How To Let Go Of Being Wronged – Finally

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People sometimes ask me, “What is the deepest, most important healing that must occur for me to break through my blocks?”  For the serious seeker, one of the most powerful places to go in your healing is where you still hold resentment towards those who did you wrong.

I’m not talking about recent events but the most highly-charged incident in your earliest memory about being wronged.  This is not a place that most people would deliberately choose to go unless it becomes utterly clear to them that certain patterns that bring unhappiness and that keep unfolding in their lives have something to do with the hurts they still carry from this event.

Whether or not you have come to a point in your life where you’re experiencing this awareness, you can clear a great deal of toxicity that holds you back from the different areas of your life by visiting that place where you first encountered being betrayed, unfairly accused, shamed, humiliated, bullied, coerced or deprived.

Life has a way of bringing you circumstances where you have an opportunity to heal those hurts from your past.  If you aren’t aware of it as an opportunity, it may seem to you that life keeps punishing you by giving you the same emotional experiences.  Just as you come out of one disempowering circumstance, you find yourself in another one, and then another.  You may feel frustrated and scream inside your head, “What am I missing?  What’s the lesson I’m supposed to learn from all this?”

If you relate to this, it may be time to work on finally letting go of a your resentment about being wronged.  Here are the steps:

1.  Go to the Scene of the Crime.

It may take a fair amount of courage for you to mentally visit the scene that took place early in your life.  If you know in your heart that healing is needed from that place, trying to blur the truth is just going to remove power from you.  You can only run so far before it catches up with you, and in the course of your running away you may lose even more power by succumbing to numbing-out tactics that end up hurting you even more.

Removing the veil so you can see clearly what needs to be dealt with brings your power back to you.  Who is the person or persons whom you perceive to have wronged you?  What did they do to you that you feel is wrong?  How has what they did costed you?  Acknowledge your true feelings and beliefs about your experience with these individuals.

2.  Make a Surprising Change.

You started off as a victim and now you will emerge as a hero.

Usually, we choose to remain a victim long after the incident is over – replaying over and over again the story of injustice in our heads, unable to let go of the last traces of our resentment and the unfairness about being a victim.  We protest, “But I didn’t do anything wrong to provoke it.”  No, you didn’t, but now you have a chance to respond to it in a different way that will heal the whole experience for you.  The only healing that needs to happen is in yourself.

If you insist on seeing justice done to those people before you can heal, you may never free yourself from the one thing that causes you to recreate unpleasant situations in your life.

If you’re having half-fantasies at the back of your mind about someone coming into some kind of misfortune because they deserve it, you are building up bitterness inside you.  Even as you relish in the glee of imagining someone “getting their due”, sending nasty thoughts about someone leaves a toxic feeling inside you which will make you unhappy in the long run.  This tit-for-tat approach traps you in a cycle of unforgiveness – where you are doing the same thing (even if only in your mind) as what you see the other person to have done to you and for which you can’t forgive, and as such at a core level you’re unable to forgive yourself.

3.  See Through the Behaviours.

I believe that harsh, exaggerated behaviours come out of fear and inadequacy.  Meaning, the person who did you wrong had only acted that way because they felt afraid or inadequate in some way – just as those who act in violence often do so because they have a hatred towards themselves.  This step requires you to see through to that person’s fear and inadequacy, and have compassion for where they were at.

At this point, your mind may protest, “So what?  I don’t care what she went through, she shouldn’t have treated me that way.”

Chances are that person did not set out to deliberately harm you.  Maybe you were her chosen victim, or scapegoat, but at the end of the day, it wasn’t personal.  What I mean is that even if you were the person chosen to be on the receiving end of the unfair treatment, there was something bigger that drove her to act out the way she did.  De-personalising it this way can help you to gather a sense of compassion that will help you to free yourself eventually.

Where we get stuck is by continually focusing on the unfairness of why we were chosen as the victim of such treatment.  I invite you to let go of your investment into this focus.  The fact is that you were the chosen victim or scapegoat.  Get over it.  By taking a step out of it, you can begin to move towards freedom and peace.  There’s a gift in it for you; finding that gift is what will set you free, so it is your choice to remain stuck or be freed from it.

4.  Do the Unthinkable.

There are some resources that ask, if you could go back in time what you would do to change the events in a particular incident.  Usually, they prescribe a way of lashing out at the perpetrator, so that you turn your victimhood into empowerment.  For instance, if you passively allowed yourself to be bullied, you are encouraged to imagine getting angry and fighting back.  Whilst this can give you an immediate sense of gaining control of the situation and being less victimised, it isn’t true empowerment since you are still responding from a place of false power.

I believe that a higher kind of healing can take place when we transcend our anger and desire for vengeance, and do what is unthinkable to our mind.

Remember I said the person’s actions had got to have come out of fear and inadequacy.  That person was not connected to his heart when he did what he did.  Fear does that to you.  If, in that moment, somehow, love was given to him in a way that they were able to receive the full vibration of it, he would melt back into his heart and the behaviour would stop in that instant.  The events in the incident would change and your pain of suffering from the injustice can heal.

So imagine you are back in the scene of the crime.  Now instead of seeing yourself as a victim, imagine you are a higher being whose heart is totally awakened.  As they start to do what they were going to do, see them melting into their hearts as your light touches them.  Perhaps a light touch on someone’s arm, or a few sincere, calm words that speak the truth to the person and open his heart – you see whoever is around you dropping into their heart space, returning to their innocence where they operate from love and radiant joy.  In the absence of fear, of their inadequacy, there is no need for them to treat you the way they had; the drive just isn’t there.  See all of them becoming higher beings themselves – conntected to their hearts, their innocence.

At the end of the day, this is the healing we all need: to return to this awakened heart space and back to our innoncence where hatred, jealousy has no place in it.  Your compassion, to see through someone’s illusions of fear, inadequacy and hatred, is what heals you ultimately.  You heal yourself by freeing them from their roles as abusers and thereby your role as victim.  There is no abuser or victim anymore.  You are free to be who you truly are with your full powers intact, poised to create another life that truly honours you.

The Day When Suffering Stopped

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I was in a session with a client at my centre the other day when I witnessed the precise moment when suffering ended.  It was breathtaking.  In that moment, I saw the endless grasping –  the controlling, fixing, righting what’s not right, perfecting what’s imperfect, knowing what’s not known, searching for answers – STOP.

In my work as an addiction therapist, my job is to lead people to the edge of the door beyond which lies their heart waiting to awaken, and guide them to travel through that door and emerge the other side as their authentic self.

For most people, recovery from addiction is a long journey, since the addictive behaviour is the outermost expression of many layers of imbalance and conventional treatment for addictions tend to focus on the most apparent symptoms first.  As a result, people can spend years in therapy and never really get to the deepest source of their imbalance.  Some might manage to stay on track for years, slowly working off the drive towards addiction as they re-educate themselves to a new way of coping with life – yet never really doing the deep healing that would set them free and tolerating a life of being an addict.  For some luckier ones, they might reach a stage at some point when the latent drive towards addictions eases off.

What drives addictive behaviours is a deep feeling of not having enough of something or other.  This feeling can come from unresolved emotions, unhealed traumas and losses, giving rise to a state of unwholeness in the pit of an individual.  In our attempt to cope with this feeling, we reach out to all kinds of things to make us feel better.  When we do this excessively and we’re unable to stop, we’re said to be addicted.

Almost everybody suffers from this unwholeness.  Almost everybody is addicted to something.  Addiction is not confined to drug and alcohol taking; just in the dimension of computers and internet alone, you can be addicted to checking emails, Skyping, Facebook, playing Free Cell, etc.

Addiction is a behaviour that is acted out excessively and you feel as though you can’t stop that behaviour.  You can also be addicted to being in pain and anxiety – where your thoughts are continually generating those states of being.  The thoughts which you have trained yourself to run in a repeated loop are what you can’t stop, trapping you in pain and anxiety.

Therefore, addiction and suffering are synonymous.  Suffering is when you try to get out of something or towards something, and feeling as though you can’t change the situation.

Like many people, my client had spent most of his life being in suffering.  A painful past and an addiction to feeling bad were the sources of his long-term suffering.  He had undergone treatment for addictions a number of times throughout his life but the deepest source of his discomfort within himself was still plaguing him.

Through our guidance, he had gone to the deepest, darkest places which he’d been too scared to go in the past.  Armed with admirable courage and complete trust in our guidance, he had forayed into the depths and reclaimed parts of himself by stretching the capacity of his heart to love and forgive those who’d wronged him.

The power that came back to him was so palpable that it imbued the room with an electrifying presence.  As the sense of separation dissolved, replaced by a merging with the light that was revealed to him beneath the human dramas, he said:

“I am full, filled with the most incredible energy…. and it is all mine, it comes from me.”

This, to me, is the heart of addiction work.  That emptiness, hollowness, void, deep loneliness or whatever it is called, must be filled from within in order for addiction to stop.  Otherwise, the drug is only going to be replaced by another drug.  Maybe it’s alcohol, pills, relationships, exercising, Tweeting or anything that seems to be a lesser evil but is nonetheless a drug in disguise.

It is not so much that the addiction is bad for you.  It is that the gem it can point you to lays forever buried.  Like a pebble in your shoe it pokes at you to get your attention but you spend the rest of your life trying to ignore it, yet putting up with the discomfort.  If you stopped walking and examined the pebble you might find out what wondrous gifts it contains.

How to End Suffering

Stop running from your pain.

You can’t stop your suffering while you continue to run from your pain.  When it feels counter-intuitive to stop, take a deep breath and make an about-turn and face your pain.  Stay there, face-to-face with it, for just a few more moments.  Resist the urge to run away.  Feel the power, disguised as fear.  Stretch your capacity to remain there.  You’re there… and you’re still there…

Let the truth of what you’re facing cleanse you.  For the longest time, you’ve probably been covering it up with a number of defensive behaviours which have manufactured a false self.  You’ve probably been secretly yearning to return to your authentic self – freely expressing who you truly are.  With self-honesty, you are on your way to reclaiming yourself.

Change the direction in all levels.    

You can’t stop physically acting out a behaviour for long unless you also change the direction in your emotional, mental and spiritual self.  Just as the first tip above tells you to stop and change direction in your emotional reality, you should also explore what’s keeping you in suffering mode in your mental-cognitive realm – stopping the kind of thinking, self-talk, beliefs and attitude that perpetuate suffering, and adopting new ones.  Equally, look at what you’re doing spiritually; if you’ve been keeping your energy small and self-punitive, reach out and connect to concepts that give you a sense of expansiveness.

Let go of the past.

Do you hold on to your past way too much?  This can provide a great distraction for you and generate a lot of conflict with yourself – such that when you’re moving towards the things that make you happy, you sabotage your own happiness.  You might do this by shutting down emotionally and further confusing yourself – as a kind of blurring-it-up mechanism to avoid facing your problems.  If you aren’t aware of it, you might even seem to be hitting a wall wherever you look and end up having your focus all over the place.

We hold on to the past because we believe we might lose an essential part of us if we cut ties with it.  But letting go of our past does not mean wiping it off our memory.  Whatever painful experiences you’ve gone through have made you who you are today.  It simply means deciding that you no longer want to be governed by the sense of guilt, loss, disappointments and tragedy of the past, and move forward in your life.

Even if you think you’re not choosing it, I invite you to take a deeper exploration to see if there’s a part of you that might need to make a clear decision to let go of what’s been pulling you back from happiness.

Notice what is already good.

In the throes of suffering, you may be focusing only on the bad stuff.  Without dismissing that the bad stuff is there, turn your head around and see what else you notice.  Physically look up and around you, taking your attention away from you for a moment.

Do you notice a certain heaviness at the thought of doing this, or even as you’re doing it?  A kind of sticky web that glues you to your preoccupation with the bad stuff?  This is the energy that traps you in suffering mode.  It also contains a lot of your power which you’ve put into it every time you perpetuate the cycle of addiction/suffering.  When you break out of the cycle, even if temporarily, you break that strand of web and free up a pocket of power.  This pocket of power will return to you as you move forward in a direction of higher vibration.

Maybe you notice a certain colour in a painting that is your favourite shade.  As you focus on it, you notice the same shade jumping out from a few other places and catching your attention.  You may start to feel a sense of richness evoked in you as you admire the shade, and you feel a certain openness in you – as though the world seems a little less bleak now.

As you do this, you still battle with the sticky web that tells you that you haven’t finished with your suffering, that there’s more suffering to be done.  At this point, you can yield to the sticky web or you can push through to move into an increasingly expansive state.  By staying with the opened feeling, you will start to notice other things that can give you more positive feelings.  You may remember that you have people who are loving and supportive in your life, or the opportunities you do have to create happiness.

Give something of yourself.

One of the most powerful ways to turn suffering into empowerment is by turning your attention to someone else.  It doesn’t mean you have to solve someone else’s problem; just by engaging with someone you may gain a different perspective on your own problem and a renewed sense of self – which might turn out to be the very thing that sets you on a different direction towards greater happiness.

No matter how depleted you may think you are, you do have something of yourself to give.  Even a quick phone-call to a friend can stop the cycle of self-beating and put you on a different path.  The sense of fulfilment when you feel as if you’ve contributed to someone else’s happiness can even heal you of the pain that made suffering a prefered choice.

 

Ending your suffering can be easier than you might imagine.  The state of non-suffering can be yours with just a slight shift in your focus.  It doesn’t mean that you will forever be free of difficulties as you go through life.  What it means is that a type of situation that tended to provoke an intense and emotionally charged reaction in you will stop having that kind of effect on you.

If certain people’s behaviours tended to provoke anger or irritation in you, you’ll find that you no longer have such reactions.  If the idea of people laughing at the ideas of your project embarasses you, you stop having the constant feeling of wanting to hide aspects of what you do and find it easy to share it with others.  If someone criticising you would make you feel so bad about yourself that you’d automatically consume a substance to numb you of that pain, you now find that it doesn’t bother you that much and you can cope with it calmly.

At the end of the day, what it means is that you are free.  Free from all these torments that make you feel uneasy within yourself.  Free from the constant need to right an injustice because you can’t bear the deeper feelings inside you which you’re afraid to face when you give up your personal crusade.

Freed from all these low-level struggles, bullshit, pretenses and dramas, you can allow the full force of your highest self to embody you.  Who you are, is not who you think you are… and that is very good news.

Ohmee

Why Law Of Attraction Is So Yesterday

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Ever since the movie ‘The Secret’ came out in 2006, a whole new sector in the global self-help industry has blossomed.  Suddenly, people were finding the message that we can create our own reality an empowering alternative to what they had put up with previously: being stuck, sick, poor and unhappy.  Six years later, after countless of books, audios, videos, programmes and systems being produced to cater to a mass of people hungry for more info, more details, more secrets to master this ‘secret’ – I see two things in terms of where this has taken us in our conscious development.

On one hand, we have seen people deepening into the awareness that there’s more than just visualising getting the money, job, relationship, house, car, vacation.  We’re seeing people moving on from what started as quite a shallow level of approaching the concept of our spiritual powers, to understanding that we cannot force our external reality to change without doing the work to change our internal selves.

For example, by adding the dimension of our emotional states to check where we are internally and doing the work to bring our vibration closer to that which we want to manifest.  By working on the blocks that get in the way of us feeling a certain way internally, we have to examine our stories of injustice, hurt, betrayal and abandonment and heal those issues inside us in order to be able to change our internal state – and then as our external state morphs to mirror it, we’re said to have succeeded in manifesting what we want.

This can be good thing.  As our awareness deepens and we’re able to appreciate beyond face value, our consciousness as a whole can continue to expand further away from the level of struggles in which so many of us are trapped – so that we can finally reclaim our true spiritual powers.

But I also see this whole LOA business as a terrible thing for our growth.  I am all for people wanting to exercise their personal power and take control of how their lives turn out to be.  People are, however, getting it wrong with the law of attraction and unless they wake up to the truth, they will continue to be side-tracked to a false path of empowerment.

I’m going to take a risk and say something bold here.  Practising law of attraction keeps us stunted in our growth.  The way it is generally being practised is limiting.  It keeps us stuck in a limited perception of who we are and the extent of goodness the Universe is capable of showing us.  It prevents us from fully expressing ourselves as the true, magnificent beings we are.

The reason for this is, in the practice of LOA there’s usually an over-emphasis on manifesting a specific outcome.  People are taught to put all their energy into making one specific thing come true.  The problem with this is, the idea of this specific thing which we believe we want, is usually borne out of our limited, egoic selves.  What I mean by that is it comes from a part of us that doesn’t know any better.

This desire which we have – and which drives us to go in search of techniques and tools to manifest it into form – is not a higher desire, or a spiritually inspired desire.  The reason I say this is, a higher, spiritually-inspired desire would not put us in a state of desperation, neediness and obsessiveness – like the one that drives us to go looking for more secrets to ‘The Secret’.  We would be relaxed about it, since we’d have a sense of knowingness that it will come to manifest, and we’re not obsessed about ensuring that it will manifest.  We would recognise it as a divine calling and know that we will be supported to have it.  Actually “to have it” is not quite accurate, because it denotes the same “I must possesss it” energy behind most LOA practices; rather, it’s more accurate to say that “we will be bestowed this thing at the right time”.

LOA is usually practised in such a way that it’s a dynamic of opposing energies.  It’s like we’re trying to force something into being.  We’re taught to summon our will to make it happen, to max-up the intensity of our desire, to keep seeing in our minds the thing we want with all the details of exactly how we want it.  I don’t know how some people can claim to enjoy practising the law of attraction!  Sounds like such hard work and so much of working against what feels natural.

Don’t get me wrong.  I practise manifestation from time to time since I’m very human and have my own fears and desperations.  I’ve even ‘perfected’ my own manifestation ritual incorporating breathwork, movements, energetic alchemy and ceremony, which works very powerfully.  I am merely pointing out the gap that’s found in what seems to be excessive and off-track in the way we’re practising it.

The thing that bothers me most about the LOA practice is how we’re encouraged to want something so badly that we’re not willing to accept not having it.  This is one of the supposed ‘secrets’.  Sure, we’re also taught to add in the phrase “or something better” after stating what we want.  But people don’t mean it!  Their focus is still on the desire; the “something better” is a token addition just in case something goes wrong with your manifestation so you’d better spread your net a little bit wider.  It is still borne out of fear of not getting that thing you want.

Sure, we’re taught to practise “letting go” of the desire to want it after we’ve performed the manifestation ritual.  Again, this almost counters the intense desiring, intending, forcing that happens when we’re “putting it out there”.  Why pretend to let go when in truth we’re obsessed about getting it?  The two opposing steps do not make sense to me.

At this point (if you’re still with me) you may be reacting with the thought, “But I only want this thing!”  I understand that you do not and cannot know anything else that might make you feel more fulfilled and happier.  This is what you’ve got right now and you only have this to go with.  Right?  Not really.  I invite you to consider the possibility that if you can move past this stage of only accepting having this thing which you want, you stand a chance of liberating yourself from what is yet another disempowering paradigm and really stake your claim on your true powers.

A Much More Empowering Paradigm – The True Path to Freedom, Abundance, Joy

The way that most people practice LOA limits their true potential for joy and happiness.  Even if we’re tapping into our spiritual powers to create something into reality, it is still a shallow level of exercising our powers.  We are capable of far more than that, and we deserve to stop limiting ourselves to only such limited options and dive into real joy and happiness.

We are aiming for more of this-and-that when we should be just letting go of it all and dropping into what we already are – which far surpasses what we can gain from manifesting this thing we think we want.  Our true purpose or destination should be to enter into what I call the Realm of Miracles, where true beauty, joy and abundance is found.

The place where we truly want to go, but which we normally don’t realise, is to return to and to live in Wonderment.  I truly believe that this is our final destination.  Bearing witness to the contrast of how things were and how things turn out to be – which fills us with a sense of ecstatic joy, inspired awe, complete marvel at the sheer ingenuity of how a certain situation has turned out to be, or the deeply-moving beauty of a sight before you.  To be surprised, to see now what we didn’t see before, to be presented with a creative solution we never could imagine before.  To feel joyful and happy for no apparent reason, just from being alive, freed from all agendas to gain something or other…. This is the joy we’re really meant to experience on a daily basis.

To get there, we need to transform our default template from one of negativity, harshness, scarcity, sadness, depression to one of joy, beauty, abundance, inspiration.  Where every day of your life – whether you get the things your mind thinks it wants or you don’t – you are fully awake at every moment and able to sense the life in everything around you.  This is the work we ought to be focusing on, not the limited work of aiming to manifest one specific thing outside of us.

You might at this point say, “Well, if you had to go through the financial stresses I have, you wouldn’t be sitting on your high horse and telling me to aim higher for the Realm of Miracles.  Right now, the only miracle I need is some hard cash to pay my bills!”  That is, of course, understandable; our fears make our perception so narrow that we can’t see outside of the problem and it’s natural that we respond in fear/limitation.

But let me tell you.  When I didn’t get the money I was fervently trying to manifest, I’d experienced more joy and happiness.  Not from having a lack of money, but I found a source of joy and happiness somewhere other than money.  This was a real gift to me.  That door to more joy and happiness than I could ever imagine, regardless of whether I have or don’t have money, was closed until I found it and opened it.  I was able to find it by looking somewhere apart from where my mind told me to look.  I don’t mean looking towards something dysfunctional to distract myself.  I actually looked into a place inside of me – the last place one would think to look.  Had I manifested the money, I would’ve gone on with my life without having any reason to look in this place.

I’ve had many such experiences.  When my relationship didn’t happen the way I wanted it to, I learned to connect deeply with myself and healed my deep insecurity.  When a job I wanted didn’t materialise, I reconnected to my original passion when I started doing this type of work and discovered how beautiful my powers are.  So don’t judge yourself as having failed if your LOA ‘fails’ – you have not failed in your spiritual growth.  If I had gotten the money I wanted, the relationship I wanted, and the job I wanted, I might not have had the chance to experience all these unexpected and highly-creative outcomes.

How many times have we heard somebody saying they wouldn’t trade their difficult experience for anything because of what they now know.  They might be talking about having gone through a huge financial crisis that saw their whole world crumble overnight, a terminal disease, five years of imprisonment, a painful breakup…. things the mind could not have fathomed any other way of resolving except to manifest that specific thing directly related to the situation.  Yet they may report afterwards about some great unexpected gain which totally took them by surprise and healed them into more wholeness than ever.

The bonus is that when this happens, your reality will change anyway.  That thing which you want, will come at the right time and maybe not in the way you wanted.  From this viewpoint, I’d say that effortless LOA works, because you’ll always get what you deeply want.  But you may not get what your egoic self wants if it’s not aligned with your deeper desires.  Trying to do techniques to try to make it come true isn’t going to work and if it does it’s not a lot of fun.

Practising ‘deliberate creation’ (another LOA term), the way it is usually being practised, keeps us stuck on a limited perspective of who we are because it reinforces our sense of lack.  I believe the real work we need to do right now, as a collective, is in healing our inner insecurity – to fill up the emptiness, void, lack-of inside us with our spiritual essence so that we’re strongly connected to the divine, and it triggers memory of who we really are and how powerful we are.

Elephant Medicine: Healing My Relationship With The World

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Only three months into the year, and 2012 is already looking to be a widly adventurous and creative year for me.  I am driven by a great enthusiasm to create – inspired by a curiosity to move into unknown territories.  In the material sense, it has translated into me taking up projects that test the boundaries of conventional thoughts/methods – allowing me to explore insights, knowledge, wisdom that may yield more exciting ways for people to experience the world.  It also allows me on a personal level to challenge my own beliefs and expand my perception of life.  All of this coincides with a deepening of my spiritual connection that has significantly raised my awareness in the last couple of months.

One of the projects I’m most excited about is the development of the first “elephant-assisted therapy” in the world for addictions.  For several years, I have felt a calling to connect more with animals and work with shamanism – both in my personal life and in my work.  So when I came upon this project, I had an inspiration to help develop it further, in a no-question, no-doubt-about-it, moment.  I was filled with an instinctual knowledge, a deep knowing, of what this modality could do for people recovering from trauma and addictions.

I sat with this knowledge and inspiration for six weeks – eager to connect it to an actual experience.  I was excited to see what would unfold when inspired knowledge and physical experience came together.  To my frustration, week after week, my planned outing with the elephants got cancelled.  I now understand that sitting with my instinctual knowledge was an important part of the process.  The wisdom had to come from that direction first, to be confirmed and expanded through an actual experience, at the right time.

Two days ago, I found myself in the elephant conservation centre where I was introduced to the animal that was to be my ‘healing partner’.  Jum-Pui is a 41 year-old male elephant with the longest tusks in the sanctuary.  What I had signed up for was a day of training with the animal’s mahout and learning to interact with it.

Part 1: Entering into a Strange World

I approached Jum-Pui with some trepidation.  The first thing that struck me was not only the size of the animal, but his impressive white tusks that curved upwards at the ends made him look more like a mammoth than an elephant.  That, and amidst the wide space it was walking through, lent the whole vision before me a surreal quality – as though I’d been beamed into a forest of millions of years ago.  By then, I’d been given the safety rules and taught a list of commands which the elephant could respond to.  But at that point, they were only mental concepts and I wondered clumsily how many mistakes I’d have to make.

How many times had I found myself with that same feeling – in a crowded shopping centre, a social event I didn’t want to go to, being forced to leave the comfort of my isolation cave?  I remembered the brutal contrast between being in my safety zone and being exposed in a world that didn’t seem to offer any safety railings to hold on to.  A world I didn’t care to know…

Part 2: The Habit of Conjuring Up Distress

As much as I looked forward to the process of getting to know and bond with Jum-Pui, it seemed a long way away.  I was nervous at the prospect of having to climb on top of the mammoth-like beast and riding it without one of those seats secured on an elephant’s back.

Rather unelegantly, I managed to climb up to his back, at the tallest point just behind his ears.  It was only then that I remembered my fear of heights.  I had trouble bringing myself to sit upright.  After a few moments of being frightened to death, I reminded myself that it was too late to back out; this wasn’t just a recreational ride, I had a mission to accomplish and a commitment to fulfill.  With that, I forced myself to sit up.  It felt wobbly; I didn’t feel safe.  There was nothing to hold on to apart from a few bristles on his head.

Then the animal moved, slowly and to a short distance to drink.  I was close to panic.  Certain that I wasn’t safe on top of the elephant without any contraption or harness, I began to imagine falling off the animal.  I imagined having my legs broken and my head cracked open.  I imagined a whole production out of it – the dramas that would ensue, each scene that played itself out in my mind progressively more chaotic and intense.

Suddenly, I had an awareness of how my mind would often go into fearful scenarios.  My tendency to create distress in situations and expecting bad things to happen was being played out in an exaggerated way for me to see.  In that moment, I decided to counteract that pattern.

I scaled down the level of catastrophy in my mind.  I expanded my fear into exhiliration.  I got myself to act as if I believed I was safe.  I relaxed my body a bit and trusted a little more.  I breathed calmly.  My fear lessened.  But I still felt rather vulnerable, exposed and insecure.

Part 3: A Desperate Need to Control

Then the animal started to walk across the open space, and I was thrown into a frightful state again.  Guided by the mahout, I tested out some of the commands I’d been taught.  Go forward, turn left, right, lay down, stop, move backwards, etc.  But my commands did not seem to work immediately.  I wanted to manoever him the way I could make a car move: instantly.  Jum-Pui was very good at responding to commands but there was a period of delay between my command and his response.  That delay would fill me with a feeling of being out of control.

I wanted instant result.  I wanted to feel like I had full control of the situation.  I wanted to close the gap and eradicate any feeling of not-knowing.

After some time, I began to get used to the rhythm of command-and-response.  Instead of expecting instant result, I allowed more time for him to respond.  It highlighted to me another pattern I’m familiar with: the desperation to seek control in situations that make us feel insecure.  In trying to regain a sense of control, we may act out in ways that can lead to bigger problems, such as addictions or destructive behaviours.

Behind addictive and destructive behaviours, there’s usually a lack of tolerance for discomfort.  Part of the process of recovery is building our tolerance for discomfort by examining how we might have exaggerated the intensity of the discomfort we feel and changing the way we perceive our discomfort.

We learn to stay with these feelings instead of trying to escape from them.  We learn that allowing ourselves to have these feelings doesn’t kill us.  By letting these feelings be there, we allow them to evolve and move through our bodies.  We learn to accept and embrace the myriad of emotions that give us depth as human beings.

Out of this, we acquire the qualities of patience and trust.  Rather than trying to close the gap, we see it as a window that opens up to new beauty.  We begin to notice the quality of grace in our world.

Part  4: Taking the Focus Away from Me (Selfishness vs Altruism)

I was feeling more confident being on top of the elephant, until the mahout allowed it to wander off to feed itself.  I grew worried when Jum-Pui found the juiciest leaves near a ditch.  I imagined being thrown headlong into the ditch.  My pleas for the mahout to come and stay close were ignored.  I felt annoyed and it aroused the part of me that felt injustice.  Inside, I screamed, what about my safety?  I tried to get the elephant to move away from the ditch, but it kept on tearing off branches of leaves.

Then I heard someone saying that the elephant must be hungry.  Suddenly, I realised that I had been focusing so much on my own safety that I completely did not pay attention to the elephant’s needs.  It was supposed to be a two-way communication, yet I’d focused solely on getting my own needs met.

This kind of selfishness occurs more often than not in relationships when one party takes the other for granted – requests turn into barking orders, uncommunicated needs become expectations, unfulfilled expectations become a source of outrage.  We can be so taken over by our own drive for survival that we forget we are in partnership with another person, whether it’s in a personal or professional context.

Feeling guilty about my selfishness, I focused my attention on feeling Jum-Pui as a living and breathing creature, and not simply as a vehicle.  Slowing down my breathing, I connected to the life force that emanated from him.  A tiny fraction of my consciousness dropped into his massive body, and I felt his pulse synching with my heartbeat.  The noise in my head subsided.  Rather than nurturing my own fears, I now nurtured the creature’s need for self-nourishment.  Fear gave way to humility.  There was two of us now… and we were partners.

Part 5: Bonding and Caring For Another

By the time my partner and I moved into the lake, the tension and rigidity I had felt earlier had left my body.  I felt bigger.  Aligning in partnerships can do that to you.  Resources are doubled, and areas of insecurity are made secure through the strengths of another.

As I felt more secure, I relaxed into playfulness and fun.  Fear puts a shield in front of us that blocks the expression of who we really are.  When it is stripped away, we begin to come from a more authentic part of us that is capable of responding with spontaneity, much like a child who knows no fear.

In playing and having fun, we naturally bond with others because the shield around our hearts are kept down, allowing our true feelings to flow.  Jum-Pui liked spraying water with his trunk, which delighted me since I’ve always liked the sensations of water dropping onto my skin.

In between the water sprays, the mahout guided me to wash the elephant in the water.  I only managed a few tentative moments of doing this before choking back tears as I was moved by the act of giving love.  The fear of love is something I hear expressed in one way or another by the majority of the clients I work with.  Recalling this, I felt a deep sadness for the loss of what the world can potentially gain from the greater connectedness that comes from us feeling freer in our capacities to give and receive love from one another.  A simple act of love, carried out with devotion, with an undefended heart, may begin to heal the way we relate to the world.

Part 6: Surrendering to Uncertainties

As we emerged from the lake, I noticed a certain calmness in myself.  The atmosphere around me seemed to be imbued with a softness.  Everything seemed to move at a slower pace, whereas previously everything seemed to be moving dangerously fast and I was rendered out-of-control within it.  The harshness of trying to survive in a world that wasn’t safe had fallen away, and I was fully present with all my senses.  Jum-Pui’s legs felt like an extension of my own legs, moving forward in one unhurried, certain step after another.  I didn’t care where it was taking me nor worry about what would happen to me.

I stopped wanting to control.  In that act of surrender, I felt liberated from the mental weight of trying to fix, achieve, resolve, understand, compartmentalise.  As my body relaxed, I leaned forward and rested my elbows on the elephant’s head.  It gave me a different view of the experience – one where I could appreciate how high up I was above the ground.

Suddenly, I was able to transcend everything around me.  From my higher perspective, I was acutely aware of my own livingness and my connectedness with the elements.  Below me, I could hear the voices of people talking, shouting, laughing – but it was just noise.  I was aware but unattached to anything that was taking place.

In that moment, I saw the difference between choosing to get sucked into our stories and rising above these stories.  There’s always a choice, if only we slowed ourselves down to see that.  It doesn’t mean trying to ignore what’s going on (a fearful act) but to make an empowered choice to not engage on an emotional level whatever it is we know is happening.

Part 7: Total Trust is Earned

Eventually, I felt comfortable enough to lean forward until my body lay on the elephant’s head.  I learned something new then – that total trust is earned through the act of surrender.  When we surrender, we come out the other side with total trust.

Total trust is the state of being in absolute abundance.  When we trust completely, we experience no limitations, restrictions or scarcity.  We’re in a state of infinite possibilities and freedom of creativity.

I felt I could fly if I wanted to.  I could make the clouds form any shape I wanted.  I could do a back-flip and land perfectly.

Part 8: Merging with Divinity

Yet I descended the elephant the same way I had climbed up (but without the drama).  I felt a little sad that our journey together had come to an end.  I felt a deep bonding with the animal and a desire to come back to see him again in the near future.  I asked the mahout how long he had been with Jum-Pui, knowing that a mahout looks after only one elephant and throughout the elephant’s life.  Twenty years, he said.

“Just imagine,” he said, looking at me.  “And you’ve only had one day with him.”

I went up to Jum-Pui and looked up at him, marvelling at how incredible an opportunity it’d been to interact so closely with this majestic animal.  Then as I looked into his eye, I saw Ganesha, the Hindu elephant deity.  Prior to the journey, we had prayed to Ganesha at an altar in the conservation centre.  Now, looking up at my ‘healing partner’, I felt Ganesha’s presence.  I got a sense that the deity had been guiding, facilitating and overseeing my journey all that time.

In my spiritual belief, all deities are aspects of the greater divine spirit.  As I connected the dots all the way to the intelligent force that created us and that governs all life, I knew there was nothing unsafe about my world.

I walked away richer and fuller – infused not only with the shamanic properties of the elephant and what Ganesha brings to a devotee, but the lessons learnt about trust, surrender, love, selflessness, courage, vulnerability, spontaneity, making empowered choices, and transcendence.  I carried with me these lessons and an impression that was to last for days, reminding me to look out for divinity amidst the turbulence in life.

How Failure Can Lead You To What Your Soul Yearns

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In the horror film ‘Vanishing On 7th Street’ there is a scene where John Leguizamo’s character Paul is led into a tunnel.  As he follows to the end of the tunnel, he finds himself facing a dead-end.  He turns around and sees the light furthest to him black out.  Then the next furthest light dims, and the next….  What struck me most was not the sensations the producers of the movie must have wanted to evoke in the audience, ie. to feel Paul’s increasing terror as darkness inches closer and closer.  Rather, it was how the remaining light becomes increasingly brighter as the light dims one by one.

It reminded me of how our missed opportunities in life can highlight what we’re really meant to do from a spiritual viewpoint.  And Paul’s increasing fear can be likened to how we might feel as we get closer to our true passion.

Sometimes, the thing we’re most passionate about, the thing that holds most meaning to us, is not obvious to us right from the start.  Initially, it may even appear as something we hate, have an aversion to, or stubbornly resist.  So much so that we won’t naturally be looking at the right places when we’re searching for the thing that gives us purpose in life.  We may spend many years pursuing in other directions, the fulfilment of a sense of purpose still eluding us.

Imagine a greater intelligence is watching over your soul’s progress on the physical plane.  It sees you going after one false dream after another in pursuit of finding your way home to doing the thing that makes you feel like *you* in a deeper sense.  Maybe it’s been providing signs to guide you to the right place but you ignored or missed them.  So it decides to intervene by dimming the lights out of the things that take you away from your true calling.

After the first light is dimmed, you may become aware of your true calling.  If not, another light is dimmed.  This can go on for a while and can explain why we sometimes find ourselves facing one ‘failure’ after another – when it seems that whatever we pursue turns out to be a failure.  We may even start to suspect we are cursed by a spell of bad luck.

Being in the middle of a series of failures can be mentally and emotionally exhausting.  It seems to test our resolve and how much resources we can pull out of us.  If you’re in one of these challenging times, it may help to shift your thinking from one where the world is out to get you or God is punishing you, to one where you are being divinely nudged towards your special, beautiful place.

That job you badly want, the relationship you’re sacrificing so much to salvage, the business you just can’t give up, the contract that means the life to you, etc.  Most of us have experienced losing one of these things which we’ve invested so much of our energy into.  It seemed so unfair that they were taken away from us.

Some of us will even focus on the unfairness of it forever, and this is what stops us from healing from the pain and discovering something greater.  That childish stubborness to hold on to what we didn’t get will kill off any chance of us finding happiness again.  If you focus on it as a missed opportunity, you can turn it into a life-long regret.  What it means is that you will continue to invest mental and emotional energy to your loss, keeping your pain around it alive and dilluting your success in all other areas of your life.

The moment you let go of your sense of unfairness around it, you stop giving it energy.  You are effectively taking back your power from it.  When you turn your perspective of it around and see it as a gift rather than a missed opportunity, you start to heal from all those feelings of loss and regret.  This healing will spread across to every part of your life and you’ll notice how much more opened you are to new opportunities for success.

Thus, healing comes from having an openness to consider how that loss might be a gift.  As you take this step, you can become clearer about what’s really important to you.  In time, you can appreciate how that experience had led you closer to your heart’s desire, what your soul is yearning.  But without taking the step, you’re simply stuck in the misery generated by continuing to focus on what didn’t happen for you the way you wanted it to.

It is my belief that the Universe will support you in fulfilling your true calling, even if the road to it may be littered with obstacles.  Those obstacles may serve to sharpen your focus, intent and vision of your true calling.

Failure can lead you closer to the thing you truly want, deep down, on a soul level.  When all other options are being taken away, you are forced to move to the one thing that stands out.  Sometimes, it presents itself as a light-bulb moment, when it suddenly becomes obvious.  But sometimes, it seems as though we’re left with a lesser choice, and it’s not until we’ve moved into that option that we discover what a gift it really is.

Because it is not an obvious choice, we would not be moving towards it if other options had not been removed from the picture.  Like Paul in the tunnel, we’re pushed to the place where there’s nowhere for us to run, no more room for excuses.  We’re forced to turn to the only option available in front of us.  That’s why it has to come from that direction sometimes – we are scared of it and won’t choose it if it was one among other options available.

Why are we scared of the thing we’re meant to do, if it’s good for our soul?  Not because it’s bad for us but because it’s good for us in ways we’ve never known good to be.  The newness of goodness – our capacity to be bigger, more expansive – is what scares us.  It’s still an unknown even if it’s good for us.

The wall at the end of the tunnel is not a dead-end.  If your resources are dwindling, it can be terrifying.  But it also forces you to look in places you’ve never looked or thought to look before.  One of these places is where you’re being divinely guided to go – a door which when opened will allow you to meet a stronger aspect of you.  It may not be the easiest place to visit since we tend to avoid parts of ourselves, but our soul knows it is where we need to go to find true freedom.

If you’re suffering from a series of failures, adopting these attitudes and practices will ensure you’re moving in the direction you are being nudged towards.

“This is a good thing.” 

Allow yourself to consider it may be a good thing.  If you’re struggling with the anger, resentment, bitterness, disappointment, worry and anxiety from not getting what you want or losing something you had, changing your perception of it can shift you to a more balanced mental-emotional space.  Often, we generate even more of these difficult feelings by continuing to focus on the unfairness of it.  The sooner you let go of your sense of injustice, the sooner you’ll see where the light really shines.

Be grateful for this gift. 

The failures you’re experiencing may serve to be a kind of ‘process of elimination’ to help highlight what you’re meant to pursue.  Changing your attitude to being grateful will enable you to spot the star platform of your life quicker.

Being grateful also means giving attention to what you’re being shown.  Sometimes, we simply refuse to give energy to anything else, even if we recognise that the loss is a good thing.  It could be that we’re still recovering from the effects of the loss and this can be a valid reason to not pursue something else for a while.  But it could also be fear-based: we might be afraid of being disappointed again should our next project become another failure.  If so, know that it is okay to invest cautiously this time.  Proceeding calmly, without drama or desperation, will ensure a well-balanced outcome whichever way it goes.

Let go of old beliefs. 

Take some time to get clear about what you’re saying to yourself about your losses.  You may find statements like these in your head:

“He’s so out of integrity!”

“She’s going to pay back for this.”

“How can he do this to me!”

“It’s all my fault!  I should’ve said yes right away!”

“Oh no, what am I going to do now?”

“Can’t believe I’m being reduced to this!”

“There’ll never be another opportunity like that…”

“Damn, I was so close….”

If you look closely, you’ll find that these statements are supported by the beliefs you hold about people and the world.  For example, “He’s so out of integrity!” may be supported by a belief that everyone should act in integrity at all times.  I’m sure you can see how a belief like this can be a source of stress – there will always be people who won’t act in integrity and it’s not always within your control.  If you insist that people should always be in integrity, then you’re just setting yourself up to feel upset.  A healthier belief might be, “I prefer people to act in integrity.”  Here, you allow the space for people to act contrary to what you’d like them to, and you benefit from this increased flexibility.

Look for the lesson. 

The force that is supporting you to respond to your soul’s yearning will continue to dim the lights until you get the message.  But you can do your part by opening your senses to what it’s trying to show you.  Every failure contains a piece of wisdom that can point you to where you need to go.  It’s your job to look for it.

Start by seeing it as a gift, and then ask yourself how you can do the next thing differently.  If you keep doing the same thing, in the same way, you’re not getting your message yet.  Listen with your whole body as you tune into this question.  Your bodily signals, emotional cues, perceptive skills and intuition will combine to give you an overall gut feeling to steer you in the right direction.

Sometimes, the failures were needed to teach you certain values or to enable you to develop certain qualities like humility, generosity, forgiveness and compassion.  Ironically, the quickest way to learn these qualities is through experiencing failure and loss.  In the depth of misery, it’s easy to forget to look at how it can make us stronger or a better person.  But it’s precisely what every failure has the potential to do, if we choose to see it.

Relax into it. 

Stop resisting the sensations arising from your experience of failure or loss.  Acknowledge that they are just a form of energy wanting to pass through your body as part of the process of constant growth.  Most of the discomforts we feel is due to our resistance; when we stop resisting, we allow the energy to move through and out of us.  We move from being constricted to being expansive.  It requires us to relax into the whole sensation of it – to be opened to the feelings as tightness unravels itself inside us – and staying with it long enough for us to move into the expansive stage.

After writing this article, I decided to revisit the scene of Paul in the tunnel.  This time, I paused after every dimming of light.  At every pause, I imagined that Paul, given the time to let it sink in, would look around him and marvel at how much brighter it’s grown around him.  What might he have noticed instead of the fear?

What might you notice?  What’s been illuminated for you?

Are You Afraid To Step Out And Do Your Thing?

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If given a choice, I could spend a lot of time focusing on my own growth.  Since I rate spiritual growth as my top personal value, it’s easy for me to devote lots of time to psycho-analysing myself, processing my issues and healing my pains.  Admittedly, it can get close to the level of self-indulgence if I don’t watch myself!  From time to time, I’m jolted to awareness of how self-centered I have been, to be focusing on my own inadequacies when I could be looking at how to help more people.  I then get redirected internally to make it less about me and more about others. 

This, of course, tends to happen when I’m in a period of having more free time than usual.  I think it’s healthy to focus on our own wellbeing first and foremost, but it’s also easy to cross the line of being excessive and self-indulgent. 

I see this in many others too.  Usually, it happens during a period of growth – perhaps following a disastrous event when you’re well into the recovery stages of picking up your pieces, and you’ve connected to a project that inspires you.  By your reckoning, this project will launch you into the world again, as your new, improved self.  It will mark your rebirth, of having survived and grown through an exceptionally tough time. 

The thing is, more often than not, people don’t end up launching themselves this way.  They get scared and stuck in this stage of feeling they’re not ready yet – there’s always more to work on, more to heal, more to improve about themselves, more skills to acquire, more this or that. 

As the years go by, they continue to wallow in how they’re still unpolished, imperfect, undeserving.  The groundwork gets worked on, edited, tweaked, improved, updated, upgraded, added on, simplified, expanded.  Meanwhile, they are still talking about some day being actually out there doing their thing. 

Their project has become more of a fantasy, a source of motivation that keeps their hopes alive via the promises it holds.  As long as it hasn’t been tested out there, it will remain a powerful potential, and God knows we hate to have our fantasies destroyed. 

But the price for this is the guilt you suffer from knowing you have procrastinated yet again.  Since there’s a part of you that truly wants to step out there and actualise your vision, whenever you stop yourself from doing so, you suffer the discomfort of knowing you have not been true to yourself. 

Every time we make an excuse not to step out, we add more guilt to our emotional baggage.  Every time we judge themselves as being not good enough yet, we die a little more inside.  The self-herating that accompanies such judgements can be very damaging to our self-esteem. 

It can be many years before someone actually takes the first step of stepping out into the arena, and sadly, many never make it to this stage.  Do you have a project you can’t seem to get off the ground because you’ve been stuck in a stage where you know you need to step out but feel you aren’t quite ready?  The good news is, no matter how long you’ve been sitting on your project, the point of power is now.  You can make empowered choices now to step out into the world and live in the glory of being you.      

1.  Shift Your Focus Onto Other People

Sometimes, focusing on our own inadequacies, or how we’re still not good enough, is actually the easy way out.  As much as I admire someone who is committed and dedicated to her own growth, I admire even more someone who stretches herself to have the courage to get out there and do her thing – whether it’s to facilitate that workshop, teach a yoga class, write that book, start dating again or start that business.  Sometimes, we need to stop working on ourselves internally and take our growth out there.  If you’re serious about growing, then demonstrate this to yourself by stepping out there.  There is where you’ll be stretched to grow optimally and achieve the most self-improvement.    

Shifting your focus onto others will bring you two benefits.  One, focusing on others can make your own problems seem less serious.  When you focus excessively on your own problems, your perception of your world will shrink until it seems as though there’s just you and your problems, within a constricted world.  When you take your focus away from yourself and to other people, it changes your perspective.  It allows you to see that there are others who are struggling with problems and to sympathise with their plight.  Knowing that you’re not alone in your suffering can be very healing.  Your empathy may even help alleviate their plight, and knowing you have contributed positively to another can connect you to your personal power which opens up a whole new world for you. 

Two, focusing on others will enable you to sharpen your vision and shape your role.  Make it less about you and more about others.  Focus on what you can do to help, support and benefit others.  Start to take notice of what the world around you needs and how you can contribute to make a difference. 

Stepping out of the place in which you’ve been struggling to find a solution may be just the thing you need to get unstuck.    

2.  Turn On Your Excuse Buster!

Decide to bust all your excuses from now on.  Everytime you catch yourself giving an excuse about how it’s not time yet to step out, expose your dishonesty.  Be ruthless and brutal in shredding all the excuses you give yourself to stay safe. 

Is it really true that you’re not good enough to step out yet?  Could you be finding the excuse to not be good enough?  Are you sabotaging the realisation of your project by using your excuses to channel your resources elsewhere rather than to your project?    

You might not be totally aware of how you’re sabotaging yourself with your excuses.  By exposing your dishonesty, you elevate your behaviours to a conscious level so that you can be more in control of the choices you make. 

What’s left in the absence of your excuses?  I want you to stay with the discomfort of thinking you’re going to step out there.  The fear you feel is different from the gut-level fear that protects you from real danger – it’s a mixture of fear and excitement.  Stay with the discomfort until it expands into feelings of excitement. 

Most of the time, we react as soon as we feel uncomfortable.  By staying with the feeling long enough for it to evolve, you change your reference of the idea of being out there doing your thing. 

3.  Step Out As Your Imperfect Self

You may be holding back because you feel you need to be perfect before you share yourself with others.  Understandably, you want to present the best version of yourself to the world.  But the best way to improve yourself is by stepping out as your imperfect self. 

That place you want to be?  You’ll never get there unless you step out now.  When you’re chasing perfection, you’re pursuing something that doesn’t exist.  It’s a fact that as humans we never stop growing and having opportunities to work on ourselves.  If you’re invested in the idea of being perfect someday and holding yourself back before that day comes, you’ll never reach your dreams. 

Most of the time, our fears get blown out of proportion.  We magnify our flaws, imagining others will do the same.  Yet others would probably give it 1% of the attention we give it. 

Furthermore, your flaws make you more human in the eyes of others.  They make you seem more reachable, relatable, and they give you more depth, colour and character.  You can improve and grow in front of an audience.  The energy with which you invest to hide your flaws can translate to a sense of tightness around you and emotional unavailability.  Letting go of wanting to be perfect can make you seem more authentic and sincere, allowing you to form more genuine relations with those you interact with.   

4.  Play Big, Don’t Stay Small

Another reason you may be holding back is the fear of being judged as not good enough.  It comes from believing that what you have to give isn’t good enough.  Whilst striving for high standards is an admirable quality, it can also stop us from taking the emotional risk to step forward into the playing field.  Sometimes, we reconcile this by playing it safe: we stay small instead of playing full-on, hoping we won’t attract any untoward attention that would crush our dreams. 

If you’re true to your dream, it cannot be destroyed.  This means continuing to believe in your dream and not allowing yourself to be defeated or give up too soon, even when you’re getting negative feedback.  It means having the maturity to understand that rejection is part and parcel of taking the risk to present yourself to the world; instead of being discouraged by rejections, you use them to point you to where you need to grow.  You become interested in the response you generate, instead of dreading the outcome.  Accept that there will likely be negative as well as positive response – if you insist on not getting any negative response at all, you may never take the step to actualise your dream.   

As the saying goes, good enough is good enough.  It pays to put in lots of time and energy to work on creating and honing your idea before you launch yourself, but after a certain point, you just got to get it out there. 

And when you do step out, step out fully.  Not in the sense of giving a first-time performance to a thousand people or nothing at all.  If you’re an aspiring singer, you could start as small as inviting five of your friends to a free performance at a house.  Stepping out fully is about being committed to what you’re doing.  Sing your heart out in front of your five friends.  Give your best.  When you step out, you’re either in or you’re out. 

It’s better to be there 100 percent for a small crowd than to be ‘kind of’ there for a thousand people.  But playing big does involve increasing the scale of what you do when you’ve mastered the level you started at.  To stay at this level is to resist stretching beyond your comfort zone and stop growing. 

5.  Use the Power Of Comparison

As scary as it may seem, stepping out is probably not the scariest thing for you to do.  The trouble is, we tend to compare it with what’s less scary to us – e.g. it’s less scary to not have to step out because we imagine the vulnerability we would feel if we did.  Of course, we’re bound to choose the less scary option.  But suppose you compared it with what’s scarier to you. 

Think of something that absolutely horrifies you if you were in that situation – something that is scarier than stepping out.  It could be something totally unrelated, such as a phobia.  Now notice how by comparison the idea of stepping out is significantly less scary. 

What this does is it puts your fear into perspective and gets you to think of it rationally.  It short-circuits your automatic response that is based on irrational fear and puts a different kind of energy around it.  

6.  Let Go of Regret

No matter how long you’ve procrastinated on your project, decide to let go of all regrets about not having done it earlier.  If you have a habit of keeping score of how much time you’ve wasted and generating guilty feelings, it becomes a block to taking action now.  We mistakenly believe that by beating ourselves up, we can redeem ourselves and feel less badly about ourselves.  But all it does is add to the guilt we  already feel. 

The most nourishing thing you can do is to cleanse yourself of all the negativity you hold around it.  Imagine releasing this toxic energy into the earth as the force of gravity draws it away from your body.  Release the critical, self-limiting thoughts you have and replace them with ideas about strength, hope and beauty.  Let go of your grip on guilt, hurt and regret – give them up to gravity.  Feel your entire system cleansed of all the should’s and shouldn’t’s.  From now on, you’re erased of the past, the history of how you’ve let yourself down.  Only the present matters.

Stepping out and doing our thing is such a deep, personal thing that it’s bound to come with a lot of resistance on our part.  But the greatest reward that comes from it is so sweet: the fulfilment that comes from giving of yourself.  You can be proud of the fact that you’ve stretched yourself to step out even when you felt you weren’t ready yet.  It’s like the advice parents often give to aspiring parents: “You’re never ready.” 

But you do it anyway. 

How To Be Free & Spontaneous – Without Hurting Yourself

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One of our greatest desires is to be free and spontaneous.  If you look at most personal and social problems, you will see that somewhere along the way we were striving to be free from our physical, emotional and mental constraints.  To be able to express ourselves freely and spontaneously, to be freed from our fearful beliefs and the emotional pains that grip us – these desires are what sprouted the whole self-help and human potential movement. 

But the desire to be free and spontaneous can become a trap.  In our efforts to get unstuck, we can lead ourselves to a place of even greater stuckness.  This does not mean, however, that we shouldn’t strive to be free, for I believe that freeing ourselves from feeling trapped is our spiritual purpose.  The journey of unshackling ourselves is both exciting and rewarding, to be savoured throughout our lives, as every bit more freedom we gain moves us closer to becoming our ultimate self.    

How is it that we trap ourselves when we want to be free?  There are four aspects in the dynamics of freedom and imprisonment which I want to explore:

FREEDOM                                                     RESPONSIBILITY  

                                               VS

SPONTANEITY                                            COMMITMENT

On a conscious level, we aim to be free and spontaneous.  But our fear of being trapped may be so intense that we end up creating the very thing we fear.  It may come in the form of an accident that leaves you bedridden; getting into trouble with the law and consequently ending up in prison; indulging in mood-altering substances to the point of being addicted; being in a relationship with a highly controlling person; or running into financial problems. 

For a balanced person, responsibility and commitment aren’t bad things.  In fact, having a healthy sense of responsibility and commitment helps us to be in touch with our personal power.  But for those with an exaggerated fear of being trapped, the idea of responsibility and commitment can trigger this sense of fear, so they tend to avoid them at all costs.  When we disown these aspects of our power, we create an imbalance within ourselves that drives our psyche to bring back some balance by overcompensating with the other extreme. 

So if you lack responsibility or commitment, you might end up in a trapped and limited situation even as you embark on creating a situation that makes you feel free and spontaneous.  An example of this is when you leave things to the last minute and end up creating chaos around you.  That chaos puts you in stress which limits your resourcefulness.  Your world shrinks tighter and tighter, and you become more and more trapped. 

Another example is when you want to enjoy feeling free and spontaneous by getting into your car, driving too fast without putting on the safety belt and getting into an accident.  You might suffer the consequence of being seriously hurt and ending up in hospital, or having hurt others and being persecuted for it.  In your pursuit of freedom and spontaneity, you have ended up in a situation of being trapped and limited. 

If you find yourself in such a situation, where you’ve created your own prison, consider working on your attitude towards responsibility and commitment (especially if the idea of it makes you recoil).  Responsibility means taking something into your realm of control.  Trust in your capability to effect changes in your world, the power of your field of influence.  Bring in that which you have been pushing out of your field.  See the force in your field as vibrant and dynamic as you step up to own your power in it. 

Commitment means making a pledge to be fully engaged with something instead of having one foot in and one foot out.  Bringing both your feet in to stand firm and solidly in one place will give you the power to reach forward into a place of joyousness.  Both of these power aspects enable us to consolidate our resources and maximise our accomplishments.  Exercised in a balanced and healthy way, they help ensure our freedom rather than limit our freedom. 

Healing the Source

Most of us, when we find ourselves in a trapped and limited situation, tend to focus on changing the symptoms – e.g. how to get more money, how to get out of a controlling relationship, or how to make the bathroom floor less slippery to prevent accidents.  While these strategies are helpful for your immediate security, unless you also work on the source of the pattern, you will recreate the same symptom in one form or another, over and over. 

If you’re aware of having a pattern of getting into a similar type of situations that make you feel trapped, it’s likely that you have a mentality of being trapped.  This means that you consistently see yourself as a person who is trapped; even when you’re out of your ‘down cycle’, deep down you still see yourself as a person whose fate is to be trapped.  It is so entrenched in your psyche that it’s become a part of your self-identity.  This self-fulfilling prophecy will lead you to recreate the pattern.  Until you change your mentality, you will probably end up in the same place again. 

Changing your mentality requires more work than just visualising yourself to be free when your circumstances show you otherwise.  Not only is this level of work ineffective on its own, it is bloody difficult!  You need to go deeper, and confront, address and heal the source of what made you feel you are trapped.    

To truly undo this pattern, you must escape your prison – not your current symptoms of trappedness but your original prison.  It can come from cultural, social or family dynamics.  Where across these dimensions do you experience a strong emotional charge about being trapped?  Make peace with it through forgiveness and changing your perception of your place in it. 

Examine your battle in your original imprisonment.  Even if you are no longer in this context, you are still engageed in an emotional battle.  Whether your battle is taking place in a real or mental place, you can free yourself by finding the little doors that lead you out of your imprisonment.  Where could you be receiving of useful, positive energy that supports you to thrive as a person?  Where could you say no to being belittled, abused, limited, controlled?  How could you assert your individual rights? 

You can take steps now, no matter how long this situation has been around, to reconcile the emotions you have about this situation.  True freedom is when you feel free within you, and this inner freedom will lead you to create more situations that reflect it. 

With the irrational fear of being trapped gone, you will no longer reject responsibility and commitment to gain freedom and spontaneity and end up destroying yourself.  Responsibility no longer means a loss of spontaneity but a way of enhancing it.  You no longer fear commitment because you know how to use it to pull you further into a productive future and make things happen for you (read The Power Of Saying “I Have Decided!” ).  As you stop resisting these previously feared concepts, you gain more freedom, relaxation and creativity.  Life flows, and good things can come to you, because your efforts are no longer being cancelled out by something hidden from your awareness.