All these new age slogans. Being your authentic self is complicated because not everybody is just worthy and not everybody is your best friend. And where you are on your healing journey and how vulnerable you are able to be and how open you are able to be is a personal choice.

Have you ever noticed that when you're in pain or feeling desperate you up yourself care you do things to make yourself feel joyful and happy? And then when life gets good you find it difficult if not impossible to make time to enjoy your life. What a strange dilemma.

Any person who has been wounded will have done horrible things to other people. They didn't mean it. Just like a wounded animal might bite and attack you they didn't mean it either. But at some point there is a stage of healing where you have to go back and look on accountability in order to heal your heart. We call The looking back part.... inventory. In order to heal the heart that's called making amends both to yourself and to other people when it will not cause them more harm than the original event or occurrence. And this age of worshiping the victim and overindulging in entitlement and moving towards toxic positivity this stage of healing and becoming a mature person that is responsible and accountable seems to have disappeared into the smoke of I deserve it.... I deserve it all and I want it. 💔

It's not easy to be an aware Spiritual person and yet it gives us a depth of life that is not always available to others. It makes relating to other people a little bit more complex with many different choices. Hope you find this podcast helpful.

Working with a Spiritual Teacher or a healer or even a therapist it's very special kind of relationship. And yet so many people especially in the spiritual movement or industry where there is a lot of ego and people want to be the all powerful healer clairvoyant telepath etc. spend a great deal of time analyzing and critiquing their chosen Teacher. Analyzing someone else in order to figure out your boundaries and tolerances it's definitely a good thing to do with friendships and love relationships and family. With a Teacher what I always look at is what am I learning. And does that Teacher have a practice... do they walk their talk. Beyond that I follow the 12th step advice "take the best and leave the rest." People on ego trips very often like to study with someone in order to bring them down or compare themselves in order to make themselves feel better. And then they will engage in a passive aggressive relationship with their Teacher and a secret game of compare and compete never asking questions never finding out backstories that are typically none of their business anyway. And then the hostility will fall out at some point. when you are walking this path you cannot be a student you cannot learn because all you're interested in doing is finding the flaws in someone you admire so you can feel better about yourself. Your Teacher is not your friend or your lover and therefore you are not at risk with getting submerged in a personality relationship. Your Teacher's personality and choices are none of your business. You don't do this with your car mechanic or your dentist do you? No because there's no ego gratification in that. If you have a cranky mechanic who does a great job you might keep that mechanic. Or you might decide it's too annoying and move on but you will not psychoanalyze them and tell your mechanic you don't like their tone of voice or how they're handling the wrench. Why do you do this with your Spiritual Teacher... Or with any authority figure that you admire? That is the question you need to be asking yourself if you want to become a student. Not everybody can learn. some people are too busy posturing presenting and competing to be a learner.

The great Spiritual Teachers talk about how we will change and be and behave as we evolve. But we cannot put on those behaviors like clothing on top of a body of inner demons. You can't fake it to you make it. You have to cleanse in order to evolve. You have to face the darkness in order to evolve. The evolution then that comes will match what the Teachers have taught you. Only now it will be your authentic behavior.

Such a popular phrase..... Feel your feelings and another one is do the work. But how do you do these things? Here are some thoughts that you might find helpful.

Acceptance and surrender is such a foreign concept to westerners. most people react to it as a kind of passive resignation perhaps even being a doormat. However it is not that at all. It is complicated and here are some thoughts on how I approach this primary practice of the Tao.

The journey towards the authentic self in the beginning is complicated and confusing. Hopefully this episode will give you some insight and comfort and courage to either start or continue your journey

For those of you who know the story of recovery in five chapters you will know what this title means. For those of you who don't know that story it is a common tool used in Alcoholics Anonymous. You might want to look it up. I've been taking some ongoing courses again and reading research-based material and that inspired this podcast. I also found a book you might want to check out it's a little extreme so take what you can use and leave the rest but it's written by a clinician and it's called F*ck Feelings.