As I mentioned already, a lot of the healing/emotional growth/enlightenment community focuses on external achievements: “get enough clients and then you will be a successful coach” “make enough money and then you will be an abundant entrepreneur” “keep track of the full moons and then you will be truly enlightened”. Unfortunately these teachings are no different than the teachings we’ve absorbed for years in our standard materialistic and consumeristic culture, where we try to compensate our inner lacks, fears, insecurities, voids, with external and material things, in order to escape those feelings rather than actually grow. What happens then is that - since we haven’t addressed our negative emotion but rather, we have escaped it - the void is still there, and growing bigger the more we fight it. So we need ever more money, clients, you name it, to keep compensating our inner voids, just like a drug.
I had such a great example of this from my recent experiences that I want to illustrate it. While in Costa Rica, about a month ago I was walking nearby my favourite restaurant, “luv burger” - a small healthy vegan place that makes amazing salads, in an area of San Jose that is considered luxurious. Since working in a real estate development company in New York City, I grew a true interest in real estate, and so I was admiring the surrounding buildings. I saw one that fit perfectly my dream home: I thought to myself “one day, when I’ll be able to live effortlessly in an apartment like this, I will have made it”, thinking of some distant moment in the future. Unknowingly to myself I was repeating one of those success phrases that we get bombarded with in the spiritual community.
However, as it so happens, I have a tendency to prioritise being fully present and diving into my emotions, and integrating my shadows, over any external goals (which can actually be quite frustrating in our so goal oriented world believe it or not). That same day I felt an incredibly strong longing for a sense of feeling at home, and a deep lack of having a place that I feel at home in. Surely that feeling was reinforced by my travelling for the past 2 years, but it went deeper, something that I dragged from my childhood: a lack of belonging that has haunted my entire life. As I dove into shadows linked to traumatic memories of feeling unwelcome, a stranger and outsider in my own home as a child, I started to dissolve this lack, and moved to a state of feeling welcome and at home. This integration process took about a week. And guess what happened at the end of that week? That’s right, I ended up living in a luxurious apartment with all I ever dreamed of - better in fact - effortlessly.
How did that happen, you may ask? Did I work for it? Did I plan for it? Did I make a detailed list and clear schedule on how to achieve it? No, no, no, and no. I simply went to meet my potential Airbnb host while I was immersed in that newly acquired and beautiful feeling of home, to the degree that the host felt so at ease with me, that he offered me a deal. In exchange for my real estate and Airbnb experience on how to market his place, I could stay on his new apartment on the market for a ridiculous price, for as long as I wanted.
My point is, when our higher self creates a desire, we already have moved to that desire, we already have achieved it. Any teachings that tell us to fight for it, to hustle for it, to work extra hard to achieve it, should firstly ask themselves, what are we fighting against exactly? Probably ourselves. Because we always have two choices, we can either embrace and integrate the aspects of us that are not ready to get what we desire, and are therefore holding us back, or we can fight them. Guess which one works most effectively. Hope this example illustrates it ;)
Love you all!