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Are you tired or are you weak?
I am starting to see why my students loved me, rallied for me back in 2012-2013-2014…
It’d been puzzling me… what did I do differently then?
Today I saw it.
I had a private call with a brand new client from Australia, and it was a video call on zoom (don’t ask… first time zoom user myself!) so I could see her, and the changes the conversation was creating in her.
Sense signals fight for dominance all the time, and humans allow visual signals to dominate most of the time… so I wasn’t consciously feeling her… I actually saw her.
And that was a different guidance in many ways… I could SEE what was missing for her, and guide her through that.
Like everyone, she has put all efforts into fitting-in as a child… If I can fit it, I will be loved like others… delusion.
And gradually she lost touch with her “real” self, the self who could have guided her to be herself, regardless of what fitting-in would mean.
But luckily for us, I saw a short video of her dancing in a class… and felt that her real self is still there, expressing herself in dancing… however short that video was.
So I could suggest that she dances every occasion she can create… so she can learn how the real self expresses itself, how it uses her limbs, and organs, and shoulders for guidance. To love, to rejoice, to feel.
Her eyes lit up, and suddenly there was a real sparkle there… so I knew I was on the right track…
So I went deeper: can you feel your love for your child? I asked… and of course she didn’t… So I kissed my fingers a few times, neshikot, I call it, and I was in the space of yearning and pure love… but she wasn’t moved…
The dance will help you get in touch with love… your love… Dance is love…
And the third thing: stand in front of the mirror until you can only see the person in the mirror, the innocent, beautiful person, and you can fall in love with them…
I loved her, and I loved myself as I was teaching her to get back to the inner guidance of her real self.
And this is what has been missing, what has been almost gone from my teaching “style” of late.
For that I apologize.
Do I have an explanation? Justification? Reasons?
Of course… of course I do. But when you really look, no explanation will have undone the damage I may have caused.
Surprisingly, my teaching got more effective, probably because it has been more in line with your outward directed attention.
My “job”, if I want to fulfill on my life’s purpose, is to have my cake and eat it too…
Be effective in teaching, and teach you to get guidance from the inside.
The innate guidance. Innate literally means: inborn…
100% of today’s humans have lost touch with their innate guidance, their “real” self, through the tyranny of having to conform to expectations to fit in.
Fit in, through inner guidance, is one thing… it is healthy, using the innate intelligence to adapt behavior.
But humans, unfortunately, have changed their behavior through meaning, interpretation, through unreality.
Through the concept, through the idea that there is something wrong with you, therefore you must do things differently to make you appear right.
And now that is the “floor” your life is built on… there is something wrong with you, and whatever you have been DOING, and BEING, either worked or didn’t work… so you are either OK, or you need to CHANGE some more.
What isn’t being said is that there was never anything wrong with you, other than somebody said so…
You said so, or somebody else said it, and you took it as a gospel.
Certain soul corrections have more layers of wrong and “correction” or adjustment than others.
The more peeling it takes to get to the “there is nothing wrong with me” original self, the harder it is… and the more likely that the person will settle for some learned behavior that still cuts them off from their self.
One of my students has been trying, working real hard, to peel of the adaptive behavior, for about two months now.
No one has done more work than him.
The illusory feeling is the every new revealed self is the real self… but if it is not innocent. So he is continuing to peel away. All I can do is hold the dirt as he is digging for gold, help him look through more filters, more distinctions, to be able to identify the next level of adaptive conditioning, so he can go beyond.
That is one way to get to your innate guidance, to your real self.
The other way is what I suggested to the Australian client this morning: connect to the real self directly.
I, personally, have done both. I found the mortifying adaptive behaviors, and then asked the innate self (is it consciousness?) to help me with it.
And when I was honest about asking for help, I got it. The behavior melted away without my need to force it, or create a rule about it.
This double edged sword method is the fastest… but it requires you to have skills and a level of integrity that is rare among humans that have been only concerned with surviving and looking good.
You come to me with a certain worldly desire to accomplish, health, wealth, happiness… and I have been reluctant to tell you that you have to build a new self from your real self for yourself, to become the innate you, for you to feel that your life is not empty.
And you have to face the ugly about your learned behaviors, owned that you have been that way, and ask for guidance to behave differently.
The standard behavior is to explain the behavior away… and be stuck with it. Blaming it, hating it, disowning it will make it stuck. Acting to compensate for it… ditto.
Here is an example I got conscious of it yesterday.
I got a phone call from the driver of the community van, inquiring about my well being. I appreciated the concern… honestly I am not used to it, so it moved me.
He suggested that I rest a lot.
I countered that I am not tired… I am weak. Rest is for the tired… The weak needs to get stronger.
And then I suddenly saw that the common parlance, the common usage of those two words is inaccurate, imprecise.
Tired is the result of sustained effort. When you rest, the tiredness melts away, it is a pleasant feeling, and then you are able to do more sustained effort.
The fake tired doesn’t get resolved by resting… no energy gets returned. And this reveals the real nature of this fake tired: it is an avoidance, an excuse… an excuse to cover up some weakness… weakness of character, weakness of thinking, that needs a completely different resolution than tiredness.
One of the moves the new adjusted/fake self does is pretend that it’s better, smarter, kinder, stronger than the real self.
And this pretense exacts a very high price: you are asked to do more than what you are prepared to do.
You resent the implications of your pretense… because it has become an uncatchable ball… because it has become an expectation of you, and you are not willing… Never were, by the way.
So unless you cut yourself down to size… to your original size, you’ll suffer till the end.
You can’t be all you can be, because you have set up the game that takes someone who is more than you can be, more than you are willing to be… so what you can be either seems too puny, or it is simply not available to you, you simply can’t see your way to becoming enough. a total uncatchable ball.
We each have some of it…
I, for example, have set myself up to everybody’s nurturer ‘Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!’
And just like America, I resent the implications… working for free, never appreciated, favoring the needy to the productive…
So yeah, you are not alone in this work… I am right there with you… catering to the desires of the takers, the unappreciative, the ‘it’s all about me, for me… bug off’
My innate self says: you should trust that when you do your soul’s work, when you say no to the takers, when you charge for the value you give, you’ll be noticed, appreciated, and be fulfilled.
I have never quite trusted that it would be so… And, of course, most people are bottomless pits, the more you shovel into them, the more they want.
Now you see why my integrity is not 100%…
I even stopped talking about, teaching, how to be true to yourself… And my teaching’s effectiveness doubled, tripled, quadrupled. WTF, right?
I now have scarcely two students who exclaim: I love you, to me…
What was I trying to say in this post?
That there is a you, who is innocent, and who knows how to be happy, fulfilled, and even how to fit in without giving up what is important to you.
And that you can return to it, or not, and it’s up to you, and up to how much work you are willing to do, and how much fear you are willing to take with you.
I am adding this “bit” to my courses, as a counterpoint. This is also part of the invisible dynamics that corrupt, bastardize, and destroys life… Life.
Surprisingly the Integrity Workshop will be a course where I can teach this… If you want to be in it, please apply asap.
I will, from now on, only sell the course month by month, given how much new stuff I put in, how much effort, how much more results you can accomplish with each added element.
So here is the link to register
https://offers.by-sophie.com/integrityA one on one session, like I had with the woman from Australia, is an upsell… an option, after you sign up to the workshop.
PS: As I am preparing this article for publishing, I am aware of an inner weeping. Regret. Sadness. Loss. Grief. Quiet, in the background.
I have a lot to grieve… so I do. And I have some work to do… get guidance from the discarded, ignored, invalidated self… that wants me to fully express what I was born to express… even if it is not as popular as the Lady Liberty’s ‘drivel’ I have adopted as my life’s full expression.
How about becoming popular with those who deserve me? Now, that is a new and somewhat scary idea.
