Living Authentically With Self- Assurance

To live authentically with self-assurance, we must dive deep into who we are and connect to our core identity.

Then we have to stabilize and strengthen our connection to this deep and true identity, if we are to learn how to live from it.

One inauthentic style of dealing with the shaky uncertainty that comes with living at the surface of life is to try to negate it through achievement. Those who do this flee from a lot of self-doubt and insecurity, but just barely.

They stay just a step ahead of it, like someone fleeing from an angry dog that’s right behind them. The angry dog of shaky uncertainty can chase many people into a fierce struggle for power, position and wealth.

It’s important that you avoid this seductive struggle because it’s a false path; it doesn’t deliver what it promises.

As a consultant and mentor to many high achievers, I’ve worked with a lot of people who fall into this category. They reason that great financial success and recognition will conquer their doubt and uncertainty.

They place huge bets that achieving wealth and power will free them from uncertainty and that the payoff will be a life of relaxed ease and satisfaction.

Many folks work hard to achieve great success and huge wealth because they are driven to do so.

But very often it’s a half-hearted, external success only, not an inside-out success, not a success flowing from a deeply felt certainty about who they are and what their lives are uniquely about.

Unlike the successes of someone who has found the self-assurance that comes with finding and living from one’s “core identity”, those living from their surface identity are driven from behind by the attacking dog of their insecurities, not pulled up ahead by their dreams and visions for tomorrow.

Our culture tends to reward this kind of effort to medicate fear and self-doubt by seeking certainty outside of oneself.

It doesn’t matter how you get to rich and powerful, as long as you get to rich and powerful. But as Lily Tomlin told us—even if we win the rat race—we’re still a rat.

Big time outside success always markets and promotes itself as a great antidote for our self-doubt and insecurity—but it never turns out to be that. It’s not a good remedy for a life filled with self-doubt, confusion and shaky uncertainty at all.

It may be better to be rich, powerful and poisoned than to be just poisoned, but surely not that much better.

And people who lack a connection to their core identity who achieve external success have the added burden of having to face that they have been misled, that they have spent long and often tortuous hours marching in the heat of many a noonday sun—toward a mirage.

After they get their sought after success, they often discover that there’s no deep relief or satisfaction in it.

They’re still under attack by the same old feelings, but now with a different agenda of concerns. “Was I just lucky? Will I be found out? Can I do it again? Will I lose my position, my wealth…and so on and on and on.”

The uncertainty monsters don’t go away if we get rich and powerful; they just drive in more expensive cars and live in more expensive homes.

To learn more about how to live from the confidence and conviction that comes with “Unshakable Certainty”, check out my book here.

Here’s Why Your Self-Image Can Hold You Back

We develop our Self-Image in our family. We come to see ourselves as we were seen by our parents and siblings during critical periods in our formative years.

In reality, your Self-Image is a surface affair, conditioned by your family and your culture.

It’s made up from borrowed and downloaded ideas about who you are, about your physical and psychological characteristics, about your intelligence and abilities and about your value and worthiness as a human being.

Although your Self-Image is largely formed and conditioned by others’ Views of you, you still come to think of it as who you really are, as your “I” or “me”.

In fact your Self-Image becomes your “Wrong Psychological Address” , a place where you reside much of the time, but one which isn’t your true home.

It’s not where you belong, but you probably don’t realize that—yet.

It’s probable that a good deal of your recurrent anxiety, depression and frustration expresses a deep desire within your soul to connect to your “True or Right Address”.

Expert therapy combined with authentic spiritual practice (not New Age woo woo or the “Secret” and “Law of Attraction” stuff) can make you conscious of your soul’s longing and put you in a position to satisfy it.

A LITTLE STORY ABOUT JACK, AMY AND GOD

Complete self-assurance depends on Awareness and the self-knowledge it grants. There’s no other gateway to a life that’s well lived, loved and understood.

To be connected to we most deeply are while fully awake is to be unshakably certain.

With other words, Aware Presence and Unshakable Certainty are two sides of the same coin. Here’s a little story taken from my book Unshakable Certainty.

A story about Jack, Amy and God.

One day God couldn’t take Amy and Jack praying to Him any longer. They prayed everyday for so many things that it took God many hours just to listen to them.

They wanted to sell their little grocery store in a small town and be able to move into the big city and be free from the constraints of their family, a family that lived in the same small town for five generations.

God came down and met with Jack and Amy. He told them, “I will grant you three wishes and three wishes only. After that, don’t bother me anymore. I’m busy.” They were thrilled but they were uncertain about exactly what to ask God for.

Finally, they decided. For their first wish, they wanted to be so rich that they could leave and start a huge business in New York City while they lived at Trump Towers.

God granted them their wish.

However, after a few months they grew homesick. And they were having a lot of complicated business problems; much of their money was at risk.

Jack and Amy missed the simple life of their grocery store and the daily connection with their family.

They were ready to call God for their second wish, but they were so shaky and uncertain about exactly what to ask for that they were beside themselves.

Amy woke up one morning with a brilliant idea.

She told Jack and they called God:

“Dearly beloved God”, they began, “we are so unsure, confused and frightened about what to ask you for that we’ve decided that for our second wish we want you to tell us what to ask for—for our third wish.”

God laughed out loud. He said,

“That’s easy. Ask for Unshakable Certainty, then you’ll be happy, fulfilled and satisfied no matter what.”

Meditation Is Not Just Sitting Cross Legged

Most western meditators and meditation instructors wrongly think that meditation is sitting cross-legged and quieting the mind to experience the calm state or “emptiness”.

But the real core purpose of meditation and all authentic contemplative practice is to discover who we truly are.

St Francis of Assissi put it this way: “What you are looking for is WHO is looking.”

When we try to find who is looking there is no one there. Other than awareness, not awareness OF anything, but awareness in and of itself.

So the goal is not to reach the calm state or emptiness and stop there. But to go further and discover WHO experiences these states.

Calm and emptiness are just experiences. And the movement of thought and energy are also just experiences.

If we don’t get distracted by and identified with the movement of our thought, then it too provides the opportunity to discover WHO experiences this movement.

This can happen anytime, anywhere, not just on a meditation cushion.

Carry Death On Your Shoulder

Steve Jobs thanked death for teaching him so much. Death taught him to live with passion and conviction.

We should carry death on our shoulders to keep us awake and vital.

If we’re in the right state of mind, death won’t frighten us–it will inspire us instead. The evidence tells us that if we expect to die when we die–we’ll be very surprised indeed.

In western culture death has lost its sacred dimension because most everything else has. The cult of science says too often that “if you can’t see it, it ain’t there.” To leave death to funeral home directors is like leaving it to a Jiffy Lube franchise.

Pioneering science research is now confirming what authentic spiritual traditions have said all along. The death of the body is not the end of life. It seems that we live on. Check out Dr. Jeff Long’s book Evidence For The Afterlife.

And we live on more deeply because our consciousness isn’t tied to the density of mass and so we can connect to who we deeply are. We are no one’s child from that place and our family and cultural conditioning fade to the background.

Our destiny on the other side of this life is governed by our love and inspiration while in this life.

If we connect to and live from who we deeply are while we’re in our body, then our experience after death will certainly be a lot better than if we spent our time here watching TV in confusion, working in jobs we hate and stuck in relationships we don’t belong in .

With death on our shoulder–we have a better chance to live with intensity and conviction.

What Deep Therapy Is Really All About

Deep psychotherapy is NOT focused on solving problems at the surface of life.

It’s focused on connecting to the core essence of who we are. This core essence is our True Identity.

Our False Identity is the conditioned self-image that we identify with. It’s what feels like our “I” or “me”. It isn’t. But we have to awaken to this discovery, we can’t just hear about it.

The fact is we identify with a self-image that developed while growing up in a particular family and a particular culture.  This self-image is hypnotically powerful. Whether or not it’s accurate–we think, feel and act in accord with it. This causes more suffering than war.

Once we connect to our True Identity, we can then  do three things we could not do otherwise:

1. turn toward our wounds and heal them,
2. turn toward our conditioned patterns and programs and dismantle them, and
3. turn toward our Heart so we can come Home to what deeply we ache and long for.

For more on this topic, see this article: Psychotherapy And The Soul: Deep Personal Growth.

What’s The Current Vision For Social Media?

What drives the form, style and content in social media today? And what forces will shape and determine its future?

It appears that, despite being surrounded by new technologies on many fronts, the wash on the canvas is same old, same old: profit, gain, popularity, etc–the things that feed ego, not soul.

I think this is the vision that emerges from the marriage between science and commerce. Science is blind to inner reality and commerce has a money fetish that no one seems to be able to remedy.

Yes, the marriage between science and commerce has accomplished great things on some levels. But its dark side is that it gives rise to dumb and meaningless appetites at the expense of what really matters in life.

What matters is knowing how to create and live a life with real depth and meaning as well as a loving connection to ourselves and to others.

What direction can social media take to enable and empower us, alone and together, to craft a life that can be well lived, loved and understood?

How can social media serve to awaken us to the deeper levels of life, levels from which we could better understand and fulfill our obligation to ensure the survival of our species?

Dogs Can Be Great Teachers

My dog buddies have helped me to realize a lot about myself and about other people.

One in particular taught me a number of lessons. His name was “Mr. Jones”. I got him at a shelter. He was supposed to be “part setter and part retriever.”

But he grew a beard three weeks after I brought him home, and he became mostly a terrier. He was an amazing dog — I loved him a lot.

We lived in a town where dogs could go out and he had a few pals he’d hang out with. His pals started chasing cars, chasing their spinning hubcaps all the way down the road while barking up a storm.

Mr. Jones joined them. But unlike most of the other dogs, he had no idea why he was running after cars — he just did it. Because the other dogs around him were doing it.

Mr. Jones and his pals taught me two things about people:

1) There are strange forces at play in people, forces that impel people to do things they don’t really understand, things that are not conscious. Like developing a money fetish and spending all of your time trying to accumulate and protect money.

Or even like studying for grueling hours to earn a doctorate degree to do work that doesn’t really interest you.

2) Once a critical mass of people are doing something, then others will join in even if they’re clueless about what’s really going on — to say nothing of why.

Check out what passes for life on CNN or television in general. Look closely at the corporate-funded commercials developed in consultation with “persuasion” experts, experts who show us video of dogs chasing cars so we’ll chase them too.

So we’ll chase things like pill erections or pills for fictional medical problems, pills that will make us, and anyone within 50 yards of us, smile and feel a whole lot better about life’s tough spots.

Your Dreams And Self-Knowledge

Dreams present us with an interesting paradox: Our nighttime dreams can awaken us from our daytime “waking dreams,” from the unconscious patterns and programs that run our lives.

Anyone seeking self-knowledge and self-understanding must discover and come to terms with the forces at play in their psychology. Dreams can be a powerful means of unveiling these forces. Dreams can empower us to become aware of what drives what we think, feel and do.

Working with our dreams can help us to become more aware and to enjoy a more satisfying, higher-quality life.

Dream consciousness is largely unedited. Not so in our waking life. Our waking self-image typically screens and filters most thoughts, feelings and attitudes that do not agree with its view of reality. If, for example, we learned that anger was “bad” as a child, then our self-image or surface identity will edit anger out of our awareness.

But where does the anger go? It doesn’t go away; it becomes part of our “unconscious mind.” When our mind filters and screens our anger, to stay with our example, then the anger goes underground and becomes unconscious. And, then, there is a discrepancy between what’s going on in our body and in our mind. Our body experiences the anger. Our mind does not.

We can pay a great price for protecting ourselves this way. Most costly is that we can become cut off from who we deeply are. As the surface identity presents its edited versions of reality to our consciousness, our sense of who we are can become stuck in a small and limited identity.

Dreams are a form of communication from our underground unconscious life to our “above ground” conscious life. Before we can make use of these communications, however, we must learn the special language of dreams. They have to be translated. Dreams are not what, at first glance, they appear to be.

The “Dream Maker” is a poet, not an attorney. In dreams, symbolic images are more important than literal story lines. Each image has importance as it corresponds to and represents inner realities. What is true for the waking conscious life is not at all true for dream life. For example, when we meet our boss Joe Schmidt in waking life, we are meeting our boss Joe Schmidt.

But the Joe Schmidt we meet in our dream most likely represents something or someone other than Joe in our waking life. If our boss Joe is a sad and grumpy man, then the image of Joe in our dream may represent and correspond to that part of ourselves that is, like him, sad and grumpy. The image of Joe may refer to the Joe inside of us.

In dreams, the “I” or “me” we feel ourselves to be is most similar to our waking experience of who we are. But that’s not who the dream is really about, though it seems to be. The other people in our dreams often represent aspects of ourselves that are unknown to us. These are the unconscious parts of ourselves that have often been edited out of our awareness by our surface identity.

It is sometimes shocking to discover these unconscious parts of ourselves. But it is also very exciting. It is a bit like reclaiming lost territory. With self-knowledge, there is more room to live. If this life is a journey, then we have to make it as who we deeply are. Otherwise, we can get stuck in living out a false destiny.

Becoming familiar with the dream world can also enable us to tap into our creative resources for thinking and living imaginatively. Our imagination is like muscle in that if we don’t use it, we begin to lose it. Our surface lives rarely bring the imagination into play. When our ordinary consciousness begins to appreciate the enormity of what is actually inside of us, a whole new feeling about our lives can emerge.

The ability to work meaningfully with dreams is an art and science that requires a good deal of training and experience. A therapist must typically go through a long apprenticeship with an expert, in their own therapy, to become skilled at working with dreams.

Not all dreams have significant meaning; many dreams are just residue from our day. But now and then, a big dream will come along, a dream with an important coded message from the Dream Maker. The American Indians refer to this kind of dream as a “Big Dream.” Big dreams often change the direction of lives hungry for depth, meaning and adventure.

SELF-KNOWLEDGE IS FOOD FOR YOUR SOUL

Reliable self-knowledge empowers us to live with awareness and freedom. If we’re not aware and not free—then we can’t expect to experience what really makes life worth living. Without self-knowledge, we often get lost in emotional confusion and its offspring—fear, self-doubt and hesitation.

If we’re looking to create and enjoy a high quality life—a life that can be well lived, loved and understood— then we need self-knowledge.  Self-knowledge is the basis for a life that runs deep, a life we can live with clear intent, conviction and gusto.

SELF-KNOWLEDGE EMPOWERS US TO BREAK FREE

Until and unless we discover and break free from our conditioned programs and the unconscious automatic patterns that drive what we think, feel and do, we’re starring in a movie with a screenplay we haven’t written.

We can’t be really happy and fulfilled, or come to terms with life’s tough challenges—if we don’t understand the forces at play in our lives or if we don’t star in a movie that we have scripted.

Unfortunately, most of us live stuck in a conditioned self-image, an identity that’s much too small for who we truly are. And we do this without alarm, because everyone around us does it and doing so passes for normal life. We suffer a good deal because of this.

Clearly self-knowledge is a valuable treasure. But acquiring self-knowledge is not always easy to do on our own because seeing ourselves accurately is like trying to pick up a board we’re standing on.

THERAPY FEEDS THE SOUL SELF-KNOWLEDGE

Psychotherapy at its best serves soul by feeding it self-knowledge. Therapy is much more than “treating psychological problems”. To define therapy in such limited terms is absurd. It’s like trying to fit Mt. Everest into a shoe box.

Good and great therapy involves a relationship devoted to self-knowledge, to enabling and empowering us to develop the eyes to see ourselves accurately. So we can break free from conditioned limits and dive deep into our core identity.

Not all therapists work in the service of self-knowledge, but many do. If you go into therapy for the self-knowledge required for deep personal growth and well-being, ask your therapist about her or his vision of therapy. So you know the fit is right.

Think of a sweater with a large stain on it. The stain appears to be part of the sweater, but it’s not really. It can be removed. Similarly, our conditioned self-image is like a stain that lays over our core identity—over who we truly are.

Keep in mind that our conditioned self-image, our surface identity, has a view of reality based on our past experience, particularly when we were young. It keeps us reacting to “now” as if it was “then.” Instead, self-knowledge empowers us to respond to now as now.  And our quality of life goes hand in hand with our ability to actually be aware in the present instead of mistaking the present for the past.

SELF-KNOWLEDGE ALLOWS US TO STOP HIDING FROM PROBLEMS THAT AREN’T REALLY THERE

Think of the dilemma of many Japanese soldiers who didn’t realize that World War II was over. They hid in the jungle for years afraid the Americans were coming. Any sound of a plane would trigger their fight or flight alarm system and they would flee from the beach into the jungle and hide in fear of attack. Their survival was at stake, or so they thought.

Think of the wasted days and nights, of the missed opportunities, of the experiences they missed and could never reclaim. When these Japanese soldiers finally learned the war was over—they were free from mistaking present time for past time. They were no longer soldiers at war but people free to come and go as they pleased.

Our dilemma is similar. We developed a sense of reality based on our unique circumstances as children. While we were young and lacked perspective, we learned what was safe to feel and to say and what wasn’t. And we developed ways to protect ourselves from what felt dangerous to us there and then. These protective strategies became downloaded like software.

And they trigger here and now. But they don’t announce themselves when they trigger. And so we feel certain that we’re at risk when we really are not.

So like the Japanese soldiers who didn’t know World War II was over, we react in present time as if the Americans are coming. That is, we react, unconsciously and automatically, as if what was dangerous to us back then is still going on and so dangerous to us now. And we live much smaller lives than we need to as a result. And we miss many of life’s deepest possibilities as a result.

The good news is that self-knowledge gives our protective strategies a software update, one that grants us more joy and freedom.

Next Page »