“The secret to life is knowing that you will not figure out everything.”
To realign yourself when you feel lost.
“Your life force is the only part of you that is capable of guiding you when you are lost.” “Your life force is the only part of you that is capable of guiding you when you are lost.” Pyramid Steps:
- 1 - Relationship with Body (sleep, diet, exersice, meditation)
- 2 - Relationship with Others (taking initiative to connect with other people, even if it is 1 call or meeting 1 person)
- 3 - Relationship with Unconscious (writing, read, travel, new experiences)
To be aware of the supervillain in your head.
“Part X is the judgmental part of you. The voice of impossibility. An invisible force that wants to keep you from changing or growing.” “You can’t get rid of it. You can defeat it temporarily but it is going to keep coming back. If you could banish Part X, there would be no further progress.”
You can never defeat this, you can defeat it temporarily but it is always going to keep coming back. Because this part of your own-self is a evolutionary response to the chaos around you. We need part X, if we did banish it there would be no progess or growth or bravery. Good cannot exist without the bad.
To see opportunity in adversity.
“Nobody gets to avoid the three aspects of reality.”
Pain, Uncertianty, Constant Work
“Pain will never go away.
Uncertainty will never go away.
There’s no getting away from the need for constant work.”
“If you want to be happy, learn how to love the process of dealing with these three things and loving the progress. Because the highest creative expression for a human being is to create something new in the face of adversity. The worse the adversity, greater the opportunity.”
When either one of the three above show up, first identify it and then use a tool on it to nullify it. If you can teach someobdy to do that, they can change their life drastically.
Small Incremental Changes
To keep moving forward.
“This is a matter of identity. Who am I? I am not great. I am not shit. I look at myself just in terms of the habits with which I take action. Everybody needs help moving forward, failure, weakness, vulnerability is like a connector. It connects you to yourself and others. Shame and emmbrassment is actually the glue that connects everybody. No one is perfect. Try to do the best thing at each step and don't try to control the outcomes.
“The winner is not the one who always makes the best decisions or looks the best. The winner is the one who works the cycle (keeps moving forward), who is willing to take a risk, willing to work with some degree of faith, and then eat the consequences. If the consequences are bad, you work the cycle again.”
Each action forward (a pearl in the string) will have a turd in it (failure, unintended consequence, bad luck), every action has equal value. Worry about forward motion.
"You are the only person that can put the next pearl into your string, nobody can do it for you". Please learn this, this is important.
To be enough for yourself.
“It is the part of you that you are ashamed of. The part of you that you wished you were not. The part that you wanna hide from everybody”
You are gonna have your shadow for the rest of your life. Accept it, dont try to fight it and suffer your whole life.
“The shadow needs attention, not from the world, only from you. It is a process of constantly relating to it. If you don’t, it will make you do destructive things. Being in sync with your shadow is a sense of wholeness. Wholeness means: I don’t need anything else. I am whole the way I am.”
3 sides of your shadow: Inferior, Evil and Sick try to take care of each side.
You have to visualise your shadow to talk to it. Talk to your shadow, ask him how does he feel, how have I treated him? Ask him how he feels about my treatment about him. He just wants attention from you. Ask him what you can do for him? To make him happy?
You have to pay him attention for your entire life.
P.S. The Sick Shadow is unlike the other Shadow figures (Inferrior, Evil). We can bond to these Shadows with words as well as feelings. But the Sick Shadow doesn’t lend itself to words; it only connects energetically, through feelings. Sick shadow is sacraficial in a world with no light.
To free yourself from the illusion of perfection.
“The perfect experience you are looking for that does not exist (it can be perfect wife, perfect car, perfect house. It is just an image in your mind. A static fantasy you created and have crippled yourself with. People tell themselves that if they enter that perfect world, magic will happen.”
“But the reality is:
Pain will never go away.
Uncertainty will never go away.
There is no getting away from the need for constant work.”
You will never escape it.
To free yourself from the hold others have on you.
This is what forgiving others in order to heal yourself comes from.
“The Maze is always about other people. It is a product of Part X because Part X always wants fairness. What you’re telling yourself is that I’ll move past this once they make up for whatever it is that they have done to mistreat you. Your quest for fairness puts your life on hold.”
Time is fleeting and we do not have time for that bullshit. The only thing that matters is forward motion and not being trapped in your past's maze.
“The average person wants to be paid back. They want everything to be fair and balanced. But you are not going to get that from other people. The way you feel like you’re being paid is to get satisfaction from the exercise itself. It’s called Active Love.”
Active Love- Close your eyes and imagine you are sorrounded by an universe just populated with love energy. Take all the love energy from the universe and put it in your heart. See the person you are angry at and concentrate the love in your heart and send it to that person. You hold nothing back. You feel your love enter the other persons body. If you can love this bastard you can love anybody.
“Do you want to be right or do you want to create something? That’s what it comes down to. Life is about moving forward. You cannot get those days, hours back.”
To see value in every event.
“Every event has something in it that you can learn from. When something bad happens, anyone can say ‘that’s not that bad, I’ll be fine tomorrow’. That’s not good enough. You have to create a reflex to squeeze the juice out. Squeezing the juice means finding something meaningful; to find a state of not being negative but asking yourself: What am I going to do about it now?”. Pity party is a waste of time.
"Take action no matter how firghtened you are"
Steps to Radical Acceptance: An event occurs that makes you anxious
- 1 - Don’t judge yourself or be negative. (it does not mean there is not something negatvie about it, you are just not allowed to do it)
- 2 - Find something positive about the event.
- 3 - Squeeze out something meaningful or valuable from the event.
“It means you not only have the will but also faith in the process, that there’s something valuable in every event. Slowly, everything starts to become more meaningful. If you can do that, then you are in the zone of tremendous opportunity.”
When you have a cloud hanging on your head.
“Part X wants you to have the negative flow. So it will create a cloud up there so you can’t see the sun. But you can penetrate the cloud with gratefulness - the sensation that there’s something positive out there, even if you can’t see it.”
“The Grateful Flow is not the things you are grateful for. It’s the process of creating gratefulness. When you have to dig and work to find gratefulness, that process itself will change your mood.”
“When your thoughts are out of control, the worst thing you can do is argue with them. It’s effect on you is terrible and it does nothing for you. Gratefulness helps you break through that cloud and once you are up there it’s a different world.”
Just try to be grateful for at least 5 things every day.
“Part X, on the other hand, says you shouldn’t be grateful because you got screwed. You are a victim. You didn’t get enough. That’s the devil talking. That’s classic Part X.”
To deal with attachment and loss.
“Most people are very bad at processing loss. Even before there is a loss, they constantly worry about it. The goal of this tool is to get to the potency of non-attachment, which means you can pursue something but you are also willing to lose.”
Tool Steps:
- 1 - Pick something you have become too attached to.
- 2 - Imagine you’re grasping at it, like a branch on a tree. It’s scary to let go.
- 3 - But you let go. It’s a slow and gentle fall. And as you fall, you say: “I am willing to lose everything.” Silently, but with intent.
- 4 - You hit the surface of the sun. At this point you have lost everything because the instrument of possession is your physical body.
- 5 - You are now just one sun beam amongst many sun beams. You’re radiating a loving, giving energy in all directions.
- 6 - All around you there are an infinite number of other such suns. They are saying: We are everywhere. This is the Sun World. Here you can only give, not take. There’s nothing to hold onto.
- 7 - Open your eyes.
“You’re not trying to be non-attached. You are trying to move towards non-attachment everytime you’re afraid of a loss. As a human it is healthy to be not-attached on the contrary but it does not mean we are alone.”