Any good tool, technique, practice, or philosophy, can help you out of suffering and into greater happiness and love. And when that tool, technique, practice, or philosophy is taken too far, it can become a dogmatic trap that creates unhappiness and suffering. That dual edged sword applies to the tools, techniques, and practices I teach as well.  The Buddhists refer to this dynamic as a “Near Enemy.”

A hammer can pound a nail so you can hang your picture.  Miss the nail and you hurt your finger.  A skill saw or table saw can cut that piece of wood just right and help you build a house.   But if you cut a board the wrong length it costs you time, money, and you have a pile of waste.  That same saw helping you build your house can also take off a finger.

Tools can help you build a home and everything in it so you are warm and comfortable.  They can also hurt you if you mishandle those tools.  There are techniques you apply to changing your beliefs and emotions so you can be happier.  Take them too far, or misuse them, and you hurt your self or others unnecessarily.

Acceptance vs. Boundaries

The practice of acceptance can allow you to be gentle with your self.  It’s a new inner communication softening the words of the inner critic and even dissolving them completely.  It’s a way to relax internally that you feel physically and emotionally.   If taken further you dissolve judgmental criticisms in your mind about other people.  This can relieve you of lots of toxic thoughts and emotions in your head.  If you take the practice of acceptance too far you allow people to be disrespectful to you and take advantage of you. You avoid putting up boundaries with abusive critical people when it is called for.

Then, when you feel the emotional consequence of the other party’s disrespect, your overdeveloped faith in the acceptance tool tells you that you aren’t doing it right.  You should be more accepting of people who disrespect you.  You end up telling your self, “If I was just more accepting of them and myself then their words wouldn’t bother me so much.”  Self judging words inflict more emotional harm.  This is the result when you try harder with a tool that you have already taken too far.

It is a fine point of balance to stand in acceptance of your self where you are in your journey while you push forward with changes on your emotions and beliefs.  You will probably cross over this balance point many times before you stabilize on it.   That’s just part of the practice.

Left or Right?  Which way do I go?

More than once people have pointed out what seemed to be contradictions or problems with the tools I share.  Often the problem is that the understanding of the practice has been exaggerated or taken too far and is no longer helpful.   Being mindful that any practice or technique can be taken too far and it becomes harmful will help you be more skillful in your practice.

One student complained to his teacher, “A while back you said I should do more of A.  and now you are saying that I should do more of  B.   That’s almost the exact opposite of A.  I think you are contradicting your self.   The teacher responded, “Yes I did tell you those things.  That’s because last month you were veering too far off the path to the right.  So I told you to come left.  Now you are veering too far left and leaving the path so I’m suggesting you move more to the right.”

Work Ethic vs. Rest and Play

Lisa has a well developed work ethic.  She applies it to everything.  When she took on my Self Mastery program she went at it with the same work ethic she applied to her education, her job, and her triathlon training.  She made a lot of progress fast.  She saw a lot of amazing changes within her self and changes in her relationships and her life.  That inspired her to work the program harder.  Her discipline and consistent focus of time and attention was reaping rewards.  However as hard as she worked, some issues still hadn’t changed.

A conversation with Lisa revealed that no matter how hard she worked, she still wasn’t getting there as fast as she wanted.  “Where do you want to get to?” I asked.

Lisa described an extensive number of big changes she still wanted to make, including achieving levels of emotional mastery.

“What is driving you to push so hard to make those changes?” I asked.

Lisa was quiet for a while and then said, “It seems like it is a critical voice in my head of the inner Judge.”

“And how do you feel when it is beating you up for not working hard enough?” I asked.

Lisa took some time to think and feel into the dynamic.  “I feel like I’m not good enough.  Like I am lazy, like I’m failing,” she said.

“So let me get this straight. There is an image of perfection you have in your mind that your belief system says you should get to.  It’s a  kind of super spiritual ego image.  Your judge is there pushing you to it, criticizing you for not being that image already.  All under the assumption that it knows the time line for how long these changes take.  And the result of believing in the image of perfection, and the inner Judge is that you push your self hard every day, and feel like a failure of a victim while you do it.  Is that about right?”

“That’s about right,” she said.

It turned out that some of the motivation for doing this inner work was being driven by the same judge/victim belief system of suffering that existed in other areas of her life.  A strong work ethic has rewarded her well in life and she should benefit from it.  It seemed she was over using her “go to” tool and in the process abusing her self with it.

Some of Lisa’s work ethic was driven by the harsh critic voice of the inner judge.  The more she followed what it said, the more she reinforced the Image of Perfection beliefs and Victim feelings as well.  The result was that the “hard work” dynamic was reinforcing negative beliefs instead of allowing her freedom from them.

Balance and Moderation

Lisa’s new assignment was to take some time off during the week and have fun. Go do things just for enjoyment and pleasure.  Maybe it was a day off from the inner work, maybe it was an afternoon here and there where she didn’t need to struggle to be “aware.”

At first Lisa resisted this approach thinking she wanted to go faster.

“It will help you to go faster,” I said.  “It’s a different way of accomplishing the same thing.   Right now the strong work ethic approach has been corrupted by judgment and victimization.  It is inflicting emotional suffering which is what we are trying to alleviate.  So it is time to back off that pattern and work on changing those beliefs a different way for now.”

I explained that the new approach of taking time during the week to enjoy your life and have fun is actually a different way to break the pattern of the Judge/Victim beliefs causing  suffering.  When you are laughing, you are not in self judgment or a victim state of suffering.  When you are playing and having fun you are not in a judge/victim state of mind.  When you are enjoying you life you are freeing your self from suffering.  These are all ways to transcend the emotional suffering of the judge/victim mind.  Going out during the week and taking time off to enjoy your life is a direct way to do it.

In one of the early emails you get after signing up for the Self Mastery Course I tell people to make time to have fun.  I think many people over look this point or don’t understand the importance at the time.

Practice all things in balance and moderation.  Any approach, even the “hard work” approach can be taken too far and trip up your steps down your Pathway to Happiness.

Any self help tool or technique can help you to be free of unhappiness.  The same technique can also be misused, abused, and exaggerated and become self destructive to your process.   This is why the Buddhists call them “Near Enemy’s” They start out as your friend and you hold it close.  But if you hold too tightly it becomes distorted or exaggerated enough to become an Enemy that is hurting you.

It will take time to learn how to properly use the many different techniques effectively.  You will no doubt misuse some at times, particularly in the beginning.  That’s to be expected and is okay.  The over all use of any practice should help more than hurt.  And with practice you will become more skillful with each exercise so that after a while you don’t use it against your self, or others, at all.

It’s not just practice that will make you a master, but skillful practice will make you a skillful master.  In the beginning things may be a bit clumsy, but so is everyone when they start something new.  The way to solve that is to practice and observe what happens.  Put the tools into action and allow your self the freedom to change how you use them in a way that works for you.  That will help you avoid becoming dogmatic.

As you practice each tool, do so while being aware of the results as best you can.   Be aware that you can take it too far, become too dogmatic, or become too attached to its use.   If you keep each practice in moderation and balance it with skillful use, you can avoid using these tools as Near Enemy’s against your self.

Hope that helps.

Gary

Specific exercises and practices for becoming more mindful and changing beliefs can be found in the Self Mastery Course. The first few sessions are free for you to try.

In summary:  a Near Enemy is a Buddhist term used to describe how the ego distorts a useful spiritual practice into one that causes more suffering.

Instead I liken it to cleaning.  Big cleaning, like a road or driveway after a flood. (Think of it as a Pathway if you want.)  First time through you go to work with a front end loader.  The road gets cleared and you can make your way.  But if you look around closely there is more that can be cleaned.  You go after it with a shovel.    It all gets scooped up.  After a while the shovel doesn’t pick anything up anymore so you think you are done.  But if you look more closely at the path, between the bumps in the asphalt there are granules of dirt and sand.  Granules that could sometimes collect in areas and create bumps or slick spots where it isn’t as safe to drive the car or brake.   So you get a broom and sweep.  Now this dust comes up that the shovel never touched.

It may seem like you are going over the same area covering the same issues and stories as before, and, like you might have failed to do a good job.  (Careful about a judge victim story like that.  Wouldn’t be the first time someone fell for it though. )   Truth was that you are showing  up as a different person now looking at the same issues and can do a more detailed cleaning that you couldn’t do the first time.  It made no sense to start with a broom.  You needed a front end loader the first time.  Now the front loader won’t do the job for these details that were hiding between the cracks and bumps.  So you have to go back over the area of the same story,,, but in a different way this time.  You the cleaner can be more thorough this time with your broom in a way that you couldn’t do with a shovel.    That’s why sometimes these same stories/issues have to be revisited again.

In a way the thing that you are cleaning is your Self from all the false beliefs and false images you carry around in your mind.   At the same time You are the cleaning instrument.  The first time around you,,, the instrument, were still pretty clouded and so you probably didn’t clean your self up 100%.  So now, after you’ve done a thorough inventory and let go a great many beliefs, you are cleaner.  You also are a more finely tuned instrument.  So when you go back and you look at the same set of beliefs that you cleaned up a year or two ago, you see them differently.  You can find the distortions now that you couldn’t see before.  You see the dust in the cracks and can sweep those thoughts out.  When you were using a shovel you didn’t have the skills as the cleaning instrument to finish the job.  Therefore returning to the same topic more than once isn’t a measurement of failure.  Rather it is a progression of your skills to refine, grow, and be more thorough and complete in your changes.

Why do I call it a “Spiritual” journey or retreat?

1.   I got to call it something.
2.  Spirit means Life, and this is part of the Life journey.
3.   Spirit means Love, and this is part of the path to Love and Happiness.
4.   A Spiritual experience is about Connection, and that begins with connecting with one’s self, in a way of love and respect, and then extending that connection to others, and to all living things.
5.  All of the above.

Is it dangerous with all the drug related issues?

NO.   And yes that is a capital NO.  If there were any likelihood of danger for people in a group I am guiding I wouldn’t be going.  Heck,, it’s more personal than that.  If I thought I was personally going to be in danger I wouldn’t go myself.  We fly into the Mexico city International airport where there is plenty of security.  We take our own van with a private driver to our own hacienda/retreat center located next to the old city ruins.  The small town that we stay in mostly sustains itself from the tourist and artist business in the area.  So,,, after having travel to this area regularly over the last 17 years I have no reason to believe it is dangerous.  It is more likely that the scary things you will face on this intensive are your fears and own inner demons.

How many people will be going?

We won’t know til the last week or two.  Last year’s group was 18 in size.  I’ve done trips as small as 6 people and as large as 40.  When it was 40 people it was combined with other teachers.  There are reasons to really like a small group like the closeness and amount of personal time, but we lose out on some of the diversity and richness of personalities and insights that that happen in a larger group.  With a larger group some activities like ceremony and group meditations are strengthened with numbers.   So by my standard the ideal number is the number that show up.

Is there time for personal interaction?

Yes.  There is time during meals which we all have together and walks to and from the grounds.  There is also personal relaxation time in the afternoons before evening class.  For me sometimes the personal interaction is the most enjoyable part.  It’s not just a facilitator and participant relationship. We get a chance to share, know each other as equals, joke, laugh, and create a more well rounded relationship.  Some people that have worked with me over years have become good life long friends.  And that’s not just true for me.  You also meet others on your trip that are of a like mind that you may stay in touch with well after the retreat.

What kind of people go on these trips?

My trips are generally pretty balanced between men and women.  Most are college educated professionals.  Some are starting out in a process of working through emotional reactions that have recently arisen. Others have worked through those basic stages and discovered there is a lot more love and happiness to experience.  They return numerous times seeking deeper levels of truth and understanding of the world, and to experience deeper and more expansive love, compassion, and freedom in their lives.

I tend to attract people who appreciate my common sense and logical approach to love happiness, and changing beliefs and emotions. Last years group included two doctors, two PhD researchers, an auto mechanic, a dentist, a stay at home mom and an investment manager.

Is this process associated with any religious group?

(Sometimes read:  “Is this a cult?”)

I do not adhere to or limit myself to any single doctrine.  The essence of all spiritual traditions is the removal of emotional suffering and unhappiness and replacing it with a feeling of love, happiness, and connection.  So I embrace the fundamental truths in all traditions.  The process actually mixes and changes each day.   The morning might start with a Shamanic journey into dreaming, and in the afternoon we engage in a whole hearted forgiveness exercise based in a Christian perspective.  That evening I might use a story from the Hindu perspective to help in making a point.  What I care about is using these teachings as practical tools to guide people out of emotional suffering.

What you will find is that I am respectful of each person’s belief system.  I’ve had people attend my programs and done coaching with me that are Orthodox Jews, a Christian Seminary student, an atheist, Catholics, Buddhists, and others.  What I teach about is personal belief systems, perspective, changing emotions, and Love.  I also teach it in a way that respects each person’s religious beliefs.

And as far as the cult thing?  No.  I try hard to avoid suggesting to people what they should believe.  (You might notice a great void of this in my website and audios.)   I tend to leave people’s personal choices to them selves, even if they ask me for suggestions.  (which they often do).  Instead I guide people to become aware of their hidden beliefs, be aware of the emotional and behavioral consequences, and then decide if they want to stay attached to those beliefs.

Isn’t the place with pyramids in Mexico where they did human sacrifices?  Is that part of this teaching?

Human sacrifice is not part of what I teach.  What I point people to inquire about is themselves, what they believe, and the emotions they feel.  I then engage them in practices and processes to change those negative states of emotions.

I haven’t studied the history of human sacrifice on this issue except to understand how people could fanatically believe in a dogma so strongly that the would take the life of a fellow human being.  I think it is helpful to be aware of such things so we don’t fall into such practices.  I am skeptical about the history, mostly because it is difficult to say what happened 1000 years ago in a society or why.   There may have been a splinter sect of the teachings that distorted the things and became fanatical about their beliefs.  I really don’t know. It wouldn’t be the first time that a small group of fanatics have seized power and ruled over a large group of people that just wanted simple freedoms and a simple life of happiness.  These civilizations have thousands of years of history and I am not an expert on all of it.

Pointing to one part of the civilizations past and saying they believed in human sacrifice would be like pointing to the Spanish Inquisition and saying, “That is what Christianity is about.”  Or pointing to a few Buddhist monks that set themselves ablaze in past years and saying, “That is the teaching of Buddha.”  Nothing could be farther from the point.  We wouldn’t look at the history of Rome and point to the most horrific of persecutions and conclude that is what they had to teach or is their legacy.

What it helps to be aware of is how our mind fixates on such issues that probably happened for a short period of time within the history of a culture and then ignores a thousand years of history.  How is it that our mind fixates on such a negative and builds it up in our imagination so that it blinds us from seeing the beauty in the world?  This is worth breaking free of and is the type of process that I teach.

Why do I go to the ancient ruins and Pyramids?

I go to the ancient city and pyramids because there is a rich history there of personal transformation.   A large part of their culture for many centuries consciously worked through their individual beliefs and mental states of emotional suffering. A large city of people lived in peace and harmony within their own mind, and with the people around them.  It is that part of the culture that is interesting to me. It interests me because if they could do it, then we can do it.

The city of Teotihuacan was built principally as a University for teaching conscious awakening.  Where people became aware of how the beliefs, chatter, and negative emotions in their mind were causing emotional suffering, and they developed practices to free themselves from their fears, critical judgments, and negative emotional reactions.  When we go to Teotihuacan we engage in the same types of practices that were successfully used for hundreds of years.  In short, I take people there through these processes because they work.  That’s probably the engineer side of me.  I want things to be effective and work for people or they aren’t of much value.

Do you need to do anything to prepare for the Intensive?  NO.

Often people feel they are not ready for a trip.  They feel they need to study more, or do more of my on line Self Mastery course and develop some level of skill and accomplishments before attending a week long intensive.  This is only a belief.  Truthfully this is not so.  My intensives are taught in a way that the material is accessible for the most basic beginner.  It is not necessary to have read one book, or done my online course.  At the same time there is plenty of depth for the more advanced students that have been doing personal transformation work for years.  Some of the people on the upcoming trip have done several events with me in the past, even 4 or 5 intensives to Mexico.   Each time they go the find more subtle, and sometimes more profound changes in their life.

Do I teach alone?  Generally yes.

If I know it is going to be a large group, then I might invite someone to assist.  If there is someone who is has been on several intensives before, I might call on them to share and assist at times.  This benefits them because they get to step out of their role as a “student.”   It also helps them integrate and deepen the material when they talk and share about it.  By sharing they deepen their learning.   I am discerning about the quality of the teaching experience that people get so I have a short list, but I am hoping to lengthen it.  Some people have shared an interest in learning to teach what I do.  In preparing for that these types of intensives are probably the best training.   

Will we be required to share?  No

You don’t have to share anything about your self or your process unless you want to. If you want you are welcome to do the entire intensive in silence.   I’m not inclined to have a big group counseling session where we each air the dirty laundry of our history. What I have found is that long telling of our history can be time consuming and when done in a group can be a distraction to others.  We don’t have to talk about our dark secrets in order to clean them up.  What is important is that we clean them up.  To do this we put our own attention on our own stuff in a constructive healing way.

Given that, I do invite people to share at times if they so choose.  There is value in sharing.  We can learn the lessons of others without having to repeat their mistakes.  We can gain insights and different perspectives on what they did and how they did it to help speed our process.  We get to find out that we are not alone, and not that different from others.  This helps break down the beliefs that keep us feeling isolated.   When sharing we can break the emotional patterns of hiding, and shame, that often accompany self judgment.  There is something healing about sharing what is going on inside with a group of people and realizing they don’t judge you.  It plants the seed that you don’t have to judge your self either.

So share if you like, or don’t if you prefer.  I respect each person’s free will to do their process as they please.

By the same token, when you attend one of these retreats, intensives, or spiritual journeys, you are welcome to participate or opt out of any of the activities.  Sometimes people opt to take the afternoon off and be by themselves.  That is fine.  I completely respect each person’s choices and their own process.

I have been hearing a lot about LSD lately and the effects of it on the mind and how it can expand consciousness. From what I heard it can give you the same results as years of self mastery work and meditation. It sounds pretty far fetched. I was just wondering what you think about using LSD or other drugs to advance consciousness on this spiritual journey.
Being Curious AJ

Hi AJ

Drugs can have an impact on your brain and you will likely have an experience from that. What that experience will be you won’t get to know in advance.

I suppose that if you took a pot of coffee and poured it on your computer and monitor you would get an interesting experience as well. There would be a show of sparks, smoke, and possibly even an electrical fire. To a young child, or the inexperienced or naive this could be seen as a magical and profound show. To someone a bit more familiar with electricity and shorting out electrical circuits it will be foolish, dangerous, and an expensive waste of electronics.

In the same way you can have different experiences if you pour chemicals on the synapses of your brain. However at what price? As far as I know those parts of the body are not replaceable. You get issued one brain with that body so you might want to seriously consider how much risk you take with it.

My personal opinion about using drugs to elicit spiritual and conscious expansion is this. I don’t recommend it. I’ll go so far as to discourage the use of drugs for spiritual growth and consciousness purposes. These are a few of my reasons:

1. I first suggest starting with the awareness of what beliefs in the mind propose this avenue of curiosity. What beliefs dictate that you need or would benefit from an artificial substance? What part of this belief system implies that you are not powerful enough to create change on your own? What it is it about these beliefs that discount your use of skillful practice and discipline?

2. Then there is the down side risk of letting your self lose conscious control and possibly injuring your self on just a physical level.

3. I don’t see how one progresses to a Spiritual Self Mastery by losing conscious control through substances. This is just a bit contradictory. I don’t know what your version of “self mastery” is but it doesn’t fit mine. Self Mastery has to do with gaining conscious control of your mind, not abdicating power of the mind over to a substance.

4. Now consider the upside of a drug induced spiritual experience of conscious awakening. You are likely to attribute the source of your conscious raising experience to the drug. In the belief system of your mind the drug becomes the power necessary to open the door of consciousness. This perspective indirectly creates the belief that you are less powerful. The paradigm results in disempowering your self. I don’t see this as a path to gaining conscious control over one self and mastering one’s life.

The Spiritual Journey

Stopping your internal dialog and accessing expanded levels of consciousness is challenging. It is even more challenging to do without skilled guidance and a mentor. It’s why I suggest people get skilled guidance. I’ve attempted to make some of that guidance easily available on this web site through the free audio and the Self Mastery program. It certainly is not all the guidance everyone will need for every circumstance and question, but hopefully it is a starting point.

For me that guidance came in the form of my mentor, don Miguel Ruiz over many years. The guidance of my mentor was invaluable in my journey. Through his words, wisdom, and perspective he lent me his consciousness.

He was also able to provide one of the most powerful and addictive substances for my personal growth and spiritual progress. That substance wasn’t a drug, it was unconditional love. The power of unconditional love was so addictive that I made every effort to be in his presence as much as I could. But what was more powerful that sharing his unconditional love with me is that he taught me how to grow my own.

I understand that desire for that feeling of love that is often called a spiritual experience. I haven’t done any recreational drugs in my life. I really don’t have any desire to. I feel the unconditional love that I create and I don’t’ have any desire to pour artificial chemicals on that. The added benefit of using love to facilitate your expansion of consciousness is that you don’t have to come down from it.

When a person engages in personal and spiritual growth practices they often begin with reading and gathering knowledge. This is a good place to start for background information. However the knowledge approach has limited potential for change. It can also be relatively slow.

Real life changes in emotions and behavior don’t happen just because you have knowledge. When you decide to speed up your personal process and make real changes you will want to add Perception, Awareness, and Action to your process.

How real emotional and behavior change happens.

You’ve probably experienced an epiphany before, perhaps many times. People describe it as the “light going on.” All of a sudden you have a moment of clear perception that can startle you. In that moment your mind often stops thinking. In that mini awakening you don’t have any more information but you are aware of something new. It may have been right under your nose but you hadn’t seen it quite that way before. Mostly what has changed is the way you view something but it completely changes the picture.

When you have a small awakening like this your conscious awareness is changed. New synaptic channels open in the mind. From that moment on you no longer interpret things in the old way. You make different interpretations from this new viewpoint, draw different conclusions, and make different choices. Your new behavior becomes easy to integrate as you naturally follow your new perception. This is a means to make rapid personal changes.

If you think back to when you had an epiphany you can recall that you immediately and permanently changed.

Perception and Observation

Radical changes such as scientific discovery or creativity often come in an epiphany. Archimedes claimed, “Eureka!“(I found it) when he saw a solution to his problem of how to measure the mass of gold in a king’s crown. He had been struggling over the problem for some time. Then one day while settling into a relaxing bath he noticed how his body displaced the water from the bath. In that moment of perception he observed the relationship between water and an object in a different way. His direct perception of the relationship formed new understanding in his mind.

We should note that he had done some background work on the problem. This is where background information from reading can be helpful. However it isn’t the whole process of change.

The key point is that the awakening that created real change did not happen as a sole matter of knowledge gathering or information analysis. The change happened when he looked at the situation from a completely different view point. He looked at it from the perspective of his bath tub as he lowered himself into it. He saw it in relationship to the water rising. The answer to his problem wasn’t found logically. His realization came as a creative process of discovery that happens when you shift the way you look at things.

Knowledge and Intellect Don‘t Facilitate Change

Many times people will be aware of a behavior or self sabotaging pattern that they want to change such as jealousy or anger. They might know when they adopted it, how it was developed, and the motivations behind it. They can also see all the reasons why they should drop this destructive behavior. However all their knowledge and intelligence doesn’t change the behavior. This can be very frustrating until you realize that knowledge does not shift emotions or behavior.

Knowledge can be helpful to define the problem. However that knowledge of definition is not the same as effective treatment.

When it comes to emotions and behaviors you can have all the information but if you haven’t shifted your point of view you still feel trapped by them. This is true even if you have the understanding that it is only a belief about something that isn’t real. This is common in emotional behaviors like irrational fears and unwarranted jealousy. You can have all of the knowledge that the beliefs aren’t real, but until the perspective shifts the beliefs and emotions remain.

This is one of the key differences between knowledge and awareness. Knowledge usually has a very limited viewpoint. Awareness has flexibility and versatility in perspectives. It allows for creativity and lateral thinking outside the box. When you have awareness you can shift your point of view outside typical problem solving paradigms and adopt a different approach to a situation. This is what Archimedes did.

You can do things to Consciously Change Your Perception

A few years back Magic Eye pictures were very popular. At first look, and sometimes second look, the images appear like chaotic pointillism. However, by shifting your eyes the mess of color reveals a three dimensional image hidden within. The picture isn’t really hidden. It’s just that you see it unless you adopt a certain point of view with the eyes to see it. Once you shift your perspective you see something you didn’t notice before.

Seeing with the magic eye effect is similar to changing your point of view so you can see the same thing in a different way. You can notice layers of an issue that you didn’t see before. This is the power of awareness.

When you apply this approach of shifting viewpoints to your personal process you can accelerate your rate of personal change. You will look at your self and emotional issues where you feel stuck completely differently. With awareness you begin to see elements and options that didn’t seem to exist before.

How to Make Changes in Perspective

One of the difficulties in getting someone to see the hidden image in the depths of the magic eye pictures is that you can’t explain how to “see” it. We aren’t use to consciously changing the focus of our eye. We usually leave it to be done automatically by the mind. An explanation of how to change the focus your eye may not translate very well. Even if we know intellectually that we need to focus differently it might be difficult taking those eye muscles out of automatic. Having intellectual understanding about moving the focus of the eye is very different from doing it.

A more effective way to shift the eye is through taking certain actions or tricks. If you hold the image to your nose, look beyond it, and then slowly move the picture away, it can help your eyes make the shift. Notice that this is an action. It’s not an intellectual explanation of how to shift. Holding the image to your nose is a way to break the automatic focusing habit of the eye and shift your perspective.

It is in the process of taking new actions that you can
change perspectives and create personal change.

The Value of Perspective in Relationships

When it comes to difficulties in relationships the suggestion is often “try to look at the issue from the other person’s perspective.” This is nice advice. It’s also usually wasted. Most people have not developed the skill to jump between points of view effectively. To look at an issue from another person’s perspective requires that you drop all your beliefs, opinions, and emotions, and then put on the virtual reality of the other person’s beliefs, opinions, and emotions. This is not an intellectual exercise. It’s like developing a magic eye for relationships and something not many people have taken the time to learn how to do.

For those that are able to shift their perspective, you can immediately develop a respect for another and their point of view. The additional perspective will automatically change the tone, attitude, and emotion in your communication. The attitude of conflict will drop with your perspectives of right/wrong and good/bad. When you can drop the right/wrong perspectives in relationships it is easy to create more love, respect, and happiness. You can see depth in a person that you didn’t see before. The critical challenge is to develop your magic eye for people by being flexible in your point of view. To be clear it doesn’t’ mean you have to give up what you want. It just means you don’t use fighting and conflict as a means of getting it.

If there was ever a place where a shift in point of view would dramatically change emotions and behaviors it is in personal relationships.
Habitual Patterns of Perspective

We expend and waste a lot of our energy in habitual patterns. There are also habitual patterns in how we see our self, relationships, and the issues we feel trapped in. You know you are trapped in a limited perspective when you keep making the same interpretations and drawing the same conclusions. That limited perspective can blind you from other options and choices that can lead to your happiness. One of the biggest traps is not recognizing the importance of point of view in these patterns.

To make real changes in behavior and emotions begins with a change in point of view. When you learn to consciously shift your point of view you can see those options and choices in moments instead of struggling with emotional issues for weeks and months. Just like learning to see the magic eye images, it will take some effort to learn how to shift your perception at will. However once you learn to develop this skill you will be able to fast track your personal and emotional change.

Action is the path to personal change

For practical steps in changing your point of view and developing your awareness practice the exercises in the Self Mastery course. The first couple sessions are free. Session 1 and 3 introduce you to the issue of point of view while sessions 5, 7 and 10 accelerate the process.

Making real changes in your self and your life happens faster when you consciously change your perspective in a ways that expand your awareness and your emotional choices.

If you eliminate the sources of your unhappiness your life will be significantly happier without all that emotional drama from fear, stress, frustration, sadness and anger.

This might appear to be a simplistic big picture approach in how to be happy. It is. It’s also helpful to very clearly understand where we are going and how we will get there. If you don’t have a big picture of the process you can easily get lost in all the details on your path.

Of these two paths to happiness the one most often chosen is the first one. I think this can be an excellent choice under certain circumstances. If you have the capacity to completely focus your attention on actions and thoughts that fill you with love, happiness, and fun, by all means do so. However my experience is that very few people have the mastery over their attention necessary to make this approach work. Most people have minds where thoughts and emotions run around in there uncontrolled at times.

If you are able to completely avoid letting your mind engage in emotional reactions, sabotaging behaviors, fears, insecurities, and self criticism, then by all means take the first path towards happiness.

If you find that you occasionally have fears, get angry, feel frustrated, or fall victim to other emotional reactions and don’t have complete control over your mind you may want to consider the second path. It is an important component in how to create deep sustaining happiness. It is the path that is less traveled. Perhaps that is why only few people live their lives with a deep sustaining calm and happiness.

Directly challenging the causes of unhappiness has a lot to do with evaluating the interpretations in the mind and changing the core beliefs that are at the foundation of those interpretations. It is a bit of work to come to “Know Thyself” in this way, but you get a high quality emotional return on your investment.

You should know that this path of introspection isn’t reason to judge your self as a failure at happiness or life in any way. It is actually quite common and normal for people to experience unhappiness at various times in their life. Even the Buddha pointed out in his Four Noble Truths that life involves some emotional suffering. But don’t let the commonality of unhappiness trap you into the belief of accepting that it can’t be any different or that life will always be that way.

Being unhappy at some point in your life doesn’t mean you are a failure. Your unhappiness could be due to any number of things including an inability to live in complete denial of your emotions. This isn’t failure. It’s being successful at being in touch with your emotions. Being in touch with your emotions is important in feeling deep meaningful happiness in your life.

I’ve personally found that the path of eliminating the causes of your unhappiness is far more effective. However I don’t recommend it, I even discourage it. I don’t encourage people to go face their fears, inner judgments, and tangle with stories of victimization in their mind? That stuff is unpleasant. Just admitting to our self that we engage in these types of behaviors and feelings can be disheartening. This kind of internal battle isn’t permanent but is often something people avoid for the sake of their ego. Of course avoiding the truth about this dark side of our self just keeps it repressed there until it jumps upon us another day.

The path of ruthless honest truth is the kind of thing that sets you free from emotional suffering. It isn’t pleasant challenging your inner demons, but neither is it pleasant to live day after day, year after year pretending we don’t have them.

What is the best path to choose when you are deciding how to be happy? Whenever I have a choice between two options I sometimes like to take both.

Make a concerted effort to pursue what you enjoy so that you can facilitate your happiness. At the same time take notice of when you have emotional reactions that take away from being happy. Use those opportunities to dig into the root causes of those emotions. When you do you will often find core beliefs creating false assumptions, expectations, judgments, and stories of victimization. Take your time to inventory the beliefs behind these emotional reactions and change them. When it is cleaned up go back to doing your best to create happiness and love in your activities and relationships.

By pursuing both paths to happiness you create a push-pull effect that facilitates being happier faster than if you just pursued one approach.

How to be happy in your life is a question that no one can answer for you. Each person will enjoy different things. Someone else’s formula will not work for you. In the big picture approach there are two paths to follow. Pursue what you love enjoy. Simultaneously take time to be ruthlessly honest with your self and challenge your inner demons of fears and false beliefs.

If you are interested in more specific steps to creating emotions of happiness and eliminating the causes of unhappiness engage in the exercises in the Self Mastery Audio Program.

It was many years before I began to find a different kind of courage. It was a kind of courage that wasn’t easy to spot at first. It wasn’t the kind of courage that inspired external actions or would result in any medals or awards. I think of it as real courage.

From my point of view real courage is that attribute necessary to face and challenge our own inner demons. Real courage is that gumption to go face to face with your fears, anger, insecurities, and the voices of sabotage, doubt and judgment in your mind. It is a willful act of personal strength that you draw upon to deal with the conflicts in the mind and make peace within. Many people have fought wars with enemies outside of them. It is a rare kind of courage to take up the fight to make peace within.

To face that critical voice in your head and tell it that you will not believe its criticisms isn’t an easy thing to do. Oddly enough it isn’t even something that many people consider doing. They just go along with the less than favorable opinions they have of other people. They go along with the unkind and even self abusive opinions about themselves. Why do we fail to stand up to these self abusive comments? Why don’t people stand up against the tyranny in their own mind? Perhaps it doesn’t occur to us to challenge those thoughts. But perhaps it doesn’t occur to us because we are afraid of what will happen if we challenge those inner demons.

What will happen if we look face to face at our anger instead of just expressing it? What will happen if we look into all the justifications for why we are angry and say, “I don’t want to justify and defend feeling this way. What will happen if we look directly at our stories of insecurity, stand up for our self and say, “You have no power over me”?

Why does challenging the voices and rationalizations behind our unhappiness take such courage? Part of the issue is that we have come to unquestioningly trust our mind. We trust it to make decisions for us and to keep us safe from physical pain and emotional hurt. It has structured a giant list of rules to follow in order to keep from getting hurt. It constantly reminds of these rules with its “should” and “shouldn’t” chatter. We learned follow our thinking mind blindly. Yet it is those same voices that can keep us up at night with uncontrollable chatter driving us to fear and anxiety with imagined stories of terrible outcomes. Oddly we trust this very same mind to guide us to happiness.

So what is so scary about challenging the beliefs, thoughts, and opinions, in the mind that it needs real courage? Very simply, if we can’t trust our mind then what can we trust? This notion of not trusting our mind to tell us what to do can push us towards a fear that we will want to avoid.
A person needs real courage to challenge the thoughts in their head because without that mind in charge what are we going to trust to keep them safe from emotional pain? We have come to rely on every thought from our mind as being true that we feel we need it there to guide us. We trust our mind to keep us free of emotional pain and yet it is the principle means by which we generate emotional pain and anxiety.

There is a slight shift you can make to help begin the journey. It is to make a difference between trusting your mind and trusting your self. You can learn not to believe in the thoughts in your mind and still believe in your self.

What are those rules in our mind that are driven by our inner demons of fear? Fear tells us, don’t fall in love or you will get hurt. Fear tells us, that if we start that business we might fail. Fear tells us not to speak up in the meeting because we might look foolish. Fear tells us not to do something for our self because we don’t want to be labeled as selfish. Fear tells us not to climb too high we might fall. Those thoughts are rules that are supposed to help us be better off emotionally. Of course each rule requires loading our self down with a fear.

Challenging your demon thoughts and beliefs is like letting go of a hand rail that we have hung on to for safety. Our fear says that we should hang on or else we might fall and get hurt. Our fear has been reminding us ever since we fell down on the play ground as a little kid and got hurt. It has been pounding the message into our being until we don’t let go of any handrails. Learning to hang on to the handrails may be a good idea when we are little and haven’t fully developed our balance and muscle control. However when we get older we still follow the advice of fear in our mind. Fear has become our adviser in making choices in our life.

You can’t run very fast or far in your life if you don’t let go of the handrail of fear.
We sometimes fool ourselves and think that we are gripped by fear. The reverse is true. We hang on to fear as a trusted adviser gripping it as if it were going to keep us from getting hurt emotionally. We cling to all its advice in hopes that we won’t get hurt. We don’t realize that hanging on to these beliefs and fears extracts its own kind of emotional price. Fear becomes our mythological god. We follow its counsel, we trust its words. When we obey those voices of fear in our mind and serve our personal god of fear and all its laws.

What happens when we disobey the god of fear? Perhaps we hold the belief that bad things will happen to us if we disobey the rules of the god of fear. Perhaps that god of fear will judge us for being stupid and not following its advice. There is the fear of being punished or feeling guilty for disobeying. There become fearful consequences for challenging our fears. Imagine that, fear of breaking free of agreements of fear.

To challenge your personal fears may feel like taking on a whole nest of inner demons. It’s more than just letting go of the hand rail, it’s fighting off the fearful reactions in the mind that happen when we break the rules in the mind. That takes real courage. We are also risking the possibility that people will react differently when we act differently. We are stepping into the unknown. To challenge these inner demons and step into the unknown consequences takes a different kind of courage.

In my last post I shared that what we typically think of as courage often has larger fears at the foundation. What looks like a brave act may really have deeper personal fears as part of the motivation. What I have come to realize is that it takes a real kind of courage to challenge these deeper internal fears at the foundation of our behaviors and actions. To challenge the inner demons and fears in the mind is a truly heroic act that only few dare take on. That is why it is often referred to as the mythological journey of the hero.

What is different about facing your fears and inner demons is that there is no public glory in it. No one will notice that you are reflecting on your own behavior, emotions, and reactions. No one gives you medals, and hardly anyone recognizes the kind of courage it takes. There is no one rooting you on. You go on this inward journey alone. This solo adventure that you don’t do for anyone else and don’t do with anyone else is part of why it takes a different kind of courage.

It also makes for a kind of courage that doesn’t get corrupted with the self importance of getting attention and recognition from others. It has a kind of humble integrity that is independent from other people’s opinions and how they measure you.

Having the courage to take this kind of inward journey beyond your own inner demons has no external rewards, at least not in the beginning. However the internal changes and personal freedom gained is its own reward. To be free of fear, to no longer be subject to the emotional reactions of anger, jealousy, and insecurity is a reward. To no longer have to prove your self to any one, even your self is an incredible relief. To have immunity from fear of what other people think of you is an internal reward that can’t be externally measured. To slay the voices in the mind of doubt and criticism and create peace within is a completely unseen reward.
To challenge your inner demons and win over your fears is a heroic feat. It is truly a hero’s journey to face and win the war within. It is a feat that requires a different kind of courage.

I’m in awe of anyone who even tries. To me it is not important to win. We don’t know how long we have to live, maybe just a week, or month, or year. We can not count on winning over our inner demons when we don’t know how long we have. In any case this Hero’s Journey it is not about winning. If we make it about winning we are also making it about losing, and perhaps the fear of losing becomes another one of our demons. The journey is more about letting go of the fear of losing and the fear of failing that so often corrupts the desire to win or succeed.

In the challenge against our inner demons of fear and judgments winning and losing is not important. It is only important that we find the courage to try.

RELATED MATERIAL
For a step by step process on dealing with your inner demons listen to the session in the Self Mastery Audio Program

For guidance on challenging your inner demons and recovering your integrity see the Workshops and Spiritual Power Journeys events page
MP3 audio podcast on Overcoming Fear

The Courage to Live Consciously by Steve Pavlina

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.

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.

The one common thread in all experiences of realization, or awareness or awakening seems to be that the person has to be in a state of intense pain or suffering prior to that moment of awakening. Whether it is someone famous like Eckhart Tolle, Katie Byron or someone less known like the lady you interviewed on one of your podcasts, they all have lived through some form of deep pain. So, I wonder, is that almost a requirement to attain the state of freedom?What about others like me, for whom it is more a feeling in the background of missing something, a feeling of being unfulfilled? Not that I consider myself a self-aware or conscious person, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing to you. I do not feel myself to be in a hopeless state – at the same time, I feel a void and that leads me to seek for answers. But since I am not completely beaten down, does that somehow prevent me from progressing or from finding what I seek?

It seems that enlightenment or awareness comes either to those who live in intense suffering or devote their lives completely to spirituality (like Buddha or Ramana Maharshi). That is somewhat discouraging – what about ‘normal’ people or at any rate people with low-intensity unconsciousness?

Or am I thinking too much – just let things be?

I look forward to any thoughts you may have

regards
Raj

Raj,
Emotional pain and suffering are not required for conscious awakening. Most of the people I know that have really developed their consciousness didn’t do the path of deep depression or emotional pain. This is easier because they didn’t have such a big hole to dig themselves out of. What little emotional drama they did do was enough for them to decide to make a change. For others it was enough of a void and yearning to be fulfilled that was motivation. That commitment or agreement with themselves for change was strong enough that they took action, and that new and different action created the change in consciousness and emotion.

I specifically say “take action” which is quite a bit different than being a seeker of knowledge. Accumulating knowledge by reading books does not constitute action. Challenging the voice in your head and the beliefs in your mind is the kind of action I am talking about.

If you look you will find others that did not follow the path of suffering towards consciousness. Miguel Ruiz is one, and his son Jose Luis is an amazing spiritual teacher who avoided the deep emotional pain route. I know quite a few consciously aware individuals that have not devoted their lives to a spiritual path but are masters in their own way. They are devoted to raising their children and still have their day jobs as pediatrician, graphic artists, IT manager, and real estate brokers. They did their pursuit on the weekends, some evenings, and spiritual retreats for vacation much the same way I did.

Suffering is not required. Desire is. And that desire has to be strong enough to spur a person to sustained action. Yearning to fill that void is enough, IF you are willing to change some habits and take sustained action to satisfy the yearning.

Most people don’t take actions or change habits because they don’t have enough desire. They let their mind talk them into not meditating, doing an exercise, or going to a study with a teacher.

A lot of time desire comes from emotional pain but not always. Sometimes desire just builds over time as the feeling the emptiness and yearning that is unanswered builds. The stronger the desire the more definitive will be the action. If the yearning to fill the void is stronger, you will take more actions and create more conscious change faster.

It was an emotionally painful relationship that got me started in the personal development process. But that wouldn’t have been enough motivation to keep me going. If that was all I experienced I would have just gotten myself comfortable and gone on with my life asleep. But then the real inspiration came. My real desire came from the experience of my heart opening and feeling an incredible amount of love flow through me. It was ecstasy, bliss, but better than any drugs could create.

It was love that inspired me to take sustained action. I wanted to feel that unconditional love flowing all the time. The desire was strong enough that I continued for months making small steps every day. I was determined. Not because of pain, but because of the emotional pleasure of love. It was a feeling I didn’t even know was possible before I experienced it. Even after I experienced it, I wasn’t sure if I would get there again. But I had to try. Each time I experienced that much love and joy flowing through me it increased my desire even more. I wanted to get back to that feeling again and again. Love and happiness can be very addicting.

Emotional suffering is just one way people get motivated to a path of action that leads to emotional change and consciousness. It is not the only one. The joy of your unconditional love flowing out of you is probably the most powerful motivator for sustained action. It shows you by experience the destination. From then on, you know what you are seeking is an emotional feeling. You know it is real and it is possible and that is an incredible motivator for action.

The Catch 22 of this is that you may not experience that feeling of great love flowing out of you until you’ve taken sustained action for a while.

For many people they are motivated just to get out of emotional suffering and once they do, they stop there. A smaller number will continue further and experience waves of unconditional love and they are inspired to go much further in consciousness than the average seeker. These often become the spiritual teachers you hear of.

Related Material
For individuals wondering what actions to take, I suggest beginning with the free sessiosn in my Self Mastery course, and then adding the paid sessions if they are inclined.