Category Archives: Injustice

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.

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?

“Accept The Unacceptable”

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I was watching an animated movie about Doctor Strange, the Marvel Comics creation.  It was my first introduction to the character and I was fascinated by the world of sorcery portrayed in the story.  The movie depicts how Dr Stephen Strange, a successful surgeon, who after injuring his hands in an accident finds his way to a monastery in Tibet where he is trained by The Ancient One to be a powerful sorcerer.  Lots of spiritual lessons reflected in the movie, especially in the doctor’s early training when he has to move past the pain of his loss, guilt and shame to recover a sense of purpose in his life.

Embittered by the loss of the use of his hands as he knew it, Doctor Strange destroys his life by wallowing in self-pity and anger.  By the time he reaches Tibet, he has lost his career, reputation, wealth and home.  The Ancient One shows him all kinds of supernatural tricks, and eventually he learns that he can still heal people and do other marvelous things even without his hands.  To reach this stage, however, he has to learn to “accept the unacceptable”.

In the midst of having lost everything he valued, as well as his identity which was formed around all that is lost, The Ancient One’s constant call for him to “accept the unacceptable” only triggers anger and confusion.  How does one accept something that is so painful?  Even if he wanted to, how does one actually do it?

The energy that gets in the way of accepting the unacceptable is resistance.  It comes from there being conflict between what you desire (an attachment to a certain outcome) and what is.  When you resist what is happening, you refuse to see any other way.  You are unable to see that there are possibilities out of your pain.  Your perception is closed off to something else that is more positive – a gift that is revealed only when you have let go of your desire.

Accepting the reality of something can be very painful.  Yet the pain is prolonged and kept in place by your reluctance to ease your grip on wanting to right the wrong.  The outrage of injustice is what keeps us stuck.  Accepting doesn’t necessarily mean that we must accept the injustice, but to allow that feeling of injustice to flow freely through you.  In other words, do not resist the pain of it.  Once you allow the feeling to flow freely, you begin to see doors out of that pain, whereas by resisting it you can only see one path – the path of loss and hopelessness.

Accepting means allowing what is happening to happen.  Whilst it may feel as though you are stuck in that outcome, no outcome is ever the end.  Life is ever flowing, evolving and changing all the time.  This outcome you find yourself faced with is only the outcome for now.  It has the potential to change into something else, even if our minds cannot see what that change can be or how it may look in the future.  That is to say, do not give up – not in the sense of wanting it to change to a specific outcome we want but in maintaining hope for something different out of the present outcome.  But you need to accept that this is what it is for now, with the potential for your life to evolve into new experiences.  What these new experiences are, you have to accept that right now you do not know.

One of the greatest paradoxes in spiritual learning is the art of remaining hopeful while accepting a present situation that does not fit into what you desire.  The very act of allowing a situation to be can kill off any sense of hope for a bright future, as the loss of something we hold dear means losing what has made our life worth living.  This is especially true for those who tend to invest all their resources into one single thing, whether it is a business, a relationship, an idea, a belief, etc. to the exclusion of everything else.  Since there is no such thing as guaranteed security, everything we have is at risk of being taken away from us.  To invest all our resources into one thing puts us at risk of some day finding ourselves with nothing when that thing is gone.

Of course, it is an illusion that we have nothing apart from this thing on which we’d placed so much importance.  We have simply turned a blind eye to what else there is in our process of putting everything into one basket.  Putting energy into a cause, project or relationship can yield great results but when we do so with obsession and fixatedly, it becomes unhealthy as our lives become unbalanced.  Before Dr Strange’s hands were crushed, he had placed his entire emphasis on his career and neglected having people close to him.  What happens when he finds himself no longer able to perform as a surgeon is, he has no one to turn to for support.  Eventually, he turns to his ex-girlfriend to ask for money to travel to Tibet to find a cure for his hands – a rather humiliating thing since he had treated her badly in the past.

So as a preemptive measure, examine your life right now to see if you are putting all your energy into one single thing and neglecting other things that are important to you (but perhaps you take for granted).  Vary your interests, your social life, your investment of time and attention.

Returning to the lesson of accepting the unacceptable, is there anything in your past which you find difficult to accept?  Look for bodily signals of refusal to let things be – e.g. a feeling of contraction somewhere in your body or a sick feeling as you think about an event.  Is there something which you think is unacceptable?

Forgiveness has the power to liberate you from your pain once and for all.  Decide to forgive everyone who has ever wronged you, no matter what they have done.  We never really know what another person is going through, just as no one can really know what you are going through.  Opening your mind to consider a different perspective will break up the energy of hatred stored in your heart.  It elevates you from the place of being stuck in your angry judgements, churning out its poison against you as long as you are in that place, to a higher place where you can gain a greater understanding of what has happened.  That greater understanding will heal you and free you from the illusion of being trapped in your pain.

Sometimes, forgiving yourself is even more difficult than forgiving others.  Accept that what’s happened has happened.  Focus on how it has made you a better person now because you have recognised the ill-effects of certain actions you used to take and you are aware of having new choices, not on beating yourself up.  Learn to grow from it.  Forgiveness is a step towards being able to accept what you saw as unacceptable.

The idea of accepting the unacceptable may fill us with dread and horror, as if by allowing that energy to come closer we may go mad.  Yet that energy is made more intense by our efforts to push it away.  Once we’ve let go of resisting and allow ourselves to receive the flush of energy, the intensity will lessen as an even, free flow of energy is restored.  Without our resistance, that intense energy which passes through us can awaken us to a new level of truth about who we are.  Allowing and accepting that which had been too painful to allow and accept will expand you to a new level of being – one where you are more in touch with your true personal power.  In the world of sorcery, you would open doors to the realm of magical powers, when your mind has relieved itself of its scepticism about what is possible.