If you’re a human, who’s alive and breathing, there’s a good chance that you have some goals and aspirations for yourself.
There’s a good chance that there are relationships you wish to have or to deepen.
There’s a good chance that there are places you want to travel, experiences you want to experience and new horizons you want to explore.
There’s a good chance that you want to expand your skill set, get a new job, create a new career for yourself or find a way to meet your needs that actually feels good and not like ‘work’ all the time.
There’s a good chance that you want to improve your health/physical situation in some way.
There’s a good chance that there are parts of you that you KNOW you haven’t been able to fully step into - or that you feel are buried deep within you - that you want to bring to the surface and express.
When you lie in bed at night, when you have those moments of calm, when you’re not occupied with the day to day tasks that consume your attention, there’s likely a place your mind wanders to - a place in your future where life is different, where you are different and where you’ve become someone greater, happier, stronger, more peaceful. Where you’ve accomplished goals, expanded and grown in ways that you truly believe are going to make your life more meaningful, fulfilling and something you can be proud of.
In other words, if you’re alive and breathing, I’m willing to bet that you have ideas about you YOU, a LIFE that you want to experience that you have yet to experience.
This desire for more, this push for a different future, this part of self that isn’t satisfied with what is and has a longing for something better seems to be an inherent part of the human experience.
As far as I can tell, it appears that total satisfaction with what is, a complete lack of desire to shift or change anything, a total acceptance of reality is at best, a fleeting part of the human experience. It’s at best a state that we may find ourselves in for moments or days - but it doesn’t tend to be a place any of us park and reside in.
Rather, it seems to be that this quest for the unknown, this inner call to ‘get somewhere’ in life - no matter where we have already been and no matter what we’ve already achieved or accomplished - seems to be one of those shared human traits that underpins the very nature of what it means to be conscious.
This desire we all share looks different on all of us - again for some it’s a desire for the external realities to change - the job, the house, the relationship, the body, the location - all of the above. For others it’s more an experiential shift we are desiring - more love, more fun, more success, more freedom. For others, there’s a call to shift the self - to change our personalities, to express in different ways, to be more or less of this or that.
Many of us have a feeling that permeates our experience that we translate as telling us that our way of being doesn’t ‘match’ something we know to be true deep inside - that what we are doing with our careers, who we are with, how we express, how we look, how we are perceived and received doesn’t match what we DESIRE to be.
It seems that so long as we are alive, we are going to have a desire to get ‘over there.’
No matter who you are, where you’re from or what kind of life you’ve lived to this point, chances are you don’t feel complete and total contentment and you don’t feel like you’re ‘done’ with your experience.
There’s a ‘more’ that you want - likely many different ‘mores’ - and that feeling can be something that’s deeply uncomfortable and downright miserable.
Do you resonate with this?
If so, you’re not alone.
Enter - Self Help And Personal Growth
It’s this nearly universal feeling of dissatisfaction that gives rise to pretty much all of what we see in the self help, spirituality and personal growth worlds.
Which wouldn’t be a problem if what was being offered as solutions were actual solutions.
But most of the time in these ‘self help’ and ‘spiritual’ spaces we receive the exact OPPOSITE of actual solutions.
Rather what we get is more fodder for the underlying PROBLEM that is inflammation this entire problem.
So much of self help/spirituality is geared around the idea that we suffer because we are making bad choices. That we suffer because we are lacking some inherent inner wisdom that would set us free if we could just access it. That we are causing our own pain via failing on some level. Much of the self help/spirituality out there feeds us messages that we should be able to feel good any time, anywhere - and that when we don’t it’s because WE suck.
The underlying message is almost always that our suffering is coming from us not being good enough - us not doing the right things, us not thinking the right things, us not expressing the right way - and that if we don’t have enough it’s simply because we aren’t trying hard enough.
This is why so much of the self help/spirituality work out there only serves to keep us trapped in loops of pain, rather than giving us the tools we need to get OUT of those loops.
They are not built on the foundation of self support, but rather upon foundations of self rejection and fixing what isn’t actually broken.
You see, the desire for growth, for more, for expansion, for the new, for experiences and so on aren’t bad desires. They aren’t the cause of our pain and suffering.
Rather, it’s either the lack of access to that which we actually NEED to establish reasonable levels of safety and provision or it’s the feeling that who and what we are right here and right now isn’t ‘good enough’ or worthy of love that is the fundamental root of our pain.
Again that desire for growth is natural and it’s a part of what makes a healthy life healthy.
Without that, we wouldn’t have the drive we need to express ourselves fully.
What hurts in this life is when we are living in circumstances that leave us legitimately unsafe - because when this is the case we are going to suffer. When we don’t have the basic things we need to survive well or to survive without being in a constant state of fear for our survival, we aren’t going to be able to focus on healing, growth, expansion and expression. We aren’t going to have the resources, time and mental/emotional energy left over to discover who we are, what we want, what we value and what we want to ‘become’ as we go through our experiences.
Now, this isn’t to say that we can’t express, grow and change if we don’t have perfect safety and provision. Of course adversity and challenge are going to be a part of all of our lives to some degree - and this stress can and usually does serve as a kind of springboard for our growth. Not all challenges are bad. Not all stress is bad. We don’t want to live in a state where we believe that nothing is possible unless we have perfect conditions - rather we want to understand that part of what allows us to grow and become what we are capable of becoming is the facing of the challenges and adversities that are in our way.
But this has to be balanced with safety.
This has to be balanced with rest and recovery.
This has to be balanced with having enough to be ok *most of the time* or with an actual PATH to getting to better.
If we are perpetually stuck in states of stress and not enough, we are going to be perpetually stuck in stress, trauma and pain - so when the self help/spirituality world offers us the idea that we need to learn to be happy anywhere or that we need to learn to take any and all circumstances and use them as a platform for growth and transformation - they are being disingenuous.
They are denying the very real reality that we are physical beings that have specific needs that DO fully affect our capacity to be, do and express.
If these root issues of actually not having enough aren’t addressed, if we are told that everything we are experiencing and everything that we do or don’t do all boils down to our own individual choices - if we are not going to take our childhoods, conditioning and lived experiences into account when looking at why we are in pain or why we are not able to reach the goals we have for ourselves - we are doing ourselves a massive disservice. We are denying an aspect of reality that NEEDS to be addressed.
So much self help/spirituality denies reality. It makes everything a personal responsibility rather than giving us the tools we need to process the traumas of our past or to process the trauma of our present and it doesn’t help us reconcile the reality that not everything is within our control or ‘because of us.’
Which means we are offered tools to ‘fix ourselves’ that never work, because we aren’t broken - rather we are responding completely appropriately to a situation where we are genuinely unsafe, unsupported or where we have unprocessed pain from a past where we were unsafe and unsupported that is clouding our capacity to be in the present and do what we need to do for ourselves.
Second, self help and spirituality work often tells us that in order to ‘get where we want to go’ we have to deny, suppress, get rid of, fix or change in some significant way who and what we are right now.
This is the most painful part of self help and spirituality.
It drives us into a state where we believe that in order to feel how we want to feel, in order to achieve what we want to achieve and in order to create the new lives we want to live, we must abandon the version of us that currently exists. We must see that the current version of us is the reason we aren’t ‘there’ yet, and we must be in a constant state of working to improve the current version of us so that it will become better.
This means that we are literally trained to be at war with ourselves so long as we have a desire.
Which means we are always going to be at war, because we are always going to have unfilled desires.
Self help and spirituality rarely helps us to really look at WHY we want what we want, what we think having the things we are going after are going to give us, where we may be operating from conditioning or seeking external validation vs. following what is actually going to fulfill and satisfy us.
It teaches us to see ourselves as flawed and broken when we aren’t where we want to be.
It teaches us to believe that the version of us ‘over there’ is always BETTER than the version of us that exists right now.
It rarely supports us in doing a deep audit of our desires, our value systems, what actually matters to us and WHY we believe we need to achieve what we need to achieve - and it rarely helps us to love and understand who we are, so that we can grow via an avenue of support and love.
It fosters self rejection in the face of desire and this brings us to a place of perpetual suffering as we seek to get out of suffering.
The Antidote
So what’s the solution?
How do we allow ourselves to have our desires to grow, how do we honor our humanity the parts of us that deeply WANT to become something more - without slipping into constant states of pain and suffering due to that ‘never enough’ syndrome or due to the fact that we are being taught to deny reality?
We learn to show up for the person, the being, the situation and the circumstances we are currently in, right here, right now.
We learn to have COMPASSION for the version of ourselves that currently exists, and rather than asking ‘how do I fix/change/improve/get rid of this version of me so that I can become the version of me I WANT to be?’ we ask ‘What does this version of me need right now to feel SUPPORTED and LOVED?’
Because when we start to show up for ourselves in THIS way, we are going to realize that this is how we find our next steps.
This is how we grow.
This is how we create the conditions in which we can actually start to thrive.
We show up for the person that we currently are, and we get honest about the conditions we’re in.
We get honest about where we have power, where we are creating what is happening to us, where we are participating, and we get honest about the things we DON’T have power to shift or change - and in BOTH of these states of awareness we continue to ask:
‘How do I best SUPPORT myself in this?’
You see the theme here.
Creating the conditions for growth, for change, for finding our steps forward comes down to supporting ourselves.
It comes down to being as nice to ourselves as possible.
It comes down to asking what we need, vs. asking how to ‘fix’ ourselves.
Because we are just like any other life form.
When we are getting our needs met, when we are being supported in the best way possible in any given time, when we are being given what is available - we are going to grow the most.
When we are being hated, shamed, blamed, or when we are being asked to deny reality, we are going to get stuck - because just like any other life form, when we are facing unnecessary antagonism, we suffer, we don’t thrive.
When we learn to love who and what we are right now and when we learn to stop telling ourselves that we ‘should’ be able to thrive in any situation - we can finally release all the tension and pressure that comes with self rejection and denial of reality.
Then we can start to do the work required to move forward.
We can be kind to ourselves, we can honor our bodies and emotions. We can figure out how to take small, doable steps that won’t push us into a state of freak out and shut down. We can let ourselves learn more about WHY we are the way we are so we can again, actually SUPPORT our own growth rather than continually banging our heads against the proverbial wall of self improvement that never addresses actual root issues.
We can start to figure out what we ACTUALLY want to grow into, and what’s just conditioning and us thinking we ‘should’ become something for reasons OTHER than genuine, authentic desire.
We can stop fighting with reality - believing that the only obstacle in our way is our own mindset and we can start dealing with any REAL obstacles that we may need to face in order to expand and grow.
We can water and nourish what we are, and we can start to see and realize that what we are right now is the SEED of what we will become. We are not going to grow by getting RID of ourselves, we are going to grow by FEEDING ourselves.
Nourishment, compassion and support.
THAT’S how we ‘get there.’
It’s how we learn to enjoy the ride as well - because the reality is, no matter what we grow into, it’s always just going to be the platform for the next thing we want to grow into.
There’s no ‘there’ to reach - so if we are hating ourselves the entire time we are in ‘growth’ or ‘desire’ mode - we are going to be in a perpetual state of self hate.
Because this is what life is.
Learning to support who and what you are right now, is literally the fastest way to grow, and it’s the fastest way to take the SUFFERING out of the natural, human desire for more.
What if you were allowed to love who you currently are, knowing that this is going to make the ‘becoming’ so much easier and more enjoyable?
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Are you sick of the self help roller coaster that leaves you constantly striving and never arriving?
Are you ready for a true spiritual path that connects you to yourself and reality so you can feel good about your life?
Then come check out the Mystery School.
