your children are not served by thinking that you are perfect. Allow them to be aware of your “imperfections”. If you don’t know the answer to something, demonstrate asking someone else for the answer or meditating in order to ask the universe for the answer or say “I don’t know but maybe you’ll find out one day”. Instead of following ego down the path of needing to be a god to your children, empower them to be the progression of you.
All emotions should be understood and validated. We are not validating that the child’s belief is right. We are validating what they feel. We are mirroring it. The concept of mirroring emotions can be seen in this scenario. A child falls down and is crying and instead of whisking the pan away, we say “Oh I bet that felt really scary didn’t it? I know I used to feel really scared when I fell down when I was your age” We just mirrored how they felt. By doing this, the child is not fighting against their negative emotion and as a result, the emotion blows over quickly. All to often, children are shamed for the way they feel and the way they act because of how they feel. This leads me to the next point. Do not shame your child. Shaming is emotional abuse period the end. You can’t argue otherwise. And children will only respect and love those who respect and love them. Shaming creates humiliation and it makes the parent the enemy. The child cannot learn if they are shamed. Shaming is as good as pouring acid on a child’s self-concept. Children are more than capable of learning from their own actions. I am constantly explaining to parents the value of letting kids make mistakes. As parents, we have to deal with lots of criticism for this and also flack from teachers. But we want to raise children who feel free and loved and who are responsible for themselves, not children who are just parts of our societal machine that do things purely to avoid conflict with authority figures. This means for example that if your child does not go to sleep on time after being informed of the potential consequence (feeling too tired the next day at school), let them find out for themselves. Let them experience the consequence, without ever saying “I told you so” and they will eventually decide to go to bed on time themselves. Shame is worse than guilt. Guilt is believing that one has done bad whereas shame is believing that one is bad. Those of us who are conscious of what our own childhood did to us are well aware of just how damaging that belief can be when it is carried on to adulthood. We think a parent can only traumatize their child if they are hitting them or neglecting them etc. This is not the case. In fact much more damage can happen on an emotional level as a result of things we have become acclimated to, things that that we call “normal parenting behavior”. Shaming is one of them. I’m going to make a bold statement, having myself been the victim of a multitude of different abuses. Seeing the damage to my adult life that was caused by abuse in childhood, by far the worst kind of abuse that a person can suffer is emotional abuse. emotional abuse, including shaming, is worse than physical abuse and it is worse than sexual abuse. And it is a tragedy that we have created a society that has accepted the practice of the worst form of abuse, while widely condemning all other forms of abuse. If the emotional aspect of yourself is wounded and if your self-concept is corroded, all other aspects of your life are a living hell. These behaviors that we think are “normal” and that we are in fact desensitized to, cause trauma in the child’s being and result in a dysfunctional adult who cannot thrive. I love this term “failure to thrive” that they use when dealing with children of abuse and neglect. There are a great many people who fail to thrive that are “functioning” members of society. But what does it mean to thrive? I can tell you it means a lot more than just surviving into adulthood.
The more you integrate your own childhood, the more you will see just how damaging the so called ‘normal good parenting’ of our time is and just how many long term negative effects have to do with this popularly accepted style of parenting. We need to question everything we have come to believe about parenting and how a parent should and shouldn’t be with their child. It is frightening just how much we parent on autopilot. We become acclimated to the status quo and we adopt the beliefs of other parents (especially our own) about the right and wrong way to raise children. But conscious parenting is about waking up. Conscious parenting is about being aware enough of ourselves and of our children that we can change the status quo and facilitate both expansion and progression in this world.

You Don't Fear The Unknown

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