Creative Status: Episode 41: Aline Ra M: The Realness of Spaciousness

by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

Creative Status is a podcast about using creativity as a vehicle for improving your life by deconstructing ego, integrating the shadow self, and designing and manifesting a real life.

Every episode explores how the creative process can help you GROW REAL by moving towards wholeness in yourself by making the unconscious conscious.

In this episode of Creative Status, I had a profound conversation with Aline Ra M – a spiritual healer, coach and author who helps people to connect to their divinity and life REAL lives.

Aline has a four-step process that guides people into truth and this is what we focused on in this conversation: Connection, Love, Spaciousness, and Devotion.

Check it out if you want some insight and inspiration for growing real.

Peace,

Oli

(Scroll down for show transcript)

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Episode Links:

Aline’s website: https://alineram.com/⁠

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Show Transcript: The Realness of Spaciousness

Intro

Oli Anderson: Oh hi there, Oli Anderson here, you’re listening to Creative Status, this is a podcast about using creativity to improve your life by allowing you to have a deeper relationship with yourself as the creative process takes you towards wholeness or realness or connection to yourself, others and life itself.

My name is Oli Anderson, if you don’t know I’m a creative performance coach, help people to bring more realness into their lives and business, creativity is the vehicle for doing that. Every episode of this podcast I interview somebody about life, creativity, what it’s all about, how things connect.

Today’s episode is no different, I’m interviewing Aline, she is a coach and a healer and a writer, she does loads of amazing stuff and the main theme of this conversation is spaciousness, making space for life to do what life does and for you to do what you need to do being real, loads of cool insight, won’t say too much, hope you enjoy this episode, here it is, boom.

Interview

Oli Anderson: Oh hi there Aline, thank you so much for joining me on today’s episode of Creative Status, I have a feeling there’s going to be quite a deep conversation and we’re going to go down various rabbit holes and explore various avenues, but before we do, would you like to introduce yourself, so tell people who you are, what you’re all about, what you want to get out of this conversation and anything else that you want to throw into the mix.

Aline Ra M: Yeah thank you so much for having me on your show Oli, I’m super excited to talk to you today and my name is Aileen, I am a spiritual guide, healer and teacher and my work is to help people to establish solid foundations for spiritual growth and self-fulfillment, to develop this direct and self-sustained connection with the divine, that we don’t need any intermediaries, but we do need to activate a few things in us that are dormant so to speak, so that is what I focus on, to bring people back to the divine within themselves.

Oli Anderson: Well that sounds super interesting already, so let’s get right into it, so when you talk about these solid foundations, what kind of thing are you talking about?

Aline Ra M: So I have developed in my work and in my personal life four pillars for foundations that are spaciousness, love, connection and devotion, so I’ve focused on this for and there’s so many subtopics within each one of them and different practices that we can do energetically to expand each.

What I like to highlight here is this concept of foundations because so much of life is based on things that are invisible but we don’t see, we put so much attention in our senses on what we can see and touch, but all those things are just results of things that exist in more invisible and subtle way, so in the creativity aspect, the table that is in front of me right here right now came from a human mind, you know, somebody had an idea of how they wanted this table to be and had an idea that became a concept, that became a draft, that became a real product and the same thing is with love, the expression of love starts within ourselves and the same thing with houses, foundations is what support houses, if we don’t have strong foundations, the house crumbles and we don’t put enough attention into those things that are supporting everything we create in our lives.

Oli Anderson: I’ve thought and said this many times throughout the podcast. Ultimately, there’s a distinction between the world we perceive, interpret, and believe we live in, and reality itself. If we take the world at face value, but it’s actually a product of unrealistic thinking and emotions, as you mentioned, which lead people to design or create things reflecting the disconnection within themselves – between who they really are and divinity, wholeness, or anything else – then it becomes a matter of ‘garbage in, garbage out.’ In other words, if you input reality, you’ll get reality as the output, but if you input unreality, you’ll get unreality as the output. Many times, we’re living unreal lives without even realizing it because, as you said, we mistakenly believe that the world is a consequence of itself rather than a consequence of the way we think about it, something like that.

Aline Ra M: Yeah that’s absolutely true and most of the times we’re unconscious of what we’re creating, we’re just repeating emotional patterns and that doesn’t mean we’re not creating, that just means we’re creating out of alignment and creating unnecessarily things that are for our highest good and sometimes we need to crash and have much suffering in life to realise that unfortunately not everybody has to go down that path.

At the same time I mean I’m a terrible artist in terms of like I cannot draw or anything like that so which I think is a great example of what I’m about to illustrate here because if I draw something I was thinking about what I was going to draw first I had an intention at least right, my intention is much stronger and pure than what comes to paper which means that what is in the paper is just a symbol of the real thing, the real thing only exists in the invisible, the archetype the real thing is never real or it is it is super real but whatever we’re creating in the world is just just a, it’s a prototype of something that is much pure and is stronger within us. If that makes sense.

Oli Anderson: Yeah. Yeah. 100%. Sorry. The audio went a little bit funny there. Yeah. So the way that I see it is when we’re creating something and it can be anything, it can be our lives, it can be like a drawing on a piece of paper. Like you said, it can be a book, whatever it is, it’s not just about us as individuals.

And if we think it is, that is when we kind of end up diluting the potency of whatever it is that we create. We stop it from being as real as it possibly can be, because we put more of our ego basically into the mix, into the creative process. And if you think about it, the ego is just the idea that we are creating things purely by ourselves, that we’re creating everything alone. But actually the creative process is more about interdependence.

It’s about connection between us and life and divinity or wholeness or whatever you want to say. And when we do put things on paper or we create whatever it is, we have to be open to allowing things to come into the process that are beyond just our ideas about ourselves. And I know that’s a really convoluted way of going about it, the way I’ve just described it. But what I’m saying is, if you think that you are responsible for creating everything in your life, in the way that where we think that it’s just about our ideas and our concepts, more than the experience and the learning and the evolution and blah, blah, blah, then we can’t create anything real because we’re just trying to control the process too much.

So, yeah, how does that fit into your view?

Aline Ra M: Yes, I mean, everything is relationships in this life. There’s no such thing as not relationships.

Everything is constantly talking to us, including ourselves, including our hearts, our bodies. There’s no such thing as this kind of separation that we are single individuals. And of course, the relationship starts with ourselves. We are multi-conscious beings. There’s a lot of things happening within us. And then we can extrapolate to our ability to listen to nature, to relate at this deepest level with any type of energy or people or in any kind of layer that we would like to go. So, understanding this oneness, because everything requires the whole life, like life-visual creation to a point that everything we do requires the whole of existence to conspire for it to be possible.

Just having the stable in front of me, how many people were involved to have this? Somebody had to go to the tree, somebody cut it, and somebody took care of it, and then somebody designed it, and somebody had to take it to the store, somebody had to work on the store. Like, if we start analyzing the amount of appropriations for anything to exist, we realize the whole universe has to work for things too. You know, at the smallest simplest ways.

And if we think about everything that this simple table allows me to create, like I can work here, I can write here, I can eat here, I can invite my friends and have a gathering here on this table, like all the possibilities, like the infinite possibilities of every single object, the amount of life that everything comes with and supports. I just find it absurd if we allow ourselves to tap into that. The whole universe is with us at every single second.

Oli: Yes, yes. And the only thing that stops us from engaging with that process that is constantly unfolding is our thoughts and ideas about who we are. Like, if we create a false identity based on our underlying emotional stuff and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, then ultimately we become fragmented and we stop ourselves or hold ourselves back from that natural relationship where everything is feeding off of everything else. And if you feed back into it, it will feed you back even more.

You can tap into abundance and all that stuff. And I think the creative process is ultimately about returning to that state. That’s how I now see it. So at the start of a creative journey, we’re normally more fragmented than we are at the end of that journey when we’ve returned a little bit more closely towards wholeness. And the more whole we become, the more I would assume we’re aligned with these four pillars and the foundations that you’re talking about. I think that ultimately is our natural state, wholeness. And the solid, the most solid foundation we can have is a real relationship with that wholeness, with that connection to it. So let’s, shall we break down your pillars like one by one?

Spaciousness, love, connection and devotion. Was that right?

Aline: Yes, that’s correct. I love spaciousness. It is my very favorite one. I just, you know, we live in such a vast universe and Earth is so enormous as well, like the deserts and the oceans. And somehow, like the heart is spacious as well. If we compare our hearts with our minds and somehow we managed to create lights that are very busy and cluttered. We go into our living rooms and don’t have space to just walk without bumping into something, you know, and that blows my mind because life doesn’t happen to us. It happens through us.

So we have to make space for it to be able to come in and out. Just as we breathe in and out, just as we create and we receive and give, you know, for me, this, this circulation of life, when we get stuck, it really harms us, you know, when, when we are judging ourselves and we cannot allow our creativity to flourish because we are holding it back, we’re judging ourselves, we’re scared or when we also just keep on receiving things but we never give either that also creates a weight in our hearts. So for me life is something that is always flowing and so many people tell me they want to flow with life. Well they make space for it to be able to flow. Let things go and let things come in. Yeah.

Oli: Yeah, wow. So just to keep it simple so we can unpack it a little bit more what would you say is your definition of spaciousness in this context?

Aline: In terms of spirituality I connect spaciousness a lot with purification. It is the idea that we have too much energy clogging us and it can be mental models, it can be things waiting on our hearts, things we cannot forgive and forget all these things. They are cluttered, they are energetic clutter inside of us that causes suffering.

Oli: 100 % agrees. So when I’m talking about all this stuff I like to break everything down into wholeness and fragmentation like I’ve already said a billion times but also it’s either real or unreal. Real is that we move into wholeness so we connect to it.

Unreal is that we’ve picked up fragments that are preventing us from flowing in the way that you’re talking about and I think a simple way to understand it is that the more we become attached to our own fragmentation because of our underlying emotional stuff which is normally shame, guilt and trauma the more attached we become to the fragments the more unnecessary tension and friction we add to our experience of life.

But the good news is all of that unreal friction which eventually turns to frustration and misery is just something that we can let go, we can release it if we can learn to see and perceive in a real way and I think based on what you’re saying, perceiving in this real way is that we are seeing the space, the space everywhere and we’re holding onto all of the stuff that makes it seem like there is no space.

So if that’s true how do we start to increase the spaciousness that we experience in our lives?

Aline: There’s so many different techniques that we can use for that from meditation to mindfulness practices to be more intentional about what we’re doing. Being always in alignment of why am I doing what I’m doing just the action of getting out of autopilot creates spaciousness. Breathing, deep breathing, prena yama breath work creates a lot of space in our hearts. Relaxing our bodies, creating this releasing tension and good posture because when we are all contracted in our posture we are actually pressing our nervous system and we do start getting more anxious because our nervous system cannot communicate well in our bodies.

So simple things like posture and relaxing our bodies can have tremendous effect in our mental and emotional well-being.

Oli: So it’s a lot of it just getting back into our bodies. So it seems like a lot of your work is about getting out of our heads, getting away from the mental chatter and all of the autopilot hamster wheel conditioning that we picked up and kind of returning just to the presence of our bodies or is it a bit deeper than that?

Aline: No, it goes much deeper than that in the sense that well we’re not our thoughts, we have thoughts, we are not our emotions, we have emotions, we are not our desires, we have desires and we are not our bodies, we have bodies.

So we’re clearing these things, clearing the space in our bodies, clearing the space in our minds just so we can get to our hearts because that’s the place where we can connect to something much bigger. So that’s the clearing there because otherwise we get caught up by this pain here in the shoulder, this other thing there. Like all these things keep just getting our attention constantly and allowing those things to catching ourselves so much so that we can drop into the heart. It’s kind of getting more like self mastery, so to say.

Oli: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So normally when I’m thinking about self mastery, it’s down to two basic things I guess. Mastery of like our biological wiring, like our instincts and like our urges and all that kind of stuff. And then also mastery of our social conditioning and like all of the assumptions we might have picked up about what life is, who is supposed to be, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And if you can strip that stuff away and master it, release some of the unnecessary tension that we pick up because of our ego shit basically, then we can kind of relax into this flow that you’re talking about. But a question I wanted to ask you is, do you think, is spaciousness the natural state of the universe?

So one thing that I’ve seen in my life is when you get to this point where you understand your inherent connection to wholeness at all times, you realize that a lot of the things that we perceive to be problems in life, or the obstacles or the challenges or whatever else, they only exist as problems because of our interpretations, our judgments of good and bad and blah, blah, blah, blah.

And if you can step away from that stuff, well, first of all, the problem kind of dissolves because our relationship to it dissolves, but you see that in the spaciousness or in the whole, everything is just kind of perfectly imperfect. And like, you just have to kind of go with it. And if you can do that, you still might have just challenges and stuff in life that you’re going to grow through and become purified in the language that you used. But there’s no longer the tension of adding problems because actually there are no problems, if that makes sense?

Aline: Well, there are things happening, you know, and definitely with spatialness, one of the things is disability to zoom out. When we zoom out, we’re creating space. We’re not in this narrow perspective anymore. So linking to what you said, like when I was saying before, we’re not our minds, we’re not our bodies, we’re not our emotions, we’re not our desires.

Like this is where all the conditioning is. And as long as we are expanding as people, as consciousness, then spatialness is the natural state. But we need to choose expansion because we can also choose contraction at any given moment. We have free will for that. So that’s what we see so much in many humans living in cluttered lives, be it in their bodies, be it in their schedules, be in their homes. We can always choose to not allow things to flow.

Oli: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like I think all that contraction in whatever form it shows up, it’s an attempt to control life, to resist the flow. So the expansion, I would say, is the natural state. Everything is constantly moving towards wholeness. We all as individuals have a natural drive to move towards more wholeness, more connection, blah, blah, blah. But because of our fear, because of our emotional stuff, and all the assumptions we picked up about our own limitations, because of all that stuff, we think that contraction or shrinking away from ourselves and from life is going to save us.

But that’s really just a survival mechanism. And so I would personally say that contraction is never real. It seems real. It seems like that’s what we need to do. But it’s always a product of our belief that being unreal is going to save us when actually that’s the only problem.

Aline: Well, I mean, we don’t perceive it as unreal, right? We perceive it as very real at that moment that we’re actually experiencing it.

And understanding this amount of suffering that some people can go through, because what is it that, why they choose contraction? What kind of fear do they have? And there are so many different fears that I find it understandable.

It doesn’t mean then, but for instance, the fear of the responsibility, because once you expand, you have a lot of responsibility over your life. You cannot victimize yourself any longer. And responsibility is not exactly something many humans enjoy. Many of us have issues with the word work. And this path requires a lot of work on ourselves.

And it’s not always nice. So that is one thing. Another thing is, well, life is very powerful. It’s a lot of energy to take in. And I know many people, I’ve had many clients who actually struggle with the ability to just accept life to that extent.

Because it’s so big, the amount of energy that we can receive is so big, light is so powerful in the sense that it overwhelms some people’s nervous system. People get literally physically triggered, you know, it makes them tense. That’s why we are so tense, actually.

So the ability to relax also helps with that, because to be able to take in life, we need to let it flow and it cannot flow if we tense up. So energetically speaking, there is this thing, it’s very powerful. And we oftentimes don’t feel we are that powerful. And understanding that we’re so much bigger than whatever we call that is a problem, understanding our dimensions. It’s something that unfortunately most people haven’t helped you to understand how big they truly are.

Oli: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think when people feel threatened or triggered by life, it’s almost always because life is ultimately showing them that whatever illusions they carry, because of the identity that they’ve picked up and conditioned themselves with, those illusions which are often useful illusions because they help them to feel that they’re going to survive in the future and that they can be able to deal with life, blah, blah, blah.

Life basically shows that those illusions are unreal, that they’re untrue, and so we have to let go of them. But if we let go of the illusions, which the identity is founded upon, then we have to go through this whole process of redesigning our relationship with ourselves, reconfiguring our relationship with reality. And it comes down to the thing that I’m always saying, like the truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off and make you miserable. And yeah, and it’s about riding through that process. But in order to get on to your second pillar, sorry, like how does all of this stuff feed into the second pillar, which is love, because I’ll let you answer, sorry.

But like, yeah, how does the second pillar come into all this?

Aline: Love here is very different from romantic love or anything that people think about love. Love is consciousness.

It is a deeper understanding of the whole picture. The metaphor that I enjoy using for love the most is nurturing, like nurturing a plant, if you have a plant at home. Love wants that which he loves to grow and thrive, which means there is a dosage and love is consciousness.

Love is the understanding of the dosage. Because if you have a plant to know that if you don’t give water to it, it will die. But if you overwash it, it will die.

it will also die. So love is not doing anything your beloved ones because that is not nurturing of the person or yourself or the relationship. So love can be much, I mean, love is super warm, but love can also be much colder than what people expect love to be. Because love knows when it’s not right and love can cut it. And love is not always saying yes, or if you think about a mother taking care of her child and the child only wants ice cream, the parent has to be able to say no, like enough, you know, this is not good for you. And this is love. It wouldn’t be loving to just say yes.

Oli: Yeah, yeah, I love that. That’s amazing. Ultimately, it sounds like what you’re saying is it’s about balance or something like you’re constantly calibrating the right dose of realness or love that you need to give people. And I suppose I always bring back to the ego thing, sorry, but if the ego gets involved, that’s when you’re going to be out of balance. You’re going to be saying yes all the time. You’re going to be saying no all the time. A lot of co-dependent relationships are basically built on that principle of a lack of balance because of the emotional stuff people are carrying, something like that.

Aline: No, for sure. And this also, I mean, love is not only love with others but love with ourselves, like self love. Some people think self love is cutting themselves slack. And I don’t see how allowing myself to have a massage every time I want to have a massage instead of working on the book I want to write is self loving.

Because this is not nurturing of my best interest. Sometimes I might need a massage and not saying it’s never good to rest. Sometimes we need to rest. But people are using rest and this excuse that those things are self love as coping mechanisms to not deal with the stuff they actually want.

Oli: Yes, I am so happy to hear you say that. It’s so true. There’s so much nonsense out there where people are kind of using these spiritual principles as an excuse to keep hiding from themselves and to keep going back into their own ego stuff and their conditioning. Like, yeah, sometimes you might need a massage, but ultimately, the most loving thing you can do is to see the potential either in other people or in yourself and to then find ways to move towards that potential. If that potential is more wholeness, more realness.

Aline: Absolutely. And the hardest thing here in practice for many people is to accept that there’s no such thing that is always loving love changes situation by situation. What will support that to try to change the situation with situations? So there’s no such thing as if I always do this, like love has to be like that. No, love discerns between what is best situation by situation.

Oli: Yes, it’s ultimately it’s meeting people where they are, but also understanding, you know, where have you been?

Where are you going? And it’s, I know like past, present, future, like they’re just concepts. And ultimately, it’s always now. But actually, when we’ve been real, we can mold now so that we’re moving towards the future that we want. And because everybody is constantly on this journey, we keep talking about of moving towards more wholeness, more expansion.

The way that love will show up in their lives, or the way that they need to receive love, is going to evolve as well. Because one moment you might need nurturing, another moment you might need a kick in the ass or some motivation, whatever it is.

And it’s about being able to adapt in that way. Because real life reality, it’s not static, is it? You’re 100 % right. So if your ideas of love are static, well, you’re going to stagnate, basically.

Yeah, exactly. The only, the only constant is impermanence. So that applies to everything. Yeah. And it’s unloving to expect things to stay the same. Yes, for sure. Yeah, that is fear based, which is the exact opposite of love.

Yeah, it’s control free. So we’ve done the spacious thing. We’ve done the love thing. This third pillar that you’ve got is about connection. So can you elaborate on that a bit, please?

Aline: Connection exists in multiple layers, starting with self connection, the understanding of what we value, what we want, what we really long for. I see many people looking for clarity as if it was a mental thing. But clarity is a result of self connection.

The more you know yourself, the more you know, your next step and what you want. And you can honor that. And, and then we go to relationship with everybody around us. So connecting to our families, our friends, the more we can connect with ourselves, the better we can connect with others, because the more we develop self compassion and self understanding, the more we can offer that to people around us from an authentic place from understanding from relating to people suffering and accepting things for what they are.

And then we have connection with nature connection to the trees to the elements and also connection to the divine to energies to anything more abstract, so to say to God, if you want to say so. So so there are multiple layers and connection has a tremendous effect on our well being when we feel disconnected, we feel alone, separate, not belonging. So the more connected we feel the more we see ourselves as part of oneness. And that brings such great well being and safety in ourselves in a way as well.

Oli: Yeah, yeah. I think most mental health problems, anxiety and depression are often caused by that disconnection. Like obviously in some cases you can say you got a chemical imbalance, whatever it is, but I think a lot of anxiety is just caused by people being disconnected from themselves. So they create an ego version or false version. They put that false version out into the world.

And because it’s not real, they keep getting this kind of negative feedback constantly from reality, which makes them anxious. And in relation to depression, I think often what’s going on is they’ve taken themselves out of this natural flow towards wholeness that we keep talking about. And when they stop moving, that’s when they become low energy and disconnected from life because the movement, even though it takes energy, also charges you up. And so if you choose a real purpose for yourself, then you’re not going to be anxious and not going to be depressed. Obviously that’s not in all cases, but I think in a lot of cases, this kind of connection you’re talking about is the solution because the only problem you can have in life has been disconnected ultimately.

That’s what I think. So how can people reconnect if they’ve become stuck and all that kind of stuff? Like how do they reconnect to themselves and life and reality?

Aline: I mean, there are quite different ways to connect. Like for some people, it’s easier to begin with nature if they are having a lot of issues just going more to nature and recovering the sense of everything is fine because this connection many times come from a crazy amount of fear. So sometimes we need just to feel safe first and like ground back and come back to this planet, you know, instead of being locked in our homes and in our brains.

So allowing ourselves to just go a little bit more outside and move our bodies, allowing the stagnation to move through. Nature can be a great healer and then developing more the self-compassion, how we are talking with ourselves. If we’re judging ourselves too much, what is it our like self-dialogue?

Because we cannot be loving with people we fear not to be loving with ourselves. So we do need to work with our own connection and just say nicer words to ourselves, be better friends to ourselves. So cultivating that, doing things that we love.

Oli: Where do we find the fine line between self-compassion and, you know, not judging ourselves and all that stuff, but not lapsing into that mindset we were talking about a few minutes ago where we think we’ve been compassionate towards ourselves. But actually what we’re doing is we’re just making excuses or we’re playing the victim or whatever so that we don’t have to push through our, I guess, limitations, perceived limitations and grow real. Do you know what I mean?

So if we’re getting, yeah, how do we calibrate that?

Aline: So this is about developing discernment which we can use for this and for many other things actually like just differentiating between our excuses and our reasons. And we do this through spaciousness actually because we need to develop those perspectives.

We need to be able to zoom out and create space to see them. So the foundations are actually quite interrelated in a way. They’re supporting each other to exist. Yeah, yeah.

Oli: No, you’re right. So I think it’s like I said a few minutes ago, like reality is constantly giving us feedback. And if we feel a lot of friction in our lives, we feel a lot of frustration, we feel miserable, whatever, it’s a sign that we’re not been spacious enough. Basically, we’re adding a lot of unnecessary mental friction, tension, fragmentation.

And that ultimately is just feedback. It’s a sign that we need to make changes. And if we’ve been compassionate in the right way, then we’re going to keep moving, we’re going to keep expanding, we’re going to keep evolving. If things go wrong, well, we’re not going to beat ourselves up. We’re going to get up again and keep going, blah, blah, blah.

And if we get in that mindset you were talking about where, you know, we go in for a massage every day and we’re pampering ourselves and all that stuff. And it becomes out of balance. IE, it’s no longer self-love, it’s more like self-denial or something, even though it’s dressed up as though. Then the feedback we get from life will eventually become quite negative, like we’ll start to feel depressed or we’ll start to feel like there’s something missing or we’ll start to feel restless. And it’s because we’re not calibrating our lives or our relationship with life properly. So does this…

Sorry.

Aline: And the way that I see it, when we talk about those things, there’s so much about our ability to be honest and honesty. And honesty for me, truth serves love. Love is not really love if it is self-deceiving.

So in that sense, I connect consciousness is based on truth because it is being able to see this bigger picture. And that’s why love can be firm. So again, if we understand what love is and what it brings, then we cannot really lie to that extent.

Oli: Yeah, I totally agree. This all comes back to the truth ultimately. There’s the thing that the hippies used to say in the 70s, love is God is truth or truth is God is love or whichever combination you throw in there. It all comes down to the truth and you’re even moving with the truth and trusting the truth and allowing the truth to live through you in the way that you talked about. Or you’re not.

And if you’re not, then that’s when you’re going to feel miserable and have a bad time. So is this a good segue into the devotion thing?

Aline: Yes. Yes.

Oli: Okay. So how do we open that up?

Aline: The devotion to allow ourselves to live divinely, to live as the divine beings that we are living our lives fully. The devotion is devotion to our souls. ourselves, devotion to life, to give us ourselves fully to surrender to the deepest longings of our beings, that is living devotion is living 100 % to surrender ourselves to ourselves to stop struggling with ourselves. One consequence of devotion though, that I love is that when we are devoted to something, we also become more committed and disciplined.

And I know many people are allergic to these words, because we live in a society that is so like, you know, quite firm. But we can develop those virtues that are so incredibly powerful from our hearts from out of devotion to ourselves, because if I love myself, and I am connected to myself, I know what I want, and I can give myself fully to myself to live the life that I want. The only way is by being committed to myself by showing up day after day, otherwise, I’ll just let myself down and not leave divinely. So devotion comes with very high stakes.

Oli: Wow. Do you think there’s like, there’s an element where it’s kind of paradoxical, because we are devoted to ourselves. But in that devotion to who we think we are, the only way we can truly surrender, and to truly flow and to expand and to move towards more wholeness, is to let go of ourselves.

So earlier on, when you’re talking about, you know, spaciousness, the ultimate spaciousness, I would say, is realizing that you, your ideas of who you are, like collectively, I mean, in general terms, is that you don’t really exist as an idea. You are just an experience. And if you strip away all these ideas and labels and theories and ideologies and blah, blah, blah.

It’s exactly what he said, you are life. But the only way you can get to that point is to just let go of yourself. And then when you let go of yourself, that’s when you find yourself.

But you’re not what you thought you were. I know that sounds Yeah.

Aline: But that’s absolutely true. And the whole spiritual path, when we talk about spiritual growth, it’s about know they self.

But that is very abstract for many people, like what the hell do they mean? I know myself, I am myself. That’s like, yeah, no, but we go through certain exercises and experiences and rituals that show you that maybe we’re not really who you think you are. So it’s something that it can be very tricky to talk on a mental level, but we can experience different sides of us, and realize how our minds are controlling us all the time.

So this is connected. That’s why I use the word purification before as well, because a lot of spiritual purification has to do with that that the solving, they go to find the core, the core that has always been there. But there’s so many layers of complexity that we have created that it’s hard to access.

But it is possible to access it, we just need to do some clearing work.

Oli: So I always say what’s real is always real is always there. And so a lot of this, this journey we’re talking about this process of returning back to spaciousness and love and connection and devotion. It’s just about unlearning all of this extraneous stuff that we’ve picked up, and all of the unreal things that we perceive, because of our fear. And so what would you say, just to kind of wrap this up, what is the main barrier for most people to being on this path that you’re talking about?

Like, I know it’s different for everyone, but is there like a core theme or pattern that tends to lead to this separation?

Aline: A fear. Fear is the, and then when they actually start on the path, committing to it can be very tricky, because it is a path that requires showing up every day consistency to the practices. Yeah, then that’s why the devotion is one of the pillars, because we absolutely need to be devoted to the path for it to work.

Otherwise, it’s just, it’s just a fun day we had a little like a hobby, and it doesn’t work.

Oli: Yeah. Yeah, that is so true. Like, you have to be committed.

What are some common pitfalls that might arise on this path? Because I’ve seen this as well in my coaching practice, like you’re right, like people set out, things start going well, they start to realize, okay, it’s just, you know, I’m aware now that I was holding myself back, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But then they will often be a relapse into old patterns. That’s just normal as part of the transformational process.

Yes. But, you know, what are some of those pitfalls? And what can people do to prepare for them, I guess, so they can stay devoted to this path that you’re on about?

Aline: Especially in spiritual growth, one pitfall that I see all the time is at one hand, it’s beautiful, that spirituality is more accessible, that you can go to yoga studios and meditations everywhere, amazing. On the other hand, that also makes it much harder for people to actually do the work, because there’s too many possibilities and they chop around and they play around and never commit to anything. And they think they are doing the work because they, the ego is so clever, it wouldn’t, otherwise it wouldn’t be doing its job.

But people start on this path and start doing, going to all these kind of different events and trying out different lineages, which allows their ego to tell themselves that they are doing the work. When in fact, they’re not. They are having fun experiences. Instead of going to a concert, they’re just trying something else.

But they are not going deep enough to actually have any real transformation. And that is one of the reasons why I work as a guy. because then I can make people stay on their path.

Oli: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, what you said is so true. Like I’ve noticed this myself. Like people, they have assumptions or even desires about what they want the truth to be.

And a lot of the time when people set out on this journey, because they’re coming from the place of ego, they think that they’re so complicated and complex and that their case is so different and that there are special snowflake that needs to do all these esoteric, crazy things, that they assume the truth is the same thing. And so they constantly use the spiritual journey, if you want to call it that, as a distraction when it should always be a return to reality.

If you’re distracting yourself with all these different things that you said, then you go in in the wrong direction. But it’s because they want it to be complicated because at the level of themselves, they want themselves to be complicated so they can feel special. It’s still like an ego thing. And when it gets like that, it stops them from the core solution in my opinion, which is to trust.

You have to trust whatever it is that you commit to basically. Like there’ll be some vehicle for you and your individual situation, because we’re all different, but all these different pathways lead back to the same thing. There’ll be something you can commit to, but you just have to trust. So my final question, I guess, to sort of wrap this up, how can people trust the process more? Because it always comes down to that. Like at the end of all these podcasts, it’s basically what I’m saying in every episode now. Like it’s trust. You have to learn to trust. So how can people do that, do you think?

Aline: No, I don’t have a recipe for that. You have to just trust. And you have to drop it a little bit, like release it from your hand a bit and just let go. And we can start with a simple exercise sometimes, like just hold a ball on your hand. And if you turn your hand down and release the ball, it will just fall. That would be letting go.

But you can also just hold it on your hand and just release your hand, but with your hand palm facing up. So you’re just letting it be. And sometimes we just need that to let things be. Because sometimes the idea of having to let something go when release control completely is alien to many people. So there is no way, like you have to trust.

And you just have to. And technically, if we actually think about it, it’s not that difficult because the whole universe, we wouldn’t be able to live if we didn’t trust things. Living without trust makes people extremely damaged. You need to trust that there will be food in the supermarket, otherwise you’re going to live in panic. We have trust, we have that within ourselves. We lose it when we overthink it.

Oli: Yeah, yeah. Like trust is the natural state, ultimately. It goes back to what we were saying earlier, like there’s problems, blah, blah, blah. Only exist in perception because of our fear and the ego filtering everything through it, blah, blah, blah. And when you step back, you realize that anytime you’re not trusting, anytime you’re forcing things, anytime you’re trying to assert your individual, separate will on life, then you’re not trusting.

And so you’re not being real because reality is just one big relationship, having a relationship with yourself. And so all you can do is kind of go with it. And I totally get what you’re saying, like all you can do is trust. Like you can’t really explain your way into it because it doesn’t need an explanation. It’s just something that you do. Like it’s all you can do. Like when it gets to that point, you realize, oh, okay, that’s basically it. I’m going to trust because that’s it.

There is no other way. So Aline, we’ve covered a lot of stuff in this conversation. We went through your four pillars, spaciousness, love, connection, devotion, all this other stuff we just said.

How would you sum up this conversation? Have you got any final words of wisdom? And can you also let people know where they can find you if they want to work with you as a guide or I don’t know to read your books or any of that stuff?

Aline: Yeah, so for me, spiritual path is all about coming back to our hearts. And for that, I’d like to say the mind shouts and the heart whispers. So create spaciousness so you can hear the whispers of your heart. And the mind is busy and the heart is so spacious.

The mind wants everything and gets confused and the heart is very clear with what it wants. And it’s so much simpler than it might seem. So I’ll leave you with those thoughts.

Oli: Yeah, that’s awesome. So maybe, sorry, just like the trusting ultimately is about getting back in your heart, maybe.

Aline: Yeah, we can put it that way for sure.

That’s beautiful. And yeah, you can find me on my website, alineram.com. I have a free guide called What is Spiritual Growth? If you would like to dive deeper into that.

So it’s alineram.com/spritualgrowth. Maybe we can put the links in the show notes.

Oli: So yeah, 100 % we’ll definitely do that.

So awesome. All right. Well, thank you so much for this conversation. It’s been really good.

Aline: And I just really appreciate your time. It’s been really good. Yeah, it was really fun talking to you today. I really thank you for having me.

Oli: Thanks again.


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Books: Go DEEPER and Grow REAL

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A REAL conversation can change your life...

Book a free 'virtual coffee' with me below to talk about anything you've read on this site and how to move forward in life in a real way.

Hi, I'm Oli Anderson - a Transformational Coach for REALNESS and author who helps people to tap into their REALNESS by increasing Awareness of their real values and intentions, to Accept themselves and reality, and to take inspired ACTION that will change their lives forever and help them find purpose. Click here to read my story about how I died, lost it all, and then found reality.

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