The Amyra Records

I am currently revising the Body Renew manual.  In the Introduction, I’d started by saying, “Most people seek to come to a place of inner peace, no matter what forms their struggles present themselves in their lives.”  I wrote that three years ago, and today I still find that to be true. 

Since the time I first wrote the manual, I have battled more life challenges and grown, seeing and learning more about life in the process.  Yet I still maintain that most people, if you boil down their desires, are seeking to find peace within themselves. 

Inner peace can only mean one thing: to have all our internal conflicts resolved, so that the critical and self-berating noises in our heads would stop, along with the pains that result from the noises.  

Let me qualify by saying that inner peace is achieved in small measures rather than a constant, permanent state.  It would be great if we were in a state of inner peace all the time, but how would we continue to grow if we didn’t have our inner conflicts to guide us to where we need to develop ourselves?  It’s the work which we do to return to a state of inner peace that makes us grow.  For we crave inner peace whenever we become overwhelmed by the tangles of desires within ourselves - some pulling us this way and some that way.  We are then guided to reconcile those conflicts to come to a place of inner peace. 

A conflicted state which gives rise to a desire for inner peace may look like this: 

Mentally, you are tormented by self-judgements.  Emotionally, you have yucky feelings about yourself - hugely uncomfortable feelings that stem from hatred for yourself.  Physically, you have done things or acquired habits that make you feel bad about yourself, which preserves those thoughts and feelings about yourself.  Spiritually, you’ve kept yourself limited, small and disconnected from your inner guidance. 

To achieve inner peace, clean the space within you.  Imagine entering the four levels of your being armed with figurative brooms, vacuum cleaner, scrubbers, detergents, etc.  If inner peace resembles a sparklingly clean room, then the state you’re in which prompted you to seek inner peace would need a lot of cleaning up - cluttered, messy, things misplaced, etc. 

In your mental room, clear away all cobwebs of obsessive thoughts caught in a loop, going nowhere but spinning around in the same circle until a brutal swipe breaks it apart, freeing the thoughts to move in new directions.  Throw away expired items - old thoughts, beliefs, attitudes that keep you stuck. 

In your emotional room, clean up the wounds in your pride and dignity.  Scrub off the stains in your heart.  Gather and put back together the broken pieces of your self-belief scattered all over the place. 

In your physical room, line up the actions you’re taking on the top tier of a display shelf.  These are actions which reinforce or add to your inner conflicts.  They are usually actions that go against your values - for instance, making money from a morally unsound or questionable business.  Examine them.  Replace, change or discard those actions. 

In your spiritual room, clear the air with a purifier and open the windows to let in the sun.  Lift the glass case off the brilliant rock in the center of the room and polish it to a shine.  See the rays of light from the rock of your core dazzle and mingle with the sunlight coming in through the windows. 

With your thoughts untangled, emotions smoothed, habits renewed and spiritual space expanded, you’ll find yourself in a state of inner peace. 

Inner peace is not something that is given to you from outside, it is something that appears from inside of you when you’ve taken actions to clean up the conflicts you have with yourself.  The actions may involve freeing up or letting go of energy where it is overly-concentrated, or adding to the energy where it’s scanty.  Re-read the previous five paragraphs with this in mind and you may get a new level of awareness. 

In my previous posting, I stated that change is an ongoing process.  The acceptance that life is meant to be a voyage of discovering more authentic parts of ourselves, rather than a pursuit of a state of perfection we expect to achieve overnight, will make us much happier.  As long as we remain present in life, we would be able to take on the signs that are shown to us to keep us moving forward in our growth.  The quickest way to accelerate our growth is to observe how we respond from our ego and then make more empowered choices from a higher perspective. 

Observing how we respond and how much hold our ego has on us which determines our response can point us to where work needs to be done.  It’s one of those sticky paradoxes though: our ego prevents us from admitting to our weaknesses, yet to get to know that part of us requires us to pay attention to it. 

The function of our ego is to protect us from being hurt.  Unfortunately, it operates from a primal fear of how we can be hurt that what it perceives as threats to us is over-extended, outside of the appropriate context.  Hence, we tend to react to what others do or don’t do, say or don’t say, from a place of fear that we’d be damaged in some way or deprived of something we hold as valuable to us.  This fear is not real, in the sense that it is misplaced.  When we protect ourselves from this level of fear, we act in ways that cause us more hurt.  This is distinct from protecting our personal values and against true violations of what we stand for at our core. 

Problems in relationships arise when two people react from their egos.  Rather than act in ways that further the relationships and that allow them to grow as individuals, they trap themselves in a low level struggle of pettiness and one-upmanship.  When we work on freeing ourselves from the hold of our ego, a lot of our tensions would dissipate. 

How do we free ourselves from our ego? 

Step 1:  Notice your feelings

Begin by taking notice when your ego is pulling you to act in ways which perpetuate your struggles.  Observe your internal reactions to a situation.  You will feel a tightening - an uncomfortable feeling - as if your inner space is contracting to put up a defensive wall around you in response to feeling angry, resentful, jealous or short-changed.  You will recognise this as a defensive feeling. 

Mentally, your mind will construct thoughts that are tantrum-like, such as “Who does she think she is?” or “I’m going to show that bastard!”  or “He’s going to be sorry!”  It speaks in themes of hoarding, revenge and braggadocio.  Our automatic response is to impress, lie, manipulate, rob or cause suffering to another - because we feel we’re about to lose out on something.  Such response, should we act on it, can be subtle and insidious, with an agenda behind it. 

Step 2:  Delay taking action

Once you recognise that you’re driven to respond to a particular situation from your ego, refrain from acting on it.  This momentary pause in acting on your automatic impulse will give you the space to consider options that don’t result in instant gratifications but in advancing you in your personal growth. 

See, we grow by taking risks.  Ego-free responses carry a bigger risk than ego-driven actions.  The risk I am talking about is the risk of our getting hurt (actually, it’s our ego that is at risk of getting hurt).  We take that risk, holding an intention that is higher than the mere protection of our egos - the intention to conserve some core part of us.  We take that risk by fully accepting and being willing to put up with temporary discomfort, and in the process our ego heals from our having moved through the false pain it carries. 

Step 3:  Clear your inner space

When our ego has a strong hold on us, however, it can be quite difficult for us to choose a more loving option.  Let’s look at freeing ourselves from our ego from an energetic view. 

When you know you’re reacting from your ego, get a sense of where the tightness is located in your body.  Next, get a sense of the energetic strands that hold this tightness to your body.  You may be able to visualise or perceive in some other way these strands. 

Now relax the hold of your ego by mentally dissolving those strands until you feel freed from the strong hold that pulls you to act towards preserving your ego.  Once freed, your inner space will expand, allowing more options to appear.  In this calmer space, you’ll be more able to choose and take more loving steps that make you grow. 

Step 4:  Give it away

As you relax your ego’s hold on you and your inner space expands, the energy that is freed from the tension produced by the fear of your ego goes back to you and you’re reconnected to your resources within.  You gain a new perspective - rather than perceiving the situation as desperate which drives you to act desperately, you’re able to see other possibilities and consider new options. 

At this point, you may choose any action that counters the direction your ego wants you to go.  But you can go one step further by giving away some of the energy that’s been returned to you - a loving, altruistic action that may not have anything to do with the situation. 

The way to counter ego-pulled actions is to go the opposite way and act as if you are abundant and thus cannot be diminished.  The effect of acting big is it leaves you feeling big-hearted - you derive fulfilment from knowing that you’ve contributed to another and not from scoring petty points which leaves a trace of bitterness in your heart.  Thus, you turn what had been uncomfortable into an empowering experience.   

Often, we fail to grow because we don’t give ourselves that chance.  The little actions that we take in response to other people’s actions, when we choose to act contrary to what our ego dictates, we break out of being stuck with a set of patterns that cause us and others pain.  As you practise countering your ego’s pull and act in ways that further your growth, you’ll find that a lot of your tensions in life will lessen.  

One of the reasons why we fail to create lasting changes in our lives is we tend to focus on what is not-yet ‘perfect’ and using that as an excuse to sabotage our progress.  We tend to begin a process of change expecting to wake up one day with all our internal conflicts gone overnight.  It’s called a “process” because it is an ongoing journey of healing parts of ourselves.  But most of us expect our issues to disappear within a short time, and when we see that we’re still struggling, we consider ourselves to have failed.  So we go back to our old habits or old structure - full on - because “it’s all or nothing”. 

In our strive for perfection, we will never win.  That destination we call ‘perfection’ is an illusion - as we move closer to our concept of what is perfect, our standard for the thing we strive for will change, again and again, making it increasingly more difficult to be achieved.  As we strive for perfection, the distance to that which we consider perfect keeps increasing and our hope of becoming happier shrinks.   

In our strive for perfection, we miss out on the gifts of the moment.  We refuse to see that anything short of ‘perfection’ is worthy of us living it.  And because what we consider to be ‘perfect’ is impossible to achieve, we’re stuck in a limbo of unhappiness. 

The way out is to start by relaxing that childish refusal to consider a different option.  It is not all-or-nothing.  That space between “all” and “nothing” is where the greatest beauty and gifts can be found.  All we need to do is to give ourselves a chance to discover those gifts. 

People in recovery from addiction and other destructive habits often find the idea of abstinence a dreaded prospect.  That period following some changes that have been put into place usually means no alcohol, drugs or other sources of dependency as they create a clean space in which they’re able to find their self-sufficiency.  If you’ve been dependent on quick-albeit-destructive habits to cope with bad feelings, it can be difficult to see how you can possibly live a life of abstinence, even if it’s fairly short-term.  You would tend to see it as a big sacrifice, an unfair compromise, something that would leave you with very little to go on. 

Once you relax your refusal to accept that there might be something really worthwhile in the change, you’ll open up to the beauty of an alternative outcome.  It is very much a matter of focus - if you focus on what you’re giving up, you’ll feel the deprivation; if, on the other hand, you focus on what positive things your new way of life may bring you, you’ll find the gifts. 

Instead of striving for perfection to warrant a new lifestyle, see the perfection in the ‘imperfection’ of things.  If you adopt this mentality every step of the way, your period of abstinence or apparent lack-of will become a rich experience for you.  When you feel despondent as you focus on the negative, keep your attention on it until you see the beauty in it surface.  Everything is a source of beauty; if you focus on something long enough, you will see beautiful aspects emerge from it. 

Our mind is quick to judge, based on our previous experiences and the way we’ve learnt to categorise things under ‘good’ or ‘bad’.  But when we give something a chance, by simply looking at it longer than usual, we’ll see aspects we never saw before. 

Look at the picture above.  A sloppily-constructed stair that replaced a broken one.  Depending on the context, it may be ugly or beautiful.  In the context of someone’s home, we’d normally label it as ugly, but in the context of an art gallery, we may label it as something quite beautiful.  So the potential of both exists.  This stair, in the context of someone’s home, can be seen as beautiful if we focus on it long enough.  As we keep our focus on it, we move past our automatic judgements and see a myriad other possibilities out of it, until we find perfection in it.  This is the only way we can reach perfection, and what an enriching way that is.

In the rehab centre where I work, it’s been pointed out to me that I tend to leave my coffee cups all over the place instead of putting them from where I’d taken them.  I started putting them back to their appropriate places, but then found myself wanting to leave cups at the pool, common bathrooms, etc.  I caught myself thinking it a few times, which prompted me to look closer behind it. 

Clearly, it comes from a rebellious streak to do something that is considered a breach of what is acceptable to the authority or within an institution.  A minor thing to leave my cup where it doesn’t belong, perhaps, but it comes from the same place as someone who expresses their rebelliousness through substance abuse.  I believe that everyone has a rebellious tendency in them; it’s a self-balancing mechanism to correct any imbalance arising from suppressing our expression in some area of our life. 

In working with clients, we often find that there’s an element of rebelliousness behind their addiction - how might their behaviours be an expression of some message they strongly want expressed?  Usually, I would isolate the aspect of the client that is driven to rebel, help the client understand its motivations, and work to reconcile the differences between this and other aspects in that person.  For a person in addiction, telling them off or threatening them with punishments or any other forms of assertion of authority is not likely to get them off the habit.  Instead, this would feed right into the part of the person that wants to rebel, fueling its intent.  If a part of you wants to rebel, it is not enough to tell this part to “shut up, sit down and be quiet”. 

When we engage in addiction or other “fuck you” behaviours, we often end up hurting ourselves.  For instance, if the issues behind our need to rebel aren’t dealt with, we may neglect a physical illness in ourselves just to say “fuck you”, with detrimental consequences to our health. 

We rebel because there’s some area of our life in which we’ve held back in our expression.  Our natural state is one of balance, and when something in us is off-balanced, we are driven to correct that imbalance.  If we don’t have a clear awareness of that imbalance, something in us would drive us to achieve balance haphazardly.  This can easily lead to an explosion of expression elsewhere as we naturally seek to even out the energies within ourselves. 

In this article, I am dealing with the rebellious tendency which is in all of us rather than the pent-up energy from unprocessed emotions.  Rather than trying to kill off this aspect in us, we need to find non-destructive ways to satisfy our rebelliousness.  Behind rebelliousness is a desire to assert our identity - what we like and dislike, what we value and condemn, what we want to create and no longer tolerate.  Therefore, it is not necessarily a destructive mechanism, only when we let it run itself, without our awareness. 

The way to get a handle on our rebelliousness is by remembering that it is acting out because our self-expression has been stifled in some way or other.  Habits such as using illegal substances, engaging in dangerous activities and run-in’s with the law are extreme ways in which we’ve allowed our rebellious aspect to operate.  We can replace these habits with those that do not hurt ourselves or other people. 

Since we tend to operate from an “all or nothing” mentality, we may not see that there are non-destructive ways of allowing our rebellious nature to express itself.  How might you express yourself, in less dramatic ways, that won’t harm yourself or others?  What do you want to be more of, in the eyes of others and yourself?  What small ways can you find to express this feeling, belief or idea? 

Most importantly, how are you going to channel it to express your creativity?  Rebelliousness is a passionate force that can be used either to create havoc and destruction, or to push ourselves out of our shell where we allow our true selves to see the light of day.  Since healthy self-expression involves some amount of our taking risk to step into unfamiliar territory, we can use the force of rebelliousness to bring out more authentic parts of ourselves. 

This is also to say that when we become aware of wanting to rebel in ways that don’t really serve us, it’s indicative of an area of our life where our expression has been stifled.  We need to examine ourselves calmly, take steps to find expression in the appropriate area while indulging our rebellious tendency in ways that move us forward in lovingly expressing ourselves.

I sent two clients who had completed our four-week programme to the airport yesterday.  As I said goodbye to them, I felt a surge of emotions well up inside me.  I walked away from the departure hall blinking back tears, overcome by a poignancy that moved me on a deep level.  When you’ve had four weeks of caring and watching the personal battles of a client who’d been residential with you, you can’t help but feel a little sad when they leave.  But it was sadness tinged with an admiration for their courage in pushing through some issues that are quite painful to deal with and coming out more whole that moved me. 

I was reminded of my fortunate position to help facilitate personal shifts in people and by extension, of my place in life where opportunities abound for every individual to make meaningful contributions to one another.  Just as I’ve contributed to our clients by virtue of my job, they have made unplanned contributions to my life.  Such moments of recognising the abundance of life and the greatness of our spiritual role often infuse me with a deep sense of gratitude for being simply alive, being participant in the universal cosmos. 

More and more, I believe that to find work that enables us to make meaningful contributions in a way that fulfills us is what makes living in this world joyful.  The road to recovery from our painful habits is paved with signs that guide us to our real place in life.  Our journey on the road to recovery must be taken to lead us closer to that place, where the gifts of our healing, the “what’s behind the door” of our pains, are transferred to help others get more happiness, inspiration, hope, peace and joy. 

If your journey seems all too overwhelming to you right now, you could perhaps be consoled by the idea that every painful moment you move through courageously now will help shape a strong, positive future.  Nothing will go to waste unless we make it so.  Behind every pain, there is a gift that will make itself apparent to you as long as you move ahead with a sense of adventure, openness and discovery.  We need not force ourselves to love our pain but to approach our pain with a certain expectancy in discovering something positive which we cannot yet see will give you the drive to move forward in your journey. 

Not that the journey will ever end.  Our ego-based personas may not recognise this but on the soul level we are constantly seeking out more situations that push us to recover yet another piece of who we are beyond our identity.  To strive for that point of an ultimate victory over life is to defeat the whole purpose of life.  We win the game when we’ve looked at ourselves at every challenge we faced and as such the game is never over until we cease to exist.     

True fulfilment, then, is when we grow out of pleasing our ego through thoughts and actions that come out of a desperate need to be liked/loved/admired and of hurting our enemies, to feeling profoundly grateful from observing the growth of those around us.  This is not to say that we must kill our ego but to find ways to transcend our ego at times to get to a place of seeing the bigger picture which can be a very beautiful thing for us.