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Have you ever been in a big shopping mall where you were trying to get to a particular store, but you didn’t know where you were in relation to it — so you had no idea which direction to turn? Then you found one of those maps that showed the layout of the mall and had an X that said, “You are here’ — and instantly you knew which way to go!
You can’t get where you want until you know where you are.
This seems obvious on the surface, and when it comes to simple things like finding our way through a mall, it’s fairly easy to figure out. But when it comes to finding our way to more important destination and accomplishing higher priorities, getting clear on where we are requires a different kind of map, and a deeper kind of work.
In the Truman Show, starring Jim Carrey, his character could never go beyond a certain area of his town. Try as he might, when he hit a certain street or the edge of the lake, he was overcome with mental and emotional anxiety and had to stop. He didn’t even remember why initially, all he knew was that it was dangerous to go further.
Because the world he lived in was false, made up by someone else as an experiment, there had to be boundaries that he would never go beyond — or else he would break the illusion and the reality show would be over. To make sure he would stay within those boundaries, he had been conditioned through fearful experience as a boy so that he wouldn’t go beyond the known borders.
This same level of conditioning has been used on circus elephants, where they are raised with a strong rope around their neck, a rope that holds the baby elephant. As it grows up, the rope can no longer restrain it, however, because it has felt the pull and the restraint for so long, it believes it is stuck in place. So much so that even during one great circus fire, the elephants never tried to escape, believing they couldn’t.
This is called learned helplessness. It’s a state of mind and being where we believe we are stuck with certain limitations that are no longer true, or maybe never were.
How this relates to your life now is that, in the areas where you seem stuck, limited, or feel like you’ll never make it, you’re experiencing a level of conditioning making it look and feel that way — but it’s a lie. You aren’t where you really think you are, what you really think you are, or who you really think you are. You are so much more, but you have been conditioned to be trapped.
The problem, like with Truman, is that we don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t know what we’re believing that is false, and we don’t know what the truth is. We’re not actually experiencing reality, we’re experiencing our limited perception of it — like taking a picture of a small part of a vast landscape, and calling that picture reality!
We don’t have choice or free will without expanded awareness, without knowing what we’re believing and the patterns we’re reacting to. This is why all the great master teachers and teachings include some form of meditation and contemplation as part of the practice. As the great Oracle of Delphi says, ‘Know Thyself.’ That’s what we must do.
We must be willing to get really honest with where we are, what we believe, and how we feel. You can’t heal what you won’t feel. That energy remains stuck, unconsciously wreaking havoc on your life. But when you bring this unconscious material to the surface and challenge it with the truth of your being — now real healing, growth, and ultimate freedom can happen.
That’s what happened with Truman. He finally confronted his deepest fears and worked through them — finally realizing they had no power to hurt him. Once he broke through this, he could keep going, past the perceived boundaries, and break out of the limited world he had grown up in.
The key to his transformation was his desire. He has a bigger vision for his life and a deep love, giving him the fuel to face his fears, overcome his foes, and keep going until he achieved his freedom!
What is that burning desire in you that you want more than anything? What are you willing to risk for, to work hard for, to face your fears and even die for? You won’t have to literally die, but some part of you will have to — the old identity, the old protective habits.
The challenge is that the human mind is designed to avoid pain and move towards pleasure. It’s an evolutionary mechanism that was designed to help the developing human survive before we had the higher levels of cognition that allowed us to think more deeply about life and our choices. But this same program that helped us survive now puts us on the verge of extinction.
To override this, we have to be willing to challenge our beliefs and experiences, to dig deeper and find out who we really are, where we really are, and why we are alive – and then to design a way of life that is in integrity with that. It’s not easy because of this survival mechanism, but it is possible – and it’s necessary if we’re going to live our full potential and highest purpose.
To begin overriding this limited program, you can start with the Prayer of Awakening: “More than I want to fix, change, heal, control anyone or anything, I want to wake up to the truth that makes me free. I want to know who and what I really am and why I’m alive. I want to see with the eyes of God, feel with the heart of God, know the truth.”
That prayer can, in and of itself, begin to bring up everything that’s in the way and even start to heal or release the limited patterns. It’s a powerful intention.
The second prayer or intention is, “I’m willing to see and feel all the things I’ve been avoiding, all the things I’ve been afraid to look at, and let everything that is not serving me anymore come up to be embraced, redeemed, transmuted, or released — come what may.”
On a regular basis, you can also ask yourself, “Where am I really? What am I really? Why am I here? What do I really believe? What do I really feel?” This will continue to make you a candidate for fresh insights and healing activations.
Remember, you can’t get to where you really want to go, to where you’re destined to go, unless you’re honest with where you really are – and willing to live here, fully present to whatever exists. That’s the journey I invite you on and welcome you to. It’s one trip where you’re guaranteed to lose your baggage on and be happy about it!
To support you in mastering this, Listen to the in-depth podcast on the subject, where we break it down and put it into real-life practice TODAY. This will be a real game-changer.
To Your Emergence!
And remember, self-help is shelf help – you have everything you need already!
Stay inspired!
Derek
Other powerful free trainings in the podcast library:
When to Stay the Course, When to Change Directions
Why ALL Your Beliefs Limit You (And What You Should Do Instead)
Why Going With the Flow is Wrong
To get these trainings now or see more episodes available, CLICK HERE!
PS – Like this episode? Please share it! Want more advanced training? Full Transcript
[The following is the full transcript of this episode of the Emergence, A Revolutionary Path for Radical Life Change, with Derek Rydall Podcast]
Greetings, everyone, my fellow Emergineers. Derek Rydall here, the founder of the Law of Emergence and author of the best-selling book, Emergence. It’s just great to be with you again as we continue this journey of never-ending, ever-expanding, always unfolding growth and potential. Just think about that. There is no limit to how much good you can realize and express. There is no limit in your body. We think about our body as being just as material thing that is limited to whatever we’ve experienced so far humanly. The body is actually infinite. It has the potential to infinitely and eternally unfold new capacities, new strengths, new talents, new gifts, new abilities, the mental body, the emotional body, the astral, the etheric, all the subtle bodies, the physical body, and your entire body of affairs. It’s that infinite potential, infinite abundance, infinite genius, infinite love, peace, joy, beauty, freedom, wisdom, creativity, infinite. No matter what feeling you have seen, no matter what your culture or your parents or your school or the world says, there’s infinite potential remaining.
It’s something to think about, because we bump into so many beliefs, so many experiences with your coagulated beliefs and the human laws, which are also just coagulated beliefs, and it’s very tempting to think this is it like in the Truman Show, the movie with Jim Carrey could not ever go beyond the water, the river, or the ocean, or whatever it was, the lake and certain places. Not to go beyond this street, this lake, because it was a fake world, it was a circumscribed world. Everybody outside of it knew, and even inside of it, except for him. He had been conditioned and grown up in this world and had experiences like almost drowning in the boat, or his brother drowning or whatever the case was, in the storm, and so he had this conditioned fear. It kept him in this circumscribed little world, until one day, because of his desire for love, for freedom, he eventually was willing to push beyond those boundaries to discover what was really true, what was really there, and ultimately became free of that particular world and discovered a whole new bigger world.
It’s also like the actual reality of the elephant that ultimately died in a circus fire. They were staked to the ground with these ropes, but they could have easily pulled the ropes out and just stormed out of the tent and would never have been hurt, but they stood there and burned to death. Why? Because as little elephants, they had been trained to believe that they couldn’t move. When they were little, they were staked with a strong rope or a chain. They would feel that, and they couldn’t move. As they got older and older even just a feeling of the tug of the rope made them think that they were still stuck, that they couldn’t move, even though they could have easily just pulled it out of the ground and trampled over everybody and stormed out. They sat there feeling the tug of the rope, believing they couldn’t move, and ultimately they didn’t have the ability to question. They didn’t have the ability to question their reality, what they were thinking or feeling, and they ended up dying. There’s many experiments like this. There’s the one with the fish in the tank where they have a fish on one side, a glass partition, and then the food on the other. The fish bumps up against the glass over and over again, can’t get to the food, eventually gives up, goes back. They remove the glass, and the fish keeps swimming in circles. It’ll swim right up to where the glass used to be, stare at the food, and then swim back and end up starving to death, even though the food was available to it the whole time. So, what does this all have to do with what we’re talking about today? I have no idea. No, I’m just kidding.
We’re talking today about Where are you really? You can’t get where you want until you’re honest with where you are. Another analogy I used for that is if you’ve ever been in the mall, a big shopping mall, and you want to get to a particular store, but you have no idea where to even start unless you look at one of those signs that has like a map of the mall, and it says You are here.It has a big X or an arrow pointing to where you are, and then you can easily go, Oh, okay, so now I know how to get to where I want to go. If I didn’t know where I was, I wouldn’t know is it the right turn or left turn, is it up, is it down, because I have no point of origin. So, we have to know where we are. The problem is, like these examples I just gave – the fish, the elephant, and Truman – is that we don’t know what we are unconsciously reacting to. We don’t know what we’re unconsciously believing. We’re not actually experiencing reality. We’re experiencing our belief about it. We’re experiencing our perceptions about it, the universal perceptions that we’ve also made personal. Like Truman, he didn’t even know he was trapped. The elephants didn’t even know that they were trapped. The fish didn’t even know that he or she could just go get the food. They didn’t realize they were reacting to an unconscious conditioned pattern. They thought they were in one place, but they were really in a very different place. By the way, as I’ve said before, there’s no real free will without this expanded awareness. You think you’re making choice, but you’re really just reacting. You think you have free rein to choose whatever you want. In fact, you really don’t. I mean, you do in truth, but you don’t have access to that level of choice until you have enough expanded awareness to see what you’ve been unconsciously reacting to, the beliefs, the condition patterns, the undigested emotional content, the beliefs of your culture, of your parents, of the society, etc. and/or the lack of the knowledge of what’s called the letter of truth, which means the spiritual principles. So, to the extent you don’t know those, and to the extent you aren’t aware of what you really think and believe and feel and perceive, to that extent, you have XY access. To that extent, there’s a corollary to how much of that you don’t know, to how limited your real freedom and real choice is, but you’re dreaming a dream that you have a choice. That’s one of the tricks of the ego, because you’re thinking you’re making all these choices and that you have free will, but really it’s doing that and keeping you circumscribed in your own little Truman show, in your own little circus tent. The challenge is that the human mind is designed to avoid pain and move towards pleasure, which is one of the ways they train an animal, right? They crack the whip, or they give it food. When it does the thing they want to condition it to, they give it food. When it doesn’t do the thing they want to condition it to, they crack the whip, and eventually the animal develops that pattern, that habit, that conditioning through pain and pleasure. Eventually, that becomes its reality. The same exact thing is happened to us.
By the way, as I’ve said before, there’s no real free will without this expanded awareness. You think you’re making choice, but you’re really just reacting. You think you have free rein to choose whatever you want. In fact, you really don’t. I mean, you do in truth, but you don’t have access to that level of choice until you have enough expanded awareness to see what you’ve been unconsciously reacting to, the beliefs, the condition patterns, the undigested emotional content, the beliefs of your culture, of your parents, of the society, etc. and/or the lack of the knowledge of what’s called the letter of truth, which means the spiritual principles. So, to the extent you don’t know those, and to the extent you aren’t aware of what you really think and believe and feel and perceive, to that extent, you have XY access. To that extent, there’s a corollary to how much of that you don’t know, to how limited your real freedom and real choice is, but you’re dreaming a dream that you have a choice. That’s one of the tricks of the ego, because you’re thinking you’re making all these choices and that you have free will, but really it’s doing that and keeping you circumscribed in your own little Truman show, in your own little circus tent. The challenge is that the human mind is designed to avoid pain and move towards pleasure, which is one of the ways they train an animal, right? They crack the whip, or they give it food. When it does the thing they want to condition it to, they give it food. When it doesn’t do the thing they want to condition it to, they crack the whip, and eventually the animal develops that pattern, that habit, that conditioning through pain and pleasure. Eventually, that becomes its reality. The same exact thing is happened to us.
So, the challenge is then to subvert or override that mechanism. We have to actually do what is completely counterintuitive and counter to our human nature which is to not participate in the pain and pleasure mechanism, to not let our mere pleasure and our movement towards feeling good, determine what we’re willing to look at and challenge, and to not let our fear of feeling pain, which can feel like more than just a fear. It can feel like a matter of survival, because the ego doesn’t know the difference between emotional pain and physical danger. We have to override that whole evolutionary mechanism, which can really feel like we’re crazy, like we’re going against our nature. It’s there initially as a way to help these organisms that did not have high level of cognition, that were just much more reactionary before our brain was developed. There had to be a way that this human species could survive. It had to be like an animal, which is to basically avoid pain and danger and move towards pleasure. Moving towards pleasure would mean sex, would mean procreation, would mean food, would mean survival, would mean moving away from pain, would be avoiding anything that had a sign of danger which could lead to being hurt, being killed. It’s a good idea when you got a developing species that does not have the capacity to think about what it’s thinking about, metacognition. It doesn’t have self-consciousness, so it can’t go, Well, it looks like that dangerous, but let me investigate it. We couldn’t do that, so we have the ability to just be moving around like an animal with instinct, move away from pain, and move towards pleasure. It helped. It allowed us to survive. It allowed us to ultimately populate the planet.
Now, that same mechanism is preventing us from evolving and growing outside of our circumscribed little world. So, we have to override that. That can feel really hard, really challenging, really scary. Everything in our body and mind can try to convince us that we shouldn’t go that way, because we’re not used to that. It just seems like a very dark mysterious place to go to. It’s like that analogy of the guy that’s outside of his house searching for his key, and his neighbor said, Where did you lose it? The guy is like looking in all the bushes under the street lamp. The neighbor is helping him. After an hour, the neighbor said, Where did you lose the key? because they’ve been looking all over. The guy said, Well, I lost it inside the house, but the light is better out here. So, that’s the way we are. It’s dark and scary to go into the mystery, the cave of mystery, the cave of our evolutionary potential and really discover where am I really. Then, you get into a spiritual path, and you learn about visualization and affirmation and all these feel-good tools, which are beautiful, but then the ego uses them to cover us what we really feel, to cover up what we really believe. So, you’ll hear people saying, Well, no, I mean I know God is all there is but…͟ and then you’ll hear me say, Ah, ah, ah, no, you don’t really know God is all there is.That’s just a nice concept and an affirmation to cover up the fact that you really believe you’re lost and alone in a cold and unfriendly Universe. So, let’s get down to what you really believe. Why? Because you can’t get to where you really want to go if you aren’t honest with where you really are. You can’t heal what you’re not willing to feel. That doesn’t mean you necessarily have to feel every little grain of emotion you’ve ever experienced, but it definitely means you have to be willing, open, available, and to really look at your beliefs.
Again, this is very counter human nature. People go to war for their beliefs. People kills for their beliefs. People bomb abortion clinics and beat people up and stand on a pulpit and rain fire and brimstone down on a congregation and scare them into their little caves of limited belief to fight for belief. To say I’m going to question all of my believes, especially my core one, the mind is going to think you’re crazy, and it’s going to feel very dangerous, but if you really want to wake up, and you really want to be free and you really want to have free will and choice, you must. You must shine the light of your awareness into the dark cave of your consciousness and see what’s really lurking there. Only then can you transmute that energy, those undigested emotions. Can you question those limited beliefs? It may not even seem limited at first. Truman doesn’t know he’s living in a limited world. That’s the trick of it, right? We don’t realize even the greatest human life is living in limitation compared to what’s possible. We have to stay open at the top. We have to stay beginner’s mind, students, and question everything, like a little kid does before they start to get solidified beliefs. Why is the sky blue? Why? Why is that? What is happening there? Why is the Grand Canyon look like that? Why do dogs sniff each other’s butts? So many things they’ve got to question. A kid does that until they get either told, Stop asking so many questions or The sky is just blue because it’s blue or we just get told complete BS, right? Belief Systems. Eventually, we just buy it. We believe it, either through pain or fear or shame or survival or exhaustion. We just buy into things, and we go along, and we try to live our lives within those programs. We wonder why we hit feelings and we got stuck and we can’t get to the next level. We’re experiencing things, limitations that others don’t.
So, we have to be willing to look. We have to have the courage to really look, because remember the ego perceives pain. Because we perceive certain things as painful, we have assigned the meaning that it’s dangerous, that it’s shameful, that it’s scary, that it’s painful, and then we have to create a coping mechanism to not feel that feeling anymore. We’ve talked about this with the shadow work, and it’s how we developed our shadows or the values conflicts. One of my friends, Jeffrey Van Dyke, I think it’s one of the most brilliant definitions of wounds. I’m paraphrasing, but he says, A wound is when you have to believe a lie in order to survive. There’s something that is inherently against your soul’s knowing of who you really are. The parent says, Rich people are whatever or says something, If you don’t go to church, you’re going to be burned in hell or just something about you, We’re just a family of people that aren’t very creative or You can’t make it as an artist. Artists live below the poverty level. Something. Maybe you’re standing up and asking for what you really want, and your parent shames you into believing that’s being selfish and a bad person. In your soul, you know that’s not true, but the threat of pain and danger and rejection if you keep believing that truth and knowing that truth becomes so painful that you have to eventually decide to believe that you really aren’t creative, that you really are a bad person, that whatever the case may be so that you can continue to survive and be taken care of and ultimately make it in this world. That’s a wounding. I call that core wounding, also a core initiation, because it’s really setting you up to have a deeper journey of transformation. It’s setting you on a journey to dig deeper and discover something about yourself that you’re here to discover and ultimately bring that wisdom to the world.
So, we create these coping mechanisms. They become very well-developed over time to where we literally don’t feel all the emotional pain that’s going on inside of us anymore. Believe me, it’s still going on inside of you, and it’s still running the show. It’s taking the potential currency that’s coming in everyday for you to invest in your life. It’s using it up to keep that emotional pain alive. You have to create a coping mechanism, some form of habit or compulsive behavior, mental, emotional, physical behaviors to keep that emotional pain out of consciousness. That’s also using up a lot of your energy and capacity. Whatever is left over, that’s all you’ve got now to create your life. If you’ve got so many of these going on, you not only have very little left over, you end up in energetic death. You have to start pulling it from the cells of your body, from other people. You become like an energy vampire, so there’s an extreme version of that. In any case, you’re stuck at certain levels, because you have to use all this energy to keep this old level alive, but you don’t even know you’re doing it. You beat your head against the wall, you try more affirmations, more visualization, more this, more that, but as Debbie Ford, the great teacher of shadow work, once said, That’s like putting ice cream on top of poop. It temporarily makes it look a little prettier, but you do not want to bite it to that sundae. I’m sorry, guys. I’m in a funny mood today, so I’m saying some pretty funny things, some crap things, but you get the point, right? You’re not going to forget that analogy. That’s the key. We have to have the courage to override this system and to really, really discover, where am I really? There’s two prayers. One prayer is, more than I want to fix, change, heal, control anyone or anything, I want to wake up to the truth that makes me free. I want to know who and what I really am and why I’m alive. I want to see with the eyes of God, feel with the heart of God, know the truth. So, that’s one prayer. That prayer can, in and of itself, if you pray it and intend it sincerely and daily, can begin to bring up everything that’s in the way, these unconscious patterns. That’s one approach. That’s just going straight to the truth. Notice within that prayer, it’s saying more than I want to fix, change, heal, manipulate, control, which are all based on coping mechanisms. More than any of that, I want to know the truth that makes me free. What that’s setting us up to is to override those coping mechanisms and ultimately have a realization of what’s really true about us and about life. Often that will bring up those coping mechanisms as they get broken down and chemicalized and start to come to the surface.
That’s the key. We have to have the courage to override this system and to really, really discover, where am I really? There’s two prayers. One prayer is, more than I want to fix, change, heal, control anyone or anything, I want to wake up to the truth that makes me free. I want to know who and what I really am and why I’m alive. I want to see with the eyes of God, feel with the heart of God, know the truth. So, that’s one prayer. That prayer can, in and of itself, if you pray it and intend it sincerely and daily, can begin to bring up everything that’s in the way, these unconscious patterns. That’s one approach. That’s just going straight to the truth. Notice within that prayer, it’s saying more than I want to fix, change, heal, manipulate, control, which are all based on coping mechanisms. More than any of that, I want to know the truth that makes me free. What that’s setting us up to is to override those coping mechanisms and ultimately have a realization of what’s really true about us and about life. Often that will bring up those coping mechanisms as they get broken down and chemicalized and start to come to the surface.
If that’s not enough, sometimes we really do need to also set the intention of the prayer, which is God, life, I’m willing to see and feel all the things I’ve been avoiding, seeing and feeling. I’m willing to see and feel all the things I’ve been afraid to see and feel, the things I’ve been afraid to look at. I’m willing to let everything that is not serving me anymore come up to be seen, to be embraced, to be redeemed or transmuted, all the undigested emotions, all of the uninvestigated beliefs. I’m willing to really see where I am in consciousness, to really feel where I am in consciousness and do the work to heal it, to redeem it, to transmute it, to let it go. Come what may. I’m willing to let go of all of my coping mechanisms, all of my attempts to control and manipulate and refresh and to really see where I really am emotionally, mentally, so that I can ultimately heal, release and know the deeper truth that makes me free and fulfill my greater destiny.
That becomes our prayer, our mantra, our intention. We’re willing, we’re available, we’re open. That alone can start the engine of transformation if you do it with sincerity and with consistency. I know that I recently have become aware that there’s undigested repressed anger in me from several years of me saying yes when I really needed to say no, from me being more of a doormat when I really needed to stand up in family and relationship, and that I was trying to be the nice guy, the good guy, keep the peace, and I realized that all of that left a lot of deposits of unexpressed energy as emotion or pain or that sort of thing. It starts to leak out in certain conversations I would hear in my mind or dreams. I begin to set the prayer. Let all that unconscious emotional stuff come up, so that I can redeem it, transmute it. Sure enough, I started to experience tremendous amounts of anger and sadness, and things came to the surface. The key thing is that it was always there, doing its damage in my system or limiting my capacity, and I just had not been willing to really feel it or look at it, because I had a belief, a shadow around being angry, at least that was years ago. That’s why I didn’t express it, but all that was still undigested. We have to have that level of courage and commitment to really grow, and it might be awkward, and it might be messy at times. You might be a neurotic mess as you start to see this stuff and let this stuff come up. You might find yourself snapping at people or breaking down and crying like Holly Hunter in Broadcast News, everyday wake up and just sob, and then go on with her day. You might find yourself in various states of emotional upheaval or suddenly seeing these beliefs you bought into in being angry or being scared or sad, but having the courage to move through it. That’s what it really takes to grow.
We have to realize that we’ve developed a lot of really good coping mechanisms. We’ve learned how to anesthetize ourselves from what we really feel. We’ve learned how to cover over our real beliefs with stories, excuses and affirmations. You can always see where you’re doing that or attempting to do that when you find yourself saying, I believe this but…͟ or like I said before, I know that I’m supported by the Universe, but whenever you find yourself thinking that or saying that, that’s a sure sign that you have a belief that you’re using to cover up what you really believe and ultimately what you really feel –the fear or the sadness or the shame about what you really believe about life or about yourself. You can’t heal that if you’re not willing to feel bad. Again, it doesn’t mean you’re going to have to feel everything. It just means you have to be willing, you have to be available to let the energy move. I invite you to take a moment right now and look at an area where you’re struggling to overcome or achieve something. What you want to begin to do as you do this process is you can look at all the dimensions of a thing. So, what do you believe about the thing? What do you believe about yourself in relation to the thing? What do you believe about the people involved? What do you believe what they think about you? What do you believe about the world of the thing? What do you believe about the world in general in that context? So, you’re looking at the dimensions of what you believe about the thing.
Let’s say your issue is you’re struggling financially. What you believe about that situation, for real? Not, Oh, God is all there is and I’m truly supported. What do you really believe? What you believe about yourself in relationship to that financial struggle? Not just Oh, I’m doing my best. I’m trying hard. Nothing is working. No, that’s not a belief. What do you believe about yourself? I just don’t understand money. I just don’t know how to do financial stuff. I’m just a loser and a failure around it. My parents said women weren’t any good at that. Okay, what do you believe about the people involved? So, that’s where we start to uncover. Well, I believe that my boss is being a jerk, and he should pay me more or The people that taught me how to do this coaching thing are stupid. It doesn’t work. They’re scam artists. What do you believe about that they think about you, that whatever people involved? Oh, my family thinks I’m a loser, I’m a failure, etc. etc. What do you believe about the world of the thing?
So, now, we expand out a little bit. So, in general, what do you believe about money and finances and bill paying or whatever? Then, you start to go, Well, actually, I think it’s all a bunch of BS. This whole capitalist model is completely wrong. The government should be taking care of…͟ Whatever, right? You start to discover, Wow, that’s what I really believe about it. You might discover I hate money. I think money is the root of all evil. I think like that might have something to do with why I’m broke or struggling. I think that people that have money are usually jerks and mean and insensitive and don’t care about other people. Okay. That might have something to do with why you don’t have a lot of it, because you don’t want to be that kind of a person. What do you believe about the world in general? When you’re in the midst of this now, unpacking it, you ask that question, and you’ll come up with the world is unfair, it’s dog eat dog; it’s every man for himself, or whatever, and you’ll start to discover some beliefs in that arena about the world in general. In other words, that’s the context in which this experience has happened.
So, you start to unpack that. Again, the dimensions are what do you believe about the thing? What do you believe about yourself in relation to the thing? What do you believe about the people involved? They can be directly involved or indirectly involved, just anybody that pops up in your awareness when you’re thinking about that. What do you believe they think about you in relation to the situation? What do you believe about the world of the thing? Then, finally, what do you believe about the world in general within the context of that thing? I’m not expecting you to do all this work right now, but play with it while we’re talking. Start to unpack it a little bit. Again, your intention is, what do I really believe about it? Not what I convinced myself, what am I trying to convince myself of, what does the world say it is, what does Derek say it is? What do I really believe about it? I’m willing to see the truth, even if it’s scary, even if it hurts. What do you really believe about your chances to overcome that or achieve that, whatever the thing is? What do you really believe? I don’t think I’ll ever get out of this mess. I don’t believe I’ll ever really make enough money to pay my bills. Really get honest. Maybe there’s some truth that you’re affirming. I’m supported. Life is for me. What do you really believe about that truth? I think it’s bunch of bullshit, right? You got to get honest. I don’t really believe life is for me. Great. That’s a great start, because as you’re sitting there affirming it about what you really believe is it’s not true, you’re actually affirming the opposite of what you’re saying.
So, what do you really believe? Do you believe in lack? Do you believe in limitation? Do you believe in injustice disease, death? Do you believe these are real things that exist that we have to struggle with? Because if you believe in any of those kinds of things, then you create them as a real obstacle, and now you have to overcome them. If you don’t even realize that you actually believe in lack, because you keep affirming and telling yourself, I’m abundant. I’m abundant. There’s abundance. There’s abundance but what you really believe in is lack. That’s like Sisyphus pushing a bolder up a hill, and then eventually he gets exhausted and the ball pulls back down again, rolls over him. He has to pick it up and push it back up again. You’ve got one foot on the brake and one foot on the gas. You want to really ask that. Then, you go back to that, and you now ask the same questions about how you really feel. How do I really feel about this thing, this situation? How do I really feel about myself in relationship to it? How do I really feel about the people involved, about what they think of me, about the world of this thing, about the world in general? Now, you unpack the feeling. This, for some of us, is even scarier, because you start to go, You know what, I’m really effing angry. I am so, so hurt. I’m so ashamed. I’m so freaking scared. I feel like such an abysmal failure. It just feels like you’re getting sucked into a bottomless pit of emotion. That’s one of the reasons why you don’t go there. It just feels bad, but you can’t heal what you don’t feel.
So, you have to begin to codify it. You have to begin to become conscious of it. There’s the saying, You shall know the truth, and the truth will make you free.It’s true, but it doesn’t just say the truth will make you free. It says you have to know the truth. Truth is all there is, but it doesn’t do you any good until you know it. Just like electricity is everywhere. It doesn’t do you any good until you plug into it. So, the fact that all there is life, love and truth, that does no good unless we’re plugged into it, unless we are consciously knowing it, aware of it, participating it. The same thing is true with healing. It’s the things that we’re unwilling to look at and become conscious of. We cannot ultimately heal or redeem or transmute, because if we’re not willing to look at them it means we’re in resistance to them. What you resist persists. What you fight you fuel. These parts of us, these egoic parts, they know that as long as they remain unconscious, they can survive and even thrive. They can live off of our energy and off of our fears and all of our emotional stuff. As long as they remain unconscious, like the little creatures that scurry around in the dark tunnels, under our front lawn or whatever, or in the sewers, as long as they remain in the dark, they can do their stuff, spread their disease, eat at the roots of our plants and trees, and go on unabated, but the minute we shine a light down those holes, and we bring it all to consciousness, they scurry to the surface, and now we can trap them, stop them, ultimately destroy them or integrate in the case of our own beliefs and feelings.
So, the coping mechanisms are very successful in keeping a lot of this stuff unconscious, so that it can survive. Once it’s brought into the light of our awareness, with consistency, it cannot survive. This is what the Biblical passage of, You cannot see the face of God and live. What it means is you cannot stare into the face of truth, the light, the fire of truth and continue to be the same person you were. It will burn away the false self. It will burn away, and it will transform you and reveal who you really are. The ego knows that, and to the ego that’s death. It’s working very hard to not let you discover where you really are, how you really think, what you really feel, because it knows that will begin the process of dying, of dying to the old self that you may be reborn to your true self. The ego is working 24/7 to prevent. It thinks it’s keeping you alive. It’s just keeping those patterns alive by keeping them in the dark. Your charge now is to no longer allow that to go unabated, but to be willing and courageous, truly heroic enough to discover where you really are, what you really believe, what you really think, and what you really feel. Now, you can do the real work around those beliefs and feelings. You can do the shadow work. You can do the mindful meditation practice where you just sit with the feelings and observe them, but don’t become lost in them. That’s important. We’re not saying feel the feelings and become indulgent and get lost with them. We’re saying let it come to the surface, so you can shine the light of your awareness on it and transmute it and redeem it. Don’t indulge in it. You observe. You feel it, but you allow yourself to be the witness of the feeling the same with the beliefs. Then, you specifically create affirmations or vision, visualization that represents the opposite, or the truth versus your limited belief. You continue to work with the limited belief to redeem and transmute the energy of it.
Do the shadow work through values conflict work, etc. You start to then notice when you start to do certain compulsive behaviors, like eating when you’re not hungry, eating more than you really need, working so much and never taking a break, and never giving yourself a break. You just start to notice, when do I start to feel constricted, when do I start to do things that are not fully serving or honoring me or others. Let me stop and let me question what’s really going on there. What am I really feeling? You’ll always discover there’s some kind of emotion there. What am I really believing? Well, I can’t just stop or slow down or take a break. It’s scary sometimes to stop and not eat that thing or not keep working on that thing or not keep doing all the stuff we’re doing, exercising, overexercising, overshopping, over whatever, overeating, overworking. It’s scary to stop, because there’s like this deep sense of void or a darkness or a fear or emptiness that we have to confront. We’ve been working so hard to not, and it does feel counterintuitive. It does feel almost destructive, almost just wrong to stop and let ourselves feel how terrible we feel. We have to override that temptation to avoid it. That’s the real path of awakening and mastery. At the same time, we don’t want to become indulgent in the content of our consciousness, so we have to also be simultaneously praying that prayer and saying that intention and doing the work to know the Truth. We’ve been talking about the truth with the little t, but we want to know the truth with the capital T. So we want to become really aware of the letter of truth, truth principles. That way we start to have a compass or a barometer to measure our beliefs against, so that when we come up against the belief that says, well, you’re such and such an age, at this point, things start going downhill mentally, physically, creatively, whatever. You can go, that feels true, and I certainly have a lot of people in society that will back me up in
At the same time, we don’t want to become indulgent in the content of our consciousness, so we have to also be simultaneously praying that prayer and saying that intention and doing the work to know the Truth. We’ve been talking about the truth with the little t, but we want to know the truth with the capital T. So we want to become really aware of the letter of truth, truth principles. That way we start to have a compass or a barometer to measure our beliefs against, so that when we come up against the belief that says, well, you’re such and such an age, at this point, things start going downhill mentally, physically, creatively, whatever. You can go, that feels true, and I certainly have a lot of people in society that will back me up in medical industry and whatever, but is it true? Let me go and look at the truth principle. Let me see if I can find anywhere in principle where this is true.
If you don’t know what the truth principles are, then that shows you where you need to do research, where you need to ask questions and investigate. What is the spiritual principle and truth about the body? Well, if the divine intelligence made everything out of itself, and its nature is infinite and omniscient and omnipotent and omnipresent, there can’t be anything outside of God. There can’t be any other substance or power or creative principle. God is all that there really is. God made all that is. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and God made all that was made out of the Word, and nothing was made without the Word, and God saw it all and named it good, or as the Course In Miracles says, Nothing real can be damaged, nothing unreal exists. Okay, so then God made the body, because if God didn’t make it, it was never made. So this divine intelligence must have made it, and if divine infinite, omnipotent, omniscient, eternal, immortal intelligence made something, then its nature must be infinite, immortal, and eternal as well. This body must be as eternal and immortal and infinite as God. Oh, yeah, it says that the body is the temple of the living spirit. Okay, so then this belief that says at this age, it should start diminishing is just a belief. It’s not in principle at all.
So, do you see what I’m doing? I’m working through it to see where have I bought in to something that’s not true, but I might have to go study the letter of truth to discover what is principle there. The same thing with finances and abundance. Again, the same principle, if the nature of it is infinite, immortal and eternal, then my dollar bills in my bank or the lack thereof isn’t telling me how much abundance I have. If I’m a unique expression of this one life, then my capacity must be the same as God’s capacity. I must have infinite supply, infinite abundance. If this is only God expressing, the one appearing as the many, like the one tree with its many branches, then if Bill Gates or Oprah or anybody else could have a lot of abundance, then the same abundance must be right where I am, uniquely expressing as this branch on the tree.
You just start to play with the truth principles and compare them against your belief systems, and you start to call it for what it really is. Then, once you really know the truth principle, you can look at these beliefs and say, if they’re telling you anything less than that you are infinite, immortal, eternal, whole, complete, perfect, fulfilled, free, fully-expressed, beautiful, bountiful, abundant, bold, powerful, brilliant expression of life, love, peace, joy, health, and abundant, if these beliefs are telling you anything less than that, they’re a lie. You can look into that and say, you’re a liar, and the father of even more lies. You can’t do that if you’re not consciously excavating them, and you’re not consciously seeking to know the truth principles. This must become a part of your practice. You must become contemplative and have the courage. This is real heroism. Certainly it’s heroic to go on the battlefield and to run into a burning building, but this is the ultimate heroism.
So, I invite you on this path of becoming a hero in your own life and in your own work to begin to ask – Where am I really? What do I really believe? What do I really feel? Understand that you cannot get to where you really want to go, to where you’re destined to go unless you’re honest with where you really are. So, I hope that serves you, inspires you, opened you up, and now you have to do the work. It’s the work play.
