Category Archives: Spiritual Growth

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.

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. 

Becoming Your Ultimate Self

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I was really inspired by a friend who told me that his goal is to be ‘Ultimate’. I did not ask him to define what it means, as I immediately felt the uplifting energy and understood what it meant for me. Being Ultimate for me means living my life as joyously as I possibly can. It includes being the best that I can be, without compromising myself and my values, and actualising my highest potential in my human experience.

Having this kind of personal vision can be very empowering and can inspire you to show yourself just how great your potential as a human being is – to do, feel, create, express, heal, change and expand. There is no universal “best”. My best can look very different from your best. But to be your best regardless of what it looks like so that you live your life being your Ultimate Self, there are four things that you can do.

1.  Honour Yourself

Self-honouring is a spiritual practice that gets you to see the truth in yourself. As you become aware and get honest about your feelings, you begin to tap into what your true desires are and what is important to you. The first step in honouring yourself is by fully acknowledging the bits in you that want to be recognised. It’s quite common for us to push away painful truths (or what appears to be painful to us) and the more we try to suppress them the more insistent (and hence more painful) they become. The act of acknowledging them takes courage, and courage yields comfort in the end. Acknowledging your truth will bring you a sense of relief and freedom.

The second step in honouring yourself is to act on your truth. That means committing to having your actions reflect what you have acknowledged as your truth. For instance, in your meditation you may have recognised and acknowledged the truth that your relationship with your mother is causing you unhappiness, and that you truly desire to have a more harmonious relationship with her. How can you honour this part of you? If you now know that this is important to you, and you still act in ways that take you further away from what you desire, then you are not honouring yourself. But if you start acting in ways that bring you closer to harmony with your mother, then you are honouring yourself. Even if the result may not be more harmony, you have honoured your truth by acting towards your truth.

2.  Overcome Your Fears and Do It!

Fears get in the way of us doing the things we’ve always wanted to do. Things that are in line with our truth – what is important to you to uphold and to express. If you know that it is important for you to create certain experiences but hold yourself back from creating those experiences, then you are not honouring yourself. You are left with a sense of limiting yourself and settling for second best, which has the effect of dampening your spirit. Being Ultimate is a feeling. It makes you feel alive and radiant because you are being the best you can be.

Being Ultimate is not about striving to a standard imposed by someone else – e.g. “You must have at least $100,000 in disposable cash in order to be financially secure,” or “You must sky-dive at least once in your life.” For you, having the feeling of financial security may not require $100,000, and experiencing an adrenaline rush by jumping off a plane may not be important to you. For you, being Ultimate may be to draw a monthly income of $5,000, or creating a meditation sanctuary in your home.

Yet it is not even about striving to your own standards. You can be Ultimate before you achieve any of those things, because you can experience the feelings of being Ultimate while being in creativity towards those ends – when you know on a profound level that you have absolutely every potential to achieve them and you are enjoying the ride to that destination.

Sometimes, the idea of achieving something feels intimidating because we focus on the long road ahead. Understanding that the end is in every step of the way on that road can eradicate a lot of the fears about not reaching that destination or what might happen when you finally reach it. The road isn’t long when you know that every step along the way is worth celebrating. Every step is already a success, and so you needn’t be fearful about not succeeding. Knowing that every step on the road is worth celebrating allows you to perceive the journey as a joyful ride rather than a dreaded task that you must endure before reaching the final destination. By removing the stark contrast between journey and destination (sudden change from a constricted state to an expanded state), it removes the natural fears we have about change. Small victories must be celebrated in the present time, as you are experiencing it, not as an accumulation in the future. The expansive feelings that come from it is what makes you feel Ultimate.

3.  Stretch Yourself

Staying in your comfort zone will not make you Ultimate. When you can sense your true potential and crave to see that potential actualised, there is a build-up of creative tension that seems to pull you away from your comfort zone. You then choose to do one of two things.

(i)  You fight to stay in your comfort zone, and that means having to fight against your inner truth. You try to ignore or minimise the feelings in you that guide you to a better place, not trusting yourself to follow that guidance. This may make you feel more comfortable superficially, but your soul yearns to grow and it can give you deeper feelings of discontent with yourself.

(ii) You stretch yourself by moving away from your comfort zone and following the pull of the creative tension. You allow yourself to feel the discomfort of being outside your comfort zone and you relish the fulfilment that comes from having stretched yourself.

Staying in your comfort zone consists of doing the same things that don’t work for you anymore. Getting out of your comfort zone means doing something new or doing the same thing differently. There’s an old shamanic technique to cultivate the habit of stretching yourself where you consciously choose to do the opposite of what you normally do, for every activity within a day. It may include walking backwards out of your apartment! (or choosing not to leave your apartment if that is a habit)

4.  Believe In Yourself

When you have an unwavering conviction of who you are, you can believe in yourself. Know your strengths and weaknesses, and accept them. This gives you a strong sense of yourself, without which you cannot feel secure about the person you are expressing. It dillutes the energy you are expressing, because when you doubt yourself you hold back from expressing yourself fully and freely. The upshot is you shortchange or compromise yourself, leaving you with less-than feelings (not Ultimate).

The way out of doubting yourself is to hold on to something you believe in yourself, no matter how small that is right now. As you continue to hold on to it, you can experience it growing. At the same time, allow your actions to reflect this part of you, as if you have complete trust in it. With every expression, you increase your sense of belief about this part of you and by extension your whole self. Keep doing this until you build your self-belief to the level of Ultimate.

Your Ultimate Self isn’t you in the future. You can be your Ultimate Self now, no matter how ‘imperfect’ your external world is right now. Allow yourself to be Ultimate now and watch your world change to give you more opportunities to feel Ultimate. You don’t need to accomplish more or do more healing to be deserving of being Ultimate. You have a better chance of accomplishing and healing more when you are being your Ultimate Self.

Most likely, you have an idea of what your Ultimate Self looks like and how it would feel if you were Ultimate. Imagine being your best self and step into this person. Experience all the feelings of being your Ultimate Self – the feelings of power, abundance, beauty, joy, connectedness, freedom, radiance, vibrancy and peace. Simply enjoy the fulfilment of being Ultimate.

“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.

Spiritual Beauty In Vastness

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Someone once asked what inspired spiritual beauty for me.  I replied that it is when I see vastness – i.e. a huge monument, a magnificent mountain, a sweeping horizon, a large body of water, etc.  We ruminated about why seeing something huge would trigger our sense of spiritual identity.  The person suggested that perhaps it reminds us of how small we are and amidst such grandness we are forced to respect the omnipotence of the higher power.  I wasn’t sure if it resonated fully with me and I’ve been thinking about it since then.

In the last five weeks, I have been on a spiritual retreat and have so far seen numerous sights that inspired great spiritual beauty in me.  I now know the mystery behind vastness.  Rather than reminding me of how small I am, it reminds me of how infinite my true being is.  The sense of being limitless and borderless in my store of abundance, my creativity, is inspired when I look in awe at something monumental.  If it’s a place of history, the richness of the complex stories that have evolved within that time brings to mind a certain timelessness, infiniteness and creativity in our capacity as expressive beings.

It is the coldest winter in 50 years.  The whole country is covered in beautiful snow.  When driving along rural roads, the vastness presented by the snow-covered vista fills me with a curious warmth as joy bubbles in my heart.  I think to myself, “I am as vast as the distance this snow stretches.”  My consciousness expands beyond the confines of my physical body.  The glorious sun shines through the cold and I love the feel of it on my face.  I think to myself, “I am the sun – infinitely radiant and abundant.”  In moments of facing bone-chilling cold, rather than reminding me of how helpless I am, I dive into the depth of the cold and recover my sense of being Everything out of nothingness.

This is the kind of spiritual growth I had hoped to achieve on my two-month retreat.  I see spiritual beauty all around me.  Interestingly, I also see lots of people complaining about the cold and the tragedy portrayed by one focusing on limitations.  I rejoice in breaking through the illusion of these limitations.  As I embrace the cold and celebrate the lowest temperatures in half a century, I discover that I am truly abundant.

I was on the phone with someone while my window became a screen playing the most awesome snowfall I had ever seen.  Outside, the snowflakes became bigger and bigger, covering the trees and ground with a fluffy blanket of pure white snow.  I was completely hypnotised and struggled to continue speaking.  Because when spiritual beauty overcomes you, there are no words.  You are immersed in feelings that defy words.

As I write this, I wonder if some people in my position would have thought they were watching a horror movie – as the snowflakes became bigger and bigger, rather than seeing beauty they imagined how much the snow would impede their movements, for instance.  Instead of seeing abundance, they saw limitations.  It reminds me of how easy it is for us to focus on the things that are at the end of a creation and interpret it as a limited creation.  When we shift our focus to the source of that creation, we cannot but see the abundance in where creation springs.  The snow comes from a place that generates an abundance of snow; the neighbourhood where the snow covered is the ‘victim’.  Where does your mind naturally focus?

I saw vastness in that snow movie because I’ve had plenty of practice appreciating vastness and letting feelings of spiritual beauty wash over me.  In the past when I was living with a more limited consciousness, I would have conjured up many fearful scenarios out of something that is really a good thing if I had been able to see it that way.  It takes practice to move away from feeling trapped to feeling free.  A prisoner who’s been released will continue to behave as if she’s still in prison, allowing those around her to persecute her until she mentally steps out of her imagined prison.  If you continue to stay small, your world will look small to you.  If you choose to expand out of your smallness, you can call in the vastness around you to be your trusted ally in freeing you from your illusion of being trapped in a limited world.

How do you call in the vastness around you?  Look around you.  Where is the source of what you see?  Follow back to that source and appreciate the store of abundance.  A picture frame made of wood comes from several pieces of wood which comes from a tree in a forest.  Keep ‘zooming out’ until you see the vastness.  What does it remind you of about your true nature?

What about something you judge as bad, such as an abusive person?  That person is expressing their beliefs and judgements, which are formed by and distilled from their experiences in life, which is a complex saga comprising rich characters with a variety of motivations, which immediately gives you a sense of how varied the store of human behaviours is and allows you to open up to the possibilities of many different experiences you can have among the storehouse of human beings you come across in your life.  This kind of ‘opening up’ of the mind is a key to freeing you from the illusion of being stuck with few or no options.  The gift in vastness is very good medicine for one who feels stuck in limitations.

I am passionate about ‘infecting’ other people with my ability to see spiritual beauty.  Having crossed over, so to speak, I would like to invite all of you to open up to the vastness around you, moving past the limitations you perceive, until you experience true feelings of abundance, joy and freedom.  I promise you, it is all there.

Do Not Be Perplexed…. Be In Awe

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I consider myself very privileged to be in a position to facilitate spiritual awakenings for clients who are open to develop their spirituality.  It’s such an honour to be part of someone’s awakening process and so humbling to witness the growth of a soul.  A lot of our clients are highly-accomplished professionals and successful businesspeople who are left-brain dominant; whilst their structured, analytical minds have aided in their professional success, it’s an obstacle when it comes to emotional healing.  Hence, we often spend quite a lot of time breaking through their tendencies to intellectualise the process so that they can deepen into the realm where true healings can take place.

When you intellectualise the process, you do a number of things: trying to put ideas into clearly-labelled boxes; being sceptical of concepts that do not appeal to your logical brain; over-analysing your feelings; the inability to be open-minded about random, subjective matters; and being too structured and linear in planning how you want the outcomes to look like.

But spirituality does not conform to boxes, or necessarily fit into logic, or stand up to analyses.  It cannot be planned in structured and linear ways.  It may not even be possible to put into words.  What are these boxes anyway if not something constructed by our limited brain?  Spirituality is amorphous, unstructured, pliable, circular, often paradoxical, mysterious, and full of undiscovered potential.

Since I take a spiritual approach to treatment, I see addiction as a gateway to discovering one’s true, awakened self.  In that sense, I tend to see every individual who checks into our residential rehab as a soul on the cusp of finding a renewed sense of who they are.  The process often entails the breaking down of the illusions of their ego – seeing through what’s false and inauthentic so that they come back to a total appreciation of the beauty of their spirit.

The flowering of the soul when finding its way back home is a beautiful process that defies what the logical, rational mind can understand.  It can only be understood by experiencing it and letting go of the need to understand it conceptually.  Bring the level of understanding from the mind to the heart, for this is where growth happens.  The more you are willing to surrender, the faster you’ll get there.  Whenever I see clients struggling to make sense of it, I tell them, “Do not be perplexed, but be in awe of it.”  When you’re perplexed, you are attempting to find answers through your logical mind.  When you’re in awe, you simply surrender to the experience while retaining an open heart.  The former creates limitations while the latter allows you to flow with the process of change, resulting in quicker healings.

When clients come to us for help, they have become stuck in their self-imposed structures – either through their own limiting beliefs or allowing others’ agendas to mark the boundaries around their actions and behaviours. They’re unable to see their way out.  A lot of times, the solutions are found by mentally removing these structures and seeing what is possible when they’re no longer boxed in by those limitations.  This applies not just to one’s physical environment but also to the beliefs they rigidly hold on to.

But to let go of these structures, there needs to be some sense of a safe alternative presented.  Otherwise, it will truly feel like death – in letting go of your grip on what has kept you safe and falling into the chasm of nothingness.  A deep depression or hollowness can manifest temporarily as a symptom of the death of your ego – sometimes known as “the dark nights of the soul”.  This isn’t a bad thing, no matter how uncomfortable it may feel.  The pendulum will start swinging back to the opposite polarity, bringing you back into light, once you’ve reached the depth of despair.  In emerging out of darkness, you’ll pick up various aspects of your true, authentic self, until you arrive at a higher form of yourself – more alive and whole than ever.

The alternative that needs to be presented to encourage you to let go of rigidly-held beliefs will not form into convenient little structures.  But a trust that there is something else worth experiencing will enable you to let go of what isn’t working anymore.  And when you begin to feel the mysterious in-betweens, be in awe of your discovery and let yourself be brought home on a wondrous journey.

Mission: Spiritual Joy At Every Moment

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Over the weekend, I was sharing with friends that I had just discovered a new life mission: to experience spiritual joy at every moment.  In the past, I had spent years figuring out my life mission, and in the end, I always came out with something to change the world or that involved making some unique contribution.  Those are all very well, but as I think about it now, they smacked of arrogance – which suggests that I had not reached beyond the ego in coming up with what I’m here to do.

Spiritual joy is, to me, the most sublime of human experience.  Some qualification is needed for the term, and I begin by making clear what it is not.  It is not about feeling happy all the time, or looking cheerful by putting on a big, smiley face.  Rather, spiritual joy is a deep emotional experience that takes you far into yourself and expands your sense of beingness in the Universe.  You can feel spiritual joy even when you are sad or undergoing some emotionally tough experience.  This type of joy is akin to opening a big book containing sacred knowledge about life; it is enlightening and it fills us with wonder.

If I focus my experience on feeling spiritual joy, then the roads and doors to spiritual joy must present themselves to me.  It might be through taking certain actions that are life-changing or world-changing.  But I am more interested in making use of every moment as an opportunity to experience spiritual joy – to sense the perpetual flow of movement in every moment, especially in my own growth.

What I’ve gained from learning to appreciate spiritual joy is that there really is so much to enjoy about life.  In focusing on spiritual joy, it’s taught me to transcend low-level struggles and to see the larger context.  Joy is a powerful, moving energy that can erase all self-doubts and inadequacies.  After all, we doubt ourselves and feel inadequate in reference to a limited world which we have constructed and which isn’t the whole picture at all.  When we immerse in spiritual joy, it takes us out of the box and into the space where everything is possible.  The more we experience spiritual joy, the more we break down the old programming that is hard-wired into our system and change our whole experience of life.

Paradoxically, indulging in spiritual joy does not make me all floaty and airy; it makes me feel more grounded.  Although it takes you ‘out there’, it does so by expanding your presence rather than by displacing your energy.  Meaning that your energy remains firmly rooted in the ground as your consciousness expands.  As your consciousness expands, you are filled with more presence.  As your presence becomes more solid, you are more aware of your earthly surroundings and the connectedness between all things.  Your existence isn’t displaced but enhanced.

This gives a new flavour to the term ‘life mission’.  For me, it is quite liberating to now look at my mission as simply to feel spiritual joy rather than to bring about some changes to my environment.  Regardless of my environment, I can still feel spiritual joy.  It teaches me to appreciate every moment and to exercise my power of choice in how I experience my world.

Having a ‘beingness’ as a life mission allows us to tap into the part of us that is in control – the part that makes the choice whether to experience something in one way or another.  When we focus on and look out for something that is readily there, we experience it.  This is true for most things in life, including feelings of abundance and excitement.

So, if the life mission or life purpose you have carefully crafted no longer inspires you, it may be worthwhile to reexamine your place in your world.  If you have evolved to a more freeing way of being but your ego is holding on to old attachments, it may be time to let go of them.  Only you have the power to let go of things, it cannot be done for you – and in so doing you will open up your world to greater joy.

Growing Through The Guidance Of Others

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In the pursuit of spiritual growth, meeting and learning from the people we come across through our work and social life remains one of the most enriching experiences.  Who we surround ourselves with can make a big difference between staying stuck and realising our full potential.  The power of that lies in us: we can hang out with people who aren’t growing or we seek the company of those who inspire us to better ourselves.

Of course, we can also learn from those who are stuck.  By observing how they live we remind ourselves how we don’t want to live, which would give us more focus and clarity about how we do want to live.  Moreover, we can use the emotional responses we have towards them to understand ourselves better.

But learning from someone you admire and respect gives you another level of growth.  If you’re lucky enough to meet someone who inspire you because of what they’ve  accomplished in life whilst staying true to their deep personal values – one who seeks continued growth and is generous in sharing his knowledge – you stand to gain much for your personal growth.

Today, I said goodbye to one such person in my life.  Steve Wyer had been our lead therapist for a year and he returns to the U.K. today.  I have seen myself grow tremendously as a therapist and as a person since knowing him.  Let me take stock of what had made our relationship work….

How to Recognise a Good Potential Teacher

For a start, Steve has a way of feeding back to me my shortcomings, weaknesses, limitations, excesses or discrepancies – in a way that makes me want to hear it and able to accept it.  He does this in an honest but caring way.

He leads by example of what he has accomplished for himself.  Unlike many so-called teachers who preach from an insincere place, Steve speaks from his own experiences.  He has turned his own life around powerfully – by not copping-out, taking full responsibility and stepping up to become who he is today.

With Steve, what you see is what you get.  He is humble and openly admits to his own shortcomings.  He does not wear his past struggles like a badge of honour.  He shares only with the intention of helping others.

Like me, Steve is committed to growth.  He strives for experiences that push him to be better and more whole as a person.  I’ve seen how quickly he is able to check in on himself and make changes to the way he thinks and responds to a situation.  Through him, I’ve learnt that change is not only truly possible but easier than I’d feared.

Steve is skilled in the art of subtlety (though this may seem unimaginable when you first meet him and if you take him at face value).  He is open and honest, yet brilliant in getting through to people using subtlety.  Through him, I learned to have a greater appreciation of the subtle shades in every situation.

Finding a teacher is not easy and the best teacher is often ‘an unlikely teacher’ with whom we come into contact unexpectedly and without our setting out to find one.  But even the best teachers will not give you the learnings you need unless you know how to be a good student.

How to be a Good Student

Firstly, you must want to grow.  The drive to grow is inherent in all of us but sometimes buried under a pile of negativity if our lives were overtaken by our struggles to get out of unwanted situations.  Our drive to eradicate struggling becomes more eminent than the drive to become the best we can be.  Sometimes, the struggle to be free from unwanted situations can be a manifestation of the drive to grow – the difference being that the former is focused on changing the situations while the latter is focused on changing the self.

As soon as you make this shift in focus, you take responsibility to look at what you can do, what is within your power to change.  It gives you back a sense of control in your life because you are now focused on your abilities and strengths.  Once you do that, more options become available to you, and you can calmly move into changes.  Change in self becomes the driving force to affect changes in your situations.

Many relationships break up because one party is not growing while the other party seeks to grow.  Within that relationship, if you feel you aren’t growing when you want growth, that the relationship isn’t supporting your growth, then you will seek to grow outside that relationship.  But very often, we don’t communicate enough about the incongruent levels of growth in a relationship, especially if the other person seems to be content with the status quo.  We stay put because we fear change.

When you’re able to get to the level of wanting to grow, you are making a commitment to change, and that includes a willingness to face up to some uncomfortable feelings.  This level of commitment to growth gives you a feeling of being solid within yourself.  Even though the process of growing requires you to feel weak and vulnerable at first, that emotional risk you take of putting yourself in a place where you might feel rejection and shame (which may or may not be the result) will lead you to a stronger place within yourself.

Growth implies change.  Any change means that we must let go of what we currently hold on to – whether it is something physical, a belief about something or an emotionally-charged idea about someone.  That damned ego must be coaxed to relax its grip so that we can move into the unknown space where all is possible (including the possibility of pain though the probability of finding joy here is greater).  You can’t get to this place unless you let go of what you hold on to now.

A good teacher will recognise that she learns as much from her student as the student learns from her.  As a student, this should not be your focus in your relationship with your teacher (lest you develop an entitlement attitude) but you need to adopt a give-and-take attitude in your interactions with your teacher.  Just because you’ve found someone whom you can learn from does not mean that you can be selfish in that relationship.  Give from your heart, sincerely, and be a good friend back.

A good teacher-student relationship might never have to be stated as such.  As long as you are aware of learning from someone, that makes you his student.  What you do internally with the information you get, and what you do differently in your interactions with others as a result of the internal changes, determine whether you are learning and growing.

A lot of times, your teacher will tell you things that are difficult for you to hear, no matter how subtly it is put across.  If you are committed to grow as a person, you would take on this information no matter how uncomfortable it feels.  Once you’ve accepted the feedback, you’ll be able to examine within yourself how true it is and what implications it has on your life.  In recognising your truth, you will grow.

As you grow, begin to step up, using what you have learnt so far.  Step up to the level you aspire to now.  This allows you to check yourself and make the necessary adjustments along the way.  The best way to grow is to keep growing.  If you take setbacks in the spirit of learning, they become valuable feedback to further your growth.

Check with your teacher if you need guidance but use what you already have.  This will prevent you from using your teacher as a crutch or substitute for your inadequacies.  Inadequacies are often imagined, real only in your mind.  They are also easily corrected by jumping into the water and finding your way out.

Of course, for any relationship to work, it is essential to establish trust.  Trust is developed by observing how someone operates to remove any cause for distrust such as betrayal, manipulation or any other forms of misrepresentation.  For your part, you need not be a model citizen to earn the right to learn from someone.  The prerequisite is simply a willingness to listen, to consider what you’ve been told, to make appropriate changes.

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