“You are not enough”.
“You will never make it.
“You are too fat!”
We have all had negative voices in our heads……
If you listen to those voices they can be crippling and will rob you of your power, freedom, and dreams.
You are not the voices in your head.
You are not your thoughts.
Just because your mind tells you something doesn’t mean it’s true.
Your inner critic is that part of you that talks negatively to you.
To be free you must learn to develop a relationship with your inner critic.
Each spring great forces are released to work upon and within us. During this time of the year the possibility of making a brand new beginning in life is never greater. Why is this true? Because spring also “dawns” within us, and if we will align ourselves with the power of its presence, then working for us is the unstoppable principle of rebirth itself. But, if we would receive this new life, with all its promise, then we must be willing to sacrifice within us whatever stands in its way…
The deepest parts of you know that if freedom from fear was as easy as "creating a new reality" for yourself, then you would already be the fearless person you know in your heart that you're meant to be. It's just not that easy...which brings us to a great liberating truth, an insight you must prove to yourself before you can know its power to dismantle any fear. When it comes to the fearless life, the Divine gives nothing freely . . . save to those who freely give themselves to discovering the truth about their own fearless Self. The good news is that this supreme confidence and calm already lives within you, needing only your realization of its unshakable presence to empower you with the fearlessness you seek.
The following seven laws are like a golden invitation to your own coronation. To "open" each one, and receive its royal instruction about how to live free of fear, you need do only one thing: ask sincerely that you might understand its secret message and then, when the answer comes, welcome those insights as long lost Friends...for that is exactly what they are. They will do the rest for you.
In these difficult times the issue of vulnerability needs to be addressed directly, because so many people feel powerless and anxious, and the social trends that undermine personal power only seem to grow stronger. It’s crucial to find a way to secure in your day-to-day life.
Let’s clarify what being secure isn’t. It isn’t achieving a confident self-image and suppressing what you feel inside. Also, security isn’t something that can be created through externals like money, status, possessions, or any other material surrogate. There are countless people sitting in the lap of luxury who feel even more insecure than the average person. Overcoming vulnerability happens “in here,” where you relate to yourself.
Now we can address the five things that actually do create security as a personal quality in everyday life.
Wishing to be free, without taking action toward our intention, is meaningless; we must employ the truths we uncover, or we will never realize the possibility of their true power, which is to help us walk away from what has been wrecking us. But with this new understanding in mind we must also realize that the truth that sets us free is not for hire; it does not so much “work” for us as it is our silent partner, producing the new life we long for. This means several things.
First, we must be receptive to truth’s instruction in the Now; only conscious awareness of our aching can lead us to what authentically answers it, ending it. But secondly, we must -- ourselves -- be true in the same moment to what we know is the truth of that moment. We must do the truth we know. We must refuse, no matter what the seeming cost in the moment, to take part in any conversation with those parts of us that have proven themselves, time and time again, to compromise us.
Do you see a bully?
The Practice:
Stand up to bullies.
Why?
Humans are profoundly social. Woven through the tapestry of our relationships are several major threads. One of these is power. The only question is, do we use it for good or ill?
The abuse of power can be called many things, including intimidation, fraud, discrimination, and tyranny. I’ll use a term that’s down-to-earth: bullying.
Bullies are unfortunately common. Throughout history and right now today, from homes and schoolyards to the halls of power, they create a vast amount of human suffering. What can we do?
“Commitment creates intention, and intention makes a desire worthy of manifestation.”
When you elevate and prioritize a goal or desire, you dedicate your intelligence and power to it. And when you bring your intelligence and power to bear on a goal, it comes into being.
I offer you the following five commitments. Allow them to become the foundation that powers your expansion.
#1: Commit to Knowing Your Essential Self
To commit to your Essential Self is to fully employ the power of Divine Intelligence in your life, letting go of the attachments and expectations that cloud its transmission. In truth, you are the Observer of this life. It is grace that is guiding the unfolding of your evolution. Grace powers revelation; grace reveals oneness and your life’s purpose. It is grace that restores full remembrance of your Essential Self. This discovery, this unfolding, this realization, and this revelation is your commitment
Your essential self is vast. it is pure consciousness, universal awareness, and it is the foundation of all expression, creativity, and expansion in this world. It is “you” in your most unadulterated form. You entered this world with this essential innocence and purity, but life’s events have distanced and covered over the core foundation of your being. You have forgotten the essential you.
When you forget, you do something very curious.You experience your mind thinking, your feelings arising, and your body functioning, and you conclude that those aspects of your experience are the totality of who you are. You say, “I’m fat,” “I’m depressed,” “I’m poor, broken, and hopeless,” “I’m angry,” or “I’m stupid,” as if you are the thought, feeling, situation, or body part.
Creating authentic power requires distinguishing love from fear in yourself and choosing love no matter what is happening inside you or what is happening outside. Our evolution now requires us to create authentic power. The coronavirus is teaching us how to do that. The reality of the coronavirus is often lost in the fear of it (including denial). The reality of the coronavirus is that no one is immune to it, and it is extremely contagious. The mortality rate of the coronavirus is much lower than small pox or bubonic plague, yet it is a deadly threat. That reality demands that we bring our fears into our awareness so that we can choose responsibly between our fears on the one hand and love on the other. This is important because not only your health depends upon your choices, but also the health of others.
In other words, the coronavirus is the perfect teacher of responsibility. The coronavirus is contagious days before its symptoms appear in you. You do not know when you become infected! During that time you can infect others without knowing it and without them knowing it (because they do not know when they become infected, either), and they can (will) very quickly infect others and on and on and on and on. These are the things that make the coronavirus very dangerous. It is extremely contagious, everyone can unknowingly infect anyone else, and it can kill you. In other words, if you mindlessly endanger yourself, you mindlessly endanger others. If others recklessly endanger themselves, they recklessly endanger you. To echo Lakota wisdom, the health of one is the health of all, and the illness of one is the illness of all.
Years ago, Erika and I discovered the healing power of mothering, and we wrote about it in “Healing Your Aloneness.” What we discovered has now been verified over and over. In his excellent book, “In An Unspoken Voice,” author Peter Levine tells a heartwarming story. When National Guard soldiers were ordered to remove Elian Gonzales – the young boy who became a pawn in a political battle in Florida – from the hands of his Cuban exile cousins living in Miami, they trained a female federal agent to caringly take the boy from the cousins and angry onlookers. Knowing he would be extremely frightened, and not wanting to further traumatize him…
“The agent held him firmly enough to not be ripped away by the angry mob, yet gently enough for her embrace to match the words she calmly recited in Spanish,”Elian, this may seem scary right now, but it soon will be better. We’re taking you to your papa…You will not be taken back to Cuba [which was true for the time being]…You will not be put on a boat again [he had been brought to Miami on a treacherous boat ride]…You are with people who care for you and are going to take care of you.’” p.265
As she rocked him gently and spoke soothingly to him, he relaxed.
Levine goes on to describe another dramatic mothering scene that occurred during the East Timor conflict. As dazed and disoriented refugees wandered into a refugee camp, a group of Portuguese nuns greeted and gently held and rocked the children and the most shocked adults, whispering soothing words to them, thawing them out of shock with their love.
When expectations get dashed, we don't see new possibilities unfolding; all we see is the way things should have gone. We don't see what is with all of its positive possibilities; instead we see only the negative . . . what is not. We feel powerless because we've become the captive of a mind resisting itself, an involuntary prisoner of a mind struggling to escape its own negative images. There is nothing but powerlessness in this resistance because by law whatever we resist . . . persists!
The only way to liberate ourselves from the confines of this unconscious relationship is to develop a new awareness of what it costs us to remain in its captivity. We must ask, what kind of "power" is it to resent any moment for unfolding as it does, to wish it didn't happen? Does it change the moment in any positive way? No, it does not. Does our pain prove that our position is right? To the contrary: the more we don't want the moment, the more we lend credibility to that moment as being overpowering. This false perception then strengthens our negative sense of self, as someone being overpowered by it.
In the moment you find yourself stressed, tense, worried, irritable, or angry -- when you find yourself in a negative state, thinking about what to do about your negativity -- all you have to do to break free is realize that you're in the wrong place. Don't think about what to do with where you are. Admit to yourself you're in the wrong place, and then... just don't go there.
You may, at any moment that you wish, become aware of yourself sufficiently enough to know where you are inwardly. When you find yourself living a resentment over again, all you have to do is see that you're surrounded by thoughts and feelings that were produced by your resistance to a remembered event. That's all you have to do. Who made you remember what you now wish hadn't happened to you? Who made you picture the person you resent? Who brought up the failure from your past? Who did any of that in the moment you're sitting by yourself, or driving in your car, or eating your cup of coffee.
Any seemingly scary condition in your life, whatever it may be, is not the real problem. It’s your reaction to it that has you shaking. Which is why, if you’ll become truly conscious of a fearful condition instead of afraid of it, you’ll change forever your relationship with fear.
Being conscious of your fear empowers you to interact with it in an entirely new way. This new inner relationship gives you the power to be awake to fear's scary influences, instead of being their unconscious slave. And as each day you discover something new about the shaky nature of your own fearful reactions, they lose their power over you. Why? You see them for what they have always been: unintelligent, mechanical forces.
To be consciously afraid means that you know you are frightened. You feel it, but at the same time you know that these very fears, as real as they may seem, are not you.
Fear is really nothing other than a self-limiting reaction that we’ve always mistaken for a shield of self-protection. It’s time to let it go, which you can do anytime you want. Here’s how: Dare to proceed, even while being afraid.
Every journey of genuine self-discovery, and the subsequent changes this process produces in us, must begin somewhere. We begin our journey with a great but unrealized truth: within each of us resides a power that can change the whole world. It’s true; we each have a secret character hidden away in us that is created for just the alchemical purpose of transforming any dark influence into a beneficial force. And yet, as appealing as the idea of such a power may sound to us, to take conscious possession of its strength is not that simple.
Becoming an instrument of this higher power takes more than merely wishing for its entrance into our life. To realize such a viable wisdom requires action in the Now. So let us be clear: we are created with everything that we need to transform and transcend the shadows of fear, regrets, and resentments that prowl the corridors of our sleeping consciousness. And when these secret seeds of conflict have been revealed and released, we are as well, for then nothing negative remains within us to goad us into acting against ourselves. Multiply this possibility by billions of beings and gone are the mindless wars and all the selfish acts of socially accepted gluttony.
Perhaps you are wondering, what is this great power entrusted to us by which we may overcome all of our interior adversaries? Here is the answer:
Within each of us resides a nascent Light born into this world with us. We can think of this as being the Light of higher conscience by whose compassionate intelligence we are empowered to discern what is helpful from what is harmful, to intuitively know the difference between a genuine act of kindness and a kindness done for selfish reasons. By this Light we are able to tell what is true and what is false. When we do our part to live in the awareness of this Light so that its presence becomes an active power within us, then what is there that can remain with the power to hurt us? How can any unseen darkness prevail if its character is revealed before it begins its punishing action? Just think of such a power and the freedoms it must bear.
