Emotional Manipulation & Blackmail: How to Stop Being Played & Stay REAL

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Life Philosophy/Mindset/Psychology/Relationships

If you don’t read this article, then you’re a terrible human being.

Oh, hi there.

Before we get started with all this, I just want to say that if you don’t read this article, then you’re a terrible human being:

You’re holding back the human race. Your degeneracy and immoral attitude towards life is ultimately ruining society.

And it’s people like you that make life way more difficult than it needs to be.

For the rest of us – the ‘good’ people out here in the world – who are just going about our business being real and so on and so forth….

Oh, wait a second. All of the things I just said were complete horsesh*t. It was my attempt to emotionally manipulate or blackmail you, into reading the rest of this long ass article – that’s because this (emotional manipulation and blackmail) is the theme of what follows.

If you read it, you’re going to become more aware of all of the emotional manipulation going on in the world and in your life, and – more importantly – I’m going to help you to become immune to it by giving you an inoculation, metaphorically speaking, so that you can stop buying into all that bs, stop being manipulated, and live a real life without unnecessary drama and nonsense.

Let’s have at it.

Emotional manipulation involves taking total responsibility for someone else’s feelings.

So before we get into the heavier stuff, let’s begin with a really simple definition of what we mean by emotional manipulation and/or blackmail, which are basically the same thing:

Emotional manipulation and blackmail is any instance of somebody else trying to make you take total responsibility for their feelings, their choices, their expectations, and ideas by turning your feelings against you.

Normally the feelings they’re going to “turn against you” are most likely to be fear, guilt and shame, and they’ll control you by creating some unreal standard of how you should behave, of how you should be, how you should feel.

If you don’t act according to this unreal standard – which is just something that they pulled out of their ass so that they can maintain their ego and not have to change or grow in life – then they’re going to put you on a guilt trip, they’re going to punish you, they’re going to basically make your life a living hell because they want you to take their feelings as your own and be responsible for them, when actually that is total nonsense (because at the end of the day, we’re all responsible for our own feelings).

If you have some kind of unresolved emotional ‘stuff’ inside you (again, usually SHAME) that makes you take on board that responsibility, then you’re going to get caught up in the cycle of being emotionally manipulated. And if you want to put an end to that, you need to ask yourself why you’re buying into it. That’s what we’re about to do.

So in this article, we’re really just going to explore why you would accept that responsibility for somebody else’s feelings and choices etc., and why you would live up or try to live up to their unrealistic standards that they have just created in order to control you in the first place (so that they can stay the same and they can watch you dance through hoops and do a whole song and dance, trying to please them so they can feel powerful).

Ultimately, that’s what this is all about: a power dynamic. And the only way that you end up giving away your power is by getting detached from your own realness, your own truth about yourself, and starting to believe some unreal nonsense that can only really belong to your ego.

And so if you can step back from your own ego ‘stuff’ and you can start to see clearly again, then you’re ultimately going to be able to stop feeding into other people’s egos, and that’s going to allow the whole house of cards to fall down.

The only reason that emotional manipulation works is because at some level, you’re choosing to be manipulated. And normally, that’s just so you don’t have to feel uncomfortable – i.e. it’s so you can feel the familiar buzz of being who you currently think you, are.

But if you’re being manipulated, then whatever it is that you think you are is unreal.

And so what you need to do is to flip the script, start being real again, and get your power back; when you do this, you remove the power over whoever it is in your life that’s manipulating you with all of this ‘stuff’.

Now, the bottom line, for the record, is that nobody is responsible for their own feelings and choices apart from themselves.

Except maybe in extreme cases, of course – if somebody’s holding a gun to your head, maybe they can coerce you and make you choose something that you don’t want.

But on a day to day basis, we are all responsible for our own feelings and our own choices.

And that means that anytime somebody tries to pass that ownership on to you, instead of owning their own feelings and choices, you have a choice to make:

You can either stop it in its tracks, or you can try and take it because of your own ego ‘stuff’ and your need to feel approval or love or whatever it is that you think you’re going to get by taking it on board.

In that moment – when you have that choice to make – that is where you have the opportunity to step into your power.

Accepting this fact of life – that we’re all responsible for our own choices and our own feelings – doesn’t mean that we should go around purposely trying to upset people or ruin their lives by upsetting them. It just means that if we’ve been real and we’re going about our lives the best way that we can, chasing our values and our true intentions and all that kind of stuff, we probably will upset at least one or two people along the way (purely because we all have different needs and agendas which is totally fine and healthy).

But as long as we’re not doing that intentionally, we don’t have to fall into the trap of being controlled when people are upset with us being on a real path whilst they’re getting worked up over something unreal in their minds – I’m just putting that out there because even though we’re not responsible for other people’s feelings, we don’t need to purposely annoy people.

But at the same time, we don’t need to get so worked up and upset if we do upset somebody that we allow ourselves to be manipulated.

Emotional manipulation is basically when people try to make you own things that aren’t yours.

So now I’m going to give you three examples of the most common types of emotional manipulation.

Once you’re aware of these, you’re going to see them all over the place because a lot of people are coming at life from a place of ego and they don’t even know that they’re manipulating other people – it’s just a survival mechanism that they’ve picked up to be able to cope in life and get the results that they think want.

And so a lot of the time it’s automatic. It’s not like people are just evil or anything like that. It’s just something that they do because they’ve always done it.

But anyway, as we already said, emotional manipulation is basically when people try and make you own things that aren’t yours, like their feelings and choices, or when they try and get you to be something that you’re not and that you can never be, because what they’re asking you to be is some unreal thing that they’ve concocted because of their own ego stuff and their desire to keep the ego where it is and to not have to face their own stuff and grow real.

So here’s the three examples:

Example #1: Feelings

The first example of emotional manipulation is the feelings thing. It shows up like this:

Somebody will say to you, “If you don’t watch read this article that I wrote, if you don’t walk my dog, if you don’t, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, I’m going to be really upset, I’m going to be really angry, I’m going to kill myself, I’m going to jump off a bridge” or whatever it is.

This is their attempt to persuade you that you are responsible for their feelings and what they do with those feelings.

Now if you’re the kind of person who has been conditioned to please everybody, i.e. you’re a people pleaser or a nice guy, whatever you want to call it, this is going to work on you because the most horrifying thing that you can imagine is making somebody feel negative emotions.

Actually, if you put yourself in the position of being responsible for this person’s feelings, or, even worse, show them that you actually will take responsibility by walking their dog or reading their stupid articles so they don’t jump off a bridge, etc. then you’re actually showing them that they can control you in that way.

When you look around you’ll see that this type of manipulation is everywhere:

It comes from our parents, sometimes it comes from our siblings, it comes from our friends -but at the end of the day, you are not responsible for anybody’s feelings except your own.

So even if they do get upset, even if they’re angry, or whatever then it’s not because of something you could or couldn’t do differently, but because of the choices they’re making about their own feelings.

Even in the absolute worst possible case of them going to jump off a bridge, it’s not because you didn’t walk their dog or whatever; it’s because – at some level – they just wanted to do that, which I know sounds really harsh, but the point is that you’re not responsible for their feelings. And if they try and make you feel that way, well…you just got manipulated.

Example #2: Choices

The second example of how manipulation and blackmail of this type shows up is around choices.

It takes place when somebody makes a choice that’s maybe not the best choice, and instead of taking responsibility for it, they try and find a way to blame you.

So maybe, for example, you go for lunch with a friend and they’re on a diet or wherever it is, and during the lunch, they end up just eating loads of calories and going away from the diet plan that they’re on.

After the meal, they start blaming you:

“Oh, my God, I can’t believe you let me order that on the menu. Like, you know, I’m on a diet and blah, blah, blah.”

Or maybe you got another friend who is trying not to drink alcohol, and, you go out and they have a few pints, and then the next day, well, it’s your fault because you let it happen.

Now, maybe you could have tried to talk them out of it if you so desired, but ultimately, that choice was theirs. And as soon as you let them put you on a guilt trip for the choice that they made, well, again… you just got manipulated.

As soon as you start kind of trying to pacify these kinds of people – or put an argument forward as to why you let it happen or why you wish you didn’t let it happen or you show that you feel bad about it or whatever – well, congratulations…you’ve just been manipulated again.

Example #3: Being

The third form of this kind of emotional manipulation is sometimes quite subtle, but it’s also very common, and it happens all over the place.

This is the kind of manipulation I’ve already alluded to where somebody pulls an unrealistic standard out of their bee-hind and then they use that standard against you, even though it’s just something that they concocted because of their own ego.

Once they’ve conjured up this standard, they try and use it as a sort of box that they want you to live in so that they can keep you under control and so that they stay the same (they need the box to avoid facing their own ‘stuff’) – ultimately, what we’re talking about here is a kind of control freakery.

We can safely say that these people are control freaks because they’re filtering life through the ego and the only way that their ego can maintain its hold over them is if you voluntarily put yourself in this kind of a box so that they can stay in their comfort zone.

Ultimately, the way that this box takes shape by demanding that you be something that you’re not.

Three really common examples or, areas where this happens are in relationships, friendships and at work.

So, for example, in relationships, your partner might say, “Right, if you don’t remember every single little detail of my life, then you don’t love me” – and ultimately that’s impossible because nobody can remember every single little detail of somebody’s life (and doing so has nothing to do with love but how good your memory is).

As soon as you buy into this idea and trying living up to it as though it’s actual reality, well, you’re putting yourself up for all kinds of guilt trips. They’re going to be able to control you. They’re going to say, “Well, because you don’t remember every little detail of my life and you don’t love me, you’re going to have to walk my dog and you’re going to have to do this, you’re going to have to do that.”

It’s all bs though and it only maintains its hold over you because you choose to let it.

In friendships, they might say something like, “If you don’t lend me £1000 (or whatever) you’re not a real friend” – and the box, ultimately, is shaped by this definition of “a real friend”.

That’s what all of these kinds of thing are about in relation to how you should “be”:

They create a label that is ultimately a mask for all kinds of bs that you can never live up to but that you’re required to live up to in order to receive emotional validation. If you don’t know that you can give yourself this validation then you’ll be ensnared in the trap.

That’s really the whole point of these labels and ‘standard’ from the POV of the manipulator/blackmailer:

You’re not supposed to be able to live up to it because if you can, they’re not going to have anything to moan about and manipulate you with.

Anyway, so, in the ‘friendship’ thing, this kind of manipulation shows up like this:

“If you don’t call me every night and listen to me talk about all my problems nonstop, you’re not a real friend.”

“If you don’t drop all of your plans, you’re not a real friend.”

Basically, the box is the idea of a “real friend” and they can come up with all kinds of highfalutin ideas about what it means to live in that box. But actually, you don’t want to live in the box. That’s the whole point. You want to get out of it.

The third thing is, third example here is at work, your boss might say, “If you don’t work on a Saturday, then you’re not going to get that promotion. You’re not a good employee”, or “If you don’t stay and do overtime, even though it’s not in your contract, then you obviously don’t care about this place, and you’re not part of the family here in the workplace, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah”.

It’s all nonsense. They’re saying that you should be a certain thing so that you can live up to their standards and climb into another one of those ‘boxes’.

As soon as you try to be whatever that is, instead of realising that it’s just pure nonsense and refusing to feed into it, then you’ve been manipulated.

In all of these cases, emotional manipulation only works if you let it – whether it’s about taking responsibility for their feelings, their choices, or trying to live up to being some unreal standard just so that their ego can maintain its hold over them, the solution in all cases is the same, and it’s very simple:

Don’t feed into it with your own ego.

The only reason you’d buy into this kind of manipulation is because your ego is causing you to believe something unreal, and so, the solution, as always – because “REAL ALWAYS WORKS” – is to step back, find your realness, and to ground yourself in something true.

And as soon as you do that, you’re no longer pouring gasoline on the fire by allowing your ego to meet their ego.

Now, often if you resist – in fact, usually if you resist – the next level after the initial manipulation is that they’re going to try and punish you:

They might make threats or they might give you the silent treatment. They might call you all kinds of names. They might constantly put you on a guilt trip and try to make you feel bad.

We could fill a whole thick book with examples of the kind of punishment that these manipulators are going to try and enforce upon you if you don’t buy into the manipulation… but in all cases, the solution is the same and it’s simply to just not feed into it.

As soon as somebody gives you the silent treatment, for example, and you start chasing after them and trying to beseech them and get down on your knees and beg that they start talking to you again, all you’ve done is managed to show them that the manipulation is working.

In other words, any attempts to appease them by giving them what they want is only going to make the situation worse.

So let’s take a quick look at how by just being REAL you can give yourself an immunization to the emotional manipulation and black by not feeding it.

Don’t feed the Gremlin.

“Do not feed the gremlin” – this is the lesson to remember next.

The solution to the problem of emotional manipulation is always to find your realness again.

I know that sounds simplistic, but the only way that you can be manipulated is because you had a moment of being unreal that taught whoever is manipulating you how to press your buttons – and if you have a button that can be pressed, it simply means that you have some unresolved shame or guilt – or even trauma (in the most extreme cases) – around something that whenever it’s pressed causes you to react in an unreal way.

The mechanics behind this are simple:

Every time that button is pressed, it’s ultimately just causing your emotions to send your ego kicking into gear – once this has been triggered you’re going to feed into the ego dance between yourself and the manipulator where you’re engaged in the power battle we talked about for being responsible for their feelings, their choices, and being whatever it is that they say you should be – so that they can finally approve of you and make you feel good (when if you focus on being REAL, you can naturally feel good about yourself anyway without them giving you the approval and validation and all that kind of stuff).

And so, what I’m saying is that you need to take the power back by realising that the only person who can press your buttons is you – and you can only do that by facing the underlying emotional ‘stuff’ that is causing those buttons to be ‘pressable’ in the first place.

There are a few strategies here that can help you in relation to these emotional manipulators and they’re all very simple:

The overarching strategy is what I’ve already said:

Don’t feed the Gremlin.

If you realise that somebody is emotionally manipulating you, then the best thing to do is to ignore them. If somebody is giving you the silent treatment, for example, ignore them right back until they cool off and come back.

Let them go off and be silent and brood and do whatever it is that they’re doing – just don’t chase after them. That’s the worst thing you can do.

If somebody is giving you the whole spiel about how if you don’t do a certain thing, then you’re not a “good friend” or a “good lover” or a “good employee” or whatever else, let them think that and don’t be shaken from yourself.

“So be it. Okay, then. I’m not a good lover. I’m not a good friend. I’m not a good employee. Oh, my God, the world is going to crumble around me.”

Not.

(Because the standard that they’re holding you accountable to is not real).

And so, ultimately, this is always the best policy: Just ignore them. Let them get on with it.

Don’t feed the Gremlin.

That will show you that they actually have no power over you – because by ignoring it, you’re kind of going to flip the script.

If they really do care about you, deep down, they’re going to have to come back to you and change the whole dynamic of the relationship by communicating in a different way and looking at how their behaviour is only serving their ego and not the relationship.

If they don’t? Well, remember the sacred mantra:

“Gimme something REAL or GTFO”.

So that’s the ultimate way to avoid the manipulation. Just ignore it and don’t feed that gremlin.

If you got some ego stuff going on, that’s going to be hard. You’re going to have a little voice in your head saying, “Oh, help me Lord, I can’t believe I’m ignoring this person. I’m a bad person”.

Or, you’ll have another niggling voice saying, “Oh, Heaven’s above, what if I am a bad lover? What if I am a bad friend?”

No. That voice is your conditioning but you’ve confused it for your conscience. It’s the ego.

If you’re coming from a place of wholeness and you care about that person and you’re there for them, but you still care about yourself and your own life, that doesn’t make you a bad anything – it means you have healthy boundaries (shock! horror!).

You’re a human being, and there’s no point trying to live up to these UNREAL standards that people create so that they can manipulate you for their own shame-driven reasons (don’t judge them, though, just ignore them and don’t feed the gremlin)!

YouTube player — This article is based on a transcript from this video on my YouTube Channel.

You can set boundaries or walk away if someone is manipulating you.

The other two things that you can do are:

One, you can just say “No!” and set the boundaries.

Boundaries always begin by saying “No” to the unreal ‘stuff’ and “Yes” to the REAL.

You might have to say it a few times but eventually they’ll get the message…

There’s a famous technique in assertiveness training called the ‘Broken Record Technique’ where you literally just say the same line every time.

So if somebody says to you, for example, “Go walk my dog or I’m going to jump off a bridge”, you can say, “Well, look, I really don’t want you to jump off a bridge because I love you and I care about you, but I’m not going to walk your dog right now because I have to go focus on my own thing and do some yoga or whatever.”

Then they’ll come back at you with more manipulation, “Oh, you don’t love me, blah, blah, blah. You want me to jump off a bridge”.

Just say the same thing (like a broken record):

“Well, actually I really don’t want you to jump off a bridge because I really love you and I think you’re an amazing person. But I have to go do this other thing right now. Sorry about that.”

The other thing you can do is to remember the super ultimate mantra that comes into play in all relationships, which is the one I mentioned above:

“Gimme something real or GTFO”.

If somebody is only ever manipulating you and your attempts to not buy into it or to set boundaries don’t work, then you’re actually allowed to just walk away.

And maybe when you do walk away, they’ll reflect and they’ll realise that they need to change their way of doing things – or maybe you’ll never see them again, but it’s better to be alone than in unreal company.

If you know that and you have an abundance mindset – which means you can understand there are other opportunities out there and that you don’t have to put up with this kind of treatment – life gets way easier and more real as you’ll remove unnecessary drama from your life.

So in the face of manipulation and blackmail you can either:

Ignore it by remembering not to feed the gremlin and so it loses it’s power.
You can say “No” and set boundaries (which may make things worse depending on the person).
You can just GTFO and go find someone who actually appreciates you and isn’t going to manipulate you.

Three reasons why people may not step into their realness in the face of emotional manipulation:

So I want to finish this article with three main reasons why people may not step into their realness and end this cycle of manipulation that they may have found themselves in.

These are really common reasons, and if you understand them, it’s going to give you that awareness to be able to make that choice to step into something real and not keep going around in circles trying to please somebody who can never ever be pleased.

The bottom line with all this is that manipulators and blackmailers can’t be pleased – they’re a black hole of shame that has consumed them:

They don’t want to be pleased. They want to manipulate you so they can feel powerful – and if you understand that, it’s going to make it easier to step into your realness and be who you need to be.

The first reason that stops a lot of people ending this cycle of emotional manipulation is that they have unresolved shame and guilt themselves (they’re shame-driven people, ultimately, and so they don’t know how to be real because the opposite of realness is ego which is always fuelled by shame).

If you have guilt, you’re going to be really easy to control, because guilt is ultimately just a useless case of some external voice infiltrating our brains and telling us that there’s something wrong with us because we’re not doing this or we’re not doing that (shame, in contrast, is about there something ‘wrong’ with your being itself – always unreal!).

If you’re carrying guilt like this, then you’re ultimately going to have buttons that can be pressed.

And it’s the same with shame:

If you have feelings of worthlessness or that you’re not good enough, it means that you don’t accept yourself and that you’re avoiding something inside your experience of who you are that’s causing these buttons to be ‘pressable’ in the first place. And so actually, the solution is to face those unresolved emotions.

Normally, what happens when people face them, they finally (after years of avoidance) just look at them head on, is they dissolve. It’s the resistance that causes them to linger in the first place. And we resist them by hiding behind our own egos.

As soon as we take the ego out of the equation and we take a good long look at what’s going on inside us, those buttons can no longer be pressed, because the buttons mean that we’re resisting something.

When we turn inwards and we face the truth about who we are, we are going to be way less likely to be ‘manipulatable’, because people will still try and press the buttons, but – like I said earlier – we now realise that the power of the button is in our hands.

That’s the most important thing to remember:

You can only be manipulated if your buttons can be pressed; your buttons can only be pressed if you’re resisting something; the power to face things is always in your hands.

So you can avoid all kinds of external ‘button pressing’ by staying grounded in your realness and by understanding what’s making those buttons ‘pressable’ in the first place.

All you need to do is start finding ways to make whatever you’re resisting dissolve, which always means bringing the truth into our lives, allowing the unconscious to become conscious.

Once you do this, you’ll be free of your own inner fragmentation whilst also being free of the external fragmentation in the form of these relationships where you get endlessly manipulated until you reclaim your power.

The second thing that stops people from staying real – being grounded in their realness in the face of these emotional manipulators, and either ignoring what they’re doing (ignoring the silent treatment, for example, or walking away, or setting a boundary) – is a fear of conflict.

They’re worried that if they go back to being real, then the unreal person in this situation – the emotional manipulator – is going to do something that the real person, or the person trying to break the cycle, can’t tolerate – or is going to cause them to be in a situation where they feel lonely, or they feel bad about themselves, or whatever it is.

When this happens it’s actually just a sign that you (the person being manipulated/blackmailed in this scenario) don’t have an abundance mindset.

For example, maybe you’re in a relationship and somebody is constantly manipulating you and you’ve tried to set the boundary or whatever it is, and you’re ready to step up – to actually call them out on it – but you’re worried that they’re going to end the relationship if you do.

Well… that’s because you have a scarcity mindset.

An abundance mindset would show you that if they do end the relationship, maybe that’s for the best.

Because why would you want to be in a relationship with someone that’s manipulating you all the time, even after you set boundaries and expressed what’s REAL to you?

It’s the same with a friendship:

If you have a friend who’s always taking the p*ss and trying to send you on a guilt trip or whatever it is…

Maybe, for example, you call attention to it and they say, “Right, that’s it, F you, I’m not your friend anymore” and they disappear.

Is this a ‘bad’ thing or have they just done you a favour?

The same with a job:

Obviously, jobs and our ability to pay the bills and stuff are intertwined – but, at the end of the day, if you tell your boss that you’re sick of this emotional manipulation and he says, “Right, that’s it – you’re fired!”

Well, s/he’s just done you a favour as well – but if you have a scarcity mindset, you’re not going to realise that you can go replace these things – your unreal relationships, ‘friendships’, employment situations, or whatever they are – and because you’re probably replacing them with something better or more REAL, well…it’s nothing to worry about.

It just means some short term discomfort as you rearrange the fabric of your life and go from unreal to real.

The third main reason that stops people from breaking the cycle of emotional manipulation by being real is that they actually have empathy and compassion for the person manipulating them.

Now, empathy and compassion, we all like those things, right?

Obviously, it’s very important to have them.

But in this case of dealing with an emotional manipulator, empathy and compassion are actually your enemies. They just make the situation worse.

For example, if you start telling yourself a story like “this person is manipulating me because they had a difficult childhood”, or “they’re going through a lot of stress at the moment”, or whatever it is, you’re actually making your life more difficult, because by doing that, it’s going to change your thinking and feeling in that way is going to change your behaviour towards the person and you’re going to cave into the manipulations.

In a strange way, the empathy and compassion are just going to make you more easy to manipulate in this kind of scenario.

What you need to do is remind yourself that manipulators are human beings too:

We can have sympathy for them and understand that, “Okay, life is difficult and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah”, but we need to remember that you can’t pour from an empty cup, and so if you’re putting them before yourself in this situation, you’re just going to keep being manipulated because you’re showing them that you are going to submit to them and their manipulations. In other words, the cycle is never going to end.

This doesn’t make you a ‘bad’ person. It just means you may have to be a little bit emotionally reserved so that you don’t give into their ego ‘stuff’ and whatever sob story comes with it because – the moment that you do – you’re giving your power over to them.

None of this is to say that we shouldn’t be compassionate in life – it just means that in this particular case, if you’re too compassionate towards someone that’s manipulating you, you’re just giving them permission to keep doing it.

So that’s ultimately all I need to say for now:

Emotional manipulation is a power struggle. “Power” is the key word because the only way that you can give away your power is by giving into illusions, which means that your ego is in control instead of your realness.

As soon as you do that, you meet the ego of the manipulator with your own ego because of your own unconscious shame and guilt and trauma and all these kind of things, then you’re just going to keep this cycle, this dance of emotional manipulation going by feeding the gremlin.

You can end the cycle at any time by just being real and not feeding into it – but to do that, you have to really be grounded in your realness because the manipulator is going to challenge you:

They’re going to try and make things worse. They’re going to push those buttons more and more and more.

But if you just stay real and you stay grounded, it’s almost impossible to be manipulated.

After reading this (long ass) article you know that there’s people trying to make you responsible for their feelings and their choices – or that they’re trying to get you to be something you never can be.

You’re going to see this all over the place. And it’s not just between people in ‘real’ life:

You turn on the TV, someone’s going to be manipulating you; you’re scrolling through your social media, some influencer is going to be trying to manipulate you – it’s everywhere.

But no matter where you’re experiencing this, it’s always the same:

You’re either being unreal because your ego is feeding into it, or you’ve been real and you can just keep flowing and do your own thing without any of this bs holding you back – making you feel bad, or just getting in the way of living a real life and being who you really are – not who they’re demanding that you to be because of their own ‘stuff’.

Stay real out there,

If you want to grow into your REALNESS then either book a call with me or sign-up for my free 7-Day course in REALNESS and life purpose.

Enter your email to join my mailing list and get the course login and workbook:

Embracing WRONGNESS: How Being ‘Wrong’ Can Set You Right

Published on

Life Philosophy/Mindset/Psychology

Being ‘wrong’ may be exactly what you’re looking for…this article will help you understand why.

Oh, hi there.

In this article, we’re going to explore how being ‘wrong’ is actually a good thing that can free you from the ideas you hold about yourself that are holding you back from life so that you can evolve into your REALNESS and the person that you were born to be

When you truly embrace being ‘wrong’ in this way, you can step into your potential, have better relationships with other people, and feel the sense of tranquillity and peace that comes from letting go of the need to control everything through being ‘right’ all the time.

When you embrace being ‘wrong’ in this way, you’ll find that you’re not constantly forcing life through control freakery and manipulation in an attempt to bend everything to your will, (which is probably wrong anyway) and you can just relax into you true humanity – in other words, you can just allow yourself to be a REAL human being who is limited in understanding and is humble enough to not attempt to be omniscient omnipotent (that’s EGO).

So the short-version of all this is that if you can just get over yourself – sorry to say – and start being ‘wrong’, I can pretty much guarantee that life is going to be way better because you’re going to be aligned with REALITY instead of forcing yourself against it and bringing unnecessary friction, frustration, and misery into your life.

Let’s go.

Socrates: “I know that I know nothing”.

So somebody like me popping up and saying that we should be wrong isn’t actually a new thing. That’s because “there is nothing new under the sun” and the human condition has always been the human condition as long as human beings have been around – and not one of us mortals – in the whole of human history – has ever been right about everything. Ever.

The most famous quote that sums this up is Socrates, the Greek philosopher. He said (quoted by Plato): “True wisdom is knowing that I know nothing.”

That’s a good way to say it. It might be a little bit extreme because we all know a little bit of something. Like, for example, I know that I need a haircut. I know that the weather outside is pretty ‘bad’ right now. So I do know something.

Either way, the point stands that if we think we know everything, then maybe we do know nothing, or we don’t know enough. Because only if you know that you don’t know everything can you truly know something and align yourself with the truth of our life. And so ultimately, I think Socrates was right: Wisdom is knowing that we don’t know everything. Let’s say it like that.

No matter who you are or what you’ve experienced, there’s always more to learn and the things you think you may know could eventually turn out to be wrong so the most REAL approach is to remain open-minded.

What we think we ‘know’ and happen to be ‘right’ about is usually just conceptual ideas and interpretations that we’ve created about life on the best judgments that we have according to the greatest understanding that we have – but because conceptual knowledge is just made of concepts and concepts are not reality itself there’s always going to be limits and we’re never going to be 100% ‘right about things. That’s just the human condition, I guess.

The thing about ‘concepts’ is that can either point you towards reality or away from it – they can never be reality itself (which we can only know through EXPERIENCE, not concepts).

For example, the concept ‘dog’ points to a thing that exists in the world; the concept ‘unicorn’ points to something that just isn’t real, although we can imagine them anyway. The point here is if we’re just trying to interpret life through our interpretations and conceptual knowledge, then we’re always going to be limited.

But for some reason, even though we all often like to believe that wisdom is one of the keys to happiness, we sometimes act in a way where we’re not being wise, according to Socrates’ definition, because we’re acting like we know everything, which is always going to cause problems.

So here’s why:

The bottom line is that human beings can’t know everything. It’s literally impossible because the truth itself is whole but we are fragmented. We’re in fragmented bodies on a fragmented planet, swimming through a fragmented relationship with time, space, and causality – if you want to get into all that.

That means that, by definition, we’re always going to be ‘wrong’ about something – we could even go so far as to say that it’s just our nature to be wrong (and that’s fine…it’s what makes life interesting and keeps us learning and evolving).

And, even if we do just grasp something that seems true through our conceptual understanding, then life just keeps moving anyway, and the STATIC concepts in our head are inherently conflicted with the way that reality is in FLUX all around us. In practical terms, this just means that there’s a very high chance that the concepts we’re using to make ‘sense’ of life are pretty much guaranteed to eventually be out of date, and then we’re just going to be back where we started: being ‘wrong’.

And so, actually, if you’re out there plodding through life like you’ve got everything figured out and that you’re ‘right’ about everything, like I often do, then something has gone horribly wrong. Horribly, horribly wrong. And the reason it’s gone horribly wrong is because it is our nature to be wrong about things – and so if we think we’re right about everything, we are literally going against our own realness.

We’re not accepting who we are. We’re not accepting life. We’re not accepting the world. We’ve taken ourselves out of the natural, REAL flow of things – which means that we keep moving, we keep evolving, and, by extension, we have to keep learning. And, that means that we will realise we were wrong and that we can go deeper into understanding the things that we already think we know.

And so if we take ourselves out of that process, we’re actually removing ourselves or distancing ourselves from our humanity and from our realness. And actually, that’s what this is all about:

The best way for human beings to feel ‘good’ is to be aligned with our realness – with our natural flow of constant growth and evolution and movement towards WHOLENESS.

If we stop moving with that NATURAL DRIVE towards wholenes or we stunt our growth and stagnate because we keep putting these conceptual blocks in our own path and try to be ‘right’ about them and defend them, then we’re going to have a really ‘bad’ time.

And so, as per usual, it all comes down to the same old problem:

What is that same old problem?

Well, you guessed it, boys and girls, it’s the EGO.

The ego is the illusion of separation, the illusion of disconnection. And in relation to what we’re talking about, the illusion of stasis, the idea that for some bizarre reason, even though everything that’s real continues to move and ebb and flow and to keep changing, we fight to stay the same.

And the more we cling to that static picture of who we are, what we think the world is, what we think reality is – the more we cling to that – the harder things get for us, because we put in friction between ourselves and life.

But even though it’s hard, so many of us try and cling to this static picture because we don’t want to face all of the ‘stuff’ going on beneath the surface that the natural unfolding and changes in life are going to cause us to face as the unconscious becomes conscious and we have to take a good look at ourselves so we can become whole again.

As a kind of COPING MECHANISM, we create these points of view, these systems of thought – these ideologies – that are ultimately an extension of the ego. And that is actually the main (and perhaps only) problem.

When people are obsessed with being ‘right’, what they’re actually doing is trying to defend a point of view that they’ve created, which is an extension of the thing that’s causing them to be miserable in the first place (because they think they need for survival).

People always talk about how the ego is a survival thing that we evolved for protection and this is true – it helped us to survive whatever we’ve been through in the past and the emotional pain that we weren’t ready to face at that time. – in addition to this, though, the points of view that we attach to – like our political views and whatever else – are more often than not, if we’re obsessed and fixated with them being ‘right’, an extension of the same old ego.

A point of view ultimately, in this sense, is just the ego’s way of working its way through the world and interacting with the world so that it can maintain its hold over us. And so what I’m saying is that when people are so obsessed with being ‘right’, they’re not actually bothered about the truth; they’re bothered about protecting the ego so they don’t have to change.

This is why it’s important to be wrong and to be open to being wrong, because if you’re not – if you’re going around through life just trying to be ‘right’ about everything – you think that you’re protecting yourself, but actually all you’re doing is protecting the ego, which is the only thing making you miserable in the first place.

And so, paradoxically, perhaps, by being WRONG, you can have some short-term discomfort, sure, but you can also free yourself from this idea, this parasite that has wrapped itself around your psyche and that is holding you back from real life.

So the short version of all that is that the more you need your point of view to be ‘right’, or the more you need other people to believe that your point of view is right – and to come to your way of thinking – the more you’re basically trying to convince yourself that it’s true because, at some level, you don’t actually believe it because it only really exists because of the fundamental state of disconnection within yourself – because of fragmentation, because of the shame, guilt, and/or trauma that have caused you to create a little ego version of yourself and to put that out into the world.

If you understand that, you can realise that, “Okay, if I want to be happy, if I want to feel peace, if I want to be tranquil, blah, blah, blah, I can step back from all that bullshit.

I can be open to the fact that I might be wrong, and I can realise that, actually, all of my opinions and all of my points of view and so on and so forth, they’re not ME or that I am. They’re just something that I have.

And if I can see that, and I can get a better relationship to the truth, then I can solve a lot of problems in my life.”

Because most of the bullshit going on out there in the world, if you look around you, is just people arguing about who’s right and who’s wrong. But it’s all nonsense.

Here’s a little secret about life (if you want to use a dramatic word like secret):

It’s not really a secret, but anyway, this thing that I’m about to share is this: The truth is the truth.

Wow. That’s deep, right?

But what it means is that the truth doesn’t change. Nobody has ever argued about the truth. Nobody can argue about the truth. Throughout all of human history, the billions and billions of dead people – and there are more dead people than living people (just throwing that out there) – but anyway, throughout human history, nobody has ever argued about the truth.

Which may sound weird at first, but when you think about it, the only thing we can argue about is our interpretations of the truth. Our opinions of the truth, our understanding of the truth, none of those things are the truth itself.

None of our attempts to defend the truth have any effect on the truth itself

None of the arguments that we have, nor any of our attempts to defend what we think is the truth – or to shatter other people’s visions of the truth because we disagree with it – none of that stuff has any effect on the truth itself.

And so if you can understand that, the ‘secret’, it actually allows you to kind of step back and to relax because you realise there’s two different levels:

1) There’s the level of fragmentation and all the opinions and the arguments and etc. going on out there in the world. And then there’s: 2) just the truth itself – which is just there truthing along without anything impacting it or anything affecting it. The truth is just the truth – all of these circles we run around in trying to be ‘right’ and to make other people wrong, they have no effect on it whatsoever.

And even if you think you do have the truth, even if you did have the truth, you wouldn’t need to waste time defending it and trying to be ‘right’ about it, because it doesn’t need defending, because nothing can change it, nothing can hurt it, nothing can have any impact on it whatsoever.

You either accept it and you’re happy or you don’t accept it, and then you spend your life arguing about whatever you think is the substitute for it, and then you get miserable. And it’s really that simple.

The truth does not need defending. The truth does not need you going out there running around trying to be ‘right’ about it. All you’re doing is fighting for your interpretations and your ego. But the truth is the truth.

So that was very philosophical. But what does it mean? How do you use this information to be happier in life, to be more real?

Well, it’s really simple:

It just means that you have to stay aware – you have to monitor yourself, so to speak. And anytime you find yourself getting overly emotional and trying to be ‘right’ or trying to persuade other people, well, you’re not actually on about the truth; you’re not trying to bring more truth into the equation – you’re trying to defend your ego.

And if we’re real with ourselves, like we’ve already said, the ego is the main source of all the problems in our life anyway. And so whenever you think that you’re on some kind of a CRUSADE to defend the truth and you’re getting overly emotional about it, well, because the truth doesn’t need defending, and all of your emotional outbursts and so on and so forth have literally zero effect on it, you can step back and you can remind yourself, “Okay, it’s my ego here that I’m actually trying to defend”.

And – maybe, if you’re lucky – that will be enough to make you stfu. So you can actually just breathe again and remember that you’re not going to change anything anyway, because no one cares if you’re ‘right’ apart from you.

This also means that you don’t really need to invest energy in defending your opinions. That’s counterintuitive to some people, because we think the more vociferous we are about our opinions, the more other people are going to come on board and think that we’re ‘right’.

If we we’re driven by underlying shame – which is often what causes us to need the ego to be true in the first place – then we feel like if we can get others to just believe that we’re right, then some of that shame is going to be diminished and we’ll feel better about ourselves.

But, actually, it doesn’t need to be that way – because if you think about it, if you really believe that your opinions are true – if you truly, truly believe it – you don’t care what other people think.

That sounds a bit arrogant, maybe, but you just don’t. It doesn’t matter what other people think though: you’re aware that what you believe is true because you’ve had some experience beyond the conceptual. And so it doesn’t matter if other people say you’re wrong. It doesn’t matter if other people think you’re right. You just know the truth.

And so maybe you’ll put it out there in conversation, and you’ll share it with people, and you’ll have a dialogue and all that kind of stuff – normal human behaviour. But if somebody disagrees, you can either calmly say, “Well, actually, I think this”, or you can just smile and nod and then go about your life knowing that you’re aligned with the truth anyway, but also knowing that you might not be (and if you’re not, that’s fine, because maybe you’ll learn some other stuff, maybe you won’t).

Either way, there’s no point wasting time arguing about things when you can just be living the truth that you think you found to the greatest extent possible.

A quote that I love throwing out there is by the physicist David Bohm. He has this book called On Dialogue where he says something like, “Your opinions are not something that you are, they’re something that you have.”

They’re not something that you, are. They’re something that you have. And I think that’s a really great quote because it just reminds you to kind of step back.

If somebody is disagreeing with you or saying that your opinion is stupid or that it’s wrong or whatever else, well, that’s fine, because they’re saying it about your opinion, which is just a conceptual idea that you’ve picked up to make sense of life. They’re not saying it about YOU.

If you can remember this and you can take your ego out of the equation, once again, you realise that you actually don’t have to take disagreement or anything like that personally, because what’s real about you is always real: you can’t add to it, you can’t remove from it, because it’s a state of WHOLENESS – and so whether your opinions are aligned with the truth or not, well, it doesn’t matter because you’re still real.

If you need to be ‘right’ all the time, then you just have some kind of a block between you and life. And if you’re open to being ‘wrong’, you can ensure that that block diminishes in its power over you, and then things are just going to be better.

So I just want to put that out there: Your opinions are something that you have, not something that you are. And if you understand that, you can free yourself because you can be wrong, and then you’re going to be aligned with life.

3 ways to align yourself with REAL life by finding your own ‘wrongness’

Here are three things that you can do so that you can align yourself with your own realness by being wrong and using that wrongness to develop a closer relationship to the truth (which sounds weird and paradoxical and maybe like bullshit, but I promise that’s how it works):

The first thing you can do is exactly what we just said: Don’t take things personally.

The only reason you take things personally is because you, are lapsing into control freakery – because you need your ego to be the truth – and any disagreement is basically threatening the scaffolding that your whole ego rests upon and you’re terrified that it’s going to come falling down and you’ll just be like an empty husk of a human being.

But actually, if the ego disappears, you become more real. So anyway, don’t take it personally because it’s just an opinion.

The second thing is to remember that if you’re wrong in life, then it’s going to allow you to learn something new. And if you keep learning, well, ideally, unless you’re fooling yourself, the only thing that you can learn is more about the truth – you can go deeper into it, and then you’re going to have a solid foundation to grow real and it’s just better.

The third thing is just to remember that nothing really matters anyway. If you’re right with your opinions, okay, that’s cool. If you’re wrong, well, that’s fine as well.

But ultimately it’s all just ebb and flow, and we’re all going to die one day anyway, so it doesn’t really matter.

So that’s ultimately all I need to say in this article – there is nothing wrong with being wrong.

In fact, there’s actually a lot right with being wrong because by being wrong, you can align yourself more closely with the truth and then – because you get out of the ego – you get into the flow of life, and you keep evolving and expanding in a real way that allows you to be more connected to yourself and have better relationships with other people because you’re not going around in circles arguing about things that they don’t really care about.

At the end of the day, most people are not interested in changing their opinions for all of the reasons we talked about – and so, you can ultimately just release yourself from a lot of the unnecessary friction and stress and nonsense that goes on out there in the world about people being obsessed with being ‘right’, because they think that being right somehow makes them a better person.

It doesn’t, which is weird to hear, perhaps because our whole lives we’ve been learning things in school by rote and things like that – thinking that we have to pass our tests and everything, picking up all these facts and stuff like that.

Obviously, it is better to be ‘right’ if you can be, because then you’ve got, the truth on your side to some extent. But what I’m saying is it doesn’t matter that much – or not as much as everyone makes out – because we can always learn more.

All I know is that I know nothing.

If You Argue With an Idiot, It Makes You an Idiot.

The final thing I suppose I want to say here is that there’s an old saying – I don’t know who said it.

They say “If you argue with an idiot, it makes you an idiot”.

This is just a reminder that if you find yourself out there and somebody comes up to you and they’re trying to be ‘right’ about everything, then don’t argue with them. Just let them think that they are right, because there’s no way you’re going to persuade them otherwise anyway and it’s just going to drive you mad.

It’s going to be a waste of time. And arguing with an idiot makes you an idiot, so it’s kind of a dumb thing to do.

And if you are the idiot – no offense – that’s going out there trying to be ‘right’ about everything….well, ask yourself “Why?”.

The answer is almost always going to come down to the same thing: ego ‘stuff’, underlying shame and a need to control life because you’re scared to leap into the great unknown of uncertainty and find out who you really are.

I hope that helps you if you needed it. I know it might be wrong in many ways. That’s cool. But, hope it helps. If anyone wants to talk to me about any of this stuff or anything else, book a call or click the WhatsApp button on this article and you can send me a message.

Let go and grow real!

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Hacking the Unconscious Mind: A Psychological Hack for REALNESS

Published on

Life Philosophy/Coaching/Mindset/Psychology

Changing Your Life by Using a Psychological Hack to Work With Your Unconscious Mind Instead of Against It.

Oh, hi there.

In this article, I’m going to give you a psychological hack that will change your life if you implement it.

Why would you need this hack?

Well, if you find yourself in a situation where you’re constantly running around like a blue arsed fly trying to get certain results in life, but those results are forever out of reach, then this hack is going to help you.

It’s going to help you to dig into your unconscious intentions and to step away from the surface level way of seeing and viewing things by helping you to DIG DEEPER so that you can reset or reconfigure what’s going on down in the depths of yourself and allow something real to surface.

Without using this ‘hack’, you’re just going to end up rearranging the furniture on the titanic whilst it still sinks because you’ll only be dealing with the SYMPTOMS, not the FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM (which is always a disconnection from your own realness).

In other words, without this hack you’ll feel like you’re chasing things and making progress but actually you’ll only running on the spot – because the things that you’re chasing are, not something that you want as much as you think you want. They’re just an extension of your ego as you attempt to fill the void (which is the illusion of disconnection).

So why would you want to implement this hack that I’m about to share with you?

It’s quite simple: A lot of people out there in the world – and you may be one of them – find themselves in situations where they’re constantly chasing something and they can never quite find it.

So, for example, maybe you’re chasing your dream relationship; maybe you’re trying to get more money; maybe you have some kind of a goal for your business or whatever it is, and…it just never happens.

A lot of the time we think that the core problem in attaining whatever it is that we want is that there’s some external thing, force or factor out there in the world that is preventing us and holding us back from acquiring or attaining whatever it is.

So, for example, in the case of relationships, we will just say to ourselves something like, “The world is going to hell, everyone’s a degenerate, and there’s only low quality men/women out there and it’s impossible to find a partner. Everyone’s so selfish and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”

That’s an example of some externalised bullshit thing, and – if you externalise everything – you take your power out of your hands.

With the ‘money’ thing, maybe it’s the same thing, right?

You’ll say, “Well, there’s some external force out there in the world, the illuminati or whatever, and they’re holding me back from making money. And we live in an economy that’s fuelled by scarcity and yada, yada, yada. And I’m just always going to be poor.”

And so the externalisation of your goal basically puts you in a frame of mind where you’re never going to get it.

But here’s the truth:

Ultimately, the problem is not just the externalisation, but the fact that the externalisation is affecting the results that you get. And the results that you get are always showing you what you are actually choosing at an unconscious level.

This is where this ‘stuff’ gets a little bit offensive to some people but that’s what the truth often does (“The truth will set you free (but first it will piss you off and make you miserable”).

But ultimately, in these two examples that I just picked to pieces, if you can’t find your dream partner – even though you’re telling yourself that’s what you want – there is something going on inside you deep down where your actual, real intention is not to find your dream partner. And we’ll dig into that in a minute.

With the money thing, as, counterintuitive as it sounds – because obviously, we all love money, it makes life meaningful (joke) – if you can’t bring money into your life, well, for some reason, you are choosing not to, even though at the conscious level of the mind and the ego, you’re telling yourself that is your intention.

Actually, the reason these things keep staying out of grasp is because, when you dig into it, you’ll find at some level, you are choosing something else more than the relationship or the money.

The ‘hack’ that we’re about to talk about is about learning to understand that is that we can reverse engineer and figure out our REAL CHOICES that we’re making (unconsciously) by the results that we’re getting.

In other words, we’re going to learn to start looking inside ourselves and saying, “Hang on, what the hell is going on here to cause me to think and to tell myself one thing, but to choose the opposite?”

I’m going to give you some examples.

So, let’s start with some examples of imaginary people that sum up some kind of common ways this shows up in the world.

So let’s say, for example, the first person is an individual called Susie (just pulled that out of my ass):

For the last decade, Susie has either been single or in a bad relationship that didn’t last very long. And, on those long, lonely nights where she sat at home watching Netflix and eating Cheetos, she keeps telling herself that she does want a relationship.

The little hamster wheel in her head keeps thinking about relationships and how good life would be if she could get in a relationship. And then every so often, somebody comes along who seems like they might be a good fit. But as soon as they get involved with each other, Susie starts inexplicably becoming hypercritical and pushing these people away. Or, she can’t help but just focus on their flaws to the extent that she becomes totally turned off.

And then after a couple of weeks, couple of months, whatever is, the relationship kind of dwindles and dies. And poor Susie is back at home watching Netflix with all that Cheeto, dust over her mouth.

So that’s not good, is it?

Or maybe there’s another imaginary character called Bob who wants to start his own business. And he keeps telling himself that he’s going to be really successful. He’s going to do whatever it takes to get this business up and running so that he can make loads of money and support his family or wherever he wants to do.

And, he kind of knows the way forward: he’s created a business plan and a vision, and he’s done some market research and so on and so forth.

But, for some reason, when it’s time to go out there and start talking to potential clients or to communicating with people about his ideas, he always finds something else to do.

For example, maybe he just goes and spends time on social media telling himself that this is “research” or that he’s finding new ways to connect with people or some other BS story.

But ultimately, even though he keeps telling himself every morning when he wakes up that “today is the day” he’s going to actually fix his business and get where he needs to be, he just keeps procrastinating. He never gets anywhere. And even though he’s telling himself the same old story again and again and again, he starts to feel a bit insane because nothing ever changes.

Or what about this final example?

We have an imaginary woman or called Melissa and she’s a little bit overweigh and she doesn’t want to be because it’s taking too much energy – she can’t get up the stairs quite as fast as she used to without getting out of breath; she’s becoming insecure about the way that she looks, and she’s worried that people are secretly judging her as she walks down the street and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

So she keeps telling herself that she’s going to go to the gym and she’s going to lose weight, she’s going to watch her diet, and that she’s making a choice for a healthier lifestyle so she can lose some weight and start to feel good about herself but – for some unknown reason -nothing ever changes:

She goes to the gym and she just kind of goes through the motions. She doesn’t really put any effort in or push herself to the edge, so her heart rate doesn’t go up, and she doesn’t burn any calories. And, when she does go home because she’s been to the gym, she ends up stuffing her face with whatever it is – some kind of a food reward that she feels she deserves.

And so six months into this exercise regime, despite this health and fitness program that she’s put herself on, nothing has changed – even though she’s been telling herself, keeps telling herself that she wants to make these changes, she’s just as overweight as she was and so she feels like banging her head against the wall.

What is going on in these examples?

A Mini Psychological Hack for Getting What You Want: Reverse Engineer Your Complaints

So, before we get onto the main ‘hack’, here’s a little ‘mini-hack’ that’s going to show you how to know if you have this kind of issue going on in your life:

The key here is to know that if you keep complaining about something, if you keep lamenting about something, then probably you have this kind of inner conflict that we’re talking about where you’re telling yourself you want something, but for some reason, there is something else going on inside you that is actually causing you to choose either the opposite or something else.

And the reason that complaining is a sign is because, ultimately, if you keep complaining about something, it means you’re keeping a problem in your life but you’re choosing not to solve it.

If you truly become aware of a problem and you truly accept what a problem is, then you will either do something about it and no longer have the problem, or you will just have to accept that it’s a fundamental part of life and reality. And so by going through the process of moving towards acceptance, you’ll no longer have anything to complain about (and, thus, the ‘problem’ dissolves).

And so complaining constantly about the same thing – not finding a relationship, not being able to lose weight, not being able to make money, or whatever it is – complaining constantly and chronically is a sign that your ego is invested in this story about a certain goal and a certain desire but – deep down beneath the surface of yourself – you have an inner conflict that is causing you to choose something else for some reason.

Stop and think about it now for a second: what are you always complaining about?

The odds are very high that if you’re always complaining about it, then in some weird, backwards way, you’re choosing it, and you need to figure out why, so that you can put yourself on a real path and actually either resolve whatever it is that you’re complaining about or to let it go, because you accept that you don’t really want to change things (which is totally fine, btw).

You Can Reverse Engineer Your Real Intentions for Yourself and Your Life by the Results that You Keep Getting.

So this is where we come on to a deeper exploration of the main psychological ‘hack’ that I promised you at the start of this article:

It’s very simple. And ultimately it’s this:

You can reverse engineer your real intentions for yourself and your life by the results that you keep getting.

Let’s look at the examples we already explored:

If you consistently can’t find a relationship – that’s the result that you’re getting – then it just means that your true, unconscious intention is NOT to be in a relationship at some level – no matter what you’re telling yourself at the level of the ego (your constructed identity and all of the stories that you feed through it about life).

And I know that’s going to piss some people off because, of course, if you’re telling yourself you want a relationship and you’re going out there and you’re getting involved in all kinds of, unsavoury situations with people because you’re “trying to get in a relationship”, then of course you want a relationship.

So I’m probably chatting BS, right?

But no…if you consistently get the result of not getting the relationship that you want, then you’re choosing this result deep down for some reason – and this psychological hack of reverse engineering from the results is going to allow you to free yourself because when you understand why you have that deeper intention for something else then you can flip the script and start changing things.

(This deeper intention could be anything, and there’s nothing ‘wrong’ with that because it’s unconscious so it’s not really your “fault” or anything, but it is still your desire, your true intention, even though it’s unconscious).

It’s the same with all of these results that I’ve given as example:

If you keep saying that you want to get more money from your business or whatever but it never happens and you’re just running around on the hamster wheel for years and years and years, then you don’t really want that (shock! Horror!) – at some level you have the intention for something else more and you need to dig inside yourself to figure out what that might be.

It’s the same with losing weight or anything (like literally anything):

If you keep telling yourself that you want a certain thing – you want to lose weight in this example now – and it doesn’t happen, then you need to ask yourself, “Okay, what do I really want? I’m telling myself I want to lose weight. But when I dig down into my shadow and to the parts of myself that I’m hiding from myself behind ego, what is actually going on?”

And that is the psychological hack again:

The results that you get consistently, no matter what you’re telling yourself, actually show you what you are choosing deep down, more than whatever it is that you ‘think’ you want.

And that doesn’t mean that these things are ‘bad’ or that you’re chasing things that you shouldn’t be chasing. It just means that you haven’t actually done any work around inner awareness and acceptance of yourself to see what is actually driving your motivation more than – and that’s the key “more than” – whatever it is that you think you want.

If you’re not getting the results that you want then you need to be increase Awareness, cultivate Acceptance, and then take inspired ACTION

So let’s talk quickly about what you need to do once, you become AWARE of this hack – that’s always the first step: Awareness.

I’m always talking about the same thing: Awareness, Acceptance and Action (any transformational journey will require that you walk through these three steps).

If you’re not getting the results that you want, then ultimately you need start by becoming more aware be aware – in this case, of not getting the results you want, it starts by becoming aware of the fact that this is because you are (deep down in the unconscious) choosing something else MORE.

And it doesn’t matter what you’re telling yourself – the little voice in our head is just our social programming, our self-hypnosis, our response to our own emotional bullshit and stuff going on deep down inside ourselves and it’s just a surface level relationship with ourselves…it’s not REAL (“the ego is the opposite of reality”).

But there is a deeper level relationship that we all have – the most real relationship – and it is always driving our lives.

And so if you want to know more about this real relationship, you need to go through that first step that I shared with you of flipping the script and saying to yourself, “Right, these are the results I keep getting. Why might I be choosing that at some level?”

To get to the next level and go through the process of Awareness, Acceptance, and Action, you simply need to start asking yourself the right questions so that you can dive deep into yourself and really get a grasp of why you in particular – based on what you’ve been through, your life story, who you are, etc. – why you in particular would have some kind of unconscious intention for something else.

So let’s say, for example, in the examples I gave earlier, the first person I think was an imaginary human being called Susie or something like that, whatever her name was, kept telling herself that she wanted a relationship, but as soon as somebody came along, she would become hypercritical and she would push them away.

And so, just as an example, the story that she’s telling herself about what she thinks she wants, what she thinks she has chosen, is actually being overridden outside of her awareness with a deeper desire she has for freedom, let’s say – because when she was younger her parents were always arguing about little things and so on and so forth, and so she is paranoid about getting in a relationship, that’s also going to be fuelled by that kind of negativity (this is based on her imaginary life story).

So – as a protective barrier – she started getting critical and pushing people away so that she can maintain her freedom and not have to relive that experience from her childhood.

Maybe that’s all bullshit, right? I’ve just literally pulled that out of my ass. But the point is, there is some overriding desire that is driving you more than whatever it is that you keep telling yourself you desire but don’t get.

So in the case of Susie, she actually desires freedom more than a relationship, even though -for whatever reason (maybe because she just wants to fit into society and she thinks it’s what she’s supposed to do) – she keeps telling herself that’s what she wants.

In the example of, Bob, who is working on his business, he keeps telling himself that success is what he really wants:

“Okay, I want my business to succeed so I can provide for my family, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”

But deep down, he doesn’t want his business to succeed:

There’s an overriding, desire for that because that’s his unconscious intention and it’s driving his life. And it might simply be because his dad, when he was a kid, was always away at work so Bob felt neglected and unloved and so he doesn’t actually want to replicate that relationship with his own kids.

And so, even though he feels like the best thing to do is to start his own business and to be successful, he actually has a stronger desire to just spend time with his kids. And, so ultimately there’s some kind of an inner conflict, but based on the results that he’s getting, that inner desire, the unconscious intention to simply just spend more time with his kids and not be so busy like a workaholic or whatever, that is actually overriding his choices and the things that he actually decides to do in life.

(Even though, ironically, if he could find a way – in this hypothetical example – to make his business work, then eventually he could spend more quality time with his kids because maybe they’ll have more money so he could pay people to work on his business or whatever)

The point is this (and it’s the same for anybody with this problem):

Even though he’s telling himself one story, there is something going on that is making him choose not to succeed in the way that he is telling himself he wants, and so he ends up writing a totally different story instead.

In the final example Melissa – who keeps telling herself she wants to lose weight and she just can’t do it – well, again, as offensive as it may seem to some people, there is something going on inside her where she is telling herself that she wants to lose weight, but deep down her real intention is not to.

It could be something really simple:

For example, maybe she’s worried that if she, does lose weight, then she’s suddenly going to be more attractive to the opposite sex. And then she’s just going to have loads of guys flinging themselves at her. And she’s actually insecure because she doesn’t know how to be vulnerable because she’s never really been in a relationship or whatever it is.

And so again (in this hypothetical example), her fear has has created an unconscious intention where she wants to be alone so that she actually can choose not to face her vulnerabilities and to grow towards intimacy in a relationship.

These are all just examples, but the point is that there will be something going on inside you exactly like this if you have this kind of problem.

If you’re constantly running around in circles, never getting anywhere and never making any changes in your life, then it’s purely because at some level there is something in you that is causing you to choose NOT to get whatever it is that you think you want – and all you need to do really, to start solving this problem and unblocking yourself, is to raise awareness of what this “something” might be.

If you raise awareness of it, you start to look at it head on. It’ll start to dissolve. But then – more importantly – once you go to awareness, you can accept it. And only if you accept it can you start to truly flip the script by replacing that intention with something real or, modifying the way that you go about ACTING on it.

When you get here, you can increase your odds of getting whatever it is that you think you want by upgrading it to something that you actually want.

Implementation: Awareness, Acceptance, and Action (It Works Every Time)

So, that was a lot of examples but let me quickly conclude and review by exploring a little more about the three-step process that is going to allow you to implement this psychological hack: Awareness, Acceptance and Action.

To raise AWARENESS, you need to use the hack that we’ve been talking about, which is, to reverse engineer the real intentions that are driving you and bubbling away beneath the surface of your ego and your relationship with yourself.

Like we said, you can reverse engineer by looking at the RESULTS you keep getting that you don’t want or that you keep complaining about.

If you do this then you can become more AWARE literally right now. That sounds very dramatic but it’s true: become aware that if you keep complaining about things, nothing is changing, then at some m level you are choosing it.

This awareness is the gateway to setting yourself free.

I may be painful in the short term, but – believe it or not (try it and find out!) – in the long term, it’s going to put you on this path to changing things.

So that’s the first step. Awareness: reverse engineer based on the results you keep getting.

The second step after raising this awareness is that you need to ACCEPT whatever that real intention is.

And so ultimately, all you need to do is to ask yourself the right questions:

“Why might I, me – based on my experience and the things that I’ve been through – why might I have this unconscious intention for not getting what I keep telling myself what I think I want? What do I want even more that I’m actually chasing?”

And the key thing to remember here when it comes to acceptance is that “acceptance” ultimately means you’re going to be uncovering some truth – some reality – about what’s going on inside you.

And, the thing with truth/reality is the only thing that you can do with it is ACCEPT it. You can’t judge it – if you start judging it, you’re taking yourself out of reality

The reason I’m saying this is because the only thing you need to do with your unconscious intention is to figure out what it is – based on reverse engineering those results – and then accept it without any judgment.

Like I said, an unconscious intention is still your intention, whether you’re initially aware of it or not. But it’s not something that you can judge or blame yourself for or you need to feel bad about.

If you have been saying yourself that you want a certain thing, but there’s something going on inside you that’s actually causing you to choose the opposite of that…well, it’s because of what you’ve been through; it’s because of the story that you’ve already lived and the way that you’re relating to it, based on your shame, guilt and trauma and all your underlying emotional ‘stuff’ that’s caused you to live in a little box (aka the ego).

And so the final point is this: just accept it. That’s all you need to do. Don’t judge yourself, accept it.

Once you have this ACCEPTANCE, then you have a solid foundation so that you can move on to the third stage, which is taking ACTION.

In this case, the action is twofold:

You either need to modify your relationship with the thing that you originally thought you wanted by realising that you’ve got this unconscious block getting in the way and then readjusting the plan that you’re going to implement as you move towards it.
You can replace the unconscious intention with a totally different intention. And all that means is that you ask yourself, “Okay, what do I really want? What is my vision for my life? What are my true values? What are my true intentions? And how do they conflict with what I have just uncovered about myself?”

And then basically what you need to do is to train yourself – and I’ve got some other articles etc. about that on this site or a free 7-Day Course here – train yourself to think in alignment with the higher intentions and to not let this unconscious ‘stuff’ hold you back when it doesn’t need to.

So that is basically we need to say about this hack and how you can use it:

You look at the results that you keep getting that you don’t want and you find yourself complaining about chronically and consistently with nothing ever changing.

Then you can say to yourself now, “Okay, this is actually a sign that at some level, for whatever reason – and whatever reason that may be is fine – I am choosing not to acquire or to achieve or to attain whatever it is that I keep telling myself I need to be bringing into my life.

On a day-to-day practical level, this hack will and can change the game for you and it’s very simple and will cut out a lot of wasted time and energy because you won’t be running around in circles trying to change things that are out of your control.

The only thing ultimately any of us have power over, is our relationship with ourselves and so if you go through the process of AWARENESS – of understanding, that you can reverse engineer the results to figure out what you’re really choosing – ACCEPTANCE (of whatever actually has caused you to choose something else or whatever it is that you are choosing instead more than what you think you want), and then ACTION in the sense of modifying your intentions and actions or replacing the unconscious intention with something else, you stand a much higher chance of getting where you want to be in life, feeling good, growing real and having a good time whilst you’re here.

Ultimately, we’re all going to die and so you might as well make sure that what you’re actually spending your time out there in the world running around chasing is something that you really want.

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Sexual Polarity and the Shadow Self (Divine Masculine and Feminine Energy)

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Creativity/Life Philosophy/Psychology/Relationships/Shadow Life

There’s a high chance that you’ve become disconnected from your own nature – this article will help you get back in touch with something REAL by understanding the concept of SEXUAL POLARITY.

If you’re feeling stuck, you’re feeling lost, you’re feeling restless, you’re feeling like there’s a void or that there’s more to life and that you can express more of who you are in the world, then there’s a very, very high chance that you’ve become disconnected at some level from your own nature – especially in the form of either your masculine or feminine energy (if you want to use the word ‘energy’). Either that or it has become out of balance in some way.

In other words, you’ve developed an unhealthy, distorted relationship with your sexual energy because you’re not being real with yourself. And normally this happens because of unresolved emotional stuff – shame, guilt and trauma are the main ones – or because of social conditioning that is telling you that your sexual energy, your nature, is unnatural in some way, or that it should be refined in a socially acceptable manner or whatever it is.

In other words, there are outside sources, outside forces coming into your experience of yourself that are basically acting as a barrier that is stopping you from letting out what needs to be put out into the world. And so ultimately, this comes down to a theme that has come up so many times now on my YouTube channel, which is that there’s a dance between the ego and the shadow.

If you haven’t heard me rant about that before, it’s super simple:

Basically, when we feel shame, guilt and trauma, or we get social conditioning and we cave into it, we create a little version of ourselves, a fragmented version of ourselves, which is a box that we live in. And the only way that we can stay in that box is by disowning really important parts of who we are. It can be our emotions. It can be our true goals. It can be our values. It can be our sexual energy – which is theme of this article.

All of those things that we disown end up being stored in the shadow self, the shadow territory, as I like to call it. And we basically spend our whole lives filtering everything through the ego so that we can pretend those things don’t exist. But because they’re real, they never go anywhere. And it causes all kinds of problems in people’s lives in the form of friction, frustration, misery, relationship problems, the feeling of restlessness and void, and all the stuff I said a few paragraphs back.

And so the solution to many of our problems in life, as always, comes back to being as real as possible. And so this article is ultimately about how – for many, many people – the next level of realness for them is to face their own nature in terms of the predominant sexual polarity that they need to be expressing in the world – either masculine or feminine.

This article is going to be about some of the bullshit out there that you can avoid if you want to be happy, but also how you can start bringing this stuff to the surface by using your creativity, pushing through your ego, and allowing who you really are to actually be expressed instead of repressed so you can stop holding back and hesitating and go live a REAL life.

The big nature vs. nurture debate and REALNESS.

So there’s a big debate in society that’s been going on for years and years about whether nature or nurture takes precedence when it comes to the human condition and the things that impact our lives and how they unfold and all that kind of stuff.

The consensus is that we need both. We need nature, obviously, because nature is nature. You can’t get rid of it. But we also need nurture, which means that if you create the right conditions, the right environment, then you can basically create any version of yourself that you want in order to get where you want to go and be happy and all that kind of stuff.

Both of those things are kind of true, but if they get out of balance, then it causes all kinds of problems in our lives. If we lean too much into the nature stuff, then we risk kind of becoming hedonistic. We live in the short term. We become driven by our instincts and just act on any impulse that pops up in our experience and all that kind of stuff.

If we lean too much to the nurture stuff, then we kind of become a bit too neurotic and detached from life itself, because we think ourselves into a way of being that keeps us in our comfort zone and where we try and control everything. And so another way of looking at it is that nature is about chaos, nurture is about control. And both of those things are kind of disruptive if we don’t see them in a real way.

Actually, we need both, but we need to accept and embrace that, but nature always takes precedence over nurture. And the reason for that is that nature is connected to reality. It has nothing to do with human ideas. It has nothing to do with human concepts. It just is what it is. And if it is what it is, then it’s real.

The only thing you can do with reality is accept it. And so that is the foundation for building a real life. The danger of the nurture stuff is that it’s filtered through all of our thoughts. And that most of our thoughts come from the ego, which, as we said at the start of the article, has been created because of our underlying shame, guilt, and trauma, and social conditioning.

And so, when we filter nurture through the ego stuff, we actually just exacerbate the problem – the problem being a disconnection from who we really are. A lot of people fear nature, though, because of the chaos and when it comes to our sexual energy that’s why a lot of women out there have become afraid of their femininity. It’s also why a lot of men out there have become afraid of their masculinity, because they don’t actually know how to take responsibility for the energy and direct it in alignment with their true values and their true intentions.

The other thing, of course, is that society has been built in such a way where men now fear women, and women fear men. And so everybody is kind of trying to meet in the middle in general – like out in public, at least when behind closed doors, it’s a totally different story. But in general, if we’re trying to fit into society, people are kind of meeting in the middle. And you have this this kind of, uh, androgynous, kind of wishy-washy culture where people are just all trying to be the same.

That is totally unreal, because we need both masculine and feminine. We need masculine and feminine to be expressed in a real way, because they complement each other.

And if you don’t have that complementary way of being, then everything just feels kind of empty and unreal. And that void that we were talking about at the start of the essay, the restless feeling – because the truth is hidden in the shadows – just keeps getting worse and worse because nobody’s being real.

And so the way back to reality is to get away from the 50-50 thing and to go back in alignment with the natural laws of reality and life itself. And an ancient, ancient way of describing these natural laws is something you’ve probably all seen before: Yin and Yang.

I’m going to talk about that now because it actually sums up loads of stuff really, really well (and that’s probably why it’s lasted for so long). So let’s take a quick look at that.

Now, here’s the famous Yin Yang symbol. Everybody on the planet pretty much has seen this. And the reason it’s endured over so many generations is because it’s so real. It just makes so much sense of the natural laws. It sums it all up.

Basically, we have a circle, which is a symbol for wholeness, but then within the circle we have the perfect unity of masculine and feminine, and each one has the seed of its opposite within itself. That’s really, really important, because nobody is 100% masculine or 100% feminine. We all need the opposite within us to some degree so that we can become balanced and real. The thing is, you never ever want to be 50-50 because if you become 50-50, well, life just gets really boring.

Maybe you’d feel enlightened and you’d be like floating around on a cloud or something, but life would be really boring if you were just totally balanced within yourself. And it’s probably impossible here on planet Earth, which is why we need other people to complement us. This is the other reason that Yin and Yang is such a great summary of these natural laws that apply to us. All these forces are not in opposition. Masculine is not better than feminine. Feminine is not better than masculine. They’re equal, but they’re different. And more importantly, they complement each other.

That is the reason these things are so important. If you know what your predominant sexual polarity is then you can find a person that complements you. Or if you want to be single, you can go out into the world and find activities and environments and places that complement what’s going on inside you. So you can feel that real connection to life.

So Yin and Yang basically sums this all up. It’s the whole thing. So it’s all about wholeness. And it shows how within the whole, these two forces need to come together so that we can actually embrace what that wholeness is. And that’s a great summary for this whole thing – because, ultimately, if you can understand that, then you can figure out who you are and what you need, and you won’t be scared to embrace it because you know it’s real.

So all you can do now is accept it. And then you work with it and everything will work out. It’ll be amazing.

One thing that I love to say is that “the ego is the opposite of reality”. And that’s because the ego is the only thing that can cause you to distort or to resist your relationship with the truth. And if you want to live a good life, really, it’s quite simple: You just need to: 1) uncover the truth, and then 2) live the truth – because if you uncover the truth by raising awareness, then that will lead you to acceptance. And if you get to a place of acceptance, then any action that you do take in the world is going to be more real. It’s going to be aligned with who you really are. And that’s what this is all about.

So if you uncover the truth and then live the truth, things will work out. And the thing that can only ever stop you doing that is ego: the fragmented idea of yourself that stops you from moving with wholeness. Now, in relation to our sexual energy and all the stuff that we’re talking about in this article – masculine and feminine and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah – the ego is the thing that will either cause you to resist it in the sense that we’ve already kind of talked about.

When this happens you’ll bury it deep within the shadow territory, pretend it’s not there, stop taking responsibility for it and become unable to go in the direction that you want to move in whilst having an authentic relationship with that energy – either that or you’re going to distort it. And really there’s only two ways that you can distort things: You can either see it as been too little or as too much. And that happens with both masculine and feminine energy in our relationship with it.

So I want to talk about unreal relationships at both of those levels because of the way we distort by either being too little or too much in touch with it.

Unreal relationships are when you’re not grounded in reality itself – you’re either too much or too little of some idea.

The Unreal Masculine

So let’s start with the unreal masculine. I’ll keep it short and sweet, but hopefully it’s going to give you some good info. Unreal relationships basically are when you are not coming from a place of acceptance and a place of being rooted in wholeness or reality itself – that ultimately just means that you’ve been very present.

You’re totally conscious and aware to the greatest extent possible. And you’re not thinking your way through life; you’re experiencing life.

That comes with a cost. The cost of being fully present is that you have to let go of all the illusions and all the bullshit that stop you from being present. All the distractions, all of that stuff. And if you’re at the start of a journey of trying to return to presence/realness, then you’re going to have a lot of those emotions I was talking about at the start: shame, guilt and trauma. And because of that, you’ll be in an ego driven place.

The only way to return to this place of wholeness, which is real, of pure presence, is to ride through that which is obviously going to be painful. And so because most people want to avoid that pain, they go to one extreme or the other of either having a very low, weak expression of their masculinity, or they turn up the volume in order to compensate for those feelings of shame, guilt and/or trauma, and they become almost a cartoon caricature of what they think masculinity is, which is when you end up being like a toxic male bro and all that kind of stuff (whatever people want to call it).

Now, the balance is not to be too much or not to be too little, but to be grounded where you actually are in the present moment, and to be able to respond to life without letting anything shake you from yourself. That is masculinity.

In Hinduism, they have Shiva and Shakti, which is basically their version of Yin and Yang. Shiva is the archetype for masculinity, and the short version of describing it is just “pure consciousness”. Nothing can shake it from itself. It’s totally, totally grounded. And if you don’t have that, then ultimately you’ve been unreal in some way. And the way it normally shows up is too little – where people are detached from their masculinity for all the reasons that we talked about: shame, guilt, and trauma, lost behind the ego, hidden in the shadow self.

And when that happens, they become detached from their purpose. They become wishy washy. They have unhealthy boundaries. They’re constantly being told what to do. They’re detached from their true values and intentions. Their life is not their life because they’re not grounded in the truth, which is pure presence. And so they’re letting the world tell them what to do. That’s too little masculinity.

But then the opposite end of the spectrum is also unreal. It’s where people realise, “Okay, I’m detached from m my masculinity. So I’m going to turn up the volume and become like a caricature of what I think masculinity means. I’m going to become hyper-aggressive. I’m going to become a total asshole, basically. I’m going to basically try and dominate the world around me to compensate for the feeling of inferiority that I have now.”

That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be aggressive. It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t go for your goals. It doesn’t mean you should take any shit. It just means if you’ve turned the volume all the way up because you feel like you’re detached from who you really need to be, then that’s just as unreal as being one of these weak willed, wishy washy guys that just has no purpose and anything like that.

The other thing about the purpose thing is that there’s a difference between a real purpose and an unreal purpose. And so when some people turn the volume all the way up in this compensatory way that I’m talking about, they’re acting and taking a lot of action, like a hustler or a grinder – whatever you want to call it – but they’re doing that purely for the sake of taking action to fill the void inside themselves. They’re not acting from the present grounded place of Shiva consciousness, whatever you want to call it, where they can take inspired action.

So the main difference between an unreal and a real masculine is that one is putting their being into their doing, and one is either doing f*ck all because they’ve been weak and passive, or they’re doing too much, but not as a way of putting their being into their doing, but as a way of doing things to mask the lack of connection to their being. Something like that.

The Unreal Feminine

The unreal feminine becomes unreal in exactly the same way as the masculine does. It’s either too much or too little – but too much or too little of what?

Well, if we go back to the Shiva Shakti thing, Shiva – the masculine archetype in Hinduism – is about pure consciousness, pure awareness, wholeness. In other words, Shakti, the feminine equivalent, which is complementary, like the Yin and Yang thing, is not about stillness, but about motion. And that is why a lot of the feminine qualities that we associate with femininity are about movement: whether it’s about emotion moving through them, whether it’s about dancing and getting in the body and all that kind of sensuous stuff.

The feminine is ultimately that. It’s about using movement to return to the present moment. And it complements the stillness of the masculine because those two bring each other together.

But anyway, if it’s too little, well, the feminine isn’t moving, and the energy within them becomes stagnated. They don’t express their emotions. They suppress them. Then they become stressed, they become burned out, they become depressed. And that is why a lot of feminine women use their bodies to return to wholeness.

Basically, there’s yoga, which I also do. I love yoga. But dancing, singing, all that kind of stuff. Ultimately, that is because motion and movement gets them back to the present moment.

Now, if it’s too much, they move too much, they kind of lapse into a victim mindset. They become really passive, and they just let life move them all over the place. They lose touch with their vision, etc. etc.

The problem is, as with masculinity, a lot of women, because of what we’re saying at the start of the essay – about social conditioning and the ego and blah, blah, blah – they’ve got stuck in this place where they’re 50-50, they’re trying to be like a man and vice versa. And when they wake up to that, because a lot of people do wake up to it, eventually they turn the volume all the way up and it becomes like an extreme version of what femininity is, and they lose control, basically.

They get in all kinds of situations they don’t want to be in. They have people take advantage of them. Their emotions take over completely. And then they just become so open minded that their brains fall out. And again, it’s about finding balance.

And the only way that you can find balance is by taking responsibility for your own energy, but giving it a direction to move in. If you don’t give it a direction to move in, that’s when you end up being totally lost. And that is the final part of this essay coming up, talking about how you can do that.

So you can embrace the energy, you’re aware of it, you accept it, but then you can take action with it that is going to be authentic and take you to a place that you want to go, not to one that’s just going to exacerbate the problems in your life and make everything worse.

The creative process is the process of allowing the unconscious to become conscious.

So what are you supposed to do if you realize that you have some of the problems we’ve kind of started to unpack in this essay?

If you realise that your ego, because of your emotional stuff and social conditioning, telling you that you should be a certain way, has caused you to hide your nature in the shadows? Or if you started to bring that nature to the surface, but it’s gone too far in either direction, you’ve either turned the volume all the way up because you’re trying to compensate, because you’ve become aware of the detachment?

Or what if you’re sort of aware of it but you’re afraid and you’ve just tried to hide it, you’ve turned the volume down and you’ve become kind of a weak expression of your own nature?

Well, whether it’s self-induced because of the emotional stuff or if it’s social conditioning, the problem is the same: The problem is that your shadow self is not getting an outlet for expression. And normally when I’m coaching people, what I find is there will be some goal in their life, some calling from the unconscious mind that needs to be made conscious, that is going to allow the shadow to become more ‘embodied’, shall we say, in the lives of the person in question.

Normally, that goal is going to be some creative thing because the creative process, ultimately, is the process of allowing the unconscious to become conscious, for us to deconstruct the ego, i.e., raise awareness of how we’re holding ourselves back with social conditioning and self-limiting beliefs and all that stuff, so that we can allow integration of all those parts that we disowned by creating the ego in the first place (in other words, we can integrate the shadow).

If you look inside yourself, or if you just ask yourself honestly, there will probably be something that you want to do that you’re avoiding. It’s going to be some creative thing.

Creative in this context is just anything that is going to bring you back to the present moment and make the unconscious conscious. It might be like a business idea that you’ve had. It might be a literal creative project, like some kind of a musical thing or an artistic thing or whatever it is. There’ll be something that you’re called to do, but you’re holding back on it because of the ego and the way that it talks to you and causes you to believe you have to be this limited version of yourself.

What you need to do is to create a vision for moving forward with whatever that is. And as you do move forward with it, you will basically learn to deprogram yourself from trying to control everything with the ego stuff and to get into this more fluid, chaotic way of being that your true nature actually asks you to work with. But because you’re moving in alignment with a vision, you’re going to have a sense of order and chaos, and you’re going to bring them together.

If you can do that well, you will move forward in life in the way that you want to move forward – you’ll be doing things that are authentic to you. But more importantly, you’re going to bring these qualities that you’ve been hiding from yourself back to the surface. You’re going to bring them into balance by merging order and chaos with the vision and the more chaotic stuff that’s kind of motivating that vision. And you’re going to get where you want to be.

And so that’s kind of a roundabout way of finishing this article, I guess. But what I’m saying is, if you can find something from your shadow that you can start acting on and you can turn it into a vision within the wider context of your life, then you’re going to either solve this problem or at least start solving this problem. because you’re going to not be living as an idea, but you’re going to be living as an experience of yourself and your nature going to come to the surface.

You’re not just going to be nurturing yourself, nurturing with the ego stuff, and you can be more real in your own NATURE.

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Mind Traps: How to Stay REAL and RECLAIM Your Time

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Life Philosophy/Mindset/Psychology

(Originally written for my mailing list but it got a lot of good feedback so here we are on the site as well)!

Oh, hi there.

One of the most common ‘problems’ I hear from coaching clients (or people jumping in my DMs on social media) is struggling to manage time in a real way.

In this article, I want to share some practical tips for managing your PERCEPTION of time so that you can RECLAIM some of the time you’re wasting by thinking and acting in UNREAL ways.

Before that, some common themes that come up in these conversations about time:

-We all have the same 24hrs in a day and so sometimes when we say we don’t have time what we really mean is “it’s not a priority” (which is fine but let’s be real with ourselves and then start tweaking what we can).

-Ultimately, it all comes down to CHOICE; from one moment to the next what you CHOOSE to do with your time is up to you (yes, even when you think it isn’t).

-We all have obligations and demands on our time but if we have a vision and sense of purpose it’s easier to GRAB the moments of downtime and use them for growing real instead of distracting ourselves.

-Everything is about the Law of Cause and Effect and progress is always progress. If you take 7 small steps over the course of a week then that’s one big step by the end of the week.

-A lot of our time management issues are actually issues with our RELATIONSHP WITH OURSELVES and the way we trap and distract ourselves with our thinking (the rest of this article will break this down and give you some practical steps for reclaiming time at the level of your mindset).

Reclaim your time by reclaiming your mind

Mind Trap

Worrying about things that haven’t happened yet (and probably never will).

Psychological ‘Stuff’

Anxiety, fear of the unknown, lack of control.

Break the Pattern

Practice mindfulness and grounding techniques, challenge irrational thoughts, focus on the present moment.

TRUST that you can handle ANYTHING (because you’ve already handled everything that’s happened to you so far).

Mind Trap

Dwelling on things from the past that can’t be changed.

Psychological ‘Stuff’

Low self-esteem, self-criticism, perfectionism.

Mind Trap

Indulging in self-pity.

Psychological ‘Stuff’

Victim mentality, lack of resilience, avoidance of responsibility.

Break the Pattern

Cultivate resilience, seek short-term support from others if you need it (I can help), focus on solutions instead of problems.

Take the action that will help you BECOME who you CHOOSE to be.

Mind Trap

Worrying about others’ opinions.

Psychological ‘Stuff’

Insecurity, fear of judgment, people-pleasing tendencies.

Break the Pattern

Trust your own judgment, surround yourself with supportive people, prioritize your own values.

Gradually step out of your comfort zone and find your EDGE (by stretching just beyond your current ideas about yourself).

Focus on the potential rewards, seek support from trusted individuals.. Most importantly, learn to TRUST YOURSELF to handle what comes next no matter what.

Lots to be working with here (and I’ll keep adding to the list) but I wanted to show you how many opportunities we have to RECLAIM our time without reshuffling our life too much.

To get started CHOOSE one or two of these areas and start taking practical steps to changing things – that’ll be one step towards letting go of the UNREAL stuff and making space for the REAL.

I can help you with this ‘stuff’ if you need support – you can book a free discovery call here (or a ‘Virtual Coffee’ as I like to call it).

Thanks for reading and hope it helped!

Stay real,

Oli

If you want to go deeper into this ‘stuff’ then check out my free 7-day course for boosting your understanding of your own realness and helping you choose life purpose.

You can get more information here or you can sign up and get started by entering your name and email below:

Men! Don’t make these mental health mistakes

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Life Philosophy/Psychology

This post might annoy people but that’s just a by-product of talking about these issues in a real way.

It’s worth the risk so that if somebody who needs it finds it then they might change their approach to dealing with life in general and getting on the path to getting their mental health where they want it to be.

Before I start writing I should probably point out two things that are relevant and important:

1, This is informed by my own ‘mental health’ journey and dealing with depression, suicidal thoughts, and difficult emotional ‘stuff’ over the course of my life due to the things I’ve personally been through and have HEALED from.

2, I worked in mental health for a long time before I started my working on my coaching ‘stuff’ full-time and so I have worked really closely with a lot of people around their issues and have helped people through some of the most challenging and traumatic things that can happen to a human being.

I know what works in general (not always) and I also know a lot of the pitfalls that men can fall into on their ‘healing’ journey (and women, tbh – but I wanted to write an article for men because I’ve seen that there is a massive gap in REAL advice and support for them overall).

When I was working with depressed, anxious, and traumatised men they would almost appreciate the fact that I was just being ‘real’ or candid with them and that I could talk to them ‘man-to-man’ instead of trying to mould them into being some kind of ‘vulnerable’ or ‘emotional wreck’ whilst equating that with ‘good’ mental health.

Of course, facing our emotions is a really important part of the journey but identifying with them and letting them linger for the rest of our lives (as a lot of the ‘talking therapies’ will ask us to do) doesn’t really do anything useful except cause us to put unnecessary obstacles in our own way.

This article is a short summary of some of the mistakes we can make like this that actually just make our mental health worse in the long-run by keeping us stuck in the same place instead of actually moving forward (and for men, this is actually the biggest problem, imo: a lack of PURPOSE).

Like I said, if you’re not ready for it, this might piss you off – if it finds you when you need it then I hope this helps you start getting on the path to where you need to be.

Here we go:

Mistake 1: Not talking about it or talking to the ‘wrong’ people about it.

It’s common wisdom these days that not talking to people about our emotional ‘stuff’ and just keeping everything bottled inside can cause a lot of problems.

This is true but it neglects a common problem in our society (or maybe even with human nature): in general, most people don’t give a damn about other people’s problems – especially the problems of men who are just expected to get on with it and to deal with things alone.

This is a problem with men and women – men don’t like listening to other men’s problems for a variety of reasons (partly because they’re too busy dealing with their own ‘stuff’ by themselves); women don’t like listening to men’s problems (unless they’re getting paid for it as therapists or counsellors) because nobody really has time for ‘weak’ men which is what men with unresolved emotional ‘stuff’ are often considered to be.

Telling men to talk about it is fine and dandy and if they’re lucky they might be able to find a guy or a bunch of guys that they can open up to. For the average man, though, there is nobody for them to talk to.

This is a shame because talking really does help – I’ve seen it myself when working with people: the simple act of just sharing something can release a lot of tension and unburden people of the weight of whatever they’ve been carrying. If it’s hard to find somebody who will just ‘see’ us without judgement then this is something that many men will unfortunately never experience.

This is what leads to the second problem in this area:

Because it’s so hard to find somebody who can just be ‘real’ and meet you where you’re at, a lot of men end up turning to the ‘wrong’ people to try and support them in the way they need: WOMEN.

(I told you this was going to be a bit controversial).

When men turn to women for their mental health advice they might get a shoulder to cry on and experience some of the benefits of ‘sharing’ and ‘unburdening’ just discussed but the problem with women helping men with their mental health advice has two main issues:

The first is that women have a bias for TALKING about their feelings as IN GENERAL that’s how they deal with their own feelings – this is in contrast to the way that men actually benefit more from taking ACTION to transmute or diffuse their feelings.

This is why a lot of men eventually get fed up with therapy or other talking interventions – because they just end up being encouraged to go around in circles, analysing their feelings and the past to death looking for patterns that may be interesting but which don’t really change that much in terms of knowing what they WANT and NEED to do in order to move forward.

Though talking about things, sharing, and unburdening is an important stage in the overall healing journey, it’s not the WHOLE journey (for men or women, tbh, but especially for men) – once you’ve raised that awareness or become more familiar with your feelings, you need to ask yourself what you WANT (that’s real to you, not a response to your feelings and mental conditioning). In other words it comes down to taking ACTION.

The second problem is that – whether we ‘like’ it or not – the reality of life is that men and women live in totally different worlds (though the reality is the same):

The harsh truth is that when women ‘talk’ about their feelings people actually listen – regardless of whether or not the people listening are men or women. This is usually because women ‘like’ to talk about feelings like we said above but also because a lot of men think that by listening to a damsel in distress they’ll somehow go up in her estimation (and, of course, some guys just listen because they care about the woman in question).

I know that sounds cynical but it’s just an observation of how things seem to unfold IN GENERAL.

If a man tries to go around talking about their feelings, they are seen IN GENERAL as being either a burden or being weak (or both). This probably has something to do with why 78% of suicides (in the UK at least) are men.

In relation to what we’re saying here, this is another reason why the talking therapies etc. don’t work for men: they’re ultimately about women giving men advice that ‘works’ for women – not actually helping men find solutions that work for men.

For the women working as therapists, it all makes sense and seems nice because in the context of their lives it has been validated. Of course, there are men working as therapists too, but it’s very rare that they haven’t been brainwashed by all this ‘stuff’ and aren’t just women in disguise giving out advice that works for other wannabe women in disguise (living in the bubble of the ‘mental health’ world) and not actual men who still want to be – and already are – men.

I know that’s controversial and I am speaking in very general terms – there are some great mental health projects for men out there that have stepped away from the bubble of just talking, sharing, and being vulnerable without going anywhere.

The problem is that most of the things out there offered to support men on their mental health journey are trying to get them to be something they’re not – if you’ve read my ‘stuff’ before then you’ll know that’s a bad idea because REAL ALWAYS WORKS.

Mistake 2: Dealing with things in an unbalanced way.

There are three ways that we can deal with pretty much anything in life: giving into our feelings (heart), giving into our thoughts (mind), or finding a healthy balance between the two and aligning heart and mind to be real.

A lot of mental health stuff just encourages men to get in touch with their feelings as though that will magically solve all their problems. What this actually ends up doing is causing them to become identified with their feelings instead of actually processing and moving through them.

Honestly, call me a cynic but I think a LOT of therapists etc. actually like to keep people enslaved to their feelings because this allows them to continuously be analysed in sessions and the therapist is ensured a regular pay cheque (this is different to coaching where eventually you ideally NO LONGER NEED THE COACH because you’ve got to a stage where you can do it alone).

Anybody who wants you to STAY in your feelings isn’t really helping you – they’re holding you back.

This doesn’t mean ignoring your feelings (that’s unhealthy) – it means EMBRACING them, learning what they have to teach you, but then taking that learning to get where you actually WANT to be in life. You can only do that if you have a vision and take ACTION (which studies have shown men benefit from more than ‘talking’ about problems).

All this is to say that your feelings are important but they’re not so important that they become the only thing you think about and focus on. A lot of mental health stuff will encourage you to go over every little detail of your past and figure out why Mummy and Daddy screwed you up – actually, you don’t need to revisit EVERYTHING; you just need to figure out what your emotions are and what you want to DO about them.

The opposite side of this coin is that people DENY their emotions completely because of faulty thinking about what emotions are etc. and they instead try to be ‘rational’ about everything and to just THINK THEIR WAY OUT of emotional problems.

When this happens the most common thing that happens is people become ASSHOLES that deny their own feelings and deny everybody else’s by extension. This is just a way of acting like feelings are unimportant or don’t exist so that they can avoid their own shame, guilt, and/or trauma.

The REAL/healthy way of dealing with all this is to be BALANCED – quite simply that means that you use your HEAD to figure out where you want to go in life (i.e. you create a sense of PURPOSE for yourself and a VISION to support it) but that you also use your HEART to ensure that you’re doing something you actually care about and that you’re not denying how you FEEL right now.

I always walk my clients through a process of AWARENESS, ACCEPTANCE, and ACTION because it embodies the head and the heart instead of just one or the other:

Awareness – figuring out your true values and intentions, how life actually works, where you currently are in relation to where you want to be, etc.

Acceptance – working to accept yourself unconditionally and to embrace what you truly value and want in reality.

Action – making sure you actually DO something about it and move forward.

Mistake 3: Obsessing over problems, not solutions.

Whatever you invest your time and energy in is what you will get more of… If your mental health strategy is to just analyse the problem to death then that’s all you will get.

The ‘solution’ for most men is to get back to reality which means to choose a sense of purpose for themselves, to dedicate themselves to it, and to meet other likeminded men in the process.

A mistake that a lot of men make when they’re trying to solve their mental health stuff is to spend all their time with other men who have the same problem – at first, this might seem like a good idea but actually when you spend all your time in mental health groups (or whatever it is) with people suffering in the same way you just end up IDENTIFYING with the problem, not solving it.

Again, in the early stages of your recovery, meeting people who have similar experiences might be beneficial (so you can be ‘seen’ or whatever) but eventually it just stops you growing because – if the only thing you have in common is the problem – then you’ll all be incentivised to keep it going in order to keep the group going.

I’ve seen people make dramatic differences to their lives when they STEP AWAY from mental health services and actually go find ‘normal’ people who they can be their normal self around (instead of just being somebody with a problem amongst others who IDENTIFY with it).

The short-version of this is that you will do way more for your mental health in a TEAM of people playing football (for example) than you will a bunch of people sitting around identifying with the problem instead of living their lives (and taking themselves out of REAL life is always the problem).

Stuff you can do instead of just talking.

Here’s some things that nearly all men will benefit from to improve their mental health:

-Figure out your PURPOSE or at the very least a VISION to move forward with.

-Do some kind of team sport or some other group activity where you can bond with other men and talk organically, not in a forced ‘therapeutic’ way.

-Work out: find some kind of exercise you enjoy and do it regularly.

-Stop watching crap and wasting your time on Netflix or other BS.

-Spend more time in nature, ideally with other men you can talk to about your life and where you’re going.

-Find a woman who wants you to be who you actually are and start a relationship.

-Journal or monitor your feelings in some other way but then decide what you want to DO with them in relation to your vision.

-Get a COACH who want to help you move forward and not just be stuck talking about your feelings.

If this story inspired or helped you then please share it with others! 🙂

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Why I Haven’t Killed Myself Yet (and You Probably Shouldn’t Kill Yourself Either)

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Life Philosophy/Mindset/Psychology

The Existential Question of Suicide

There’s a famous quote by Albert Camus where he says something like “If you haven’t killed yourself yet then you’re an existentialist”.

I think about that quote a lot.

Camus is also the guy who summed up the modern existential state by asking, “Should I have another cup of coffee or should I kill myself?”

It really helps put things in perspective: ultimately, if you’re here and you’re reading this right now then things have never got so bad that you’ve made the CHOICE to end it all.

That’s good news. Probably somebody out there likes having you around (and even if it feels like they don’t you’re probably just not looking hard enough or need to buy a dog or something).

Being a human being is kinda weird: Every morning we wake up and we keep making the choices to just keep going through the motions and ploughing on with our lives – even though we know they’re going to end anyway one day and that there’s nothing we can do about it (and maybe you could make an argument that a lot of what goes on in the world is a distraction from that inescapable reality).

This ceaseless, inexorable ‘ploughing on’ happens despite us constantly having to deal with problems and obstacles, having to deal with the dramas and derangements of other people, and having things creep up on us out of the blue every so often and knock us sideways or derail the train of our lives and whatever plans we might have had (“Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face”, as Mike Tyson said).

There’s a deeper sense of despair in the world than any time since I remember in my long ass lifetime (40 years young now, wtf) but despite all the absurdity and clownish chaos of the extremities of political ideologies and all of the weirdness, drama, and bullshit that permeates the world (and the subtle and not-so-subtle threats to OBVLIVION), most of us just keep ploughing and plodding along, doing the same old things we’ve always done.

I think we’ve all had that thought pop into our heads at least once or twice in our lives – even if it hasn’t really been ‘serious’:

“Why don’t I kill myself?”

Sometimes it just creeps in there when you’re washing the dishes, driving down the Bingley bypass, or making love.

Life is fragile, after all – it would be so easy to do any of the romanticised suicide rituals that we’ve all heard about and to end it all with relative ‘ease’:

-Go to Paris and jump off the Eifel Tower.

-Overdose on some drug of choice.

-Take a toaster in the bath (and plug it in, of course).

-Get a razorblade and slit one’s wrists (everybody knows that you need to go ‘down’ and not ‘across’ for whatever reason).

-Steal a car or commit some other crime and get the police to chase and shoot you (depending on your country or the severity of your crime, of course).

The options for leaving this hellhole are only limited by your creativity (which is ironic in a way seeing as the world you might be trying to escape is trying to quash your creativity anyway).

So why do we stick around? Maybe there’s some ‘stuff’ to be learned here?

I can’t really speak for others but here’s why I haven’t killed myself yet:

I’m going to die anyway.

Maybe it’s laziness but I really don’t see the point in killing myself when I’m going to die one day anyway.

Maybe it’s because I’m an optimist but I know that anything could happen between now and whenever that happens to be (within the realm of possibility, of course).

That could include things that are ‘bad’ and so maybe things will get worse than they’ve ever been but ‘possiblity’ also means that things could get ‘good’ or even better as well so I might as well stick around and find out.

I suppose knowing that death is inevitably coming anyway gives me a kind of peace because it makes me more present (when I’m reflecting on it) but it also serves to remind me that THIS IS IT – as far as I know, this is the only life I’m ever going to live and so I might as well squeeze every drop of life I can get out of it.

I know that things won’t always be perfect but nor do I want – or even need – them to be. Being ‘me’ is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and so I might as well accept it as it ‘is’ (whilst still trying to change what I can change and move towards my vision) and ‘enjoy’ the full spectrum of human emotions and experiences – misery, confusion, conflict; joy, exultation, love – all of these things are just part of the overall cocktail of life and make it what it is: a rich tapestry of colours and sensations that all come together in one hideously beautiful abstract painting that kinda makes sense if you look at it in the right way.

There’s loads more to do.

The thing about life is that there’s always more to ‘do’. Some might say that this is actually one of the ‘bad’ things about life – the fact that we constantly have to be bumbling around like blue-arsed flies ‘doing’ things instead of ‘being’ them.

It’s like the Myth of Sisyphus (popularised and given context by Albert Camus again) – pushing the rock up the mountain only for it to roll back down again and for him to have to repeat the process and struggle up-and-down for eternity.

I was speaking to somebody recently who was struggling with the endless ‘doing’ and struggle of the human condition:

They were saying that every time you think you’ve got to the top of the mountain you end up realising that it’s not the actual peak – it’s just a ridge.

And when you get to the top of the next ridge you realise you’re still not at the top (and on and on it goes).

I don’t mind ‘doing’ things as long as my ‘being’ is injected into that ‘doing’ – for example, by aligning it with my REAL VALUES (not the values that the world has tried to ingrain or condition me with).

In my own life, I’ve really found that by getting to the top of one ‘ridge’ I might not have made it all the way to the ‘top’ – to some perfect state of absolute completion and power – but I’ve still grown a lot more real (i.e. whole and integrated in myself, the world, and reality) and have got a better VIEW of life and what it all means along the way.

I think all this ‘doing’ is only really a problem if you either don’t KNOW what you’re doing (because you’ve been told by others) or because you’re FORCING yourself to do things that are taking you away from yourself rather than doing anything actually real or true to you (and that’s when you’re most likely to end up being like Sisyphus and doing something ABSURD).

I dunno, I think it comes down to our expectations. If we expect life to be life then it’s a lot ‘easier’ – or at least more SIMPLE – and so we’re less likely to kill ourselves. I think if my expectations were different maybe I would’ve been disappointed by now and jumped off the Eifel Tower or taken my plugged-in toaster in the bath.

Personally, I like the journey but I’ve learned to trust the process and it’s taken me out of my head and into life a little more… I think if we resist life then we resist life (if you know what I mean). I’m trying to be open.

The other thing about all these things to ‘do’ that’s stopped me from killing myself is that doing brings a lot of amazing MOMENTS and EXPERIENCES that allow me to dangle a future over my head like a golden suicide-prevention carrot that keeps me plodding along.

Like we said, despite all this empty ‘doing’ in the world (going to work in the wage cage, filling in spread sheets, queuing in the supermarket whilst the self-checkouts blurt out error messages), there’s a lot of BEING that creeps into our lives that makes it worth living.

This ‘being’ doesn’t necessarily have to come from anything grandiose or extravagant – it can just be small things that turn all your senses on and remind you exactly who the fuck you are:

-Sitting in a garden with your eyes closed and the sun on your face.

-Kicking those autumn leaves or watching your breath condensate as you go for a walk.

-Seeing a full moon from on top of a hill.

-Listening to the waves wash up against the shore or the ripples and whirls forming and fading away in a river.

Maybe these are clichés but those moments are FREE and – more importantly – they’re REAL.

I haven’t killed myself yet because of all the moments like that I’ve had previously – or that I’m having now as I write this and look outside every so often at a tree blowing in the wind – but also because of all the moments that I know will come.

I know that they will come because life is nothing but a series of moments that we try and thread together with the narratives and stories that we tell ourselves… None of those stories will last, though, but if the moments are real they’ll last forever (because those moments are about being connected to the whole and so they’re real and what’s real is always real).

That doesn’t mean that I’m going to be ‘passive’ about it and just let these moments happen to me (that’s ego) – I’ve learned now that the way to SPEED UP and experience life more fully is to create a vision for life and to go out there and LIVE THE VISION.

Obviously, there are no guarantees in life and I could get run over by a bus tomorrow and taste oblivion but if I don’t then there are things I’m pretty much certain I’ll do one day (unless something goes seriously wrong and then I can either learn to accept it or then kill myself lol).

I think without the vision it’s much harder to find reasons to keep living – the vision doesn’t need to be big but it needs to be something and it needs to be real:

I haven’t killed myself because I want to grow my business and help more people not kill themselves too.

I haven’t killed myself because I want to go to Norway and climb some mountains.

I haven’t killed myself because I want to go to Italy again.

I haven’t killed myself because I want to hold ‘The One’ in my arms and know that life is for the living (yeah, I know that it’s never the ‘One’ and just one of the ones but it’s still an amazing part of the human experience – just like with all the ones that were already the one).

You get the picture.

I suppose it doesn’t even really matter that much if the vision even materialises in reality or not (though if you ACT on it there’s no reason why it won’t – though maybe not exactly as you envisioned given the way the reality waves work and the inevitable gap between expectation and result).

No, what matters is HAVING the vision. I think as long as there’s some kind of picture in your heart then you’ll probably be okay. If you don’t have one just CHOOSE one – it’s not that complicated (though we like complications, especially when we’re already feeling down or depressed because they give us reasons not to move and grow through the FEELINGS that are holding us back and the IDEAS we created and attached to as a response to them).

Maybe that oversimplifies things or sounds delusional – I think that’s only the case if you choose something and then you don’t ACT on it. Without the action you’re deluding yourself; if you choose and then act then you’re really living (so why would you kill yourself?).

There’s loads more real human beings to meet.

Other people can be annoying (an understatement) and it can be easy to become disheartened by some of the time-wasting and drama that they can suck us into if we’re not careful.

Even worse than that, you see the news and it’s easy to lose faith in ‘people’ as a whole: they’re starting wars, stabbing each other, chopping each other’s genitalia off, arguing about politics, and generally causing all kinds of unwholesome havoc wherever they go.

Despite this being the case, this is just ‘people’ in general – it’s not humanity (which involves a little wholeness or soul).

People are just ‘ideas’.

People are just acting out their self-images and the points of view of their ego and causing all kinds of bother because of it.

One reason I haven’t killed myself yet is that, despite all this HORROR, there are still REAL HUMAN BEINGS out there that you can create memories and moments with and more importantly LAUGH YOUR ASS OFF with.

Even in the worst-case scenario – those periods in life when you feel totally disconnected or isolated from ‘The World’ at large – it doesn’t change the fact that there are nearly 8billion (or whatever it is today) people on the planet and that some of them out there are gonna be on your wavelength.

Just because you feel alone doesn’t mean that you are alone – even if you do have to do a little work of not being PASSIVE and actually reaching out or reconnecting to people.

I have family and friends that I think would miss me if I killed myself – actually, I’m pretty sure that some of them definitely would (even some of the ones I might not have spoken to in a while).

It sounds kinda funny when I put it like this but one reason I haven’t killed myself is because I don’t wanna DEPRIVE people of my presence. I’m saying that slightly tongue-in-cheek but it’s true: I’m funny and I have good things to say and I can cheer people up in general or make their lives better with the ‘value’ (overused word) I bring to the relationship.

Why deprive people of that? With great power comes great responsibility and – in some relationships, not necessarily always – I’m awesome.

Of course, on some levels, it’s not just about ‘being awesome’ – some people love you regardless of how awesome you are. In my case I think my Mum and my Gran actually love me unconditionally – despite whatever flaws I have or the stupid things I’ve done and been through that have made them worry in life.

I think if I killed myself now it would just cause them too much pain and even though I wouldn’t be around to feel guilty about it I don’t want to be responsible for that. I suppose this is why a lot of people don’t kill themselves – because they don’t wanna hurt the people they love and that love them. Life is life but we’re all in it together – there’s some comfort in that whether you want it or not.

The way I look at people these days is that every single one of them is an EXPERIENCE (or at least a couple of moments here and there).

Some of them are REAL experiences and some of them are UNREAL experiences – if you’ve read my ‘stuff’ before then you’ll be able to figure out the distinction between the two but the short version is that the real ones bring a spiral of energy as they take you deeper into wholeness and the unreal ones just block things with their own bullshit and there’s no real connection.

One reason I haven’t killed myself yet is because there’s already some real ones in my life that bring the ENERGY – I suppose you could say that energy is life-enhancing and so as long as it’s there and it’s taking me where I need to go then I suppose there’s something to live for.

Yeah, there’s the unreal ‘stuff’ and relationships too but that’s all part of the human experience like we said earlier – you can’t have the sweet without the sour. All of these things just make being ‘human’ human and as long as we have that basic panoply of experiences and the real stuff keeps coming or is around the corner then you might as well keep going.

Human beings are ‘tribal’ creatures (at least that’s what they tell us) and so people (or humans) need people (or humans).

Yeah, you can do it on your own if you really want – it’s not impossible. Overall, though, we need each other to be mirrors of each other and it’s just a lot more ‘fun’ to go out there and share the path with people and share battle stories and get scars together.

There have been times in my life when I’ve been alienated – even from the real ones – because of how things have just worked out or because I’ve had a period of downtime because of illness or whatever else. The real ones are always real, though – you can reach out or they will and then you’ll pick up where you left off like time, space, and causality aren’t even things we have to deal with. Real life is amazing like that.

I guess what I’m saying is that I haven’t killed myself yet because it’s always there – even if sometimes you have to reach out for it. I suppose when I was younger I might’ve fallen into the unhealthy pattern that if it’s real then you don’t need to reach out (and, tbh, in many cases you don’t) – people just get caught up their own lives, though, and sometimes reaching out is just a reminder of what’s real, not a reflection on who you are (that’s ego).

What about those cases where there is nobody to reach out to? What happens when I’m old, for example, and all my friends have dropped dead? Or what if I’m simply a different person now – because I was once unreal and now I’m not – and so I’ve distanced myself from the people and things that once seemed real in order to be true to myself?

Maybe that’s a tad dramatic but you know what I mean – not everybody is connected to people even though everything is connected.

In cases like that I always think that “It’s better alone than in bad company” (or unreal company – even worse).

If I ended up like that then I still wouldn’t kill myself – because there’s always the chance that there’s another real one out there somewhere or – if not – then there’s still gonna be those moments that we talked about up above.

There’s always something or the promise of something REAL and I suppose – at the end of the end of the day – that’s all it really takes to make a life: a taste here and there, the lingering sensations, and then the promise of something more.

You never know what’s around the corner but if you reach around you’ll probably find something and if you don’t you can still be real. Something like that, anyway.

It’s why I’m still here.

If this story inspired or helped you then please share it with others! 🙂

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The Veiled Veil: How to Escape the Matrix

Published on

Life Philosophy/Mindset/Psychology

Escape the Matrix

One of the most important things that you can embrace about life if you value your freedom is the idea that:

“THE WORLD IS NOT REALITY” (quoting my own books, Personal Revolutions and Shadow Life).

If you don’t step back to acknowledge this then two things can happen, both of which hold you back and limit your capacity for FREEDOM and its expression:

You start to limit yourself INTERNALLY because you take a sense of identity on board that is given to you as a conceptual set of ideas from ‘The World’ (which isn’t real).
You start to limit yourself EXTERNALLY because you start to see external barriers to your own growth and progress towards your goals (that also aren’t real because they’re rooted in your perceptions of ‘The World’).

This isn’t to say that ‘The World’ isn’t a thing that doesn’t exist (in the sense of at least being ‘there’) but it’s something that only really exists as a consequence of human ideas about life and what it ‘should’ be.

It’s a kind of MATRIX that exists as the sum total of all our collective doubts and fears about life that we project over whatever is really ‘out there’ in reality.

Nothing ‘wrong’ with that and it’s just something that human beings do in order to ‘survive’ whatever they’ve already been through (just like we do at an individual level by creating an ego for ourselves in order to keep surviving life based on what we’ve already seen of it).

The problem, however, is that a lot of the IDEAS we come up with about life and what it is are actually limited and unreal because the thinking that caused them in the first place is actually DISTORTED and untrue because of the natural limitations of being a human being.

That might sound a bit much but all it means is that the DEFAULT way of thinking and being in the world for a human being is often more about SURVIVING LIFE rather than THRIVING in life (something that you’ve probably heard before).

This being the case, we create a collective MATRIX for ourselves to live in that allows us to go through the motions of living but never to actually live in the REALEST possible way.

Perhaps that’s fine because not everybody is ready to pay the cost of living a real life and many people are ‘happy’ to just go through the motions and to take things at face value.

If you’re one of the Real Ones that feels like there might be more to life than just ‘the Matrix’ of the World, then keep reading because this article is going to simplify your relationship to it and give you a few simple techniques and strategies to start breaking out and finding freedom again.

You only get one life so there’s no point holding yourself back and being INDIMIDATED by a world that doesn’t even exist and living a life that never truly makes you feel alive.

Here we go:

Human beings need to be WHOLE if they want to be real but – unfortunately – we’re ‘made’ of FRAGMENTS.

Before we get into this, you need to understand an important difference between WHOLENESS and FRAGMENTATION. If you’ve read some of my ‘stuff’ before then you’ll know what this means but if you haven’t here’s a super quick overview:

Essentially, human life becomes more ‘complicated’ than we often want it to be because we are torn (as a result of our bodies and our social programming) between two states of being.

The first state, is what I would call a REAL state which is a state where we’re constantly moving towards WHOLENESS in ourselves by connecting to our true values and intentions, uncovering and ACCEPTING hidden ‘parts’ of ourselves that may have been disowned in childhood (like certain emotions etc.), and generally putting ourselves on a path to be more authentic.

This real state will also see us moving towards more WHOLENESS in relation to the world around us: for example, by having less barriers erected between ourselves and others so we can have more authentic relationships, finding people that share our values, and understanding the similarities between ourselves and every other human being on the planet rather than just being obsessed with and motivated by the differences.

Finally, the real state will allow us to keep going into a deeper relationship with REALITY. All this really means in simple terms is that we embrace our inherent CONNECTION to life as a whole and to the systems within systems (ad infinitum) of the universe as a whole. This doesn’t necessarily need to mean anything ‘mystical’ – it just means that we all play a role in the universal unfolding of the universe as ONE relationship.

When we are able to live in this REAL STATE then we’re able to keep flowing and growing with life and to generally avoid a great deal of friction, frustration, and misery in our lives. This is because we’re not holding ourselves back with illusory mental blocks or ideas that cause us to act as something that we’re not.

This is where FRAGMENTATION comes in – fragmentation is just anything that causes us to think, feel, and act like we’re DISCONNECTED from ourselves, the world, and reality. This is almost always because we have PERCEIVED these things incorrectly and because we have INTERPRETED these perceptions incorrectly on top of that (this is the VEILED VEIL which we’ll discuss in more detail in a second).

If you tend to CHOOSE fragmentation over wholeness then you will end up removing yourself from reality (because reality is ultimately about working with what’s WHOLE) and you will end up causing yourself to live in a state of FRICTION that will eventually turn to frustration and misery.

The most common form of fragmentation that the majority of us have to contend with is our own SELF-IMAGE (aka ‘Ego’ in the language I use) and the way that we separate and DISCONNECT ourselves from the whole of ourselves, the world, and reality in order to protect it (because we think protecting it will help us – which it might in the short-term but only causes more problems in the long-term).

For example:

At the level of ourselves, being ATTACHED to a certain fragmented image of ourselves cause us to DISCONNECT from all of the emotional ‘stuff’, values, or intentions that are real about us but which go against that self-image (usually because we want to hide from those things for whatever reason – usually social conditioning and self-hypnosis).

At the level of the world, being attached to this fragmented self-image (that we’re separate and not the ‘same’ as others) causes us to create unreal NARRATIVES about our place in the world and to start playing ROLES that are disconnected from reality (usually either acting as ‘more than’ or ‘less than’ human and playing either a ‘hero’ or a ‘victim’, respectively).

At the level of reality, being attached to this image causes EGO RESISTANCE that causes us to resist things about reality that cause us to grow more WHOLE – for example, we may resist change, we may resist facing our weaknesses, we may resist the fact that time is precious because we’re going to be dead one day.

These are all examples but the basic principle we all need to follow is that – to be a ‘happy’ human being – then we need to consciously make a CHOICE to move towards wholeness and connection despite there being a natural drive towards FRAGMENTATION inside all of us.

When the will to fragmentation starts to win, we just end up being ENSLAVED to the Matrix of the world because we believe that the world is reality and the identity we’ve created to survive in it is the truth about us.

‘Escaping’ and living our REAL lives means that we understand the unreality of fragmentation and make a shift into a REAL STATE that allows the world to slip away from our experience of our fragmented ideas about ourselves so that we can move towards wholeness (without expecting to be fully whole, just embracing wholeness as a direction to keep MOVING in).

This means battling our own biological and cultural limitations and making sure we step into what’s whole rather than just acting according to the fragments of ourselves that we picked up from our fragmented perception and interpretation of ‘The World’.

The Veiled Veil: Limited Perception and Interpretation

This is where we come to an inescapable problem of FRAGMENTATION that every human being on the planet has to contend with: the VEILED VEIL.

The Veiled Veil is what emerges when you’re in a fragmented body on a fragmented planet and when you have a machine in your head that uses fragmented concepts to try and make sense of everything it perceives (that ‘machine’ is your brain, btw).

Even though the ‘truth’ about reality is that everything is WHOLE and just one system relating to itself in different ways, human beings have TWO different levels of fragmentation that can block them from experiencing this wholeness to the greatest extent possible.

Limited perception.
Limited interpretation.

When these two things come together you have what this article is referring to as the Veiled Veil.

It’s called a ‘veil’ because it places a layer of fragmentation between ourselves and our experience of life as a whole. It’s called a ‘veiled’ veil because it doesn’t just do this once but two times.

At the first level of PERCEPTION, we experience the wholeness of life as being divided and fragmented because of our BODIES.

The fact that we’re in bodies in the first place means that our perception is limited.

My body is positioned in a different place in time and space to yours and so will have a slightly different perception of the WHOLE to you. Furthermore, all bodies are incapable of perceiving everything around them – for example, unless you have eyes in the back of your head you can’t see what’s behind you as you read this.

Nothing wrong with that, of course, it’s just the way it is but what it means in terms of wholeness versus fragmentation is that the primary information you bring in through your senses is completely FRAGMENTED from the very outset. To think that you’re perceiving the truth is a mistake…you’re just perceiving (like the rest of us).

The second level of fragmentation of the Veiled Veil is our INTERPRETATIONS of what we perceive. Because what we perceive is already fragmented, we’re already disconnected from the reality of the whole – but we complicate and fragment things even more by also being BIASED (consciously and unconsciously) in the way that we interpret things we’ve perceived.

This usually comes back to our own relationship to ourselves and our own emotional ‘stuff’ – for example, if we had a ‘bad’ relationship with somebody in the past then we’ll be more likely to interpret what they’re doing in the present as being ‘bad’ too. Another example might be that we CHOOSE to believe something about somebody because it fits in with the way that we want to see ourselves (the ‘ego’ stuff mentioned above).

Either way, what this all boils down to is that the NATURE OF REALITY is wholeness but the way that we perceive and interpret life as a default – from behind the Veiled Veil – is FRAGMENTED.

‘The Matrix’ is just what happens when we choose to continue believing in fragments in our own lives and when we choose to believe that the collective fragmentation of ‘The World’ is real also.

To free yourself, you need to condition yourself to step back from the influence of the Veiled Veil as much as possible.

Survival Value and the MATRIX

Just to be clear, we need the Veiled Veil so that we can survive life on earth but it isn’t the TRUTH about life – it’s the MATRIX that keeps us plugged into an unreal world that holds us back from REAL LIFE.

If you want to start freeing yourself then you need to improve your relationship at the two levels that the Veiled Veil causes you to buy into unnecessary fragmentation: the level of perception and the level of interpretation.

What we can do: Limited Perception

You need to find the EDGE and taste WHOLENESS

It’s probably impossible for a human being to live in a complete state of wholeness for their whole lives – this is because we’re in fragmented bodies in a fragmented world and because we will always have emotional ‘stuff’ to work through that distorts our perceptions and interpretations from time-to-time.

Even so, it’s more than possible to have a TASTE of wholeness that will permeate into the rest of your life and give you a direction to move in and return to if the ‘matrix’ starts to suck you back into ‘the world’ (and the unreal version of yourself that ‘lives’ there to keep the illusion going).

This is something I’ve talked about a ton in my books and in the 7-Day Personality Transplant System Shock for Realness and Life Purpose but the short-version is that you need to put yourself in situations that get you out of your head and allow you to feel completely CONNECTED to your surroundings.

Some examples:

-Riding a motorbike fast.

-Making love to somebody.

-Climbing a mountain.

-Getting in a flow state with a creative project.

-Etc. (the list is endless).

In these kind of cases, you will experience being completely whole and as one with life itself. This means that you managed to find your EDGE and to get out of your ideas of yourself – in other words, there is no separation between you and life. It’s just life experiencing itself.

The more of these kind of experiences you have (Abraham Maslow called them Peak Experiences) the more you will understand your REAL IDENTITY beyond the Veiled Veil.

You need to think in terms of systems

Thinking in terms of systems can also help you to perceive things in a way that is more ‘reality-aligned’ and not limited quite as much by the Veiled Veil.

A ‘system’ in this context is just a series of interrelated parts sharing a connection.

Seeing things in this way, allows you to make a shift towards wholeness instead of just being caught up in the ‘default’ way of the body to limit everything to separate parts.

As a simple example – right now, as you’re reading this, we are not just too ‘separate’ entities but have created a new system that exists between writer and reader. That means that in this moment, we are ‘One’ and the exchange between us is a system. From that system, something ‘real’ might emerge.

That might sound simple but seeing things in this way – and making a conscious choice to remind ourselves to do so – allows us to see things in a way that’s more aligned with the natural WHOLENESS of reality.

Other examples:

-If you’re in a group of people, then you’re not just all separate individuals; you’re all ‘part’ of the ‘group’ system. Seeing it as ‘one’ thing allows things to flow better between the ‘parts’ (people involved) and to allow something bigger to emerge.

-If you’re walking through a forest (or whatever), then you’re part of that system whilst you’re in it (and even when you’re not, tbh). This helps you to see how connected you are to it – even if you’re only playing a small part, you’re still ONE with the system (and it’s only your perception that makes you disconnected if you get caught up in the default way of being).

-If you have a pet, then you and the pet form a new system and this connects you to each other on a deep REAL level. You might not see this if you’re in the ‘default’ way of perceiving but seeing it as a mutually beneficial system allows you to go deeper into it.

These are simple examples and it might seem almost trivial to make this shift but seeing things as systems allows you to step out of the fragmented view of life and to start moving more towards WHOLENESS (which is always more real and allows you to feel more ALIVE).

Train yourself to look for WHOLENESS instead of FRAGMENTATION and to act on what’s whole.

In short, you need to train yourself to overcome the limited perception of your body (which of course you can’t do completely because you’re in your body) and to start looking for the real connections between things.

How far you choose to take this is of course up to you but it might just be about asking yourself from time to time:

“Am I CHOOSING wholeness or fragmentation right now?”

You don’t have to be perfectionistic about it but it will usually be clear which direction you’re moving in.

Act in a way that moves you towards wholeness and your life will usually reflect what you want to a deeper degree.

Learn to BREATHE

Focusing on your breath from time-to-time is another great way to bring yourself back to wholeness.

Again, this doesn’t have to be anything complicated and you don’t need to meditate for hours at a time (unless you want to). Your breath is a great metaphor for some of the things we’re talking about here, though, because it’s connected to the WHOLE.

Your breath is connected to the whole of your body as it carries oxygen throughout the whole SYSTEM. More than that, the breath also connects the inner and outer world and so can show you that you’re not just an independent entity but interdependent with reality as a whole (the breath you breathe is shared with all the other living things around you, etc.).

There’s loads of good stuff out there about breathing but a simple technique is just to do 7-11 breathing when you want to remind yourself to get out of your head: you breathe in for 7 seconds and out for 11.

What we can do: Limited Interpretation

You need to stop treating opinions as facts.

At the Veiled Veil level of interpretations one of the easiest things you can do is to learn to tell the difference between opinions and facts.

A lot of the time, we interpret things as meaning whatever we want them to mean because a general rule of life is that MOST PEOPLE BELIEVE WHAT THEY WANT TO BELIEVE (see below).

This could be about anything but the short-version is that whatever is going on with their relationships with themselves and their emotional ‘stuff’ causes people to act irrationally and to believe whatever will support their egos, justify their fears, give them hope, etc. etc.

When people slip into this unreal way of being they come up with all kinds of skewed distortions about life in the form of narratives and conceptual ideas that they treat as FACTS.

This gives them short-term comfort but in the long-term it just causes them to become more FRAGMENTED and to live lives that they don’t really want to be living.

If you have the emotional resilience, then a way to get around this is to be HONEST with yourself about whether or not what you think is just an OPINION or if it’s an actual fact (true for all about REALITY).

If it’s just an opinion then all you have on your hands is an INTERPRETATION of reality. That’s fine just as long as you are open to changing this interpretation if need be as you keep moving forward and growing more REAL.

You need to realise that MOST PEOPLE BELIEVE WHAT THEY WANT TO BELIEVE (and try to kill this tendency in yourself).

Most people don’t believe in the TRUTH, they believe in what they want to believe in order to feel good about themselves and life. If you’re not careful then you might also fall into this trap (as the old saying goes “ignorance is bliss” but if you want to live a REAL life then you need to be truth-facing, not truth-avoiding).

People believe what they want to believe because it’s easier than facing difficult truths about life and the people that share it with us. It also gives us a kind of false ‘hope’ that we’ll get whatever it is that we want and need in the way that we want.

Here are some examples:

-Somebody might believe that they can grow their business by simply ‘manifesting’ clients or by finding a quick fix (like posting on social media once a week and watching the clients come crawling). Both of those go against reality but people WANT to believe it works like that because they WANT to believe they can do it without doing any WORK (people hate that).

-A guy might go to a coffee shop every day and he develops a crush on the girl that works there. He WANTS to believe that she feels the same way so he starts to tell himself a story in his head that she’s madly in love with him and he starts looking for evidence that this is the case (when really she’s just being nice because she wants the tips).

-Somebody wants to believe that she can lose weight fast in only 5 minutes a day by buying some MAGIC BULLET from the shopping channel on TV (do people still use those?). Of course, in reality there is no magic bullet but people WANT to believe in them because they don’t wanna do the WORK.

-Somebody is in a relationship with an irrational emotional retard but wants to believe “they’ll change” because they don’t want to do the difficult emotional work of breaking up, finding a new partner, accepting that the love wasn’t as deep as they thought, etc. etc.

-Etc.

These are just examples but the POINT is that people interpret life to fit into what they WANT from life. That’s fine if you wanna live in Cloud-cuckoo Land but if you wanna get actual RESULTS then you need to understand that this is just a case of you skewing things from behind the VEILED VEIL in order to justify your own BS.

You need to give up CONTROL FREAKERY

Another thing you can do to manage your life in a more real way at the level of interpretation is to stop trying to CONTROL everything.

If you lapse into CONTROL FREAKERY it’s always because you need life to be a certain way to justify your own interpretations of life. That would be fine if interpretations were the truth but because they’re not, it just causes all kinds of tension in your life, ruins your relationships, and stops you growing.

In the very best case, control freakery will just lead to you managing to create a bubble for yourself to live in but this bubble will always burst when reality creeps back in.

Instead of trying to control everything – which is always EGO – you need to switch to an approach where you can handle UNCERTAINTY and keep growing with it.

The TRUTH about life is that “the only certainty is uncertainty” but this means having to also face uncertainty in yourself (which control freaks hate which is why they’re control freaks in the first place).

When people have a lot of shame, guilt, or trauma that they don’t want to face, they create INTERPRETATIONS of life and try to hide from it behind a false certainty. If you’re a control freak, you need to accept that facing this stuff is just the way back to WHOLENESS and will give you the real experience of life you want.

You need to ensure you have an attitude that keeps you LEARNING

In short, your way out of the Matrix (which is really your relationship with yourself) is to stop acting like you know everything and to put yourself on a path of LEARNING.

Acting like you know everything is the same as acting like your perceptions and interpretations are completely true. Because reality constantly changes and evolves around us this is an UNREAL STATE to be in that just causes problems (including anxiety and depression in many cases).

The REAL approach is to accept and even VALUE uncertainty without letting it affect our own levels of self-acceptance so we can keep growing real and become more WHOLE.

Learning to learn means we can let go of our attachment to interpretations and:

-Not have to worry about being seen as ‘right’ all the time (a form of Control Freakery)

-Not needing to be perfect

-Not being afraid to change our minds

-Etc.

In other words, we won’t have to live our lives defending the fragmentation that makes us miserable in the first place!

You need to stop getting involved in unnecessary conflict.

Finally, developing a REAL relationship with your own interpretations of yourself, the world, and reality allows you to step back from engaging in unnecessary conflict (aka DRAMA & BS).

When you know that the TRUTH is whole and that people can only argue about their INTERPRETATIONS of it, then you don’t need to argue about your own opinions and you don’t need to be bothered about other people’s (whether they’re positive or negative).

Somebody calls you an asshole? Just their interpretation (which might be accurate).

Somebody doesn’t like your political opinions? Cool, they’re just your opinions and they’re entitled to theirs.

Somebody thinks their method of doing [whatever] is better even though it gets the same results? No problem, carry on.

All that really matters is what’s either gonna move you to more wholeness or bring more fragmentation into your life.

If somebody shares something – positive or negative –that helps you on that journey then take it on board. Otherwise, just smile, nod, and move on because the TRUTH can handle itself.

Bring it all together by growing real

The long and short of all this is that you can keep pushing through and EXPERIENCE life deeply by growing REAL:

Choose a purpose that keeps you moving towards wholeness and shattering your interpretations of yourself, the world, and reality (so you can remove layers of fragmentation and become more REAL) on the way there.

As you become more real, you become more whole, and the rest will fall into place. Get in touch if you need some help figuring out how to do it.

Conclusion

You can either live life in an unreal state and be miserable or you can get REAL by pushing through your limits and shattering the VEILED VEIL and leaving the Matrix.

If this story inspired or helped you then please share it with others! 🙂

Sign up for my mailing list if you want to stay in touch (you’ll get access to the 7-Day Personality Transplant for uncovering your life purpose):

If you want to find your own real life, start moving towards unconditional acceptance, and finding a sense of purpose then check out this 7-Day Course that you can start right now:

The Black Rose: “Gimme Something Real or GTFO”

Published on

Life Philosophy/Mindset/Psychology/Relationships

Intro

The easiest way to build a real life for yourself is to learn to spot the difference between real and unreal in ourselves and others (so we can change, ignore or walk away from the unreal stuff).

In this context, ‘real’ means that you’re moving towards WHOLENESS via your true potential, you’re not blocking yourself with negative or irrational thoughts that distort your view of yourself, the world, and reality, and you’re not engaging in DRAMA or unhealthy ego dances with people that don’t support you and your growth (and who you don’t support in return).

Ultimately, this boils down to two incredibly important things:

Having the best possible relationship with yourself.
Having the best possible relationship with others

Really, these two things feed off each other because if you don’t work to ACCEPT yourself then you’ll never be able to provide the most amount of value you can to the world and have the best possible relationships with the people in it.

Because relationships are so important to living a ‘good’ (REAL) life, we need to be able to understand which relationships are worth keeping, which are worth ditching, and which are worth healing if need be.

This article gives you a simple but effective metaphor for just that.

Here we go:

Tending To Your Garden

In the metaphor that we’re going to run with, your life is a garden; you are the gardener and your job is to ensure that you take responsibility for making sure that your ‘garden’ is more populated with flowers (roses in this example, but you can use whatever you want) more than weeds.

This means that you need to realise that you have POWER over the garden and that if you take RESPONSIBILITY and make REAL CHOICES then this garden will be one that you actually want to spend time in.

If you don’t acknowledge your POWER, refuse to take RESPONSIBILITY and become passive and just let things happen or let nature take its course, then your garden will become overrun with WEEDS and it won’t be the kind of place you actually enjoy being in.

Roses or Weeds? That’s the basic choice for all of us but we have to step up and actually MAKE THE CHOICE otherwise we just end up living a life surrounded by unreal relationships and all of the DRAMA and BS that comes with them as everybody tries to uphold their own ego ‘stuff’ and act like an emotional retard (that’s what ‘weeds’ do).

In short then, the quality of your life will be affected by the quality of the relationships you CHOOSE to cultivate and nurture – first, the relationship with YOURSELF and then:

ROSES – the REAL relationships that add mutual VALUE to the lives of the parties involved.

WEEDS – the UNREAL relationships that don’t add mutual value and bring drama and unnecessary conflict.

Gimme Something Real or GTFO

Sometimes, we don’t realise how much power we have over our own ‘gardens’ and our ability to change the scenery.

All this means in practical terms is that it’s up to us who we ALLOW into our lives or not and that we’re more than capable of setting boundaries by saying “NO” to the unreal relationships and people that hold us back.

This might sounds strange if you’re emotionally attached to certain unhealthy ‘weeds’ that aren’t serving you but – actually, as an ADULT human being – you can kick absolutely anybody out of your life for whatever reason you want (that isn’t a recommendation that you should but just a reminder that it’s your CHOICE and you can do what you want without having to JUSTIFY yourself).

Here’s a list of ‘weeds’ that you can start to remove from your garden anytime you like:

-Fake friends that only seem to take from you and never give anything in return.

-People who don’t share your values or moral code and act in shady ways that go against your integrity.

-Family members that keep trying to fit you in a box or cause drama because of their own ego ‘stuff’.

-People you’ve outgrown for whatever reason and that are holding you back.

-Irrational people or emotional retards that are constantly causing trouble or problems for you.

-People that have stabbed you in the back too many times.

-Basically: anybody that you feel doesn’t BELONG in your garden (based on your true values, intentions, and moral code).

Get the trimmers out and say goodbye to those weeds.*

*This is an amazing thing and very empowering but it also means that if you act like a Weed people can trim YOU from their garden.

This doesn’t mean that you should get rid of anybody or everybody that annoys you – if you do that then it’s probably just your ego driving you and you’ll end up LONELY.

In the cases where people are clearly a drain on your time, energy, and attention, though – i.e. acting like bonafide WEEDS – then don’t be shy to step up and set a VALUE on your life that it actually deserves.

*Snip*.

A simple – and very effective – rule of thumb to keep in mind here is as follows:

“GIMME SOMETHING REAL OR GTFO”

Make this one of your official standards for living your life and ensuring that the people you CHOOSE to keep around are bringing the REAL stuff (in exchange for you giving them the real stuff too).

How To Spot A Rose:

If you spot a Rose in your garden then you need to do the work of nurturing the relationship and keeping it there.

This means giving something real in return (quality time, energy, and attention), appreciating its value, and ensuring that you keep it away from weeds that might be trying to KILL the relationship.

Here’s how you can spot a ‘Rose’:

They bring joy to your life

A rose will bring a sense of joy to your life by allowing you to see life CLEARY and to be your REAL SELF.

Energy

This joy will bring energy to your life and make you feel more alive on account of the relationship being LIFE-ENHANCING.

Laughter

Laughter often comes from a sense of shared TRUTH and that’s exactly what the REAL relationships are built on.

They support your goals and your purpose

The roses in your ‘garden’ actually want you to reach your goals and to move towards your life purpose because they have an ABUNDANCE mind set and your success is their success.

They help you learn and grow

The roses also realise that you won’t stay the same forever and that as life moves and those reality waves sweep over you then you’ll learn and grow into the next evolution of your realness (i.e. you’ll go more deeply into WHOLENESS – connection to yourself, the world, and reality).

In contrast, life is a little different when you let the weeds take over:

How To Spot A Weed:

They constantly make you miserable

There’s hardly and joy in your life when the weeds are involved because they’re unreal. This unreality brings FRICTION in the form of drama, frustration, and eventual MISERY.

They DRAIN your energy

The unreal nature of this misery-inducing activity will eventually drain you of energy and you’ll constantly feel depleted and lethargic around them (that’s what happens when you ALLOW the weeds to wrap themselves around you and to restrict your breathing).

There’s hardly ever any laughter

All this misery and untruth is hardly then environment for laughter (but there’ll be plenty of arguments and dramatic moments).

They belittle your goals and try to derail your purpose

The weeds want you to feel bad about yourself because they feel bad about themselves too. “Misery loves company”, after all, and so the weeds don’t want you to take action that might fill your life with more roses.

They don’t want you to learn or grow (usually so they can CONTROL you in some way and keep you the same).

Furthermore, a weed will constantly try and convince you not to grow or to do new things. This is because they don’t want you to OUTGROW them because if you do they might not have a hold on you anymore – it’s about CONTROL (so they’ll often use SHAME to try and stop you growing and GUILT to stop you doing things that are real to you as a way to convince you to stay the ‘same’).

Perhaps by reading that you’ll have already been able to see that some of the people in your life are ‘Roses’ and others are ‘Weeds’.

What you do with that information is up to you, of course, but in general you need to nurture the relationships with the roses and use them so that everybody can grow more real and you need to get rid of the weeds in whatever way works for you.

There is an exception to the rule, though:

Enter the BLACK ROSE

Sometimes, you’ll meet people in your ‘garden’ that are hard to categorise as either a Weed or a Rose. Sometimes, they appear to be a friend; sometimes, they appear to be a foe. In this case, what you have is a Black Rose.

The Black Rose appears when you’ve taken a passive approach to letting people in your life but don’t get close enough to figure out if they have the potential to be a Rose that can add value to your life or if they’re just a Weed in disguise waiting to complicate things.

In this case, things could go either way – it’s up to you to take an active role towards making the relationship work for you (or stepping back if there are clear signs that the Black Rose will reveal it’s true nature as a Weed).

There are three main ways to handle a Black Rose appearing in your garden:

How to handle the Black Rose:

Figure out if their ‘good’ side is real or not.

Sometimes, the Black Rose will look like a nice addition to your garden but the closer you look the more you realise that appearances can be deceptive.

Maybe, for example, they will constantly let you down by saying one thing but doing another. This mismatch between words and actions is suggestive that they are being untrue in some way.

Another sign might be that they constantly gossip or say negative things about the other Roses in your garden. This is a sign that they’re just a WEED in disguise trying to destroy things from the inside out.

Obviously, you should probably try and give people the benefit of the doubt but if the Black Rose gives too many signs that the ‘good’ is just a mask for weed-like behaviour then you should be wary (and be prepared to get the pruners out when things get more intense).

Figure out if their ‘bad’ side is real or not.

Sometimes, the Black Rose might just look ‘bad’ on the surface of things because they’re moody or have a strange sense of humour or whatever. It’s possible that this is just because they’re going through some ‘stuff’ and so you might be able to tend to it and turn it into a real relationship.

This depends on how much energy you’re willing to invest overall but it’s a good way to add more roses to your garden if you give the right people the benefit of the doubt.

Figure out if they’re ‘neutral’ or not.

Sometimes, a Black Rose is actually just ‘neutral’ and the best thing to do with it – if they’re not bothering you – is to just leave them in a corner of the garden where they’re just getting on with their own thing.

This applies to people that are ambivalent towards you and that you’re ambivalent towards (basically acquaintances on the periphery of your social network) – if you see them, you can say “hello” or whatever but you don’t have a particularly meaningful relationship with them and neither or you are really interested in one (for no particular reason – just how life is sometimes).

Conclusion

Your life is in your hands but you need to know that you have a responsibility to nurture the ‘garden’ and see things clearly.

You can do this by remembering “Gimme something real or GTFO” and making sure that you’re doing the best you can to cultivate the real relationships and let the unreal ones fall by the wayside.

If this story inspired or helped you then please share it with other! 🙂

Sign up for my mailing list if you want to stay in touch (you’ll get access to the 7-Day Personality Transplant for uncovering your life purpose):

If you want to find your own real life, start moving towards unconditional acceptance, and finding a sense of purpose then check out this 7-Day Course that you can start right now:

The Faces of Humanity: How We’re All Made Up of Different Versions of the Same Person

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Coaching/Life Philosophy/Mindset/Psychology

Live Without Your Mask

There’s a (pretty) famous Japanese proverb that talks about how we all have 3 faces. It goes like this:

“The first face, you show to the world. The second face, you show to your close friends, and your family. The third face, you never show anyone.”

I think it’s true, but – actually – we can take it a little deeper by exploring how there are more than three faces that the average person ‘has’ and also where they come from and why.

Perhaps even more importantly than raising our AWARENESS of this ‘stuff’, we can also ask ourselves what we need to ACCEPT, in the face of these faces, as well as what ACTION we can take to improve our lives and grow more real accordingly.

(Awareness -> Acceptance -> Action – it works every time: see ‘Shadow Life: Freedom from BS in an Unreal World’ if you wanna apply this to your life as a whole).

If you read this article, it will help you to make sense of the MECHANICS of your relationships with yourself and the world and to start unblocking yourself and moving forward towards the only thing that really matters: an experience of WHOLENESS (or ‘connection’) to yourself, the world, and reality.

The ‘problem’ with all of these faces we each have is that we either think they don’t ‘exist’ or we think that only one of them ‘exists’ and try to ignore other parts of ourselves.

Actually, it’s completely normal and healthy to have multiple versions of ourselves in different contexts and situations because different contexts and situations allow us to express certain REAL qualities about ourselves that we might not otherwise be able to express.

Everything real about us is always within us – sometimes, it just needs a little bit of help to express itself.

The ‘FACES’ we show the world aren’t necessarily the same as masks (which mean that we’re ‘hiding’) – although, of course, they sometimes can be if we have an unreal relationship with our own emotional ‘stuff’ (shame, guilt, and trauma in the shadow or fear, pride, and desire of the ego, etc.).

All of us are FLUID because reality is in FLUX – sometimes, we just forget that and this can cause confusion if we think that we’re supposed to be ‘static’ (which is just UNREAL).

These are the most common faces of the ‘average’ human being (if such a thing exists). As usual, they fit into the only three levels that anything can fit into: The Self, the World, and Reality.

How many do you recognise in yourself?

Self-Facing Faces

At the level of our relationship with our ‘Self’ we have four faces (at least). Whatever it is that we really are is what EMERGES in the interplay between the four of them.

Face 1: Who You Wanna Be (To Yourself)

The first face we all have is the ‘Future Facing Face’ (or whatever you wanna call it). This is basically the face we carry of the person we want to BECOME.

This is comprised of all kinds of things that are related to the desired future we have for ourselves and we have to constantly SHOW ourselves this face in order to remind ourselves of where we want or even INTEND to be going.

It is comprised of things like:

-Our standards

-Our goals

-Our ambitions

-Our vision

-Etc.

Some people show themselves this face more than others and – indeed – you have to keep showing yourself this face in order to BECOME this face.

The reason that a lot of people become stuck or stagnate in life is because they haven’t cultivated this ‘face’ and given themselves a direction to move in.

That’s when other less ‘positive’ (or – at least – future facing faces) faces tend to get a hold of them and weigh their sense of identity down in an unreal direction.

The only ‘problem’ with this ‘Future Facing Face’ is that if we have an unhealthy relationship with our own emotional ‘stuff’ (shame, guilt, and trauma etc.) then the future becomes a projection of our EGO, rather than anything REAL (because we are creating goals and a vision of ourselves based on the fundamental assumptions of denying who we really are as a way of avoiding facing our shadow ‘stuff’ etc.)

Face 2: Who You Think You Are Now (To Yourself)

The second ‘face’ that most of us have is the face of who we think we are NOW (i.e. in current reality). The keyword there is ‘think’ because it’s a product of our thoughts and mindset, not who we necessarily are in TRUTH.

Some of our thoughts might be ‘real’ or accurate (i.e. aligned with actual, valid truth) but often they aren’t because we get caught up in our INTERPRETATIONS of life, rather than life itself.

Anyway, this is the ‘Now Face’ and it’s a product of all of our self-assessments and conclusions about ourselves based on where we’ve been, where we think we’re going (based on the Future Facing Face), and the ways in which we JUDGE ourselves in the present to varying degrees of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (which is what all judgements deal with).

It’s ultimately, a product of the STORY we tell ourselves about who we happen to be right now.

The interesting thing (imo) – and the thing that makes the biggest difference to the quality of our lives – is not necessarily the STORY itself, but the WAY IN WHICH WE TELL THIS STORY.

If we tell the story in a way that is fixed as a FINAL DRAFT then we will stop ourselves moving and take ourselves out of reality (and be less likely to show ourselves a real Future Facing Face because we have conditioned ourselves to be PASSIVE).

If we tell ourselves the story in way where it is constantly being written and updated then we will be more likely to keep learning and move into real life (whatever that is in the context of our own lives).

Face 3: Who You Fear You Might Be

The third face is the ‘Fear Face’ – this is the face of who you FEAR you might be. This is usually shown to us when our emotional ‘stuff’ gets a hold of us and distorts our view of ourselves by our SHAME, GUILT, or TRAUMA (or a combination of the three).

When shame distorts our vision of yourself, it will affect your view of both your ‘Future Facing Face’ and your ‘Now Face’ because it will take unresolved emotional ‘stuff’ from the PAST and cause you to stop trusting and believing in yourself (so these three faces are ultimately about the Future, the Present, and the Past and your real or unreal relationship with each).

This SHAME will tell you that you aren’t the type of person to be able to get the future that you want.

It will tell you that who you are right NOW is no good.

This is just your FEAR talking and the unresolved emotions you carry within yourself that make you feel like you’re not good enough. The FEAR FACE is the one that you show yourself when you start to believe that this shame is the truth about you (because you haven’t started to DISSOLVE the shame by facing REALITY and have instead become driven by it).

It’s the same with GUILT and TRAUMA:

When guilt distorts your vision, you convince yourself that you’re a ‘bad’ person in the present and that you ‘don’t deserve’ the future that you want. This is just your emotional ‘stuff’ showing you your FEAR FACE.

Trauma – which makes us feel powerless – will distort your ability to tap into your own power and will make you feel that you can’t CREATE the real future that your (real) ‘Future Facing Face’ wants to you to move towards (because it will distort your view and tell you that you’re passive).

There is more variation and complexity here but – ultimately – you have a face you show yourself in your weaker moments that is purely comprised of your FEARS about yourself.

This is ‘normal’ and part of the human experience but the more overpowering your emotions are the more you will show yourself this face and start to believe that it’s who ‘you’ really are.

If you listen enough and believe it, that’s when you stop moving and stop growing REAL and hide behind ego instead (which is just a mental box you put yourself in to keep all your emotions and ‘shadow’ stuff at bay).

Face 4: Your Shadow Face / The Unknown

Beneath the surface of all of the faces we do show ourselves from time to time, there is another UNKNOWN FACE that bubbles away beneath the conscious experience of ourselves and that drives the course of our lives without us even knowing (not consciously at least).

This is our SHADOW FACE and it’s comprised of all the different things about ourselves (qualities, goals, ideas, ‘parts’, etc.) that we have at some stage in our lives cast aside and disowned as being ‘unacceptable’.

This usually happens because the World CONDITIONED us to believe that certain things shouldn’t exist and then we hypnotised ourselves to live as though they don’t – this being the case, over the course of our lives we try and act like these things don’t exist or suppress them (with socially unacceptable emotions like ‘rage’, for example).

The TRUTH of the matter, however, is that these ‘hidden’ parts of ourselves are just as REAL as the parts that we do face and – as what’s real is always real – these parts never go anywhere.

In fact, they’re not even ‘parts’, they’re just certain EXPRESSIONS of what we are as a WHOLE. We just conditioned ourselves not to EXPRESS them.

Even though we try and hide this ‘Unknown Face’ from ourselves, the ‘parts’ that comprise it never go anywhere and continue to call for our attention (so we can integrate them) from beneath the surface of ourselves.

One of the most common ways that these parts ‘call out’ to us is through PROJECTION.

All that means – at the simplest level – is that we try and hide these parts behind the CONSCIOUS FACES we show ourselves but UNCONSCIOUSLY we project them onto the world outside of us.

A classic way of determining this kind of thing is to look at what annoys us in other people. For example, if somebody’s RAGE annoys you – it’s probably because you haven’t ACCEPTED your own rage that’s bubbling beneath the surface of your conscious faces.

What this means in the context of this article is that we all have a FOURTH FACE: the Shadow Face that is shown to us as a reflection of ourselves in the world or as a projection reflected back from others (if we can decode the matrix).

Facing this ‘Unknown’ face is the best chance we have at growing more WHOLE (instead of just being fragmented by only facing the fragmented, surface level faces created as a response to keep the shadow ‘stuff’ at bay).

World-Facing Faces

There are two main types of World-Facing Faces that we show the world (and which are affected by our relationships with ourselves and our ‘Self-Facing Faces’):

Face 1: The Character You Play In MOST Social Situations To Survive Them (Who You Show To Strangers/People You Just Met or Want to Keep at A Distance).

The first face that we have for the WORLD is the default face that we want to show other people. This is influenced by all of the SELF-FACING FACES and how we ‘feel’ about ourselves but it’s also inspired by two other things:

How we need others to see us (because of our emotional ‘stuff’).
How we have LEARNED to survive social situations in the past

This ‘DEFAULT’ FACE is just the one that we use to make sure we can get through life on a daily basis and to interact with people we might come across like strangers we have to talk to (people that work in coffee shops, taxi drivers, people we meet for the first time at networking events, etc. etc.).

We will try and COME ACROSS in a certain light in order to reinforce the stories we tell ourselves because of our Self-Facing Faces and the ‘Shadow Stuff’ we want to keep at bay but we will also put on a strategic way of being based on how we survived social situations in the past.

This might involve using strategies like ‘being polite’ or maybe even something like trying to be ‘humorous’ and making jokes. Whatever strategy you use, it’s ultimately about gaining CONTROL of the interaction so that you show the face you want to show.

Everybody does the same thing and it’s something we have to do to keep ‘society’ going. Depending on how REAL you are with yourself will affect how much of your real self can shine through(the most whole version of yourself possible in a given moment).

Even if you’re relatively REAL, there will still be a slight warming up period around new people whilst you figure them out – whatever strategy you use to ‘warm up’ is just your DEFAULT FACE for the world. It’s not ‘You’ – it’s something that you CHOSE based on your conditioning and expectations of yourself and others.

Face 2: The Face You Show The World In Different Partnerships or Groups (E.G. Might Be Different Among Friends That Parents).

This is where things get (more) complicated. There are multiple versions of this face which is the face that you show different PARTNERSHIPS or GROUPS that you’re involved in based on your own relationship with yourself (and your ‘Self-Facing Faces’) and the EXPECTATIONS that whatever group you’re in has for you (and what you think about these expectations and whether or not you care about modifying the way you come across because of them).

Here are some simple examples of your CONTEXTUAL FACES:

You might have a face that you show your parents that you wouldn’t show your friends.

You might have a face that you show your friends that you wouldn’t show your parents.

You might have a face that you show your boss that you wouldn’t show your wife/husband.

You might have a face that you show your wife/husband that you wouldn’t show your friends.

You might have a face that you show yourself (one of your Self-Facing Faces) that you wouldn’t show any of these people (not a group, just here to demonstrate the point).

The short-version of all this is that each one of these partnerships or groups forms a new SYSTEM and you need different faces to SURVIVE them because of the roles you’re asked to play and the EXPECTATIONS that come with that role.

You can still be REAL in each of these context but how much realness is able to creep out depends on the DEPTH OF INTIMACY in each of these relationships and whether or not you’re allowing expectations to be more main motivation or realness.

The number of these CONTEXTUAL FACES changes and varies over the course of our lifetimes depending on how many different groups we’re engaged in or how big our network is (or isn’t) etc.

Reality-Facing Faces

Even though in reality we are ultimately WHOLE (i.e. not divided into all of the different categories and labels that we use to make sense of the world – which we’re doing in this article too because it’s just how we make ‘sense’ of the world), we have at least two faces that show us a reflection of REALITY.

Face 1: The OBSERVER making sense of all this .

The first of our Reality-Facing Faces is the OBSERVING FACE. This is just the version of ourselves that occasionally (for most) is able to STEP BACK from the complexity and confusion of the interplay between all of the Self-Facing and World-Facing faces and to watch things unfold.

This Observing Face is important because it is a version of ourselves that we are able to show ourselves BEYOND JUDGEMENT.

All of the other faces mentioned so far – apart from the SHADOW FACE (which contains who we would be if we stopped judging ourselves)- are ultimately unreal because they involve JUDGEMENT at some level (which is always unreal because all you can do with reality is ACCEPT it – the opposite of judgement).

The OBSERVING FACE is an AWARENESS of what we have observed or are observing and allows us to hold space so that we can start to respond instead of just reacting to the promptings and conditionings of the other faces.

This comes from the place of WHOLENESS that is within us at all times (in fact, is what we are) and allows us to come from a place that’s REAL instead of being a fragmented consequence of our outdated biological wiring, emotional ‘stuff’, or social conditioning and programming (like the other faces mentioned at the levels of self-and world).

The FACT that you can OBSERVE all of the other faces is proof that they are not ‘You’. They are just survival tools that form the foundation of the EGO (which is fragmented, not the bigger which is an EXPERIENCE of being alive which always comes back to AWARENESS).

Face 2: The REAL self (who knows what to do with all this Awareness and to ACCEPT it and to take Action)

The final Reality-Facing Face that’s relevant here is the one (which is really part of the same process) that you show yourself when you ACCEPT what the OBSERVING FACE has become AWARE of and decide to take ACTION based on this (Awareness -> Acceptance -> Action, it works every time).

When you take this kind of REAL ACTION it allows you to stop holding yourself back based on the limitations of your Self-Facing and World-Facing Faces and to put yourself back on track towards a natural DRIVE towards wholeness that we all have.

By taking action you always learn more about reality and you always become more whole because you will eventually end up having to bring your SHADOW ‘stuff’ to the surface (as you find the EDGE – i.e. where all your ideas about yourself meet reality and you can grow more REAL).

In short, the realest faces you can show yourself are the ones that EMERGE when you are able to step back from the ‘other’ faces (Self-Facing and World-Facing) and to put yourself on the path of growing real.

When you do this, you realise that you have NO faces – you’re just FACING THE TRUTH and constantly moving forward and experiencing life as a WHOLE.

If this story inspired or helped you then please share it with others! 🙂

Sign up for my mailing list if you want to stay in touch (you’ll get access to the 7-Day Personality Transplant for uncovering your life purpose):

If you want to find your own real life, start moving towards unconditional acceptance, and finding a sense of purpose then check out this 7-Day Course that you can start right now:

Psychology

If you don’t read this article, then you’re a terrible human being.

Emotional manipulation involves taking total responsibility for someone else’s feelings.

Emotional manipulation is basically when people try to make you own things that aren’t yours.

Don’t feed the Gremlin.

You can set boundaries or walk away if someone is manipulating you.

Three reasons why people may not step into their realness in the face of emotional manipulation:

Thank you!

Being ‘wrong’ may be exactly what you’re looking for…this article will help you understand why.

Socrates: “I know that I know nothing”.

None of our attempts to defend the truth have any effect on the truth itself

3 ways to align yourself with REAL life by finding your own ‘wrongness’

If You Argue With an Idiot, It Makes You an Idiot.

Thank you!

Changing Your Life by Using a Psychological Hack to Work With Your Unconscious Mind Instead of Against It.

A Mini Psychological Hack for Getting What You Want: Reverse Engineer Your Complaints

You Can Reverse Engineer Your Real Intentions for Yourself and Your Life by the Results that You Keep Getting.

If you’re not getting the results that you want then you need to be increase Awareness, cultivate Acceptance, and then take inspired ACTION

Implementation: Awareness, Acceptance, and Action (It Works Every Time)

Thank you!

There’s a high chance that you’ve become disconnected from your own nature – this article will help you get back in touch with something REAL by understanding the concept of SEXUAL POLARITY.

The big nature vs. nurture debate and REALNESS.

Unreal relationships are when you’re not grounded in reality itself – you’re either too much or too little of some idea.

The Unreal Masculine

The Unreal Feminine

The creative process is the process of allowing the unconscious to become conscious.

Thank you!

Reclaim your time by reclaiming your mind

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