Hello Enrealed ones!
My latest Enrealment Hour podcast has just launched! In this very genuine dialogue, Erica Speigelman and I get into her story of overcoming addiction and finding her true voice in the world. We explore the roots of her past addiction, and Erica shares some of the tools that helped her to empower herself and to develop ways of being (and believing) that would honor and actualize her many gifts and offerings. I am particularly interested in the role of affirmations on our transformational journeys. Where are they truly helpful? Where are they bypassing the deeper issues that need to be resolved? Check it out at the link below:
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My new book—Humanifestations—will be published in the coming months. I am delighted with it. 192 pages of quotes, excerpts, and reflections for readers to be inspired by and to ponder. This is my fifth book of this kind, and each of them mirrors my state of my consciousness during the period that the quotes came through me. Here are a few of the ideas that I lean into in the book:
THE PERILS OF CELEBRITY CULTURE
As I move through life, I am more and more mystified by the degree to which western culture has been taken over by celebrity elevation. I have known many celebrities (and more than a few ‘soulebrities’) and I have found few of them to be worthy of our perfected projections. Talented, sometimes, but surely not equipped to become our symbols of a life truly lived. In fact, its been my experience that many famous people are driven to succeed by an over-compensatory consciousness. That is, they want to be famous in order to overcompensate for a deflated self-concept and unmet love needs. And, of course, it never works, because the externalized nature of fame is not amenable to healthy emotional development. It often makes things worse. What I am most concerned about—particularly at a time when it is all too easy to manipulate consciousness with technology—is that we waste so much time fixated on people we don’t know that we have little energy left for those we do. And that includes time spent getting to know ourselves better, and crafting the life that we are born for. True-path is not easy to find in an overwhelming and distracted world. It’s been my experience that it takes all that we have to find it. And that one of the primary obstacles is now our conditioned tendency to be distracted by and to live vicariously through others. Each of us is worthy of our focus. We are all a library of unlimited possibility.
PACE OF PROCESS
One of the most frustrating things that I learned on my path is that there is an order to the quest for true-path. For example, I knew that there was a writer living inside of me, but what I didn’t initially understand is that I couldn’t actualize him until I had gone through other stages first. So I would sit down to write, and it just wasn’t there. Right path, at the wrong time. So I went back to the drawing board, and asked myself what had to happen first. And it soon became clear that I had more healing and structure-building to do first. That is, I couldn’t calm down and create because my inner and outer life weren’t solid enough yet. I needed to work through more issues, clear more emotional debris, and build more roots in the world. And this is true for many of us. We don’t yet understand that the quest for our own unique sacred purpose has a kind of directionality to it. It can be frustrating until we realize that our inability to clarify and humanifest our callings does not mean that they aren’t in there. It usually means that there are other things that we need to engage in before they can be unleashed. Does this resonate with your experience? If so, what steps do you need to take before you can find your way home?
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WRITING YOUR WAY HOME
I have been teaching my writing course for the last seven years. And it has been profoundly helpful for thousands of students. Not just those who had already begun their writing journey, but also those that had been reluctant to write for a variety of different reasons. Far too many of us are shamed with respect to self-expression at an early or later age. We know that there is something inside of us that longs to be expressed, but we can’t get to it because we doubt ourselves, or fear the consequences, or because the repression of our voice was the only way we could survive. This course is the perfect remedy for those that were silenced, and for those who are ready to take their writing (and their healing) to the next level. It is not a critical writing course. It is an invitation to express yourself and to feel supported in your unfolding. It is an opportunity to find your voice, and to celebrate your right to live a fully expressed life. If you have heard the call, please join me on this journey of soul-discovery and self-expression:
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BEFRIENDING CONFUSION
Moving forward often demands that we live lost, knowingly surrendering our attachment to who we think we are, voluntarily stumbling around in the dark with little to guide us. Growing is all about leaps into the seeming unknown.
If there was one skill that I could not have done without on my spiritual journey, it was my learned capacity to befriend my confusion. As old ways of being died off, new ways of being invariably came to life. Before the transition was complete, there was a time, often a long time, when all of these parts were pressing up against me at the same time. In "Soulshaping," I refer to this in-between phase as a "spiritual emergingcy"—a state of confusion and inner tumult that arises when a new pathway is forcing its way into consciousness, prior to its full emergence and integration. The bridge from one side to the other is confusion. You have to learn how to hold the space for all of your parts and befriend your confusion, until clarity emerges on its own terms.
Unfortunately, befriending our confusion is difficult to hold to in a linear world. Those that walk the path of uncertainty are frequently characterized as flakes, drifters, and, ironically, lost souls. Nowhere in society are we taught to distinguish aimless from growth-full confusion, madness from truth aches, nervous breakdowns from nervous breakthroughs, habitual crisis from spiritual emergingcies. Confusion is sadly stigmatized as the mark of the "loser" without regard for the fact that one cannot come to know anything without first surrendering to the not knowing.
Our state of confusion often arises in the context of careers and relationships: Why do I hate my job? What are my callings? How do I really feel about this relationship? We develop a truth ache- a sense of internal dissonance about our path, a crying out for another direction.
Sadly, when we begin questioning our choices, resistant voices often float to the surface—voices of habit and fear, internalized judgments, well-entrenched defenses. Although progress has been made on many levels, most of us are still making our primary choices as to path through a survivalist lens, with a vigilant eye to what is most practical, safe and materially satisfying.
When we step out of this framework, when we make a move toward a more soulful idea of success, we open the door to confusion, at least at first. The voices of the world arise within us in an effort to sweep away the whispers of a deeper truth. The desire to quit our unfulfilling job and find our callings is met with neurotic images of poverty. The longing to find a genuine soul-mate is overwhelmed with images of eternal aloneness. We are then confronted with a choice: turn back to familiar harbors, or let the inner battle wage on. Play it safe, or see it through...
If we don't see it through, we risk all manner of difficulty. What ultimately holds us back is our resistance to bringing our truth ache into consciousness. Although sometimes painful, although it may well force us to turn our habitual patterns upside down, the truth-ache contains the seeds of our transformation. When we repress it, truth decay sets in, and the only thing that can save us is a truth canal. Sometimes we wait too long, and we lose our truth altogether.
Seeing it through is no easy feat. You will need support. You will need to work hard to identify the voices that are attempting to obstruct your transition. They will come in many difficult and credible forms, often disguised as your friends. You will have to patiently expand your capacity to sit in the "not knowing" in ways that nobody ever taught you. And you may even have to hold to a state that feels a little mad now and then, as different aspects of your inner world come into conflict.
But if you can see it all the way through, you will be rewarded. You will know a measure of soul-satisfaction that you will never know on a false path. You will see through different eyes and feel at peace in your soul-skin. You will not have to ask the universe for what you need because the door to humanifestation will open wide as the universe rewards you for your courage. You will know a remarkably enriched reality.
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Blessings to your path, Jeff
Perfect timing ..Thank you !