fragmentation

“I Used To Be Creative” – How To Be REAL Again

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What Causes Loss of Creativity and HOW TO GET YOUR CREATIVITY BACK

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A problem that I find a lot of people struggling with when I’m coaching is that they “USED TO BE” a certain way – creative, joyful, confident, whatever – but for some inexplicable reason they’ve witnessed these REAL qualities fade away and they don’t know how to get them back.

When people find themselves having this particular problem they often start to believe that those qualities have slipped through their fingers forever and they just have to learn to live without them.

This article will show you that this way of thinking is actually part of the problem – as well as showing you how those qualities became clouded and hidden from you in the first place (and how you can get yourself back on the track to getting back in touch with them).

One thing you need to know before you start reading is something that’s been said on this site and in my books before:

What’s real about you is always real.

The kind of qualities that we’re talking about here – in particular, for the sake of this article, our CREATIVITY – aren’t something that are special or scarce but something that are vital, essential, and REAL to all human beings by virtue of being human in the first place.

They can’t go anywhere because they’re REAL – you can only distance yourself from them or prevent yourself from stretching the muscles you need to stretch to make the most of them.

We’re going to focus on the quality of ‘being creative’ as an example but what’s going to be said here applies to any real human quality that will allow us to keep growing, keep learning, and moving towards more WHOLENESS in our lives (i.e. a better connection to ourselves, the world, and reality).

We’ll start by looking at the main reasons you became DETACHED from your creativity – or, at least, started looking the other way – and then we’ll look at some things you can do to start tuning in again.

Here we go:

You started listening to the world more than yourself and you became conditioned to think the unreal things about you are real.

As the age old story goes, we’re born real but then the world starts to creep in and make us believe that we’re unreal.

It does this by giving a bunch of false beliefs and assumptions about ourselves, the world, and reality that we take on board as the truth about life and then hypnotise ourselves into believing.

As enough time passes, we forget that we’ve been hypnotising ourselves with these unreal beliefs and actually start to believe that we actually are whatever it is we’ve been telling ourselves we are.

Some people spend their whole lives believing this unreal story – always with a sense of restlessness never knowing why.

If you’re lucky then you can WAKE YOURSELF UP and start being real again – but only if you do the work required of diving into yourself and your belief systems and learning to flip the script by separating the real from the unreal.

In relation to why you “USED TO BE” creative but now hardly find yourself ALLOWING YOURSELF TO BE, it all starts with this unreal story and the effects of your conditioning and your capacity to resist and wake yourself up instead of hypnotising yourself.

Somewhere along the line, you’ve allowed the world to condition you into believing that your creativity is not important (or even existent in the extreme cases) and so you’ve started to value the world and CONCEPTS more than yourself and EXPERIENCE.

Unfortunately, because the world doesn’t generally want you to be ‘creative’ and instead wants us to be a productive, money-driven member of society you probably ended up valuing the cultural values and ideals of a results-driven uncreative world.

This could’ve been something that you picked up from your parents when you were younger – who perhaps didn’t value your creative work as much as they could’ve done (or simply didn’t ‘get it’ because they weren’t on the path that you were on).

Maybe it was your peers who valued video games or whatever else – usually some other distraction – over doing the creative work that you used to enjoy doing.

Maybe it was just the general culture you grew up in and the messages you picked up from movies or mainstream music or whatever about what you ‘should’ be doing with your life and the kind of person you ‘should’ be.

It might be something completely different but it’s always the case that something somewhere along the line gave you a bunch of ideas that at the very least made you see your creativity as being LESS IMPORTANT than it actually is and – in the worst cases – made you give up on it completely.

You ‘Grew Up’ and Stopped Growing

At the end of the day, creativity is something that we ALL have – even though it can express itself differently in all our lives – because it’s something that is ESSENTIAL for the process of human beings growing more real and becoming more WHOLE.

The short-version of this is that the creative process allows whatever is going on in your unconscious mind to come to the surface and to be processed in the light of your conscious understanding – this means that you’ll have a better grasp of who you really are, what you’re really thinking, feeling, and value, and will be able to make better decisions moving forward on account of whatever INSIGHT is revealed (because more insight leads to more REALITY).

See this article about creativity for more details about that process or listen to the Creative Status Podcast.

Because creativity is so vital to our growth, we can end up being a “used-to-be-creative” if we reach a stage where we trick ourselves into thinking that we’ve done all of the growing that we need to do and that we’re now a final product instead of a work in progress.

If you tell yourself that you’ve ‘grown up’ and that you know everything you need to know or that you’re ‘right’ about everything or any of the other UNREAL qualities that come with seeing yourself as ‘finalised’ and ‘done’ learning or growing then you just end up causing yourself to believe in what I call the ‘Illusion of Stasis’.

The Illusion of Stasis is just the irrational idea that you no longer need to move with life and that the ideas you carry about yourself, the world, and reality are the final word about these things.

When you start to believe this then you end up having EGO RESISTANCE to the natural flow of reality itself (aka THE REALITY WAVES) and so you end up living in a little box and trying to control everything instead of facing and growing through the CHAOS of life (because you’ve created a false sense of order with your EGO / self-image).

The solution here is to let go of who you think you are and to allow yourself to start GROWING and moving forward again. Your creativity will have to kick back into action if you do because that’s what it’s for: to help you navigate this process in the context of your own life.

You became outcome-dependent because you forgot how to play.

If we’re not careful then as we get older and ‘wiser’ (or not), we can become incredibly results-driven and obsessed with the outcomes of whatever it is that we happen to be doing.

There’s a longer article about outcome-independence here on this site, but the short version of what it means (if you don’t know) is that your feelings of self-worth and levels of self-acceptance are dependent on the outcomes of whatever goals you’ve set for yourself.

This is an irrational approach to living and a form of CONTROL FREAKERY because nobody can always achieve the outcomes that they want to achieve all of the time and so by putting your self-acceptance in the hands of outcomes you’re putting the way you feel about yourself at the mercy of chance and chaos (instead of being REAL and taking it as a given no matter what by practising UNCONDITIONAL SELF-ACCEPTANCE).

In relation to our creativity, outcome-dependence prevents us from setting out on a creative journey or by starting a creative project in the first place because we condition ourselves to believe that it’s simply not worth doing unless we can guarantee certain results.

The problem is that creativity – like life – is ultimately about facing UNCERTAINTY and the UNKNOWN and riding through the EDGE of our ideas about ourselves to be able to allow something new to emerge out of CHAOS.

In other words, if you try to get guarantees from the creative process then you’ll set yourself up for failure and be disappointed…

Creativity isn’t a one-way street – it’s a two-way exchange of information between you and reality itself. As you set out with an ‘idea’ about what you’re going to create – be it a book or a painting or whatever else – those ideas will guide you and serve as your map but you will have to learn and modify the original plan in the light of reality.

As the saying goes, “The map is not the territory”. Ever.

If you’re outcome-dependent then you won’t be able to ride out this chaotic pathway because you’ll need everything to be a certain way and try to control things to ‘protect’ your self-worth (which doesn’t even need to be protected because you’re always worthy no matter what outcomes you attain – what’s real is always real).

The opposite attitude here is to be outcome-independent which means that you set out on your creative journey knowing that all you need to really do is “do your best and forget the rest” because it’s the PROCESS that will help you the most to learn and grow real, not the end results or outcomes themselves.

If you find yourself being too ‘rigid’ about your creative goals and lapsing into outcome-dependence to the extent that you can’t even get started then you need to introduce a more PLAYFUL attitude to the way that you’re approaching things.

Ultimately, this just means staying curious, seeing what happens and taking some of the pressure off yourself to get certain results – when you were younger and “used to be” creative this is most likely the attitude that you had: it was FUN, not something serious that your whole life depends on (or at least your levels of feeling good about yourself).

In short, it’s not WHAT you do but HOW you do it.  If you create a piece of art (or whatever) in a ‘serious’, outcome-dependent way, it’s going to be a lot less real than one that’s created in a ‘playful’, outcome-independent way.

You Stopped Being Curious Because You Think You’ve Seen It All

As we get older, we can risk becoming jaded and feeling like we’ve seen it all, done it all, and been everything we will ever be.

This is, of course, a consequence of ‘growing up’ as we discussed above but there’s also a slightly deeper issue which is that our attitude becomes unreal and ends up blocking our ability to get outside of the hamster wheel of the same old thoughts and ideas we usually have and the same old things we do because of them.

Most of us will end up finding ourselves in some kind of a routine – in many ways, this is something that we need to bring a sense of structure and order to our lives and as long as this routine supports our growth without being too RIGID then it will add value to our lives.

Problems can arise, however, when we end up creating a routine at a time in our lives when we’re one version of ourselves and then life and who we ‘are’ changes around us but the routine doesn’t.

When this happens we end up just going through the motions and living on autopilot:

-Going the same way to work every day.

-Eating the same foods.

-Having the same conversations with the same people.

-Doing our hobbies at the same time each week.

-Etc.

You know what I’m talking about probably because we can all end up falling into this trap at some stage in our lives.

Having this problem of just going through the motions is a SYMPTOM of the FUNDAMENTAL problem of losing our curiosity.

We’re no longer curious about different ways of going to work, eating different things, talking about certain things, or doing our hobbies when we do – we just do it because that’s what we’ve identified with those things and so “It’s always been this way”.

The way out is to MIX THINGS UP by bringing some curiosity back into your life:

“What if I do it this way?”

It doesn’t have to be anything complicated but – ultimately – by being curious enough to at least ask yourself different questions you can start getting different results (if you act on the answers you get).

If you keep acting out on the answers you already think you have then you just end up putting yourself in an imaginary bubble and holding your back from the REAL LIFE you could be living as a consequence of your real creativity.

To be creative again, start asking yourself some new questions.

You learned to judge yourself and that held you back.

In short, the main reason why you “used to be” creative but no longer find it as easy to express yourself or to explore creative ideas and projects in the way that you used to is because you have picked up JUDGEMENTS.

Almost always these judgments are at three levels (the only three levels that exist): yourself, the world, and reality.

At the level of YOURSELF, you have learned to judge yourself if you express certain qualities that your creativity requires of you: taking RISKS, not being ‘good’ enough (because you’re being outcome-dependent), judging the version of yourself you see in the CHAOS of the creative process as it unfolds that your EGO isn’t ready for yet.

At the level of the WORLD, you have learned to judge what you think your work ‘means’ to others instead of just enjoying the process and learning what you can from it for YOURSELF (and then letting it just mean what it actually MEANS).

At the level of REALITY, you have learned to judge the way that things work and to BLOCK yourself from allowing your creativity to take you in the direction you need to go in so that you can make the unconscious conscious and grow more WHOLE.

All of these – and any other – judgements that you pick up and treat as being real take you out of REALITY because the only thing you can do with reality is accept it and judgement is the antithesis of acceptance.

When you have this attitude, you end up living in a way that is in direct contrast to the values and qualities required to be truly creative – in short, you have become CLOSED to life instead of being OPEN and seeing where life and creativity will take you (which is always where you need to go because your REAL creativity is the vehicle of your natural drive towards WHOLENESS).

How to Overcome Lack of Creativity: Get Out of Your Head and Into Reality

As always, the solution is to remember that “Real always works” and to start training yourself to be more open and real again.

This means stopping and catching yourself when you judge, embracing uncertainty and risk instead of running from it, and making sure that you’re on a journey of learning instead of ‘knowing’ everything.

If you spend too much time in your head then you can never be truly creative because you’re blocking your mind-body system from working together as a whole and fulfilling your natural drive to move towards more connection in yourself and life as a whole.

Like I just said, your creativity is the vehicle for allowing this natural drive to move forward – actually, whether you try to consciously direct it or not it will still do its thing (because what’s real is always real and never goes anywhere).

That’s a topic for another article but the short-version is that to live a life without friction,  you need to embrace and ride WITH this process instead of against it and that means opening to life instead of sticking in your head and trying to control everything from the closed parts of you.

You’ll know what this means in the context of your own life and where you’re holding yourself back (and if you don’t check out the 7-Day Course at personalitytransplant.info or read my books about it).

You “used to be” creative because you have temporarily bought into the illusion that you’re not. The way out of this temporary blip in your life is to get real again, see yourself as you are, and start living as whatever that is instead of the uncreative being you’ve allowed yourself to think yourself into being.


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

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The ‘F It’ Moment: How to Stop Being Intimidated by Life

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Stop being intimidated

One of the biggest problems I see people having to deal with when I’m coaching is that they’ve become INTIMIDATED by life.

This can show up in all kinds of different ways but the impact of having this problem is always the same: it stops them from taking the kind of ACTION they really want to be taking and from getting all of the amazing benefits that only action can bring.

In my own life, I struggled with this problem when I was younger and I’d been conditioned to stop believing in myself by various unhealthy influences in my life.

It was only when I really reached BREAKING POINT in my late teens and realised that the ideas in my head were stopping me from getting the RESULTS that I wanted from life that I was able to have a breakthrough moment of thinking “F it” and just decided to do whatever the hell I wanted (and disappeared to Japan).

That might sound a little reckless but – in retrospect – when you’ve been locked in your own MIND for however many years and then projected the mental cage outwards into the world around you then having a “F it” moment can be the only way out.

In fact, when things get serious enough and you resist reality for long enough – by NOT ACCEPTING YOURSELF – then eventually you’ll reach that crossroads where the only two options are to either keep resisting in a futile attempt to try and stay the same or to step up and say “F it” and then do something that might actually change your life and set you free.

These days I’m not intimidated by life at all and it’s because I put myself on a path of going out there and actually FIGURING OUT FOR MYSELF who I am and what I’m capable of (and not judging my own self-worth based on the results that I got) instead of letting the world TELL ME who I am and believing it without any real thought.

I could probably have never put myself on that path – or would’ve at least taken a lot longer to get there – if I didn’t reach that point of just saying “F it” and going out there and getting over my fear of truly LIVING.

If you find yourself being intimidated by life then the way out is REALITY but before you find it you might have to find yourself saying “F it” so that you can step outside of your programming and just going out and taking ACTION (the only real ‘cure’ for anything – especially the cure for a life lived from behind a mental cage).

This article will help you understand what that means and what you can do to start feeling truly ALIVE again.

Here we go:

Symptoms of Being Intimidated by Life

When we become intimidated by life we either STOP taking action completely or we only take the actions that are within our comfort zone and so won’t STRETCH us or show us the EDGE of our ideas about ourselves.

When this happens, we just end up living an inauthentic or UNREAL life where we ultimately play the role of a pawn in somebody else’s chess game (some boss we don’t even care about, some domineering partner or family member, or simply our ideas about ‘society’ as a whole).

The most common place we end up when we’re intimidated like this is the WAGE CAGE (i.e. some ‘job’ that you found yourself in because you forgot you could actually CHOOSE your own life if you stepped up and focused on the real stuff).

In short, we end up in this UNREAL STATE because by giving into intimidation we end up giving up our ACTIVE POWER and then listlessly floating along through life without any direction.

The way back to reality is to recognise the symptoms of living in this unreal manner, saying “F it”, and then getting back on track to finding our REAL LIVES again.

If you’ve become intimidated then you’ll probably suffer from some or all of the following symptoms:

Passive Mindset

When you become intimidated by life you’ll develop an UNREAL MINDSET that stops you from taking action.

This might show up in a variety of ways but the most common are things like negative thinking (which is almost always a way of trying to justify not taking action), ‘excusitis’ which is just a fancy way of saying that you’ll constantly come up with EXCUSES not to do what needs to be done, and self-limiting beliefs that tell you there’s something fundamentally ‘wrong’ with you or the world so there’s no point even trying.

All of these ways of SEEING and interpreting ourselves, the world, and reality just cause us to try and avoid acting in the world as a way of staying in our comfort zone (where we often don’t even want to be anyway because we’re miserable there as a result of resisting REALITY).

All of this is really caused by being INTIMIDATED by the perceived consequences of taking action and the emotions we’ll have to face by doing so (regardless of if we ‘fail’ or ‘succeed’).

Restlessness

As a result of not taking ACTION, you will probably become restless and irritable. This is simply because you know that there’s more to life but your intimidation has stopped you from going out and getting it.

When you don’t ACT, then you don’t let your unresolved emotional ‘stuff’ (shame, guilt, and/or trauma) heal itself in the way that it needs to and instead you ‘block’ the healing process behind the static beliefs that are stopping you from acting in the first place.

This causes inner friction and frustration that is experienced as RESTLESSNESS.  This is really just the DESIRE of your real self – which you’ve become detached from – screaming to be expressed in the world (and the only way you can do that is by becoming AWARE of the real ‘stuff’, ACCEPTING what’s true, and then ACTING on it).

Never Speaking Up

Intimidated people are scared of the TRUTH and for that reason they refuse to speak up and share the truth as they see it.  A big part of this is because they literally fear the truth itself because it would show the futility of their PASSIVE way of thinking and being in the world.

On a perhaps simpler level, people who are INTIMIDATED by life are almost always shame-driven individuals who have a feeling that they’re not good enough following them around like a ghost (which it is…a ghost of the past) and so they don’t want to risk ‘rocking the boat’ with their opinions or ideas in case somebody disagrees with them (which to the shame-driven individual is something that triggers all kinds of unsavoury emotions).

For this reason, when people have become intimidated by life they rarely – perhaps even never – share with others what they really think, feel, or want to do for fear of being rejected (not realising that by not sharing they’ve already REJECTED THEMSELVES).

Negative Thinking

We spoke about this above as a symptom of having a PASSIVE MINDSET (which all intimidated people eventually develop). Just to clarify a little more, negative thinking is ultimately just a form of UNREAL PESSIMISM that come from somebody trying to DEFLECT life at all costs by trying to explain it away.

That might sound a bit technical but all it means is this:

When people are intimidated it’s almost always because they have unresolved SHAME that causes them to feel like they’re not good enough in some way.

In order to try and hide from this shameful feeling (which is never real, always something they’ve picked up from outside of themselves and then taken onboard as a judgement that they continue to hypnotise themselves with), the intimidated person will concoct a POINT OF VIEW of life that justifies the story they’re telling themselves so that they can try to HIDE from their shame instead of dissolving it (by taking action).

This UNREAL POV is always negative because negativity always explains away action.

In practical terms, it just means that the intimidated person will always look on the (unreal) dark side of things in order to find reasons not to do the things that will actually free them (and you can always find a million reasons not to do things if you set your mind on doing that).

Procrastination

Another thing that intimidated people will do to avoid taking action is to procrastinate.

In simple terms, all that means is that they will focus on taking actions that feel like they’re doing something but that are actually a distraction from the REAL stuff they could be doing that will make a  big difference to their lives.

For example, I know a few coaches that would benefit from organising and having SALES CALLS but because they’re worried that they’ll be rejected or even that they’ll be successful and actually have to coach somebody they instead procrastinate by playing around on social media all day or doing other unimportant things that are their ‘hobbies’ but won’t really get them anywhere.

These tasks allow them to tell themselves the story that they’re ‘busy’ and doing things whilst also (conveniently) avoiding the things that would get them where they want to be (with the cost of having to push through their comfort zones and face themselves and other people).

Not Taking the Actions You Really Want To Take

In short, then, when you’re an INTIMIDATED person, you might be ‘busy’ in the sense that you’re constantly doing things but you probably won’t be doing the things you really want to do because you’re AFRAID of having to face yourself at some level.

Some people can spend their whole lives wasting time on distractions and busyness for this reason. If you realise you have this problem as you’re reading this then the question becomes: “What are you going to DO about it?”

Maybe it’s time to say “F it” and do some of that stuff you’ve been putting off that could change your life?

Being Outcome-Dependent Instead of Outcome-Independent

I’ve already spoken about Outcome-Independence a lot on this site (because it’s so important). If you haven’t read the main article and you’re unfamiliar with the term, then all it means is that you can live in one of two ways:

-1: Outcome-dependence (Unreal): Where your levels of self-acceptance are CONDITIONAL and affected by the outcomes you get as you go through life.

-2: Outcome-independence (Real): Where you “do your best and forget the rest” but your levels of self-acceptance are UNCONDITIONAL and not affected by the outcomes you get.

In other words, with outcome-dependence you NO LONGER feel ‘good’ about yourself if you fail to get the results you want whereas if you’re outcome-independent then you still feel good even if you ‘fail’ as you know you can pick yourself up again, learn what needs to be learned, and either try again or ACCEPT some reality that can’t be changed.

When we’re INTIMIDATED by life, we end up putting our goals on a pedestal – because we think they’ll fill the void inside ourselves (that can only be filled by ACCEPTANCE OF REALITY) – and so we inflate their importance to the extent that we become INTIMIDATED BY THE THINGS WE WANT.

Again, this comes back to our relationships with ourselves because if we become a shame-dissolving person instead of a shame-driven one it becomes a lot easier to say “F it” and go out and chase our goals in an outcome-independent way.

Imposter Syndrome

If an intimidated person actually does manage to overcome themselves and take ACTION without working on their emotional ‘stuff’ then they find themselves in a position where they feel like a fraud (Imposter Syndrome).

This is ultimately because there ends up being a gap between the way that they show themselves to the world and the SHAME that they still feel as they used action as a vessel to try and run from it instead of dissolving it.

When this happens, the intimidated person ends up being worried about being ‘found out’ (i.e. having the world reveal itself to agree with the skewed distortions of their shame).

This just adds a whole new layer of intimidation that they have to deal with because they have to find new ways to keep ‘hiding’ themselves so that they won’t be exposed as a shame-driven individual.

In reality, they could just say “F it” and keep doing what’s worked for them to get them where they are but they’re so afraid of being “found out” that they take everything too seriously to see clearly.

General Lack of Confidence

Perhaps it goes without saying, but when people become intimidated by life, they lack confidence.

This is usually for two reasons that build on each other:

-1: They keep telling themselves a story about why they can’t/shouldn’t/best not take the ACTION that they want to take (and because practise makes perfect this causes them to miss out on their own potential).

-2: Because they don’t take this action, they end up not getting results (which just reinforces the unreal story they’re telling themselves).

Once you’ve stopped taking action and you end up believing that the consequences of not taking action are WHO YOU ARE then you end up in a self-perpetuating loop that causes your confidence to dwindle.

The longer you stay in this loop the worse things can get. It’s so bad that some people spend their whole lives on this hamster wheel, going around in circles and ruining their own lives.

A shortcut to getting out of it is to realise how bad things have become, have an “F it” moment, and go out there and start ACTING again (which as you build momentum and get results will increase your confidence).

Anxiety and/or Depression

If you don’t solve the problem of intimidation then you increase your odds of becoming anxious and/or depressed. This doesn’t mean that all anxiety and depression are caused by being intimidated but it does mean that a lot of it is.

The short version is this:

Anxiety will enter your life when you create a FALSE IMAGE of yourself in an attempt to hide from your intimidation instead of pushing through it and see what’s actually REAL.

This false image just causes problems because you’ll use it as a FILTER to try and avoid reality and avoiding reality will constantly add friction to your life (which is experienced as ‘anxiety’).

Depression enters your life when you’re so intimidated that you stop MOVING. This is a consequence of developing the passive mindset mentioned above – when you start to see and think in this way then you just end up taking yourself out of action, away from any sense of purpose, and experiencing live at the level of existence alone (instead of thriving in life).

In both cases, you need to learn to say “F it” so you can start moving in a more REAL way again.

How You Became Intimidated

If you recognise the above symptoms in yourself then there’s a good chance you’ve become intimidated by life (that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re living in constant fear but it means the limits of your fear are ripe for exploration).

This means that at some level you need to say “F it” and to start taking the right kind of action again so that you can get RESULTS from life that are REAL to you.

It might be helpful to know how you ended up being intimidated in the first place (if you look at kids, for example, they have to be TAUGHT to be intimidated by life – that means in your own case it’s something that you had to learn. The good news is that if you LEARNED it then you can also UNLEARN it).

Here are some of the most common reasons for becoming intimidated by life:

Basically, you got sent into your HEAD somehow.

The short-version of what happened is that you got sent into your HEAD for whatever reason and decided to identify with it and stay there.

Normally, this is because in our early years we are made to feel ASHAMED or GUILTY in some way (or in the most extreme cases, TRAUMATISED) and it causes us to think ourselves into a fragmented version of ourselves that disowns certain emotions and desires.

For example, maybe you had a high school teacher who insulted your artwork and so you created a ‘version’ of yourself that has no interest in artistic pursuits.  The original interest is still down there – in the Shadow Territory – but you create a mental image of yourself that denies it.

This is just a hypothetical example but the point is that something happens that sends you into your head and your INTIMIDATION is just your ego’s way of keeping you there.

You might’ve listened to OTHER PEOPLE instead of yourself.

The only person who can live your life for you is…YOU.

Unfortunately, we live in a world where people will attempt to give us all kinds of unwarranted and unreal advice about how we ‘should’ live our lives.

More often than not, this advice is usually just passed on from one INTIMIDATED person to another and so it just ends up doing more harm than good.

If you listen to this advice then you’ll end up being intimidated and not listening to your own REAL VOICE which knows there’s nothing to be intimidated by.

You compared yourself to others (usually the highlight reel).

We can become intimidated – especially in the age of (anti)social media – when we look at the lives other people are portraying themselves to be living and compare ourselves and our lives to what we see.

The problem – as the old saying goes – is that when we do this we’re comparing our behind-the-scenes footage to their highlight reels. This can end up making us feel that we’re not “good enough” (that shame again) and this stops us from taking action (which, ironically, would get us where we want to be).

The solution is to realise that you can’t be compared to other people because you’re living your own life and you’ve had your own experiences which have made you the UNIQUE person that you are right now.

Comparing yourself to others is just a way of NOT ACCEPTING YOURSELF (because of the unresolved emotional ‘stuff’) and this prevents you from accepting who you are and then expressing it with your ACTIONS.

You lost your balls somehow (but you can get them back)

The super short version? Something has happened to you that’s caused you to lose your BALLS and to overthink every little detail of your life instead of ACTING on it.

You can get your balls back but you need to unlearn all of the BS that’s stopping you from recognising the truth about life: that the only person with any POWER over your life is YOU.

You let your ‘protective’ emotions like anger be turned against you (often into depression or sentimentality).

Sometimes, emotions that help us protect ourselves and to define healthy boundaries in our lives are ‘shamed’ or belittled by ‘guilt’ (in an attempt to control us) and so we develop an unhealthy relationship with them. The most common emotion that this happens with is ANGER.

When we disown our anger then it doesn’t ‘go’ anywhere – it just becomes something that we stop expressing. Because we have a mental ‘block’ that stops us expressing it externally, our anger simply TURNS AGAINST US and will be experienced as a hypercritical inner voice that constantly judges us, etc. eventually leading to a lack of action and then DEPRESSION.

Alternatively, we may also end up being overly sentimental about things because we end up experiencing everything through the FILTER of depression that a detachment from our healthy emotions can cause (and because a lack of anger can stop us from moving forward with our PURPOSE).

When we end up in this situation, we end up being intimidated by life because we think that we lack the strength to handle it (when, actually, we’re just hiding this strength from ourselves).

You let your interpretation of the past skew your vision of yourself in the present.

In short, if you’re intimidated by life in the present then you have a DISTORTED interpretation of the past and who you have become because of it.

What this might look like is different for everybody but it will usually involve you writing some kind of STORY for yourself to try and live out that DISOWNS vital parts of yourself because of shame, guilt, and/or trauma.

If you want to be REAL again and to stop being intimidated by life then you need to start writing a REAL STORY (or more accurately unlearning the BS story that stopped you expressing the real story in the first place).

This will probably mean FORGIVING YOURSELF at some level so that you can let go of the beliefs you picked up that caused you to be intimidated in the first place.

A short cut to doing this? You guessed it: you have to learn to say “F it”.

How To Stop Being Intimidated.

So how do we bring this all together and get life moving again? It’s simple in theory but not always in practice (which is the core problem).

The short answer is that you need to start talking ACTION.

The main SYMPTOM of the PROBLEM of being intimidated is that you stop taking REAL ACTION and then your life ends up being some unreal thing that you don’t want it to be.

You could spend the rest of your life trying to figure out exactly why you became intimidated in the first place (and maybe after reading the above list you have some basic idea) but the bottom line is that it doesn’t matter THAT MUCH.

If you want to REVERSE the symptoms of being intimidated then you need to start taking some kind of ACTION in your life.

More than that, you need to start taking REAL action so that you’re not just distracting yourself from the REAL version of yourself and making the problem worse (by being busy for the sake of being busy and procrastinating, etc.).

What this means in the context of your own life might be different to what it means in anybody else’s life but probably there is some ‘thing’ that you’ve wanted to be doing for a while but keep finding BS reasons (really EXCUSES) to put off doing.

If you can think of something like that then you’ve just given yourself as starting point.

All you really need to do now is to say “F it” and START doing it.

It’s either that or keep being intimidated and living an unreal life for the rest of your days.

 


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):

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The Veiled Veil: How to Escape the Matrix

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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:

  1. 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).
  2. 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.

  1. Limited perception.
  2. 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.

 

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

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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:

  1. How we need others to see us (because of our emotional ‘stuff’).
  2. 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! 🙂

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The Label Trap: Is Attaching to Labels Holding You Back from Real Life and Your True Potential?

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Stop Holding Back

One of the biggest barriers to getting the life we want and becoming the person we need to be to get there is labelling ourselves.

This is for two simple reasons:

  1. In order to make the most of our own REAL lives, we need to step up and be the real version of ourselves.
  2. Labels cause us to identify as PART of a group instead of being the WHOLE of whoever it is that we really are.

Being part of a group is obviously an important part of being a human being – “no man is an island”, after all –  but if being part of a group effaces who we really are because the group is based around static limitations rather than GROWING REAL then it can do more harm than ‘good’.

In the way that we’re using it here, ‘labels’ are catch-all terms that we use to describe ourselves to others that just end up erasing our own individuality (and the strengths and weaknesses that come with that which is totally normal when we’re being REAL).

Examples of labels might be:

-Mental and physical health conditions that we’ve been labelled with.

For example in my own experience: I have some health problems and could easily use these as a reason to focus on what I can’t do instead of what I can (and, thus, never do anything) because I’ve labelled myself as an “X Patient”.

-Stuff to do with our cultural background that we think we need to adhere to rigidly.

For example in my own experience: I might decide to fall into the stereotype of a typical reserved ‘Englishman’ and never really express what I truly think, feel, or want to do in order to keep a “stiff upper lip” (not that there’s anything ‘wrong’ with that if it’s what you want to do).

-Political or subcultural labels like identifying with a certain political party (and feeling cognitive dissonance when you go outside of the boundaries of what they say you’re ‘allowed’ to believe in) or even something as simple as overly-identifying with a certain subculture and being a ‘rocker’ or a ‘hippy’ (or whatever) and never experiencing life outside of what those kinds of people are ‘supposed’ to do.

For example, from my own experience: I really love rocking out and listening to rock and metal. If I needed a sense of identity then I could easily pluck an identify off  the shelf and start growing my hair out even more, wearing more black than I already do, and hating any sell-outs that listen to deep house (which I also love) or doing anything ‘mainstream’ (in order to strengthen my own sense of identity and the LABELS I’ve arbitrarily decided to attach to).

-Ideas about what it means to be a ‘man’ or a ‘woman’ and how these things might limit us or mean we need to behave in certain ways.

For example from my own experience: I might decide that I’ll define myself by certain outcomes that are supposed to make life ‘meaningful’ for guys like how many women I sleep with every week, how many steaks I eat on the weekend, and how often I get in a fight when I go to the pub (not that there’s anything ‘wrong’ with that if it’s what you want to do).

-Being obsessed with certain superficial qualities of our physical bodies like the colour of our skin or how much we might weigh etc.

For example from my own experience: I might think that being a ‘white’ guy instead of being a human being actually means anything or think that because I work out and can do however many push-ups means anything in the scheme of things as a whole (when it just ‘means’ I like working out and have enough energy to do the things I need to do from one-day-to-the-next).

Sometimes, these labels might help us feel a sense of belonging – which is part of their appeal – but they can also cause us to be distanced from ourselves and to take ourselves out of reality.

Taking ourselves out of reality might feel good in the short-term – especially if we have a lot of emotional ‘stuff’ or unanswered questions and confusion we want to avoid – but in the long-term it only screws our lives up and causes unnecessary problems.

This is why you need to be aware of how the labels you’re applying to yourself might be screwing your life up and why you should maybe think about flipping the script on some of them if you want to feel better about yourself and your life.

When we’re REAL, we keep growing and we’re always works in progress; giving ourselves labels can stop us growing by making us feel like we’ve reached the end of the line (even if we don’t even LIKE where that end of the line might be).

This is something that we’re not really ‘supposed’ to talk about because – even though the labels we attach our identities to can hold us back – labels are something that we become EMOTIONALLY INVESTED in and often need to be true (to protect our own insanity).

When people have an emotional need for something to be true about themselves, the world and reality – i.e. WANTING for something to be true, rather than actually figuring out if it’s true or not – then it just increases the odds of conflict and disagreement when we question these things or try to think outside of the box that such labelling has put us in.

If you look at much of the insanity around you in the world today, it can be attributed to the WARS people are fighting over the labels they’ve CHOSEN to give themselves (and others) and a battle with reality and the rest of the  world to try and prove to themselves and others that certain labels are true.

Actually, in reality, if something is TRUE, then you don’t need to fight or lapse into CONTROL FREAKERY to try and defend it – it will just speak for itself because that’s what the truth does: exist in self-evident way (it doesn’t need people to argue about it because it’s beyond conflict and just THE TRUTH regardless of any arguments).

If you find that you have a lot of UNNECESSARY conflict and dramatic BS in your life, then there’s a good chance that you’ve labelled yourself in some way and it’s causing you more harm than good.

This article will help you determine if that’s the case.

Labels are a map, not the territory (reality).

Like with many things at the level of our thoughts and beliefs about our lives, the labels we use to make ‘sense’ of ourselves, the world, and reality are not the TRUTH about any of these things themselves but our interpretations and points of view based on how ready we are to face the actual truth.

Because these labels are ultimately about trying to make sense of a chaotic and indifferent universe – where human beings are incapable of knowing and understanding everything because of our limited perception and then limited interpretations about what we perceive – then a good analogy is to see these ‘labels’ as maps that we’ve DECIDED to try and use to NAVIGATE life.

Like any tool, however, these ‘maps’ (labels) are always only ever a way of working with (or against, depending how much BS we’ve picked up) reality, not reality itself.

If you treat the map itself as the reality – which is what many of us do with the labels we’ve become attracted to – then we’ll never really get anywhere and we’ll never learn anything in our EXPERIENCE that can help us grow real in the way that we want to.

Treating the labels you’ve picked up as being the end of the line – instead of going out and EXPERIENCING LIFE and seeing what you’re capable of – is the same as looking at the Disney Land brochure online, familiarising yourself with the map of the theme park, and telling yourself that you now know everything there is to know about Disney Land.

Yes, maybe CONCEPTUALLY, you can tell yourself and others where certain things are in relation to other things at Disney Land – you might even have a loose understanding of what each ride is like because of the blurbs you read in that same brochure.

Here’s the rub, though: if you only have the MAP in your head, then you just have a BELIEF SYSTEM comprised of conceptual knowledge and information.  Unless you actually go to Disney Land and USE the map to get from one place to another and enjoy the rides (etc.) then you don’t actually KNOW anything real – you just have ideas that you picked up and CONDITIONED yourself with.

When you LABEL yourself without GOING OUT and actually finding out the truth about yourself for real – by taking action – then you’re just living in the COMFORT ZONE of your mind and stopping yourself from experiencing something that’s actually REAL.

This applies even if the ‘map’ you have does point to something that exists out there in ‘reality’ (like in the Disney Land example): if you don’t go out there and EXPERIENCE life for yourself then you’re just living in your own head and telling yourself it’s all life has to offer.

Labels help you to make sense of something difficult you’ve been through.

Essentially, the main attraction of labels is that they give us something to HOLD ONTO that gives us a feeling of certainty. Unfortunately, life itself is UNCERTAIN which means that clinging to labels just creates a sense of unnecessary friction between the way that we see ourselves and interact with the world and REALITY itself.

The appeal of labels, especially if we’ve been through a difficult period in our lives – or if we have a lot of unresolved emotional ‘stuff’ like shame, guilt, or even trauma – is that the sense of ‘certainty’ they provide can give us a stepping stone towards finding a sense of direction or purpose again (in an uncertain reality they give us a taste of something certain).

In this sense, as a short-term solution to the problem of dealing with ‘life’, then it’s understandable why people find labelling themselves to be a useful COPING DEVICE for dealing with things.

In my opinion, this is why a lot of people who have a lot of emotional turbulence or who have been through difficult periods in their lives are more likely to attach to labels than people whose lives may have been a little ‘easier’ or where they have had less intense emotional ‘stuff’ to deal with.

When we have a lot of emotional ‘stuff’ to deal with, our natural tendency can be to try and hide from the uncertainty that comes with it by finding something to be certain about that can explain why we’ve found ourselves in whatever situation we’ve found ourselves in and explain away a lot of the associated negative emotions we have from being in a difficult situation.

A harsh fact about life that a lot of us try to avoid is that the current state of our lives is often a CONSEQUENCE of our relationship with ourselves and how much responsibility we’re willing to take for our own lives.

Even in situations that weren’t necessarily our ‘fault’, once things are done and dusted, it’s up to US and us alone to deal with the emotional fallout and to learn to forgive ourselves for whatever choices we might have made and  to learn to REGULATE our own emotional ‘stuff’ so we can MOTIVATE OURSELVES to move in the REAL direction we want to move towards here in the present moment.

Because facing this ‘stuff’ can be painful and may lead to us reconfiguring the way that we live our lives, it’s often easier to find a label that explains a lot of our own responsibility for our lives away and gives us a convenient excuse to keep wallowing in self-pity or to – at the very least – set us up for justifying the failure that will come from not acting to change our lives in the way that we really want.

When we have this kind of ‘stuff’ going on then labels can help us to make ‘sense’ of a past we can’t let go of, a present we don’t want to face, and a future we don’t want to take any ownership over.

The problem with making ‘sense’ is that a lot of things that aren’t REAL or even TRUE still ‘make sense’ to us if we want them to. That’s fine as a short-term way of avoiding some of our pain but – in the long-term – it’s only going to bring friction, frustration, and misery to our lives as we distance ourselves more and more from reality.

 

Labels are like armbands – eventually you need to swim without them.

All this is to say that labels are like armbands (stick with me here) – when we’re first learning to ‘swim’ in life’s great ocean of chaos and uncertainty then they can keep us afloat and stop us from drowning.

Maybe you get diagnosed with a physical or mental health condition, for example:

In those early stages of your relationship with your ‘illness’, then you probably don’t know that much about it or what to expect; your skills at dealing with the condition won’t have been refined yet, your conceptual and experiential knowledge of the condition will both be at low levels, and your confidence in your ability to ‘deal’ with it will be almost non-existent too because you’re probably scared (because you haven’t accepted things yet as you haven’t had a chance to learn) and you don’t know what you’re capable of.

A label in these early stages can actually help you learn to ‘swim’ within the context of whatever you’ve got going on because it will give you a frame of reference for how to deal with things and a direction to move in.

There’s nothing stopping you from living according to the label for the rest of your life – in this analogy we’ve got going though that would just be the same as never taking your armbands off.

If you’re afraid of drowning without them then maybe that’s a good idea; if you really want to know who you ARE and what you’re capable of then – when you’re ready – you need to learn to swim without the armbands so that your life is really yours, not just some idea that you picked up about it so that you could SURVIVE whatever you’re dealing with and not actually THRIVE in life.

People are scared they’ll drown without the label (because they only have the label to deal with shame, guilt, and/or trauma).

This fear of ‘drowning’ helps us to understand why some of us become so attached to the labels that have helped us stay afloat: we do it because we’re actually afraid of life and by fighting for our labels we’re actually fighting for the devices that have helped us to survive whatever we’ve been through.

Obviously, there’s nothing ‘wrong’ with that – if something is helping us to stay afloat in life then it’s not up to anybody else to tell us whether or not what we’re doing makes sense or not.

The ironic thing, though, in my view, is that these labels may help us to survive in the short-term but the longer we cling to them and stop facing actual reality – i.e. looking at the ‘truth’ we may be blocking from view because of these labels – then the more harmful these labels become because they just cause us to be disconnected from ourselves, the world, and reality.

This is true of not just labels but our sense of identity as a whole: it’s a short-term survival mechanism that screws our lives up the more we keep trying to keep it in place without learning or growing through it.

In general, it seems as  though people are scared of drowning without their labels, comfortable points of view, ‘ego’, etc. etc., but actually what’s happening when they cling to these things is that they’re just scared of letting these things go because they’re attempting to keep their shame, guilt, and trauma at bay (which made them create a box for themselves to live in in the first place).

The actual fact is that when you let go of these COPING MECHANISMS then you realise that a lot of the emotional ‘stuff’ you’re trying to hide from is actually unreal and that when you hit the ocean of reality you can’t drown – you can only RIDE the reality waves to wherever it is that you want to be (as long as you choose a real vision for yourself and dedicate yourself to action with consistency, discipline, and focus).

Labels just erase our individuality which is actually what will ‘save’ us.

No real human being ever saved themselves or created a REAL life by trying to be just like everybody else.  Sure, we can learn from other people and see what’s worked for them in certain contexts, but – at the end of the day – no other human being has ever lived the life that we’re living and gone through the same things in the same way.

Sometimes, we might think that other people have the answers or can ‘save’ us but actually – even in the very best cases – all anybody else can really do is help us to better understand ourselves so that we can start listening to our OWN VOICE and then doing something with it as our ‘own’ man or woman.

This is because – no matter who you are – the only thing that will really help you to get where you want to be in life is your own INDIVIUALITY.

This doesn’t mean that you fall into the trap of trying to “THINK DIFFERENT” just for the sake of it (that’s EGO).

It just means that you walk your own path based on what you’ve learned for yourself by using your own CREATIVE INTELLIGENCE to weigh up all of the options and make a decision about what you need to do to be the real version of yourself.

Whenever you become overly-invested in a group (something you can only become overly-invested in as an attempt to hide from  yourself and reality) then you just end up erasing your true identity and all of the amazing things about you that will allow you to actually thrive in the way that will make you feel truly alive.

In my opinion (again), this is why so many people in the world get carried away with groups, causes, and movements without really caring what they stand for or are trying to change in the world – it’s not because they necessarily believe in the ‘cause’ but because it gives them a sense of identity that they don’t have to worry about choosing or creating for themselves (through the hard work of action and experience).

In other words, they might not know who they really are because they’re not willing to face their own emotional ‘stuff’ and so by getting carried away with a ‘movement’ it does two things for them: 1) it gives them a distraction from having to face anything real, 2) it gives them something to believe in that fills the void of not knowing themselves.

You’ll know if this makes sense to you or not when you think about the world and the various movements people are getting carried away over.

To get back to the main point, though, when people give themselves to ‘groups’ either directly or by applying labels to themselves, they just end up limiting their own options for growth and erasing their own individuality to become one of the faceless members of the group or label in question.

This might offer psychological comfort if you have a screwed up relationship with yourself but in the long-term it just prevents you from facing your ‘Shadow’ stuff and growing real.

By choosing a ‘label’ to give yourself you’re just lumping yourself with all of the other people that have that same label.  You’ll know how this applies in your own life or in the lives of people that you know but ask yourself this: “How am I different from everybody else with the label of [X]?”  – somewhere in the answer to that question is your way to true salvation (or whatever word you wanna use).

Labels give you a convenient excuse by telling you what you CAN’T do which stops you focusing on what you CAN do.

By labelling yourself in a certain way, you only end up holding yourself back because you just give yourself a bunch of reasons to focus on what you CAN’T do rather than what you CAN.

This gives you a sense of certainty (as we saw above) but the PRICE you pay for this feeling of certainty is that you can no longer express yourself because you’re locked behind a bunch of limitations and unhealthy beliefs at the same time.

Normally, when we focus on the “CAN’T DO” because of the label we either forget about or minimise the “CAN DO”. This is just the EGO’s way of stopping us from taking action and growing real.

For example:

You CAN’T climb a mountain because you’re a X PATIENT(but maybe you CAN still walk around the park and – actually – maybe you CAN climb that mountain but you don’t know unless you go find out).

You CAN’T listen to rock music you like because you’re a DEEP HOUSE HEAD (when actually you CAN listen to whatever you want).

You CAN’T wear a pink shirt because you’re a MANLY MAN (when actually you CAN).

You CAN’T express your true opinion because you don’t want to rock the boat as a RESERVED ENGLISH MAN (when actually you CAN say whatever you want if you’re willing to live with the consequences).

Etc.

The point is that most labels only focus your attention on the actions you “shouldn’t” take rather than the ones that you actually CAN and want to take to be authentic.

Labels keep you in the past when actually you can only find solutions in the present by moving towards the future.

Because labels are really just MENTAL CONCEPTS that you’ve picked up on your life journey, they’re just a summation of whatever STORY you’re telling yourself about where you think you’ve been.

This is fine as we all need to make ‘sense’ of our lives (understanding the limitations of ‘sense’ pointed out above) but the point needs to be made that every time you try and ACT OUT according to a label you’ve identified with then you’re just repeating the past.

In this sense, then, labels just reinforce the story you’re telling yourself about how you got where you currently happen to be.

If you’re HAPPY with where you are and you don’t have any desire to change or improve anything then that’s fine: keep telling yourself the same old story because it’s obviously working.

If you do have a desire to change or improve your life then that means you need to REWRITE the story and that means assessing your relationship with whatever ‘labels’ you’re giving yourself and identifying with.

Here’s something that can help you as you try to change and improve your life:

You can only find solutions in the PRESENT and they’re only really ‘solutions’ if they move you towards a FUTURE that you want to be living in.

In this context, the past isn’t really as impactful as you might have been led to believe. That doesn’t mean that you forget about the past or that you brush it aside – it just means that you need to work on ACCEPTING it so that you can focus on wherever you are now in a realistic way and then make a CHOICE about what you want to do with it.

If you’re too attached to labels that aren’t serving you and that are just reinforcing a story that’s holding you back, then you’re just DISTORTING your vision of what’s available to you here and now in the present; you’re also limiting your capacity to achieve something real and to ACT on the story of WHO YOU WANT TO BECOME IN THE FUTURE, not who your labels tell you that you’ve ‘been’ and still happen to ‘be’.

That might sound like an oversimplification but all it means is this: as long as you have a REAL VISION for the life you want to be living and the person you need to become to make that happen then the labels and stories you’ve told yourself about the past aren’t really that important.

Instead of labels you’re better off focusing on the skills and qualities you’re trying to develop to live the life you want to live.

A lot of people won’t like to read what I just said about the past not mattering that much in the scheme of things. It really doesn’t, though: what’s done is done and you either accept it and decide what you’re gonna do about it based on where you’ve currently found yourself or you just keep dwelling on it and don’t get anywhere.

When we ‘dwell’ on things it doesn’t mean that we’re actually growing, learning, or moving forward – it just means that we’re repeating the same old thoughts in our heads again and again like a hamster running around on a wheel.  Nothing ever changes and we never make ourselves any happier by doing this.

The main thing that keeps us on this ‘hamster wheel’ is the story we keep telling ourselves about who we are based on where we think we’ve been and the labels that we’ve attached to ourselves because of this. Every time we identify with those labels we’re just feeding into that BS story and greasing that hamster wheel so it can keep going.

To break free of the labels you need to ACCEPT where you’ve been and learn what you can from it and then follow this three-step process:

  1. Create a vision for where you want to be in the FUTURE.
  2. Be REAL with yourself about where you are in relation to that vision in the PRESENT.
  3. Start to become the person who can make that vision a reality by cultivating the SKILLS and QUALITIES you need to make it happen.

This process allows you to become the person you want to become whilst also embracing who you currently happen to be (based on the CHOICES you’ve made and what you’ve been through).

More importantly, it helps you to LEARN from the past without putting yourself in a box and limiting yourself because of the labels you’ve given yourself.

In this context, ‘Skills’ are just practical things you’ll need to be able to do to make your vision a reality (so let’s say you want to start a production company – you might need to learn videography, editing, marketing, etc.).

‘Qualities’ are just the personal traits you’ll need to tap into like ‘assertiveness’, ‘creativity’, ‘acceptance’, or whatever else.

In relation to your own life and vision these things will be unique to you alone and the experience you already have – what’s for sure though is that if you label yourself as just being whatever it is that you are right now then you won’t take the actions needed to grow REAL and you’ll just keep getting the same old story you already have.

Stop letting ‘labels’ hold you back and go and live the life you really want.

 


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

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How to know if you need a Personality Transplant (if you suffer these symptoms then here’s a guaranteed solution):

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Is it time for a Personality Transplant? Read on to find out!

The most important relationship in your life is your relationship with YOURSELF.

To some people reading this that sounds ‘selfish’ but, really, it’s just a matter of being REAL.

If your relationship with yourself is as good as it can possibly be then it has a number of incredible benefits that cascade into the rest of your life:

-You have better relationships with other people because accepting yourself makes it easier to accept them.

-You know what your true INTENTIONS and VALUES are and so you’re able to build a life with purpose that allows you to better SERVE other people.

-You’re happier because you’re getting authentic results from life and so you have less DRAMA with other people.

-You’re getting more DONE because when you improve your relationships with yourself you know what you really think and feel and know what to DO with this information.

-You’re more likely to take calculated RISKS that will allow you to get out of your comfort zone and actually reward yourself with experiences that you want (because you no longer allow a fear of failure to hold you back because you know that even if you do ‘fail’ your self-worth doesn’t need to be affected).

Etc.

Unfortunately, for a lot of people in the world – and you may be one of them – we get CONDITIONED to stop trusting and believing in ourselves and to try and conform to standards, values, and intentions that have nothing to do with who we really are.

When this happens, we end up convincing ourselves that we need to change something that can never really be changed – the REAL version of ourselves – and this just ends up causing our lives to go into a state of disarray and for us to feel the chronic call of the VOID as we disown important parts of ourselves.

We disown these life-enhancing parts because society/the world/matrix/whatever makes us self-hypnotise ourselves into thinking that these ‘parts’ (really part of the WHOLE) are “unacceptable” and so we try to hide them in the Shadows of ourselves – see the book Shadow Life: Freedom from BS in an Unreal World which you can get for free elsewhere on this site.

These collective, “unacceptable” parts are actually our key to salvation because they contain the TRUTH about us and will allow us to rise again and to live a REAL life instead of the life we’ve created as an extension of the cage we’ve caused ourselves to live in because of the denial of all this Shadow ‘stuff’ and who we really are and can become.

If what you’re reading here, makes sense to you, then don’t worry because there is something you can do – no matter what your situation – you have to ACT, though, and the price of inaction will just be the consequences of staying on whatever path you’re currently on and to keep building on whatever results you’re currently getting (you know what that means in the context of your own life – just ask yourself: “IF I don’t do anything now where will I be in five or ten years from now?”).

What you need to do is to start looking at how your relationship with yourself at present is HOLDING YOU BACK from the life you really want and how the way you IDENTIFY with yourself is keeping some of the real parts of you at bay (or attempting to – these ‘parts’ are always showing up in our lives but that’s a story for another day).

What you probably need to do is give yourself what I have recently been calling a PERSONALITY TRANSPLANT.

That might sound painful or difficult but it’s actually a relatively pain free procedure that can allow you to make a lot of ‘internal’ progress in a relatively short amount of time (usually 7-Days if you’re ready to commit and actually start changing your own life).

What a Personality Transplant involves is just looking at the personality (aka Ego in the language we use here) that you’ve CHOSEN and CREATED for yourself and seeing where it’s holding you back from taking the kind of ACTION that you need and want to be taking to get where you need to be in life.

Here’s a list of some of the most common symptoms that people suffer unnecessarily from (‘unnecessary’ because it’s quite ‘easy’ to do something about it) when they might be ready to go through the ‘Personality Transplant’ procedure for themselves:

You need a Personality Transplant because you never get anything real DONE.

The clearest sign that you might be ready for a Personality Transplant is that you never get anything REAL done.

Yeah, you might spend your days ‘doing’ things but this doesn’t necessarily mean that these activities are fulfilling or that they help you build any momentum or move forward in life in the way that you want to (like the REAL stuff you could be doing).

Normally, when this happens it’s because you have developed an unreal personality that is out-of-sync with both the nature of life and reality themselves but also the nature of who you are in your REALNESS.

This happens for a number of reasons:

  1. You don’t appreciate life as what it really is and you think that you have all of the time in the world (hint: you don’t because you’re going to die one day).This leads to a problem where you don’t value your time, energy, and attention and so you give them to DISTRACTIONS that don’t deserve them.These distractions can be ANYTHING – depending on your underlying intention – but the most common distractions are things like:

    Meaningless activities like video games, Netflix, dramatic relationships, pointless jobs, trying to escape from boredom (you’re only bored because you haven’t figured out your purpose), etc. etc.

     

  2. You have been conditioned to become DETACHED from your true values and intentions and you are listening to EXTERNAL SOURCES of ‘authority’ about how you should live your life and what you should do with it.This external conditioning eventually turns into an internal monologue that we hypnotise ourselves with that causes us to feel shame or guilt around the actions we really want to be taking.Eventually, this shame and guilt turns into NEGATIVE THINKING or SELF-JUDGEMENT that causes us to start making excuses about why we can’t act in the way we want to act.

This way of RELATING TO OURSELVES just ends up turning into an unreal PASSIVE mindset that prevents us from acting in the world.

When we are operating and attempting to design our lives with these two driving forces in our lives – 1) giving into distraction because we don’t value our time, energy, and attention, and 2) hynotising ourselves to be passive – then we just end up ensuring that everything we do is motivated by something UNREAL.

A simple truth about life is this:

Unreal in, unreal out; real in, real out.

All that means is that if you are motivated to act (or not) from an unreal place (because of your conditioning, etc.) then then end result will also be unreal (and vice versa: a real intention leads to real actions and therefore real results).

If you’re not getting anything real ‘done’ then it means that you’re starting off from an unreal place and so you need to switch things up and change your relationship with yourself (with a ‘Personality Transplant’).

You need a Personality Transplant because you keep getting frustrated and that frustration will eventually turn into misery if you don’t do anything.

Naturally, if you keep failing to get the RESULTS that you want from life then you will eventually become frustrated. This is normal.

The problem for a lot of frustrated people is that they try and convince themselves that the source of their frustration is outside of themselves.

Instead of changing their approach to life – by changing the way they relate to themselves first and foremost – they will say things to themselves that attempt to deny reality and to keep their (unreal) personality in place.

Examples of what they might say:

“Life is so unfair.”

“I’m just not supposed to succeed.”

“I’m so unlucky.”

Or maybe – instead of changing themselves and their approach to life – they will start to try and  trick themselves into thinking they have control over the uncontrollable (reality) with all kinds of magical devices or philosophies:

-Hororscopes and astrology

-Crystals or other things that can explain away PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY for our lives.

-Trying to ‘manifest’ things instead of taking action and REALISING things.

The point is that when we have unreal beliefs or use unreal systems to try and control life (instead of working with it) then we just end up distancing ourselves more and more from reality and prevent ourselves from getting RESULTS.*

This just leads to more frustration because of the friction between what we want and what we get from life.

If we don’t change our approach at a FUNDAMENTAL level (the most fundamental being our relationship with ourselves) then we just fall into the INSANE trap of “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”.

Unless we WAKE UP and see the truth – which means changing something – then we become more and more frustrated and then this frustration just turns to MISERY.

The SOLUTION is to start looking at where your relationship with yourself is BLOCKING your view and stopping you from ACCEPTING the reality of yourself – when you can do that you will start moving with reality again (instead of against it) and your levels of frustration (and potential misery) will dissipate.

*This is why so many ‘spiritual’ people (etc.) are actually quite miserable – because they’re not using their spirituality to face reality (which might mean changing) but to keep hiding and to try and force reality to their will (which is impossible and thus brings friction, frustration, and misery).

You have problems with yourself, the world, and reality that you just can’t seem to solve. You need a Personality Transplant.

When we have (unconsciously) CHOSEN a personality for ourselves that is designed to keep the truth about ourselves and the world at bay then we constantly find ourselves with ‘problems’ that can never be solved.

The variation and complexity of such problems is myriad but the thing that they all have in common is that they linger and NO SOLUTION can ever be found.

The reason for this is that these problems only exist in your head because you’re unconsciously trying to hide the TRUTH about reality and life behind your personality (which you don’t want to change).

If you could let the TRUTH in then one of two things would happen:

  1. You’d realise that you didn’t have a problem – you just had something you needed to accept about life or were thinking in a way that caused you to DISTORT reality.
  2. You’d find a solution to the problem and then you’d DO something about it (and so no longer have a problem).

The point here is that if you find yourself having a lot of existential or other problems that never go away  then the actual ‘problem’ is with how you’re relating to yourself and how this is BLOCKING YOUR VIEW of things.

Normally, the only reason we want to block our view in this way is because we have some unresolved ‘emotional’ stuff (shame, guilt, trauma) that the view will involve looking at.

The ‘cure’ is to learn to look in such a way that it doesn’t hurt and you can grow through it and find a stronger foundation to stand on. This is the end result of the Personality Transplant.

You have a restless feeling that there’s ‘more’  to life.

When you’re being unreal with yourself you’ll constantly feel like there’s ‘more’ to life and that you can express more of your potential or do more with your life.

Some people feel like this for years and years (sometimes even their whole lives) because they never wake up and smell the coffee.

The reason you feel like there’s ‘more’ to life is because there is more to life – you’re just not experiencing it because you’re holding yourself back with an unreal personality and the cage of beliefs it’s locked you within.

When you have these unreal beliefs that make you PASSIVE, then you don’t go out and get the things that you want from life. This manifests as a feeling that there’s ‘more’.

Sometimes, we’ll try and trick ourselves into not GROWING REAL by saying that we should just be grateful for what we already have (which is often not very much if you have these mindset issues).

This is an example of ‘toxic gratitude’ and is just your ego’s way of ensuring you continue not to take action (and therefore grow in the process).

The other reason you might feel like there’s ‘more’ is because as well as denying yourself external experiences (etc.) you’re also hiding all those internal ‘parts’ of yourself in the ‘Shadow Territory.  Your craving for ‘more’ is a craving to be RECONNECTED to your REAL SELF and to become whole again.

You need a Personality Transplant because you constantly judge or criticise yourself which stops you moving forward.

When you take onboard all of the external conditioning of the world that we talked about and start hypnotising yourself into believing it then you pick up a  metric-f-ton of unreal standards according to which you can judge yourself by.

This shows up as:

-Negative self-talk

-Imposter syndrome

-Hypercritciality

-Outcome-dependence

-Etc.

This stops you from taking action and makes you feel ASHAMED to be/feel/think/do the things that you really want to be doing.

What you need to do in these kind of cases is realise that when you’re being REAL you can never judge yourself because reality is beyond the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ of judgements.

You need to learn to stop listening to this unreal internalised voice and to start acting on a foundation of acceptance instead.

You can TRAIN yourself to do this and to start moving forward again.

You need a Personality Transplant because you feel like you’re stuck in a rut, just wasting your life doing the same old same old.

A clear symptom of having an unreal personality (that needs to be ‘transplanted’) is that you feel stuck in a rut, nothing ever changes, and you just keep going through the motions of doing the same old, same old.

You feel like you’re WASTING your life then the reason for this is that you are wasting your life because you don’t understand what life is (like we said above) and so you’re wasting your time, energy, and attention on distractions instead of DIRECTION.

Luckily, when you start getting back in touch with the real version of yourself by going through the Personality Transplant procedure then you will have a better understanding of your DIRECTION in the form of purpose and so things will start moving again.

Being stuck in a ‘rut’ just means that you have no VISION for the future or who you’re becoming on the way there.

Once you’ve started to look at what’s real about you, you will understand your true values and intentions, how you can create a vision around these things, and what skills and qualities you need to develop to MAKE IT HAPPEN.

When you’re armed with this information, it’s a lot easier to move – even if only a little every day – and to stop wasting your life on the same old, same old of the comfortable but familiar.

You need a Personality Transplant because you suffer from anxiety and depression that you can’t quite explain.

In many many cases, anxiety and depression are not fundamental problems but SYMPTOMS of the deeper issue of having an UNREAL relationship with yourself and allowing this relationship to remove you from reality.

Before you smash the REALITY RESET BUTTON and give yourself a Personality Transplant, you can just end up causing problems for yourself that lead to mental health issues:

Anxiety is often caused by engaging with yourself in an unreal way because you have created a false image of yourself based on false assumptions about who you are, what the world is, and how reality works.

When you interact with the world from the vantage point of this false image then you are constantly getting NEGATIVE FEEDBACK from reality in the form of unmet expectations and a lack of results.  This constant friction would cause anybody to be anxious.

Depression is often caused by not listening to the FEEDBACK you get from your anxiety and so clinging to our false self-image instead of changing it: this just causes frustration that turns to misery (depression).

The other fundamental problem that causes depression is that you have lost touch with your PURPOSE because you have picked up a PASSIVE BELIEF SYSTEM that caused you to stop moving.  All human beings need to keep moving to be fulfilled – if we lack purpose our emotional life reflects this.

If you suffer from anxiety and depression then it’s probably a result of the lifestyle choices you are making based on your relationship with yourself.

Medication (etc.) may mask these symptoms in the short-term but to solve the fundamental problem you might just need to give yourself a Personality Transplant and start moving again.

You need a Personality Transplant because you don’t trust and believe in yourself enough to build the relationships you want and get the results you need.

Our unreal personalities are always caused by underlying SHAME, GUILT, and/or TRAUMA that we are not prepared to face.

When you don’t face these emotions you end up blocking them behind an unreal version of yourself and spend your whole life engaged in CONTROL FREAKERY in order to support this false version.

Living in this manner stops you from building real relationship and getting real results.

This is because – at some level – you end up doubting yourself and failing to trust and believe in your CAPACITY to do the things you need to do and to relate to people in a way where you recognise your own VALUE and serve people in an appropriate way.

If you don’t have the kind of relationships in your life that you want to have then you need to learn to push through the underlying emotional ‘stuff’ and to learn to accept yourself UNCONDITIONALLY (which can be done).

When you can do that you’ll have a better relationship with the world and will get the results you want from life as an extension of that.

You want your life to change for the better but it never does.

In short, if you’ve been trying to change your life for a while but never get anywhere then you need to try and change your personality from an unreal one to a real one.

This means getting out of your comfort zone – which is an extension of your current identity, not reality – and to find your EDGE.

This means stepping up and giving yourself a Personality Transplant – if you don’t then things are going to continue to never change and before you know it your life will nearly be over and you’ll be battling regrets.

Giving yourself a Personality Transplant isn’t that ‘hard’ but takes a little commitment (to yourself and the life that you want).

It involves things like:

-Creating a REAL vision for yourself.

-Deconditioning yourself from all of the external things that have made you hide from yourself.

-Looking at your self-limiting beliefs.

-Seeing where you’re being too PASSIVE or NEGATIVE in your thinking.

-Exploring what parts of yourself you’re denying and what GIFTS they have to offer you.

-Looking at how you can STRETCH yourself and find your EDGE.

-Learning to understand how you might be causing yourself to be FRAGMENTED.

-What you’re not accepting about yourself and life.

-How you can use your time, energy, and attention more effectively.

-Plus a load more.

If you’ve already waited long enough to start making changes then you can get started right NOW by signing up below– this will give you access to a 7-Day course that will allow you to figure this stuff out in the context of your own life and to start getting results and moving again FAST (if you don’t want to leave this site, check out the Personality Transplant intro video below).

This is a donation-based course so anybody who is in the small group of people that are ACTUALLY ready to work on themselves can have access to these life changing ideas and be rewarded for their commitment to life itself (‘donation-based’ means pay what you want even nothing – this is an incredibly valuable course though so if this article resonates and you don’t take it then you need to ask yourself what’s blocking you).

Real life is just around the corner but you gotta step up and TAKE IT.

Many thanks for reading and I hope you get where you need to be,

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Unicorns (from Shadow Life: Freedom from BS in an Unreal World)

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This is a sample chapter from the book Shadow Life: Freedom From BS in an Unreal World:

When we send our soul into hiding because of our fears about ourselves, the world, and reality and the perceived threat (to the Ego) of facing the Shadow Territory then our soul will keep screaming to us from beneath the surface of our unreal faces in an attempt to get our attention and wake us up again.

That’s all fine and dandy but we need to discuss another element of this unwholesome process of hiding ourselves from ourselves:

This element is the Unicorn.

In the terms of what we’ve been talking about in this book, a ‘unicorn’ is really just a vessel for all of the hidden qualities in ourselves – ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ – that allows us to gain a sort of unconscious control over the externalisation of our Shadow and its hidden messages.

It’s a way of experiencing our hidden qualities but without having to face the Shadow Territory and all of the uncomfortable work and the ego-reconfiguration that comes with it.

In short, a unicorn is a kind of ego protection device that allows you to deflect the whispers from the Shadow Territory so that you can remain the same. It’s another, more subtle, form of Control Freakery.

Our consumerist society is basically fuelled by unicorns and, with the rise of social media and the ability it gives us to fine-tune and tailor our image of ourselves and the way that we share with the world, we can even make unicorns of ourselves.

It’s all bullshit, though.

You need to be aware of unicorns and how they have a hold over you if you want to free yourself and forget about the hopelessness of being a fragmented version of who you are in your wholeness.

The most terrifying part of all this is that a unicorn can be literally anything: another person, an object, an intangible concept or idea, or even something that doesn’t even exist.

To make a unicorn of something, all we have to do is project a bunch of heightened symbolic meaning onto it and convince ourselves that it has certain qualities and attributes that we feel we lack in ourselves because of our conditioning and the BULLSHIT we believe about who we are.

In a sense, these unicorns are just an external manifestation of some image that our ego carries. They’re the bullshit belief that the conceptual or interpretational can be real but – as we’ve said in earlier sections of this book – no concept can ever be real and no interpretation is the truth.  Maybe some point more closely towards ‘the truth’ than others but the concept or interpretation itself is simply a signpost or tool.

Worshipping the concept instead of the reality is always going to leave you being removed or disconnected from the whole and that is the main problem with unicorns.

The short version, then, is that unicorns are a substitute for reality that are given heightened meaning because of our hidden emotional ‘stuff’. Because we’re not ready to own that ‘stuff’, because doing so will threaten our ego, we end up projecting it out into the world so that we can still feel it without realising that it’s coming from within ourselves.

It sounds a bit convoluted maybe but it’s pretty simple if you get some examples:

Perhaps the most common place where this unicornisation shows up to protect our egos is in romantic relationships.

We’ve already agreed that romantic relationships that are based on realness can threaten our masks because we can’t really avoid being vulnerable in those contexts.

If we resist this vulnerability, however, we can end up in a co-dependent or dysfunctional relationship where instead of real meeting real we find ego meeting ego.

Most of us have had these kinds of relationships at some stage in our short, miserable lives: they’re defined by a certain sense that something isn’t quite ‘right’ and by a push-pull dynamic as everybody’s conflicting attachment styles lead to a kind of ego dance where nobody really wants to stay and nobody really wants to leave.

This kind of ego dance is what we commonly call ‘drama’, kids.

For whatever reason, we stay in these relationships because they’ve ‘activated’ something within us that we don’t believe we can get outside of the relationship (or we just wanna get laid on the regular, whatever).

This ‘activation’ is part of the Unicorn Trap (aka ‘Unicornitis’).

Even though the relationship is distinctly unhealthy overall, we stick around because we believe we ‘love’ the other person (which we might, but that doesn’t mean we have to have a relationship with them – ‘love’ and ‘compatibility’ aren’t necessarily the same thing).

We probably even have moments of tenderness or intimacy with them – though they are few and far between in comparison to all the push-pull ego drama that unfolds the rest of the time.

Really, what’s happening in this context is that two people who don’t accept themselves are turning the other into a vessel for the feelings of unconditional self-acceptance that they’ve been hiding from themselves.

Read that last paragraph again because it might save years of your life.

It’s a kind of unspoken ‘deal’ that nobody even knows they’re taking part in: “we don’t accept ourselves but we can pretend to accept each other” – something like that, anyway.

The only reason you’d stay in an unhealthy relationship is because you don’t accept yourself in the first place but the feeling you get of being whole or understood in those rare moments of tenderness and intimacy are enough to keep you ‘hooked’.

What you don’t realise, though, is that those feelings aren’t coming from the other person – they’re already inside you and always have been.

You’ve just used the other person as a unicorn which means they serve as a vessel for you to be able to feel a degree of acceptance (or whatever else you’ve been ‘lacking’ because of your disconnection from yourself) without having to actually accept yourself and destroy your current version of the ego.

This is usually because – for whatever reason – you’ve been conditioned somewhere along the line not to give yourself permission to accept yourself and so you have to go about it in these strange and sophisticated ways.

Like I said, I used to be an emotional retard so I’ve been in this situation once or twice myself. I’m not gonna beat myself up over it or anything because I’ve seen a whole bunch of my friends in similar situations so I guess it’s just part of the ‘growth’ process.

A real, healthy relationship is when we use the context of the relationship to shave away layers of fragmentation and grow more real together by finding the Edge (see a later chapter).

The Relationship of Unicorns is what happens when you want the ‘relationship’ part but not the growth – once again because real growth would mean facing the Shadow Territory and seeing the emptiness of the ego.

Even with the ‘real’ relationships there’s a period where things start to settle down and we realise that we’ve created an idea or unicorn of the person we’ve been ‘seeing’.

Normally, we call this the ‘Honeymoon Period’ – all that’s really happened is we’ve projected all of the qualities we lack in ourselves on to this creature we’re now infatuated with and think that they have the answer to the question of our missing soul (which, don’t forget, we’re always on the quest to rediscover).

Over time, once we realise that we’re dealing with a real human being and not a fantasy, we have a rocky return to reality, and then we either stick around in the relationship and commit to trying to see what’s really there – or we move onto our next fix because we need to keep that ego in place and avoid the Shadow Territory.

Humans, eh? We’re all screwed.

Really, this idea of our “missing soul” sums it all up – if the soul is the whole within us, then we will naturally be attracted or repelled by the missing parts of ourselves in the objects of our worship or disgust (unicorns).

Not all examples are as dramatic as the romantic relationships we find ourselves in; there are plenty more mundane examples that we see around us day after day but they’re all based on the same principle of somebody subconsciously trying to fill the void inside themselves instead of simply becoming the void and closing the gap between themselves and the rest of the world and reality.

An obsession that many people have had over the last few years is ‘superheroes’ – obviously, Batman and Superman and whoever else have been around for almost a century so it’s not brand new or anything, but thanks to the popularisation of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (which is basically just an expensive soap opera) people have gone next level in their fanaticism and their fervour for vicarious heroics.

We sometimes forget that the word ‘fan’ is short for ‘fanatic’ which means “Marked by excessive enthusiasm for and intense devotion to a cause or idea”.

Where does this ‘excessiveness’ or ‘intensity’ come from?

From BULLSHIT, of course.

Being excessively enthusiastic or intensely devoted to anything is probably never a good idea but feeling that way about made-up characters in tights suggests that there’s something extra missing in one’s soul that needs to be remedied if one is to ever sort the problem of one’s life out.

We already spoke about ‘heroes’ in an earlier chapter and you don’t really have to be a genius or anything to put the pieces in place and make the connections here, but all of this ‘Hero Worship’ doesn’t really have anything to do with the tights that these guys are wearing – or the adventures that they get in – as much as it does the QUALITIES that they embody and the qualities that have been denied in the people that are unicornising them.

Look, I’ll be totally honest and admit that I watched more than a few of those Iron Man movies – they’re great entertainment and Robert Downey Junior is the man.  I get it.

When I found myself watching these movies, though, it was at a bit of a low point in my life: I’d lost touch with my purpose, I wasn’t working on a book or anything like that, I’d probably just come out of some dysfunctional relationship after unicornising some chick and trying to solve all my mummy and daddy issues, and I didn’t really know what the hell I was doing with myself.

I always end up quoting Henry David Thoreau who said that “Most men live lives of quiet desperation” – look around you and tell me this isn’t true.

Why do most people find themselves in this state?

Because they don’t trust and believe in themselves, they have no vision for their real growth, have lost touch with their purpose, and are waiting for things to make complete ‘sense’ instead of taking the little bits of sense that they do have and making something more with it.

More than this, many – if not most – end up beaten into submission and living as the mask so that they can fit in with the rest of society and live comfortable but miserable lives in the safety of their socially, emotionally, and spiritually ‘acceptable’ personalities.

They’ve shrivelled away and gone into hiding but – as we’ve pointed out – the drive for wholeness and the quest for the soul never stops.

You’re looking for your soul right now. That’s probably why you’re still reading this shit.

Listen, here’s something you need to know and embrace about human beings, if you don’t already:

Every single one of us is fucking awesome.

Really.

We have been designed as goal-seeking, purpose-chasing forces of nature that constantly grow towards wholeness.

We’re not supposed to be shrivelled up and living in a “quiet” or “desperate” manner. That’s something we have to learn because of shame or guilt or trauma.

When people are becoming fanatical about Tony Stark – or any other superhero or unicorn – what they’re really becoming obsessed with is the qualities that they’ve denied within themselves for whatever reason.

Tony Stark doesn’t need permission to do whatever the frick he wants; he doesn’t live meekly; he doesn’t sit around wasting his potential and living a miserable life working in an office cubicle and then going home to his bored wife and snotty kids.

All of the things this guy embodies are exactly what the people who become obsessed with him are lacking in themselves.

But here’s the kicker: They don’t really ‘lack’ it; they’ve just been taught to deny it.

Their obsession is a sign that they need to reawaken these qualities in themselves to grow whole – the mere fact that they even recognise these qualities in whichever hero they end up worshipping means that the quality is definitely somewhere inside them already.

If it wasn’t, they couldn’t recognise it.

All these comic book nerds and other Hero Worshippers have suppressed their heroism (not the unhealthy kind, discussed earlier, but the need for real purpose) and so they’ve turned to unicorns. They don’t wanna face themselves so they experience these qualities through the vessel of [some super hero / rock star / product / whatever].

The tendency to worship unicorns is also used against us all the time for marketing purposes. It’s done by having companies spend millions of pounds on ‘audience research’ which is really just about helping them to understand the masks we wear, our aspirations, and the pain points that led to us being frustrated and unreal with ourselves in the first place.

When we’re queuing for hours through the night to get our hands on the latest [iPhone], or whatever, it’s not the actual object that we’re queuing for but an opportunity to be returned to our own souls for a little while.

Really, in the case of an iPhone, we’re literally just queuing for a bunch of minerals and plastics.

Yes, the coming together of these materials has great functional value in allowing us to better interact with the world and communicate with the people we love and care about or whatever, but, really, any phone on the market can do that these days and we don’t see the hipsters getting in line to buy those with such fanaticism.

Nope, for these unsavoury characters, the iPhone has been heightened to the level of a unicorn (though, to be honest, way less people give a crap about iPhones than they used to – thanks, Universe!).

Instead of it just being plastic and whatever else, it has become a vessel for storing all the missing parts of the human soul and connection to reality that makes life actually worth living.

Because these people don’t wanna get directly in touch with their souls because that would mean denying the ego and having to face the reality of flux and change and all of the complicated things that come with it (DEATH), they decide to outsource these qualities instead and get in touch indirectly.

I’m making assumptions because I’ve never queued for anything in my life unless totally necessary, but I guess the people who act in this strange manner get to feel a sense of superiority because they have some high-status (to other lonely people) technology, they feel a sense of belonging because the Apple Store Monkeys are all clapping for them, they’re getting attention because they might get their picture in the paper, and they get to see themselves as people who “think different” and are unique because of the advertising campaigns – just like everybody else!

It’s all BULLSHIT though (as you probably guessed).

If we take the ‘reverse engineering’ approach, we can make the assumption that a lot of these people really feel inferior, that they don’t really belong anywhere, that they never get any attention and are unworthy, and that they’re just sheep who have to make a concentrated effort to stand out from the crowd.

Those poor bastards.

Honestly, the human ego can make a unicorn out of just about anything in order to protect itself and stop us facing the Shadow Territory and grow through things.

‘Pretentiousness’ is another interesting example, because in this case people make a unicorn out of other people’s work and their ‘understanding’ of it or of abstract ideas and theories that they attach their identities to for ego-augmentation.

It might be something simple like ‘music’ – many of us have probably all been through the ‘edgy teenage music fan’ stage where we think that listening to obscure bands and avoiding things that are mainstream makes us ‘better’ in some way. I even know adults in their 30s and 40s that are still doing that crap – how insecure can you get?

It can happen with whole fields of thought too, though.

For the last few years, I’ve worked with a lot of designers and I must admit that some of them have been the most pretentious people I’ve ever met in my entire life.

In this case, they turned the whole concept of ‘Design’ into a unicorn, allowing it to become imbued with all of the qualities that they want to embody themselves but secretly fear that they never can: a sense of control over the world and the shaping of it, a sense of style and sophistication, a need to be creative and cool, etc.

I’m not saying that design isn’t amazing (look at what we’ve done for the world with it); I’m just saying that a lot of insecure people become attracted to it because of the way that it can be used as a unicorn that helps strengthen their desired image of themselves.

‘Philosophy’ is another unicorn so is ‘Mental health’ or ‘Writing’ – there are billions of them.

The point is that we take mere things or actions and then put all of our ‘stuff’ into them so that we can avoid our own souls.

If you look around you, you’ll see that the world is built of unicorns.

Which means it’s all bullshit.


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

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Refuse to Feel ‘Guilty’ for Growin Real.

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The only people who don’t want you to grow real are people that are UNREAL.

This is because being REAL is about unblocking ourselves from the matrix of our own BS – such as self-limiting beliefs, unreal expectations of ourselves and others, emotionally-distored perspectives, attachments to opinions blah blah – so that we can simply MOVE and grow through our own edge and go deeper into a relationship with the TRUTH.

Unreal people have FRAGMENTED and divided themselves within themselves and so they have attached to all this BS and even gone so far as to think that they ARE the BS.

When they see somebody doing the INNER WORK to flip the script and put their WHOLENESS out into the world – instead of allowing the world to suppress them and to EXTINGUISH the torch of the human spirit – a couple of things happen:

1. They start to lash out because the REAL QUALITIES that are being expressed in the REAL ONE trigger their ‘Shadow Stuff‘ and all of the real qualities they’re trying to hide from themselves for the sake of their EGOs start calling to them from beneath the surface of themselves.

2. They will try and TEST the REAL ONE to see if they’re as real as they seem to think they are… This is weird when it first starts happening but it’s a good sign as it means the unreal have seen your realness and can’t quite believe it.

These ‘tests’ will be about trying to SHAKE you in some way – just believe in your REALNESS and refuse to waver (there’s nothing to ‘worry’ about anyway as all they can give you is UNREALITY).

3. They will try and make you feel GUILTY and to force you into certain ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving in the world (based on ROLES they want you to play so they can keep their unreality’s hold over them).

Here, they will tell you what you ‘should’ or ‘shouldn’t’ think/feel/do based – usually – on how it’s making them ‘feel’ (normally because they’re playing the VICTIM and trying to make you and them believe that somebody else is responsible for their emotional ‘stuff’).

You need to remember that all of this is just the WORLD trying to suck you back into its unreality.

Guilt is a useless emotion but reality is FOREVER.

Be unshakeable.

I can help you reach your goals and grow real.

 


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The Truth that is Written is Never the Real Truth.

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Words are just words but the truth is the TRUTH.

It’s so easy to fall into the trap of thinking that we’re GROWING REAL because we’re consuming information about personal development, spirituality, or whatever else but all of that stuff is just part of the problem unless we take it off the page and out into REAL LIFE.

This is deeper than just the distinction between theory and practice – it’s about IDENTITY versus EXPERIENCE.

When it comes to REALITY in truth, words, symbols, ideas and concepts only have the power to POINT YOU in the right direction – they are not the direction or destination in itself.

As we’ve said many times on this feed:

ALL CONCEPTS ARE UNREAL BUT SOME POINT YOU MORE CLOSELY TO THE TRUTH THAN OTHERS.

That means, of course, that there’s a Continuum of the Conceptual (sounds aight – just made it up):

At the extreme end is ‘BS’ – i.e concepts and ideas that point you away from truth instead of towards it.

In the middle is ‘Mediocrity’ – i.e. concepts and ideas that observe the truth to some extent but are only sourced in the MIND and so can never grasp it.

At the other extreme is the ‘Rooted’ – these are concepts and ideas that somebody has formulated after touching the TRUTH in their own lives and then doing the best they can to point you in the right direction (often having to use metaphors, stories, because the truth comes through pictures more than empty words).

BS——MEDIOCRITY—–ROOTED

Either way, even the most BEAUTIFULLY ROOTED words either written or uttered are useless in themselves until they TRIGGER something inside you that opens your mind to the moment and brings in a flood of new INSIGHT.

When people treat the words as the truth without the EXPERIENCE of the TRUTH then they just end up being machines that parrot pre-programmed scripts and dogmas – in other words, they have made an IDOL or UNICORN out of the emptiness and imbued it with qualities they have denied in themselves (in this case a connection to TRUTH).

To GROW REAL, you need to take the TRUTH off of the page and into your HEART.

Only then can you align your mind with your heart and ensure that the concepts you carry are pointing you HOME.

Get in touch for a reality check to find and see if my coaching can help you reach your goals.

 


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Waves Don’t Die – They Return to The Whole.

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The waves comes and go but the ocean LIVES forever.

If you can understand that then you can understand what it means to ride those REALITY WAVES:

You know you SHARE an inherent connection to the WHOLE and that you can RIDE OUT anything that keeps you from it.

On the level of our human experience as FRAGMENTED CREATURES in FRAGMENTED BODIES the surface-level waves of our lives will change day-after-day until eventually the wave crashes or fades and so we become ONE again.

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again:

WHAT IS REAL ABOUT YOU IS ALWAYS REAL.

It can never be destroyed.

It can never be added to or changed.

Whatever that REALNESS is – and however it shows up – it is found in the same deepest, darkest ocean of WHOLENESS that connects us all and anything else that has ever uttered the IMMORTAL words of “I am”.

When you’re RIDING the reality waves they’ll take you where you ASK them to take you and to show you what you need to be seen so you can GROW REAL again.

Beware, though, there are certain things that stop you RIDING and try to make you swim against the current:

-Your EGO (surprise, surprise) and its LIES or ILLUSIONS that tell you the waves are something you should RESIST instead of helping you see that they’re an EXPRESSION of who you are based on how much WHOLENESS you’ll let in right now.

-The ILLUSION OF STASIS that tell you that you don’t need to MOVE and so you can take yourself out of the TRUTH about yourself and all LIFE.

-The belief that the SURFACE is the WHOLE and that time, space, and cause-and-effect are the limits of who you are when they’re just the RULES according to which the WAVES MOVE whereas whatever it is that you ‘ARE’ lies in the PEACE down in the depths where it’s all CONNECTED.

Waves may come and waves may go but as you learn to surf them in the direction of you highest VISION then whatever is real about you will REMAIN because what is real is WHOLE and infinitely complete.

Whatever waves you’re riding right now are just showing you what you already are – if you learn to listen by learning to ride then you’ll learn there’s nothing to fear.

What is real about you is ALWAYS real.

 

Help yourself grow real – check out my coaching page.

 


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