Now I’m going to get to the point I originally wanted to make in my last post about spiritual growth stumbling blocks. In my last post I got on to another in the set up and left it at that. Sometimes less is more. To just get one insight or epiphany in a post is enough. Let it sink in and get the next nugget later. Too many ideas on one article and the mind gets saturated to a point where ideas don’t go as deep. So that is what I mean by “less is more.”
So the emotional issue that I want to expose came about in my conversation with Ellen as we were planning the Authentic Life weekend workshop in Zion National park.
I was talking with Ellen about handling emotions and guiding people through emotional processes. We haven’t taught together so it’s good that we clarify and understand how we go about things. I know Ellen from studying with don Miguel Ruiz. She spent several years in an advanced study program of life changing teaching with him. You don’t go through that long a process and not pick up a lot of wisdom. On top of that she has been teaching body work and emotional release work for 20+ years. In spite of my respect for her personal journey we haven’t talked much about teaching philosophy and process.
One of the reasons I’m looking forward to teaching with Ellen is that we have similar views on processing emotions. Perhaps it has a lot to do with having the same teacher, or perhaps it is the benefit of being able to look back in time with 20/20 hindsight. We both see that in the spiritual side of personal transformation many people repeatedly fall over the same stumbling block.
The spiritual path that takes people in circles of drama instead of forward is when they are in denial of where they are standing. We see many times that in the pursuit of becoming more spiritually advanced, people focus on the end goal of what they should be spiritually and tend not to accept themselves where they are.
I wrote of one aspect of this in my post on Spiritual Journey Through Illusions Now I want to talk about a more specific piece relating to the emotions.
As Spiritual Seekers are inundated with information from books, internet, and audio, about the Law of Attraction, Conscious Creating, and all the infinite power they have as a spiritual being they become excited and inspired.
People then create that goal in their mind of becoming that conscious creator or even that spiritually enlightened person. They focus so intently on this goal that any time they stumble they pick themselves up again and focus back on the goal. When they get upset, sad, angry, or frustrated, they vow to shake it off and recommit to their goal of mastering their life and the love and happiness they want.
In their intense desire and commitment to succeed and be happy they fail to see the stumbling blocks they keep tripping over. They fail to be aware of their emotions that are pointing to all the false beliefs in their mind. By fixating their attention on the goal of becoming a spiritual person they have stopped being present with the person they are right now. They dismiss, deny, and avoid this aspect of themselves.
In keeping our attention on our imaginary image in our mind that we call a goal, we miss being present with the emotions we are having in each moment. It is as if your life right now doesn’t count and isn’t as important as becoming something else.
This is often because we avoid dealing emotions like sadness, anger, or frustration. We don’t want to acknowledge these aspects of our self because in the mental image game we interpret it to mean we somehow failed or aren’t “there” yet. In this way our spiritual and personal growth goals are a mechanism for avoiding our self in the here and now when that is where our attention is needed. If we don’t learn how to be present with our self and our emotions, we will not know how to do that in the future
It is tempting to believe in a hopeful way that leaping to a greater spiritual consciousness will alleviate us from our emotional reactions and unhappiness. Sometimes the mind wants to believe that this is how spiritual growth and emotional change happens.
While great leaps forward of experiencing Truth and unconditional love are possible, in the larger journey of life that is not how it works. If we haven’t dealt with our emotional stumbling blocks we are likely to fall back towards our “normal” consciousness again on any ordinary Monday morning or Tuesday afternoon. Only by going back to those stumbling blocks of false beliefs and misinterpretations in the mind can we avoid falling over them in the future.
My friend Jeffrey discovered this after many years of meditation and study in the Buddhist tradition. After years of marriage he was facing a divorce and his wife and two daughters were moving out. He found himself immersed in emotions of sadness, fear, hopelessness, and anger that his meditation left him completely unprepared for. He had spent so much time with his thoughts in the heavens that he didn’t know how to deal with his emotions here on earth.
My experience is that we can not embrace our Divinity until we explore and integrate all of our humanity. Integrating our humanity includes all aspects of our emotions, especially the dark ones that we trip over on our way towards conscious awakening.
Being in your integrity includes being in your emotional integrity. By integrity I mean whole and undivided. We don’t push any of our emotions away as not being important or not part of our creation of experience. This is only possible when we embrace all of our emotions, including the ones that we stumble over. (This doesn’t mean that we necessarily believe the stories that go along with the emotions we are feeling.) If the emotions of love and happiness are important, then the emotions of unhappiness and fear are equally important. These emotions are what interfere with our love and happiness. Ignoring them does not make them go away or make us any more evolved.
Only by becoming whole do we recover our Integrity and can journey into a more Divine Consciousness. With out this embrace, maintaining a spiritual consciousness is not sustainable. Consider this, the divine perspective doesn’t reject, repress, or fear any of the emotions. So if you are going to adopt a Divine consciousness, you can’t either.
When you understand the value of embracing all of your stumbling blocks you end up valuing all of the previous moments you spent tripping over your self. You no longer judge your self for your failings, but see them in the context of a much larger process.
We don’t become more spiritually evolved when we put on our prettiest robes and race towards God. We become more spiritually evolved when we track backwards along our path and spend time embracing those stumbling blocks that caused us to trip into upset, sadness, anger and frustration. It is in this way that we build more character, depth, and become more authentic and whole.
It is a more humble road, but maybe that is what letting go of the ego mind is about.
If you are interested in engaging in this process of honest spirituality, you can join Ellen Roseland and myself as we facilitate a weekend of ancient spiritual ceremony, dreaming, meditation, bodywork, common sense and unconditional love to recover the integrity of Your Authentic Life. The weekend is from May 3rd to May 6th in Zion National Park.
I just got off the phone with my friend Ellen. We will be teaching a workshop together in May about Your Authentic Life. I’m excited about it for a number of reasons. One reason is the workshop will be in Zion National Park in Southern UT. The striking beauty of nature there is magnificent. Any place that has that much beauty naturally becomes a powerful place of love and therefore transformation.
Going to Zion is going back to a place of transition in my spiritual journey. Years ago I was on a trip through the southwest and was camping in the park when I found what I was looking for in my quest. I was journeying in a dream at night and experienced my heart opening into a blissful and overwhelming state of unconditional love.
As I woke up and lay on the ground I realized that it was only a dream and somehow my rational mind was willing to dismiss it. But something down inside me, that part of me that was feeling all the emotion, wasn’t ready to dismiss the beauty that I felt.
I was awake, but I could still feel the love radiating through my body. In all my life I had not felt such a beautiful sensation before. It was fading, but I decided that it must be possible to feel that much incredible love in real life. Maybe it was possible to feel it and live it beyond just a dream. I didn’t know if it was possible, but I decided to believe it was.
I consciously decided to believe that I could feel that much love, and to feel it all the time. I decided to believe that I could experience that much blissful love in all my relationships. I decided to believe it on the off chance that it was possible. At that point I knew what I was looking for. It was a feeling. I didn’t know how to get there or the steps I would take, but I knew it as a feeling in my body.
In different traditions it has different names. In mystery schools it might be called the Holy Grail, Your Integrity, Nirvana, Christ Consciousness, or more simply, Unconditional Love. I like to call it the Truth.
When you have this type of experience, what many call a spiritual experience of the Truth, many things become clear. The most important of these is that you know what you are looking for. Until that time I wanted to be happy but I only really knew it as an intellectual idea. Knowing it by experience is much more powerful. That feeling is like a reference beacon to your emotional integrity. You know when you are on track by how you feel, and you quickly know when you are off track in your journey.
I don’t often share experiences about my journey like this for a number of reasons. There are reasons why and I’m getting to that. I will tell you the reasons because then you will have better chance for immunity from them. All of this is necessary just because I’m planning this workshop to Zion and I felt inspired to share a bit of my history in that wonderful place. But I digress.
There are a number of reasons that I don’t share very much about these types of spiritual experiences. One simply is that these experiences of Truth don’t translate into words. People will read this and walk away with their interpretation of my experience.
“In the beginning was the Word, and immediately after there was misinterpretation.”
I’m okay with that part. I’ve made my peace with it a long time ago. It’s the other kind of stuff that people do in their mind with this information about another person. They sometimes use these stories to activate stories in their mind and generate emotional reactions. Then I often refrain from this type of material because I know what people do with it in their mind. I know this very well because I use to do it.
Speaking from my own experience I know that before I started my journey such a story would raise a concerned reaction that someone had “lost it.” I would be skeptical, but that would bleed over into looking for signs that they weren’t logical and rationally sound people. My lack of understanding for these spiritual experiences made it difficult to accept people when they spoke of such things. I was a skeptic of their story, and I unknowingly became more than a skeptic of them.
Later in my process when I began having my own experiences, the judge in my mind would use the material of someone else’s experience to create envy. I would want what they had. I would be wishing I was them and living their life experiences. This is essentially the same thing as not being accepting of my self and where I was in my journey. This is a desire for love, happiness, and conscious awakening that gets distorted in the expression. I didn’t see all that at the time. It is easier to see your stumbling block issues when you go back and spend time with them.
Here is where I get to one of the points I wanted to make. (not the one on top of my head either) It is one of the biggest stumbling blocks people create in their mind when they are on a Spiritual path. I was talking with Ellen about this and we both saw this as a prominent stumbling block and is why I wanted to write this piece.
The big stumbling block that people in a spiritual quest create is that they use these spiritual images as a basis for self judgment. They read books or hear about other people’s experience and wonder, “Why not me?” With that question a critical voice in the mind is all too ready to propose that it is because they are not good enough, or there is something wrong with them, or that they are not doing everything right.
How to turn Spiritual Ideals into Spiritual Demons
When our mind uses Spiritual Ideals in this way they become personal expectations. As personal expectations they are the foundations for self judgment and self rejection. When you haven’t dealt with your inner judge inspirational experiences and stories of spiritual masters can become material for comparison. We can even create an image of what we should be as a spiritual person and judge our self compared to our imaginary self image.
When used in this way, what was a possible source of inspiration and a story about how much love you can feel in all your relationships becomes a spiritual stumbling block of self judgment. In spite of the possibility that people might do this in their minds, I will publish it anyways.
I decided to consciously share with you one of my experiences of emotional awakening to unconditional love. What you do with this information is your responsibility. You can either use it to open up to the possibility of more love and happiness in your life, Or, you can use it to judge me as a quack, feel envy, judge your self as unworthy, none of these, or all of these. These are just some of your choices.
Often we will make more progress on our Spiritual journey by focusing on the step in front of us than by dreaming and hoping about our destination.
More information on Your Authentic Life Workshop in Zion May 3-May6th
More on the spiritual journey in the next post.
There is a close association between personal charisma and success in life. Probably 85 percent of your success and happiness will come from your relationships and interactions with others. The more positively others respond to you, the easier it will be for you to get the things you want.
The Law of Attraction
In essence, when we discuss charisma, we are talking about the law of attraction. This law has been stated in many different ways down through the centuries, but it basically says that you inevitably attract into your life the people and circumstances that harmonize with your dominant thoughts.
You Are A Living Magnet
In a sense, you are a living magnet, and you are constantly radiating thought waves, like a radio station radiates sound waves, that are picked up by other people. Your thoughts, intensified by your emotions, as radio waves are intensified by electric impulses, go out from you and are picked up by anyone who is tuned in to a similar wavelength. You then attract into your life people, ideas, opportunities, resources, circumstances and anything else that is consistent with your dominant frame of mind.
The law of attraction also explains how you can build up your levels of charisma so that you can have a greater and more positive impact on the people whose cooperation, support and affection you desire.
The critical thing to remember about charisma is that it is largely based on perception. It is based on what people think about you. It is not so much reality as it is what people perceive you to be. For example, one person can create charisma in another person by speaking in glowing terms about that person to a third party. If you believe that you are about to meet an outstanding and important person, that person will tend to have charisma for you.
Mother Teresa of Calcutta
One of the most charismatic people in the world was Mother Teresa of Calcutta. In a physical sense, she was a quiet, elderly, frail woman in poor health, and she wore a modest nun’s habit. She might have been ignored by a person passing her on the street, were it not for the tremendous charisma she developed and for the fact that her appearance was so well-known to so many people as a result.
How Would You Feel?
If someone told you that he was going to introduce you to a brilliant, self-made millionaire who was very quiet and unassuming about his success, you would almost naturally imbue that person with charisma, and in his presence, you would not act the same as you would if you had been told nothing at all. Charisma begins largely in the mind of the beholder.
Lasting charisma depends more upon the person you really are than upon just the things you do.
Continually look for ways to improve other’s perceptions of you so that you can be more influential with them. Be a living magnet.
Action Exercises
Here are two things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action.
First, be clear about the messages you are sending and the perceptions you are creating in others. Are these perceptions consistent with the impressions you want to make?
Second, see yourself and imagine yourself every day as an important powerful and charming person. Treat others as you would if you were already strong, famous and influential.
———————- Article by Brian Tracy
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