To be in harmony, we have to walk straight in three areas: physically, mentally and emotionally. All three sides of our nature must work together, like two people running a three-legged race, for a human personality to find unity through growth. Having any one area underdeveloped will have a crippling effect; it will take the entire personality down. Our feelings are often left in the dust…

In every child’s life, there will be circumstances that are unhappy; disappointment and pain are the human common denominator…We each draw a similar conclusion: “If I don’t feel, I won’t be unhappy”…This is one of the most basic wrong conclusions that people draw about life…

We bury our feelings in the backyard of our awareness where they stay stuck, destructive and inadequate, even though we have long-ago forgotten we even hid them…But if we don’t let these experiences be felt and moved along, they will stagnate and create a dull climate of vague unhappiness that we’ll be hard pressed to later put our finger on…We shut down the factory of our feelings and along went our intuition and creativity. From there, we limped along on a fraction of our potential, and often, we still don’t realize how big a hit we took…

We grabbed a wrong solution like it was scissors—hoping to cut out what hurt—and we ran…This blocking action doesn’t prevent us from feeling the painful feelings forever—it just defers them…So as we grow up, the unhappiness we seemed to have avoided will come to us in a different, indirect way that is much more painful. We will suffer the bitter hurt of isolation and loneliness…We fail to see how we willingly choose our current painful isolation when we chose to defend ourselves this way…

If we numb ourselves to any pain, can we truly love? Isn’t love, first and foremost, a feeling?...In the end, we can’t have it both ways, both feeling love and not feeling anything…Whatever blocks us from looking at the negative in ourselves is the exact same thing that’s blocking the love….

There’s nothing inside us we need to run from…Once we move through that first painful release of what we’ve been sitting on all these years, it will feel like a poison has left our system…Old unfelt immature emotions are like a stopper holding back genuine good feelings…

We need our feelings to guide us—that’s what well-functioning, mature people do…With strong, mature emotions, we will be able to trust ourselves and find a security beyond what we’ve ever dreamed of…

Listen and learn more.

Read Bones, Chapter 1: Emotional Growth and Its Function

www.phoenesse.com

Our defenses work by blocking access to our emotions, so they choke off our ability to get to our feelings. We’re going to need to lower our weapons…Every tear not shed is a block. Every protest not spoken sits like a lump in our throat, causing us to lash out inappropriately. These feelings feel like bottomless pits...

Feelings, which are moving energy currents, will change and transform as long as the energy is flowing. But freezing our feelings stops the movement and therefore stops life, making us feel lazy…When we stagnate, becoming lazy, passive and inert, we desire to do nothing, and then often confuse this state with the natural, spiritual state of just being. But there’s a big difference…We have to feel the fear that’s under the spell of the poppies of our laziness...

No matter how undesirable a feeling is, we compound our pain when we won’t feel it, and that secondary pain is all bitter with no sweet…We must commit to go in and through, and not around. Humans, by and large, have a strong preference for going around...

We can ask for extra help and guidance, which goes a long way toward loosening up some of that stagnant matter. It’s like a rototiller for the soul…It may seem counterintuitive, but we’re more in touch with ourselves when we admit our fear than when we deny it…We won’t realize that the fear is not real—it’s truly an illusion—until we feel it and go through it...

We find our strength by feeling our weakness; we find pleasure and joy by feeling our pain; we find safety and security by feeling our fear; we find companionship by feeling our loneliness; we find our capacity to love by feeling our hate; we find true and justified hope by feeling our hopelessness; we find fulfillment right now by accepting the lacks of our childhood. If we walk through these gateways, we’ll step into life…Any spiritual path that encourages us to reach the Holy Grail without going through the weeds is full of wishful thinking.

Listen and learn more.

Read Bones, Chapter 2: The Importance of Feeling All Our Feelings, Including Fear

www.phoenesse.com

One of the subtle bodies that every living being has is called the Higher Self, or divine spark. The higher one’s spiritual development, the faster these vibrations will be…Ever since the Fall of the Angels, our Higher Self has gradually wrapped itself in various invisible layers of more dense matter that is somewhere in between the density of the physical body and the Higher Self. Say ‘hello’ to the Lower Self…

The Lower Self, which also varies from soul to soul, is made up of our faults and weakness, along with laziness and ignorance. The last thing it wants to do is change and rise above itself. It always wants to have its own way, without having to pay any price for this…

There is another layer that is quite significant but often overlooked, that we could call the Mask Self. We create this false covering because we realize we’ll likely bump into trouble with our surroundings if and when we give in to our Lower Self…Our mask is not our divine spark, although we’re hoping others will believe that it is, and it’s not our Lower Self, although we’re hoping it will work to cover up our shadow side. It’s phony. It’s fake. It’s not real…

The Mask Self can be sickeningly sweet. For an artist, it would be the difference between a good, genuine color and artificial coloring. It’s like the word we use to describe bad art: kitsch…

When a thought or intention emanates from the Higher Self, it often gets polluted by tendencies from the Lower Self…Whenever the right act is not supported by purified feelings, there is a war going on within…Self-deception is one of the hallmarks of being a human…

We are alienated from ourselves—we’ve lost our connection to the truth of who we are…We convince ourselves that we’re not really selfish, fooling ourselves about what we really feel and our twisted motives, not wanting to see what’s what. After a while, this mess sinks down out of our awareness and starts to ferment…We actually convince ourselves that we need to be selfish, which is not in alignment with our true nature. So we’re living a lie…Being true to ourselves, though, doesn’t mean we give in to our Lower Self. Rather, we need to become aware of it…

It will be far easier to face our Lower Self if we realize that underneath it lives our Higher Self. That’s the absolute reality of who we truly are and ultimately we are going to reach this part of ourselves…We have to fight for enlightenment. If we’re not willing to do this, let’s at least not deceive ourselves.

Listen and learn more.

Read Bones, Chapter 3: The Higher Self, the Lower Self, and the Mask Self

www.phoenesse.com

Our spiritual work, which comes in answer to our prayers, arrives in the form of a conflict or a friction which then activates some combination of the three personality types in us. Something happens that makes us feel we’re being treated unjustly, so we will have a chance to recognize our inner errors and purify our souls…The moment we say a prayer asking for help and strength, all hell is going to break loose. That’s when we know our prayers are being answered…Yet we think the frictions in our lives have nothing to do with us…

Any prayer to know the truth will always be answered—if we knock, the door will be opened—and the newly arriving recognitions will cancel out the disharmony, our feelings of injustice, and our misery and defiance. Frictions with our brothers and sisters will then melt like snow in the sun; we will unite with understanding and with love. There is no other reason for life on Earth than to do this, and it’s never too late to begin…

If we are the Reason Type, we govern our lives primarily using the reasoning process, making us prone to neglecting our emotions. Frankly, we’re afraid of our feelings so we thwart them. In doing so, though, we cripple one of our most important faculties: intuition…The Reason Type tends to miss out on a lot of life experiences due to fear and pride, because we basically fear any emotions that might lead to an experience we don’t think we’ll be able to handle…We, the Reason Type, like to keep everything in shipshape order, always “knowing” where we stand. But avoiding emotions leaves us adrift from our core…

The Emotion Type is equally one-sided. We pride ourselves in being capable of truly feeling, so while we may find it easier to connect with inner divinity, we easily become carried away by our emotions…As Emotion Types, we secretly look down on Reason Types, perhaps derogatorily labeling them “intellectuals” and losing sight of the fact that reason is as God-given as emotions…If we’re an extreme Emotion Type, we will impact our surroundings with our uncontrolled emotions…

None of us can exist without the use of our will, and the Emotion Type uses will in a chaotic and impulsive way, without careful consideration…Our will should always be the servant and never the master. So ideally, our will should equally serve our emotional, intuitive faculties and our reasoning processes. But the Will Type makes a master out of the servant, which pulls us out of focus in a dangerous way…If we’re a Will Type, we will tend to throw caution to the wind, losing sight of the many essential considerations needed to discover the truth in any situation…

In their highest state of perfection, the Reason Type is the Angel of Wisdom, the Emotion Type is the Angel of Love and the Will Type is the Angel of Courage. These three basic personality types are all aspects of divinity that each of us can develop, and which can all work together in harmony…For most of us, we’ll see how two of three faculties dominate and a third is crippled…We’re wrong in thinking that our extreme is better than the other extremes. Extreme is extreme, and it’s never in the middle of the road, which is where we want to be.

Listen and learn more.

An important difference between our superficial intellect and our real self is that we can direct, manipulate and govern the intellect using our will; we can’t do this with the real self. Of the two, the real self is the more intelligent one. We are so conditioned to put a laser-like focus on the use of our thinking ability and willpower that we believe we can reach self-realization through an act of sheer will; we think we can use our minds to develop spiritually…It’s our real self that connects with the living spirit of a word, whereas unfeeling repetition comes from our intellect…

If we boil it down, what obstructs the real self are our layers of confusion and error, on top of which sits our lack of awareness about our confusion and errors…What intellect and will can be used for is cleaning up the errors and confusion that they themselves have created…When we know we are confused, we are closer to our real self than when we are blind to our inner confusion, even if we don’t have any solutions to our problems...

So what, we should turn off our brains? Not at all. To do the arduous work of following a spiritual path, we want to use our intellect to understand our errors and confusion, and to see how we have misdirected our will. Doing this will indirectly birth our real self, with all its spontaneity and creativity, into our reality…We have to understand our current situation if we ever hope to grow out of it. We can’t struggle our way out by covering up what we don’t want to see...

Trying to reach the mountaintop of the higher state of being by using intellect and willpower causes us to construct images—wrong conclusions—of how we think we should be and of how life should be, according to our limited past experiences…We can’t force ourselves to love. We might think we can, but in reality we can’t. Which doesn’t mean we don’t love…

So we can’t just make up our minds that we’re going to be good people who love and have compassion and humility. We can, however, make up our minds to figure out what’s causing us to not be all that…What we don’t realize is that if we were to see ourselves as we really are, we would see that there’s nothing to fear. We need to realize that hanging on for dear life won’t bring us to the doorstep of the real self. We simply cannot find ourselves that way…

Misery is always self-produced. No matter what we may think or how much we want it to be otherwise, it’s always an inside job. And so too is finding the solution…The problem isn’t one of morals…

Listen and learn more.

Read Bones, Chapter 5: Intellect and Will as Tools or Hindrances to Self-Realization

www.phoenesse.com

There’s a direct correlation between being unhappy and not believing in ourselves; our self-confidence takes a hit that is proportional to how badly we feel. Our idealized self-image is supposed to avoid all that by supplying the missing self-confidence. This, we think, by way of our unconscious reasoning, will lead us straight down the road to pleasure supreme…

We simply can’t be more than we really are in any given life situation…What we can do is have a genuine desire to better ourselves, which leads to accepting ourselves as we are right now…Once we’ve done a significant amount of personal work, we’ll start to see the difference between feeling a genuine desire for gradual improvement, and the pretense of the idealized self that just wants to click some ruby slippers together now and look better…

The very notion that, as human beings, we can be perfect is an illusion…Since our nutty standards are impossible to reach—and yet we never give up trying to uphold them—we create an inner tyranny of the worst kind. We don’t realize just how impossible our demands are and we never stop whipping ourselves to meet them, so we feel like complete failures when we prove, once again, that we fall short…Someone or something else must be to blame for our failure…

The idealized self is a phony, rigid face that we invest with our real being. But it’s an artificial construction that will never come to life. The more we invest into it, the more strength we sap from the center of our being…Only by seeing what’s going on can we color inside the lines of our being, and fill in our missing sense of self…

Believe it or not, our feelings will become every bit as reliable as our intellect. This is what it means to find ourselves…The idealized self wants to be perfect right now. The real self knows this isn’t possible, and it isn’t bothered by this one little bit…

From our real self, we function from our wholeness, instead of from “hole-ness”…When we learn that we can squander ourselves into life, the same way that nature squanders herself, we will then know the beauty of living… In reality, having genuine self-confidence gives us peace of mind…Remember that no one can do this work alone.

Listen and learn more.

Read Bones, Chapter 6: The Origin and Outcome of the Idealized Self-Image

www.phoenesse.com

There are three major divine attributes—love, power and serenity—that in the healthy person work as a team. They maintain flexibility amongst themselves so one never drowns another out…But when they are in distortion, they step all over each other. Then love, power and serenity get distorted into their evil twins: submission, aggression and withdrawal…

In our efforts to master our difficulties, largely created in childhood and then perpetuated into adulthood through our wrong solution choices, we find ourselves increasingly bound up by the straightjacket of a vicious circle…It never occurs to us that our real problem is the solution we have chosen…

For a child, it is valid to need to receive protective love. But if such a need is carried over into adulthood, it’s no longer valid…When we’re so dependent on others for love, we become helpless; we won’t stand on our own two feet…These attitudes become so ingrained in us, it’s like they’re part of our nature. But they are not…

When a person is inclined to choose love, or really submission, as their pseudo-solution, they have the basic feeling that ‘if only I were loved, then everything would be OK’…We cringe and we crawl, complying with others demands—whether real or imagined—and selling our soul in an attempt to get the help, sympathy, approval and love we crave…We use a fake weakness as our weapon in the battle to finally master life and win…

To avoid getting caught, we hide all this falseness behind the mask of our idealized self-image: we put on a Love Mask…We submit as a way to dominate…It’s not hard to imagine that living this way will keep us estranged from our real self…Our conclusion: the world takes advantage of our “goodness,” abusing us and stopping us from reaching self-realization…Being submissive is a caricature of what real love looks like…

In the second category is the pseudo-solution of seeking power through aggression. Here we think that the answer to all our problems lies in having power and being independent…We believe the only way to stay safe is by becoming so strong and invulnerable that no one and nothing will be able to touch us. Then we cut off all our feelings…Warmth and affection, communication and caring for others—all these are despicable…

The power type is just as dishonest and hypocritical as the submissive type, because in truth, everyone needs warmth and affection. Without these, we suffer…Power seekers are wired to never fail. Ever…We will always be competing and trying to one-up everyone...

The Power Mask requires us to live more independently from feelings than a human being possibly can. So we constantly feel like a failure for not living up to our ideal self…Our pride sticks out like a sore thumb. Heck, we’re proud of our pride…We, the power type, will take pride in how “objective” we are, as opposed to being gullible. And that, we say, is wh

Children have more than just a desire to be loved; they want to be loved exclusively, without any limits. In other words, every child’s desire for love is unrealistic…Since they seldom receive an adequate amount of warmth and mature love, children remain hungry for it throughout their whole life…Essentially everyone—even the most diligent spiritual seekers—overlooks just how strong the link is between the unfulfillment of our childhood longings and our present-day problems. This isn’t just a nice a theory…

They may not have been as perfect as we thought and hoped they’d be back then, but there’s no reason to now reject them because they had their own immaturities and inner conflicts…Once we’re free of this repetitive cycle, we’ll stop crying over the spilt milk of not getting love the way we wanted it…By releasing the pain we feel now, which is inextricably bound to the hurt of then, we’ll see how we thought we had to choose this situation or admit defeat…

We can turn our painful feelings into healthy growing pains whenever we become ready to rid ourselves of the bitterness and tension we’ve been hiding…Forgetting and forgiving will become a real thing that we won’t even have to think about doing. They will naturally occur…

Listen and learn more.

Read Bones, Chapter 8: How and Why we Recreate Childhood Hurts

www.phoenesse.com

From practically the time we were born, we have been creating our own impressions about this thing we call life. The only problem is, most of the time our conclusions are wrong…They are based on a certain limited child logic, but they are nonetheless in error. As we grow up, these wrong conclusions and the attitudes they spawn sink out of our awareness where they set in and start molding how our life will look…The word the Guide uses to refer to these wrong conclusions is an “image”…

When we form conclusions about life that are free from error, our positive, healthy beliefs are flexible and relaxed; they flow harmoniously and adapt spontaneously to life’s changes. An image, on the other hand, is stuck in the mud and congested; an image won't zig when life zags…

Since images don’t entirely make sense, they can’t stay in our conscious mind. But the more hidden they are, the more potent they become, because then there’s absolutely nothing pushing back on them. They have free reign…The list of damages caused by an image is practically endless…Ding, ding, ding—here’s another way to know an image is in the house: when there’s a repetition of incidents we didn’t ask for and don’t want. Images always form patterns…We draw people and events to us like bees to honey on account of our images…

It’s entirely possible to have a legitimate desire that we speak out into the world, but we have a polar-opposite image that blocks it…The spiritual aim of all personal self-development is purification, and we can’t become purified if we don’t understand and gain some control over our own unconscious…We won’t find our way through the maze of this inner landscape if we ‘just try harder’.

Listen and learn more.

Read Bones, Chapter 9: Images and the Deep, Deep Damage They Do

www.phoenesse.com

So let’s talk about pain, and more importantly how to dissolve pain caused by old patterns…The climate we grew up in affected us—it was like perpetually receiving a minor shock…We suffered and believed our suffering was unchangable, which conditioned us to create defenses—highly destructive defenses…We repressed the original frustration and pain we couldn’t deal with, and put it out of our awareness, where it still smolders in the unconscious mind…Our defense mechanisms of aggression, submission and/or withdrawal fully developed…Our images are also a form of defense, creating by-now old patterns designed to fight against painful experiences by erecting a rigid wall constructed entirely from wrong conclusions…

For those of us who have opted for the pseudo-solution of withdrawing, we’re defending ourselves against being hurt…Dollars to donuts, if our strategy is to make ourselves deliberately weak, we are actually wanting to lord ourselves over others…It’s plain to see that being weak is hardly harmless; it doesn’t hurt anyone any less than being outrightly domineering…In every case, we hurt others while also rubbing salt in our own wounds…

Thanks to the law of cause and effect, hurting others is not a zero-sum game; there will be consequences. So not only have we done nothing to mitigate the original pain, we’ve invited more of it. Nice work, everyone…

Rather than abandoning our limping pseudo-solutions and old patterns, we wrap them into our idealized self-image, whose agenda is to make us feel better than everyone else…Since the nature of the idealized self is falseness and pretense—we act perfect since we can’t be perfect—we feel alienated from ourselves, from others and from life. Another winner, if ever there was one…We’ll come to realize that pain feels a whole lot better than being alienated from ourselves and feeling numb…

Once we’ve gone through all this, emptying our inner well of what is old and immature, then constructive patterns can find a solid foundation…Whatever we must travel through is a growing pain that brings us to our final destination: a strong, self-reliant, full life. In the end, the payoff is actually worth all the effort…Once we learn to cope with mishaps and missteps, they won’t have the power to break us…

But what hurts so much presently is really the pain of not feeling fulfilled now, which is a result of our unsuccessful destructive old patterns…Spoiler alert, here’s what we’re going to find: beneath all our various “protective” layers is a pile of unmet needs that we don’t have a clue about…Realize, it is not childish or immature, per se, to need to be loved. It’s only so when we refuse to grow in our ability to give love that we lock out and cover up our real need to receive love…We can now see that no unkind God is punishing us or neglecting us. We have brought our problems upon ourselves through our own unrealistic attempts at running away. So if we did that, we can do something different.

Listen and learn more.

Read Bones, Chapter 10: