Tag: emotions

The Challenge of a Spiritual Warrior

The challenge of the spiritual warrior is daunting.

A recent email from a client working his way through an emotionally challenging divorce caused me to share with him something about the challenge of a spiritual warrior.   In his breakup he is often overwhelmed with anger, sadness and frustration.  Outbursts still happen as he does not yet have control over his attention.   My reply:

It is a war,,, that’s why we call it being a Warrior.

In the beginning we will lose most, or almost all of the day to day, moment to moment battles for our attention.  In a way that is to be expected.  The benefit of understanding this is that you will not beat your self up when you fall into a story of drama, anger, or sadness etc.   The danger of telling you this is that your judge and victim in your belief system might distort the challenge into being so hard and convince you to not even try.

What will you do with the information that this is a challenge?  What will the judge and victim of your parasite do with the same information?

It is a risk to share this with you, and a risk to keep it from you.

My advice… do not measure the progress of your war by the results of a single moment, or even one day.

God Speed

Some of the bet guidance I can give can be found in the free audio and Self Mastery exercises at PathwayToHappiness.com The program is derived from my personal study with don Miguel Ruiz and the principles of the Four Agreements.

Dirty Spirituality

We like our Spirituality clean.  That is to say we like our spiritual journey to be clean, neat, filled with lots of wonderful happy experiences, and love.   If that’s all you want you can at best go,,, half way.

That kind of spiritual journey ignores or denies dealing with the ego, self importance, fears, and various other illusions in the mind.  Coming face to face with your inner demons like the Judge, or Victim aspects of your personality are a dirty affair.  Being honest with our lack of impeccability, how we judge our self,  or other people, is humbling.  Miss those opportunities, and you miss out on dissolving the ego.

This business of cleaning up and dissolving your fears is dirty as well.  You can’t move through your fear of death, loneliness, or what others think of you, by looking at it from afar.  Nope.  You have to get dirty.  Be present with with those fears,,, and stay aware and awake at the same time.   That’s how your emotional body gets cleaned of fears and emotional wounds.  If you try and stay “clean” in this work you will miss those wounds.  You’ll end up having a nicely spiritual coat over your emotional wounds.

Challenge your inner demons and you will lose your attention to their tricks more often in the beginning than you will win.  You will take your licks as you learn to play their game better than they do.  You will have some falls into muddy emotions of shame, guilt, embarrassment, and perhaps even touch hopelessness now and again.  With some good training, and practice you can keep your self clean.  But you will get dirty along the way.

Yes this spiritual journey is dirty business.  At least it can be that way in the beginning.  Later, if you’ve cleaned up your emotional wounds, and dissolved your self importance, it takes on that bright sparkling look, and may even have a lemon fresh scent to it.

But for now, it’s okay that this spiritual work is dirty business.

Self Mastery

Learning Self Mastery Skills takes Time

What does it take to learn the skills to master your attention, focusing your mind, beliefs, and your emotions?   These are all skills that lead to Self Mastery

In spite of what the inner judge expects, it will take some time.   How much time would you give your self to become good at playing a musical instrument?   Perhaps a year with hard work.  Even after that you would continue to improve on those skills for years afterwards.

The skills of mastering your mind and emotions deserves that same respect of time.

If this were just the knowledge that comes from reading or memorization then that would be a different matter.  But that isn’t the case.

Are Emotions Important

The Quality of our Life is Measured in Emotions, Love, Happiness, vs. Fear, Shame, Anger.

Emotions: The Key to Changing the Quality of your Life
Why is it difficult to change our habits? Often we notice our own disruptive habits, want to change them, and yet don’t. Habits may be as extreme as abusive behaviors with alcohol or relationships, or as simple as repeated negative thoughts and judgments.

All the logical intellectual understanding of why we should break our disruptive habits are known. If we know so much, and we know exactly what we want to change, and we decide we really want to change, why is it still so hard? Why do we so often not make a permanent change?

A pop new age answer is that to change your habit, you just need to change what you believe. That is a concise and tidy answer, but how does it help a person who wants to get out of an abusive relationship. Why not just drop the intellectual concept of not being worthy and pick up the concept that one is worthy and deserves better? While it’s a nice idea, I just haven’t seen it happen yet.

What keeps people trapped under these concepts is the emotional attachment they have to these beliefs. The anchor that holds these beliefs in place is emotion. It is the emotion of unworthiness that holds the belief of unworthiness in place. We can cast the concept of unworthiness away from our mind with an affirmation, but it doesn’t change how we feel about ourselves. But when a person feels that they are truly worthy, then they really believe it. It becomes more than a concept, it becomes your nature. When you feel worthy, you really believe you are. Often when people go back to an old behavior, even after breaking a habit, it is because they are reverting to an old emotional state.

It is my experience that changing emotions is not a simple task. It is more than putting on a happy face. That’s making the outside prettier but doesn’t last, and doesn’t change how we feel deepd down. To make deep down changes requres changing core beliefs and point of view.

Real change is not an intellectual process. If you want to change how you think and act, then start with changing how you feel. The key to unlocking and creating real change in your life is through awareness of your emotions. What we think, is not as important to us, or nearly as powerful, as how we feel about ourselves and our life. Our intellectual thoughts take us to where we are “supposed to” and “should” go. Using awareness to follow our emotins take us to love and happiness.