Ayla

F*CK The Law of Attraction There is no attracting something. There is only creating something. You, what you call you, is an energy, a collection of emotional and mental patterns that are exclusively using known tools and sensations so as to follow the known circumstances you have been experiencing all your life. Patterns are about safety, about what feels familiar. They are not about healing or change or growth. You cannot see your patterns as long as you are operating from those patterns. In the same way that you can’t see straight if your vision is clouded. There is a lot of bull-shit around “the law of attraction” over the internet. That BS claims that any lazy, stupid, pathetic jerk can “be a match” for the best there is. No, no… You can only be a match to what your patterns enslave you to. Let’s say you are a woman with a history of complicated relationships. You see all your ex-partners as vicious bastards who have done nothing but wronged you in some way. What you do not see, is that your safety is to be wronged. The way you live your life, the way you survived, is being a victim. You thrive in that role. That’s the only way you understand life – emotionally, energetically and logically. That kind of life is the only one that makes sense to you and your mind is a servant to that pattern. What you call “your heart” will assess any individual or situation that comes your way in terms of: can this man hurt me? Can I be a victim in any way while with him? Can he trash me? Can he make me feel insignificant and let down? Can he make me feel like something’s always missing? Then YES!!! I am “IN LOVE”!!! Then yes, I can keep creating the relationship of my dreams with this man: that is – one where I get to keep being a victim of circumstances, where I can keep feeling sad and unhappy, where I can keep feeling like life is unfair and hard… This type of a personality will thrive in “what if” and “if only”… They will not realize that these are gateways into reality distortion and fantasy. Weaving a fantasy outcome out of grief, longing and victimhood, is a mind-trap that can only be healed through authentic self-inquiry. These patterns never just disappear or heal by themselves. There’s no elf out there who is magically going to make them go away. At one point in your life, something’s going to come show you that pretty clearly. “Attracting” a better outcome, a better life experience, can only be done through awareness on your own patterns. Now the mind can’t help you with that endeavour. It’s the mind itself who created the havoc. Do you really think your mind is going to quit its own creation? On the contrary, it is going to use everything it knows to keep you stuck. EVERYTHING. Now let’s look at the partner you’ve “attracted” if you are the woman described above… If you are a victim of life, you can only “attract” (read be attracted to) a partner who will be a perpetrator of some sort. This can take many forms: from physical abuse and violence, to simply refusing to acknowledge your emotional and physical needs. Usually, men who are the perfect partners for victim-type women, give those women everything but one thing: the exact thing that woman needs the most. Do you need physical interaction? Some reason will arise where he just can’t give that to you. Do you need emotional intimacy? He will build walls around himself and keep his emotions inside so that you feel constantly disconnected. I really liked this quote from Alain Robarge – a psychotherapist who specializes in relationships, as an example of one form this might take: Usually, these men will look highly accomplished: financially well-off, somewhat sophisticated, intelligent and overtly kind. This is a mask. An iron mask they have created for themselves and others, so that nobody can have a look at who they really are. Including themselves. These men usually have no authentic self-awareness, are reactive and always right. They will show a perpetual discontent with everything in their lives except themselves. Even if they do admit to being emotionally unavailable, it is, more often than not, a fill-in phrase that allows them to escape any deeper scrutiny (their own or others’). So prepare yourself for a journey where everything that will go wrong, will be your fault. Isn’t that the perfect path for a victim? What more could you want? This man will be your soulmate – aka, your perfect source of validation, acknowledgement, acceptance and love as the victim you are creating yourself to be. You “soul” will embrace this man as perfection. Well, in fact, that embracing isn’t of your soul at all! It is your wounds feeding off a known pattern that needs to survive. In our current consciousness level, what we call a soulmate, is actually the perfect excuse to not find mental and emotional health. You cannot attract a single thing in life. You can only be what you are yourself. And every circumstance, partner or situation, will match that perfectly. Xmas is the perfect opportunity for you to look into some life-changing questions: are you hooked on someone who, for some reason (ANY reason) is not giving you what you need in these times of joy? Then ask yourself this: what is it in me that makes me want this type of a partner? Why do I feel I don’t deserve better? Why would I not let myself have someone better into my life? What do I have so wrong inside of me that makes me long for this type of a situation? It is an authentic answer to these types of questions that can shift your relationships to another level. Not jumping into a different relationship, hoping to “attract something better”. A true shift, is that where the experience feels more like peace. A true shift will do just that: shift your preferences, shift your likes and attractors, shift the way you used to see a situation… A true shift is never about outer circumstances but about an inner understanding of why we let pain into our lives. A true shift is one where you realize that the cage isn’t an outer one… The understanding that this is not who we are and not what we need, is CRUCIAL in “attracting something better” Here’s a good question you can make real use of, instead of the crap of the law of attraction: “Who do I need to become so that I can have the best life experience?”

Is YOUR Hair On Fire? I have been focused on healing work as a priority, as part of my identity, as something that I have immersed myself in for over 10 years to the point that it has become not only a hobby but a full-time job. I am aware that not everyone jumps in so completely, the way I have valued walking this path of self-reflection and growth and maturing, based upon the places that were hurting within me, based upon the internal obstacles that I’ve personally experienced around my own sense of self and based on my day-to-day reality. My work is my passion – I’m committed to this. This is my identity, my life’s work. This is important to me and I really value talking about this because my own life, my own experiences, have shown me that healing work is a viable, concrete, identifiable form of focusing one’s life, assigning meaning to where we need to grow and then cultivating that meaning. This is also what has saved me from – at times – very crippling life circumstances. I want to talk about inner work and how people change and about some of the obstacles that get in the way of committing to creating focus and allowing ourselves to change old habitual patterns of relationships – those patterns that are not working in our lives. There were several moments in my life when different layers of realization came, where I clearly understood how, despite the obviousness of the failure of my strategies, I couldn’t change the patterns and continued to stay in this routine, day after day, month after month, year after year. This is how it all really started for me. What I am proposing is to look at inner work as work and I want to look at what’s getting in the way of making that work happen because that is, from what I have seen and experienced, the number one motive for keeping sickness and unhappiness in people’s lives. Life is about relationships – everything is interconnected. We are in relationship to ourselves, to the people around us, to our work, to our identity in our little family and the world at large, as well as in a relationship with every little thing that composes our modern life: from our living space to our eating habits, our leisure and our addictions… If we do not value how we create relationships, chances are we are going to mindlessly be going through life recreating relationships that aren’t working. We seem to want to change the pattern but what’s getting in the way of changing the pattern, in my current view, is that we are only wanting to experience a different outcome while running away from any type of consistent, mindful, balanced change of what makes us miserable… and when I say running away, I should say making considerable efforts to keep in place patterns that are clearly not productive and are causing us consistent misery. I have been immersed, for quite some time in what is called loosely and quite poetically at times “enlightenment work” and an old master’s saying has come to mind that explains my life quite accurately: “seek enlightenment the same way that a man whose hair is on fire seeks a pond”… My own experience could be translated more into: ”seek your healing work, seek healthy relating, seek saying goodbye to family dysfunction, seek sobriety and ending the relationship to addictions the same way that a person whose hair is on fire seeks a pond”… I realize that inner work, the way that I am proposing it, is not for the faint of heart, this is not for the lazy, this is not for the one cruising comfortably through life. This is, at least in my view and in my experience, for those of us who simply do not find any other way out of the path of constant suffering, for those of us who have not been given any other alternative. Life has simply, bluntly, refused to give any opening towards any type of running away from inner work. I want to talk a bit about some of the obstacles and the “universal” challenges that get in our way from being able to prioritize our healing work so that we are in alignment and integrity with our higher values and about how we’re growing and maturing. I am at a point in my life where it is a certitude for me that if we don’t do this inner work, then we won’t grow, we won’t change, we won’t mature and we won’t heal this pain that seems to be our most constant companion. If we won’t do this, our relationships will continue to be cycling and recycling in the same toxic, dysfunctional, unsatisfied, frustrating tension and therefore it feels like if we do nothing, we’re just sitting there watching our hair burn. If this sounds intense and extreme, you might not yet be in a situation where you have acknowledged your metaphoric hair being on fire and so this message will not resonate with you, and you might be saying to yourself that I am being extreme and dramatic, but think about it: if you have experienced 10 years, 20 years, 30 years of crushing suffering in your life that is the result of a relationship distress of some sort, and if relationships seem to continuously belittle your sense of worth, where you betray who you are as a human being, you deny yourself to the point that you’re feeling like an empty shell of a person, not even in a relationship but just going through the motions of what you believe a relationship should look like, you do need to start acknowledging the urgency – the hair on fire – of looking into your personal childhood history of abandonment and neglect and being rejected and into the need of focused attention on this part of your psyche that’s lodged into your felt sense body, it is lodged into your nervous system as a core wound that is constantly looping and constantly manifesting as distress and pain. I call the triggers of this looping “hormone shots”. They are felt sensations that appear in specific, personal contexts of what we could call “life stressors” that keep provoking the same external reality that seems to be happening “to us”, when in reality, the seat of it lives in our psyche, more specifically in our psyche’s wounds. We might be telling ourselves that all we want to experience is love and be loved, but we have to become clear that we have been trained into mirroring what is familiar. We do not create. We mimic what we know, what feels known and thus safe. And that might be: being treated poorly, co-creating relationships that are lacklustre, where we don’t demand that much, where we learn to put ourselves on hold, we learn to be abandoned, we learn to be rejected, we participate in our own being ignored, we participate in our own abuse, we ignore self-care, we engage in self-neglect… if you have done this for years and years and years, at some point it is the equivalent of noticing your hair is on fire and tending to it has to become a priority. So yes, there are life circumstances where it becomes obvious that all we can seek out, is our healing, our self-care, our comfort and compassion, our ability to feel connected in this world, to find meaningful, authentic connection. Health is about seeking all of these as if our hair was on fire, because if we don’t, we’re going to sit there and burn in the flames of despair and emotional discomfort. Unfortunately, my overwhelming experience with people – but also my personal experience up to a point, is that many of us have built up a tolerance and a normalcy to sitting in the fire, a bit like the story of the frog that you put in a pot of water that gets slowly warmer and warmer, until the frog will boil alive, even though it would be perfectly capable of jumping out of the boiling water at any moment. Healing work is – first – about perseverance. It could take the form of regular prayer, mantra, meditation, it could mean committing to formal therapeutic intervention, or any type of continuous process where you first DECIDE that you have had enough of your own suffering, and start building the necessary muscles to pull yourself out of that metaphorical boiling pot. Building this muscle is, in fact, a way of rewiring your brain. This is done, initially, through grief work. This is about grief and grieving – and not only grieving what happened, but grieving what didn’t happen in your life. Many of us say we are ready to pursue change but we’re not really doing anything about it or we go through the motions and this is where we produce a lot of covert smoke and mirrors, confused intention and we often use the word “trying” – “I’m trying to change, I’m trying to pursue my healing work, I’m trying to participate in a path of self-directed healing”, but even the word trying is a bit of a letting ourselves off the hook and a rationalization to convince ourselves to just burn a little longer as we sit in the lingering pain and marinate in the dysfunction of our life’s relationships, in our attachment trauma and the manifested reality of our core wound.. I am quite aware of my ramped up, strong, forceful presentation of this urgency to get your hair off the fire, and I do need to acknowledge that I am doing this purposefully because I have such a passion about it, but also, I’m aware that I’m going to be simultaneously addressing a group of people that will greatly resonate with this, and then also some people are going to be turned off because it’s a little forceful – if that’s your case, then please pick and choose the content and morph it in such a way so that you can digest it, because what’s important is that you get the message and not necessarily whether you agree or disagree, or if you like or dislike the actual point I am making. Inner work means you find some innate grounded sense of an observer self, your own inner therapist self and you begin to make choices to define clearly what are you working on, what needs focus and what are the very concrete steps, the next steps you need to do to allow yourself to get closer and closer to achieving relationship-maturity… some of us do not go through that thought process to even map out what we are working on. We stay stuck in confusion which is, of course, a legitimate state of mind that happens, but please know that in my personal experience and the experiences of every single person around me – be them clients, colleagues or friends, confusion oftentimes is a buzzword that reinforces non-commitment and it can be a rationalization, a justification, a way of disempowering ourselves from actually having to show up in our own life and it reinforces the inability of attending to our hair being on fire. The first thing that you would need is a real strong innate sense, some internal spark to get off the couch and at least take one step closer to where you think your particular pond might be. This is not a passive process – this is about you coming into a contemplative, grounded, silent place to create focus on what do you need to do next that is going to bring you one step closer to self-care, to strengthening your sense of worth, to defining how you can be in relationships from a mature, adult place, how do you heal your family wounds, your legacy of attachment injuries, how do you grieve in a way that is life-giving as opposed to emotionally crushing and you don’t just spiral into hell around your own painful emotional experiences. These are concrete skills and you need to step up to making a declaration and taking a stand in our own life. Can you get inspired to really, clearly define what does self-directed healing mean to you, what particular areas do you want to focus on and how are you going to get there? If you do not answer those questions, it will not work – it could be helpful for you to learn some tools along the way and it might give you ways to brainstorm and a way to enter this new-age grouping that’s so in trend nowadays, but you are always going to come back to this invitation (and sometimes constraint) that life asks you to enter this process of healing, of maturing and of growing. You’ll basically find yourself at the same place, over and over again. Maybe with a different person, maybe in a different place, but the emotional urgency will be there, felt like reoccurring trauma and pain. To help you with that, I am in the process of creating a 10 weeks program for anyone who feels dead-stuck and challenged around creating change and being able to engage and prioritize their own healing work… The research that I have done for this upcoming program and the experiences of my own life and those of my clients, clearly show that there are two reasons why people join a self-healing path: the first reason is that people are sick and tired of repeating the same old patterns of relationships that are no longer working or have never worked – they have identified their own co-creation of dysfunctional relationships, empty relationships, painful relationships, tension-filled relationships or relationships that are based on attachment distress. Their nervous system is just whacked out and on edge and they are so stressed out all the time just by being in this relationship, that they come to the realization that they really cannot continue, they’re sick and tired of being sick and tired in these relationships that don’t work. Something has got to change!! So for this category of people, there is an awareness, an identification of the problem and the clear, honest, authentic desire to change! Other people have been on this path alone for quite a while and are looking for structure and direction. They’re sick of that continuous confusion around: what do I do now? I might be able to identify that I’m sick and tired, I might be able to identify what is not working – but they still need clear steps to move forward towards manifesting different types of relationships. People need to be educated about actually how to use self-therapy efficiently. First, we need to develop certain skills of self-reflection, certain skills of being able to track one’s own mind, certain skills of knowing how to identify and communicate with the felt sense experiences in our body and certain skills of just mapping out a plan of healing and how to begin to implement it. The first step is a process where we are preparing to be able to go deeper into other levels of the inner work, but we can’t even get there because we’re going to have to assemble, step by step, a tool-kit. The program I am about to release is mostly about awareness, about grief and learning the grieving skills that lead to a clean slate, a clean terrain, free of pesticides and weeds and bad debris that is ready for the new flowery crop. Many people feel sick and tired of their situation, but they still do not make a commitment to begin. They simply don’t! Often-times we can be very sophisticated at creating our own confusion as an obstacle and we can be very sophisticated at putting up smoke and mirrors to go through some motions to make it appear as if we are trying to engage our healing work, but at the end of the day, when we really look in the mirror, we really haven’t done anything: we have not clarified a plan of self-directed healing and the pace in which we are going to start working at it on a regular basis. Inner work is about self-accountability, it is about focus, it is about discipline, it is about boundaries, it is about self-care, it is an act of self-loving. When you are put on the spot and someone asks you: what are you working on with regards to your healing work today, you need an answer, you need clarity, you need to have put in the investment on some contemplative practice to allow yourself to settle and for some focus to come into your awareness that says: yes, I’m working on grief, I’m working on boundaries, I’m working on shame, I’m working on my relationship to self, I’m working on my relationship to basic self-care, I’m working on my relationship to family, I’m working on my partner relationships, I’m working on my relationship with food, exercise, drugs, leisure, employment… and if you cannot answer that question, then the other things that you think you’re trying to do around healing work, are empty efforts!! You’re not going to see the momentum, you’re not going to see any identifiable change in your ability to learn new skills of relating, in your ability to show up a little differently in your life, in your ability to have a deeper grounded sense of knowing of who you are, of what you want and what you’re willing to do to get healthy and happy. This all comes down to: are you ready to change? Are you ready to heal? Are you ready to do this work? Many people have good intentions and they very sincerely say: yes, I am ready! What I am proposing to you here is a process that I have put together after years and years of constant inner work with myself, my loved ones and my clients. This process is the result of hundreds, thousands of hours of trial and error of countless forms of self-directed healing work. This might all sound very, very complicated but it doesn’t need to be. What is actually happening is that we only need the clarity of intention and the decision that we need to start. We also need commitment and structure and a community or at least a work-buddy to accompany us on the path. However, this is not some type of a new quick-fix, the next life-hack to get you into a different reality at the end of a 10 weeks process. This is about investing your time and your focus: can you put this on your calendar? Can you create a quiet, contemplative space to enter a dialogue with yourself where you say: self, what do you need? Self, I’m going to take the next 20 minutes to just hang out and be intentional, be intelligent, be compassionate and also be a little serious… again, this is not for the faint of heart. When we’re talking about suffering, when we’re talking about crushing suffering and when we’re talking about a suffering that has very real-world consequences on shutting us down as a person and also denying us relationships where we feel loved and where we’re even able to identify partners who are capable of loving us back, in my opinion, that’s pretty serious. As a human being, I also join this challenge to create those types of relationships in my life – relationships that have sustainability, that have longevity and that provide that level of secure attachment for me personally and I’m assuming if you got this far on this article, for you also this is really important and that’s how we come full circle: back to where there’s an urgency, our hair is on fire and yes, we know we’re ready to do healing work, we have that sincerity. Now, are we able to put in the effort and are we going to put in the necessary work? The number one reason people seem to advance in the face of pursuing meaningful, life-changing inner work, comes back to being too busy… and yes, I know that is a legitimate response and the reality of life is very taxing and people are working two jobs and have to do the laundry and have children and… but keep in mind that while you’re doing all these other things, your hair is on fire and your head will soon be engulfed in that fire at any moment now… What is in fact happening, is that you are mirroring the neglect and the abandonment that was brought on to you through your life history – most probably in your family system and in your family relationships where you have a core wound around being abandoned, rejected, neglected or ignored and you have integrated that way of being treated, as being YOU… and you actually treat yourself the same way – so by denying yourself, by avoiding to create a very clear, concrete, disciplined, focused, self-directed healing plan and mapping it out, you’re neglecting yourself and you will not be able to own directly the pain of saying: I’ve given up on myself again. I’m so overwhelmed and confused about what to do in my healing work, so, therefore, I am going to abandon myself and continue to do the same thing I’ve always done and I can at least say I’ve tried to pursue some healing work – I’ve tried that program, I’ve tried to engage in that meditation, I’ve tried to take yoga classes… and this is how it becomes really challenging. This is the moment where we have to have compassion for our habitual behaviours, the obstacles, the lack of discipline, we have to have empathy for ourselves that we are creatures of habit, we have to have empathy for ourselves that we do lack a lot of agency to be able to really move these things forward, but we also have to see it in a no-bullshit kind of way, be honest with ourselves and say: “trying” is, in fact, a distraction that hides the habitual giving up on ourselves and acknowledge that we did not clearly invest commitment and time and focus. This is what we do to ourselves repeatedly… there seems to exist a sort of a cheerleader inner agenda: let’s get on board with this new technique, with that new program, with following that new person… but finally what’s going to happen is that we fizzle out and we implode and we feel exhausted, we feel sick and tired. Do you see the loop? So the goal here is self-directed healing that we have identified really clearly. The next step is about having clarity of where to focus our self-directed healing. The third – we need a concrete plan. First, pick your area and frequency of engaging in this inner work – it’s your choice: do you know how much is your hair on fire? You must know if you can afford to sit there and burn! This cannot be about: oh, I’ll get to it once in a while… I’ll do it whenever I get to it! What I am suggesting, what I am proposing, what this ten-week program is, is surely not about being a window shopper to your own life, this is not about saying: oh, yeah, I will casually fold this process into my life whenever I get to it. The type of people that I’m targeting – and you might be one of them – is someone who values staying focused and committed to healing work because you know that you need to create some change NOW and so, therefore, the first thing you need to do is pick your commitment to participate and pick the frequency of participation: this could be daily, this could be two times a week, this could be three times a week – which is what I recommend. So at this moment, right now, make a choice for you!! No matter who you are, what you are working on, what you’re doing, if you’re doing some other program, if you’re in therapy, if you are practising your own process of ritualized healing work, wherever you live in the world, just where you’re at in your life at this moment, make a commitment, you have got to make a choice. You can’t sit on the fence and then six months later wonder why you have so much tension and drama in your relationships and continually keep repeating on the same old pattern that you always have. You are planting the seeds today of more relationships not working out if you continue to ignore what you need to do around your self-directed healing. We are planting the seeds of our suffering today that will show up in the future and this shows up most obviously in relationships. If I was into research more, I think I could even create a calendar of the cycle and the frequency in which couples create drama, argue, push each other away through repeating old dysfunctional patterns, because, over the years, I have become aware of this continuous cycle of the next drama, tension, attachment distress, old patterns… What is needed is that we break down and identify what are the ingredients that go into creating this recipe of dysfunctional relating and then we can see how we can begin to take the ingredients out or change the ingredients and come to change the recipe, into one that allows ourselves to get close and experience intimacy and connection. If you create a commitment and a frequency to address your healing work, you will also be creating a commitment to continually observe what your patterns of relating are and where can you create some workable, identifiable, manageable change. What my program will be about, is about what does it mean to be a human being with a mind that reflects upon itself, who desires creating connection for the sake of safety and trust and closeness and finding emotional companionship, emotional closeness in order to thrive in this world and all of the obstacles that get in the way of allowing us to do that. Creating a commitment and a frequency to begin and a commitment and a frequency of how often you are going to focus on your work is a decision – and sometimes a necessity that you are not going to continue to go down the path that you have always gone down to. Once that decision to start has been made and once your engagement has been established – pick what are you going to do on those two times/four times a week that you allocated to this process: again, it’s back to the degree of seriousness and clarity and focus that you want to bring to this… you can’t be wishy-washy and say: oh yeah, I’m sort of doing healing work because I’m just sort of going with the flow – you need a plan and a path! Again, not everyone’s going to resonate with this message because there are many, many ways to approach this. In each person’s life, there is going to be a chapter, a period of time when we’re taking a softer, more organic approach… It all depends, I think, on the level of suffering and frustration and on the level of determination to put out that fire! I’m acknowledging that there’s validity to that and I am acknowledging that some people really need that because of how hurt or crushed or exhausted they are… for some of us, everything I’m talking about just sounds like a lot of work and quite honestly, it IS work!! Not only that, but you’ve got to do your own work – nobody else can do it for you! This is where I have to hold up the mirror to myself: everything I’m saying here applies to me too. I am not perfect, I’m not in order in my life, my relationships are not totally quite there yet. I also need to identify my frequency and commitment to where and what I’m working on and I also need to identify what are the top three things that I have to do to actually move myself closer to what I hope to experience in life. One of my own top three things is self-care. You can pick your relationship to yourself, to your partner, to your family, to your children, you can look at your childhood, you can look at grieving and grieving skills, you can look at boundaries… you can spend time investigating your obsessive thinking and your assumptions and judgments about how other people are treating you based upon the fantasy stories that you tell yourself… The simplest way to decide what to focus on, is to look at where you’re looping: if you are suffering from obsessive thinking over, let’s say, the loss of a relationship that ended months ago or years ago or decades ago and yet, you still find yourself looping into fuelling fantasies of how you’re one day going to get back together – know that that needs to be your focus, that’s what you need to work on… Once you pick what you’re working on, you need to identify what exactly you are going to be doing, what is the path that you’re taking as you’re running to seek out the pond. In my program, for each week, I’m going to offer different healing modalities and tools to identify a certain trait, or behaviour, or attitude, or pattern that I have seen involved in relationships that lead to suffering in humans. The next thing that you need is some form of self-accountability to turn to, but also, encouragement and praise – that’s the point of a community. There will be a Facebook group for those of you who will join in. We all need some way to receive encouragement and support – we do not heal in a vacuum, we don’t heal in isolation. Inner work does not mean isolation, it does not mean doing everything for yourself by yourself on your own – this is an approach of how you orient and organize your plan of healing that is going to be highly influenced by the urgency and how willing you are to challenge the repetitious suffering that keeps occurring in your life. So in addition to mapping out the plan, we need encouragement and we need some sense of support and that may translate into finding some other like-minded people, some community where you feel that you’re held and that you’re not doing it all by yourself. Alternatively, it might be a one-on-one partnership where you rally up with another person that feels right to you, and with whom you might bounce back hang-ups and limiting patterns… This program is not about some extracurricular tangent to your everyday life of getting something fixed and then you’re done. Inner work is NOT a sort of a recipe or a medicine that you’re going to be cured and then you’re done. If you approach healing work like that, that’s a bit misleading and that might create an obstacle because this is not about somehow working on this really hard for a few months and then you’re done and then look at how happy and shiny you are… inner work doesn’t work like that!!! Healing work doesn’t mean: oh I need to change and fix something that’s broken and be a different person!! It means: I am choosing to participate in a conscious lifestyle and a healing lifestyle of maturing and personal growth and I will choose a life that incorporates a contemplative path of self-reflection and I value getting to know myself and I value my inner world and I value paying attention to the parts of me that are hurting and aching and need attention… and I value practising how to give myself comfort and self-care and I value learning how to hold my mind in awareness… holding your mind in the cradle of loving-kindness is not something that you just do for ten weeks and then give up on it and say: oh look, now I totally have mastered the ability to hold myself in loving-kindness… This is an invitation to a lifestyle, this is to say that you will always be on the path of personal integrity… This is not about getting rid of something, but it’s about showing up in your fullness to stay grounded in the integrity of what you know is possible, of the type of human being that you’re growing into, that you’re maturing into and included in that, are the types of relationships that you’re creating and the type of relationships that you want… and here’s another big one: the type of relationships that you’re offering other people!! This is not just about how you’re going to get something and how you’re going to be happy!!! This is about how you’re developing and cultivating the skills that you can share with others so that they too can engage with you on certain levels of openness and vulnerability and honesty and emotional disclosure to reveal themselves… and that’s what it’s all about, that’s the scary part about it!! If you have attachment trauma or attachment injuries that are unintegrated, those get stirred up, that’s what’s getting triggered… The question is: how do you allow yourself to stay centred, grounded, present and open in relationships, in order to let in love and to offer another person that equal reflection back? How do you mirror back that love and initiate it?? This is very complex stuff, this is about neuroplasticity, about the ability to change, about the ability to override and rewrite these patterns… this is very concrete, researchable, identifiable stuff… it’s about how the brain works. If you’re resonating with this content, you need to practice new corrective experiences that allow your system to sync up with another person and a reasonable level of challenge and risk around vulnerability and openness, trust and safety and you really get a chance to have a corrective experience of letting someone in, allowing yourself to be seen and to be known, to be affirmed, to be valued and you must do the same thing for the other person… you must also practice taking the risk related to seeing the other person, where you’re going to invite really wanting to know the other person as well… and as we do this enough – and we don’t have to do this in the context of a romantic partner relationship – you take a risk to be vulnerable and share who you are… it’s about showing up in the world as yourself instead of as your wounding. We’re all selling water by the river here… I too am thirsty and I too need water and in the process, we’re all in the same boat. Join me soon!

How many lifetimes ago was I posting in this journal? I guess I'll start a new one

Hey!! I had to come and wish you a Happy New Year of your life! Hope it will be a good, productive, amazingly insightful one! Thanks for everything !! xx

@Leo Gura Astral ape? I find that SO cute!!!

Just about as long as you can hold a pitbull. The emphasis here is not on the mind but, as always, on the holder. A construct holding another construct. it can be done, of course, through sheer determination. and for a limited amount of time. The KEY though, is the understanding that there is no holding possible. Who would hold what? Which is what?

@Leo Gura I have..... I hear what you are saying. Yes, everyone is where they are supposed to be. But wouldn't it be nice to find a way to clearly show people when they are being trapped into yet another type of addiction? Surely, a more elevated and meaningful type, but still, just a way of escapism from what is there already. I see spirituality becoming the next big pharma, a sort of a monster with a nasty case of self-righteous case of mental diarrhea... oops!!

@Seeker_of_truth Yes, I know Sadhguru's technique...

More or less You are already embracing that mind. That's why it is yours. It is not different than your hand. Or your tongue. And it is as much yours as those are. And it understands exactly as much as your arm or leg do... So yes, truth cannot be comprehended.

This sounds like an addiction to me... which can be a kind of a thirst for... something. I see some traps in your rant. Here's one: low consciousness? Lower than what? What is your reference point? If you are interested in philosophy, study it until it consumes you. If you are interested in true spirituality, take one phrase from a video and see it play out in your life until you are done. Or undone. Depends on where you want to look at stuff. Here is another: how can you live two lives? one that is day-to-day and one that is spiritual? The answer is INSIDE !!!

@Leo Gura I'd really like to see a video about spiritual bypassing. There's a load of it everywhere. Talk and talk and talk and spiritual teachers and videos and this and that... People thinking they can think their way through/out of their own thinking or the thinking they resonate with... doing all kinds of physical or mental gymnastics to deepen into the shit even further... ugggg!!

I would replace logic with maturity. Logic can be so dependent on intellect level, etc.. You can also use self-honesty as a better concept. Maturity, responsability and clarity are the only ways one can see truth from shit. Now it remains to be seen how much self-honesty goes around its tail like this... Your mind will never be able to discern truth, but somehow You will know truth once you are being VERY VERY honest with yourself

Here is some clarity for you Feminine energy bonds when it receives, male energy bonds when it gives. In human relationships, it is for the male energy to go forth. So first lesson: if you ask someone out and she says NO, she is not ready, able or willing to receive. Move on. She would not care less if you ask other women out. I saw your other post about dating older women. Older women are more comfortable with their feminine side and that attracts you. Try!! The worst that could happen is.... ?!?! Most women in our society don't have a clue about what it means to be feminine. They think that a shorter skirt or more make up would make them more so. False! Society has pushed women to be equal to men so they HAD TO take on a male role. So it is understandable that you dont wanna live with a dude. I am talking here SPECIFICALLY about romantic relationships. Not professional ones. Just one point: be sure you like the girl you want to approach. Good feminine energy feels when it's just about fooling around. Also, you might want to wait for a sign that a woman likes you. Good feminine energy knows how to show that.

@crazycrazycrazy Nobody just gets thrown like that anywhere But to answer your question, from my own experience, I can tell you that it feels like endlessly peeling at a fruit. you come back deeper and deeper into points you thought you were over and done with. Addictions, relationships, jobs... You either know them well from working with them before, or there is still stuff to work out there. If and when they are back, it is incredibly easy to say: Nope, thanks! if they are healed. If not, they will pull you back in the exact measure your internal - lets say - magnet is. So taking your example, you would see the beauty in that life you once lived, you would let it go past you with love, or you would engage because something still pulls at you. Two more points to consider: God is a point. Like the very tip of a needle. everything else is story in layers. This work is made to be very unicorny like that, but it is, in fact, a very serious path towards maturity, responsibility, and clarity.

@Loreena,. The quickest way out of depression is creativity. Make an omelet. Make it the cutest one ever, or the ugliest one. put a smiley on it with olives and a carrot slice. Look at it. You have made that thing out of nothing. If it wasn't for you, it would never be there. Grab a pencil and doodle with it. See what comes up. Color the damn thing. Do you like it? Do you hate it? Notice your internal dialogue. What is it? Notice what your body does and think of same reactions in opposite situations. For example, you also lose your voice in a surprise situation or when extremely happy. Don't fight. Embrace. You are depressed. Okay. There is where you are right now. What is the next step you can take right this moment? Is it to lay down and cry? Cool. Do that. What next? The secret is to go off the automatic loop. Just see what it is that you are doing. Creativity is incompatible with depression. If you can create something, anything, it's like a rocket lifting you up. Just try it.