What Is It You Really Want?

When was the last time you checked in with yourself to ask yourself what it is that you really want? I think if you’re like any other human being, you could give me an answer right away because we humans tend to have ourselves on our mind a lot of the time. But for the sake of this moment of reflection, I’m not interested in what you don’t want and I’m not especially interested in what you think you want or need. I’m interested in you giving yourself the time to sink into the quiet inside of you and see what bubbles up from your curiosity.

What is it that you really want?

Is it a deeper connection to yourself? A deeper connection to your partner or your friends? Would you like to trust yourself more? Would you like to not worry so much? Are you tired of the same old fears coming up and rueing the day?

It’s not often that we allow ourselves the time to reflect on these deeper needs because we’re so good at adapting to our ever-changing circumstances and tolerating things inside of ourselves not realizing that we actually have choice.

Oof. Tolerations.

Are there parts of yourself or beliefs that you have that you tolerate the consequences of? If you’re not sure right in this moment, that’s OK. It’s a deep question. As a dear client of mine recently said when I pointed out some behavior of hers that she’s learned to tolerate, she so honestly replied with, “It’s taken me a while to even get here to talk about it because I was so used to my old behaviors towards myself, that I couldn’t tell you that it was behaviors that I was tolerating. I thought they were just... me.”

Did that make you nod your head? I did when she said it because it is so true about the human condition. We get so used to our ways of doing things. We get so used to our habits of thought. We get locked in to ideas of what we think we want out of life or a career or ourselves that we stay focused on the idea as opposed to being present with what’s changing inside of us. As Teddy mentioned in the interview this week, it wasn’t until he realized that keeping up with the celebrity scene wasn’t getting him out of bed in the morning so to speak, that he assessed what he was doing with his life and started his journey inward to start asking himself these deeper questions I’m posing to you today.

I want to circle back to what I said earlier about not being especially interested in what you think you want or need. I want to clarify what I mean. We tend to have thoughts about things that we think we want or need outside of us because we innocently believe we need those things for our well being. And it’s a trick of the mind because you have your well being right now. You don’t need anything else to obtain it. It’s a judgement or an assessment if you will, from constantly looking outside of ourselves and believing we won’t be OK without x, y and z. It’s deeply important for me to share that with you because I recently woke up to some demons that have been living rent-free in my head that I thought I had cut out like the cancer they are, years ago. And that’s money fears. I’ve woken up to them before and I’ve seen how they were fears that didn’t belong to me, they were other people’s fears that I had absorbed. But they’d been rearing their ugly ahead again in the recent past and when I was kind of shocked to be feeling what I thought was an old thought system I had cut out, I had realized in hindsight that yes, my initial realization of my money fears had definitely changed my relationship to money, but because of those initial realizations, I hadn’t noticed that I was actually still tolerating a bunch of thinking around money.

For example, when I was really busy in my practice, I would entertain thoughts that it could all go away. And when it was quieter, because that’s the ebb and flow of business, I would entertain thoughts that I may not get more clients. All of them rooted in fear, none of them rooted in truth. It wasn’t until I realized I was tired of the dog and pony show inside my mind, and as I asked YOU earlier, I asked myself what is it that I really wanted? (Answer: to be free of the grip of these money stories), then I was reminded that I am the one in charge of my experience and I have the choice to stop identifying with them. It has been an incredible journey since for me, because I feel a deep peace.. but I will warn you from experience - when you’re done with old habits in your brain, and you begin to choose to not get caught up in them and stay in your peace instead? They will rear their ugly head... louder and louder. Almost as if they want you to believe you need them in order to avoid the fearful story they’ve created. The ultimate gaslighter. But what’s fabulous? Is when you know this, when you remember this conversation we’ve had today, you’ll see through it. All I ask is for you to have patience while you practice staying in your peace while you allow the noise to pass.

As Father Greg said last week, practice makes permanent, boy oh boy is that right on the money.

So, dear ones, what is it that you really want? What is it that you want to be free of? What are you tolerating that you can be done with? I so want your heart to be given the opportunity to rest, and you are absolutely capable of experiencing that.

Sending love in all directions and I’ll see you next week...

Jess

Bamboozled Into Spirituality

Hi, I’m Jessie, and I was tricked into being a spiritual person.

Does that sound harsh? I don’t mean it to. I was recently reflecting on my journey to where I am now, what I know to be true about how our mind works and the spiritual component to life that is undeniable, and I was in awe of how I’ve gotten here.

I was at a party Saturday night and in sharing about what I do with a new acquaintance, I shared that I am a spiritual teacher with a Behavioral Mastery practice. They were intrigued… I was intrigued!

“How did I get here?” I thought to myself later with a smile on my face. I grew up in a family who was very open to any and all beliefs that helped people get through life, but we were not religious by any stretch of the imagination. There was no negative talk about spirituality - in fact, anytime we’d get into deep conversations about religion, what my parents always pointed to was how religion had become a form of power and control for many cultures (including within the states), by mistelling the story of a wonderful man who gave a sense of peace and health to those around him, and that the spiritual component was a positive aspect that could help others feel connected to something greater than them so they didn’t feel alone… and who could argue with that?

For the longest time, even up through my twenties, any word that reminded me of religion or God would leave a bad taste in my mouth. I would immediately shut down in my mind - there was no convincing me of something positive that could come from it. BUT you want to hear something crazy?! Two things that completely contradict the first statement of this paragraph. One, my dad would play gospel music from time to time (specifically, Andrae Crouch) and I couldn’t help but dance and sing at the top of my lungs, the feeling it brought me was incredible. Two, I would get the weirdest pull to watch a Sunday morning sermon on tv every now and again (I would inevitably switch it after twenty minutes because the religious angle would take over any nice feeling that I had), but still! Interesting, to say the least! I was intrigued by something bigger without realizing it!

So how did I get here? How did I go from feeling icky saying anything about spirituality to calling myself a spiritual teacher?

I was bamboozled! But in the best of ways…

Throughout my entire life I have looked to my mind for answers. I have been overly analytical since I can remember. Any feeling I had, I analyzed it. Any feelings other people were dealing with? Analyze. Relationships going sour around me? Analyze. Going into adulthood, especially as a performer, any feelings of insecurity (aka MASSIVE insecurity) would baffle me because I loved every element of being a performer. I would analyze myself into the ground (which tended to lead me to the toilet - hello, anxiety!) as to WHY I felt insecure, WHY I had fear, WHY I couldn’t handle myself. And you know what?! I always took on the challenge. It was painful, I suffered so much on the inside, but I was fueled by the discovery, I was fueled by that feeling of release I would feel when I’d uncovered the nugget of old memories or self talk that I perceived as the thing that made me feel awful. And yet (or shall I say, inevitably), the suffering would continue to come back - maybe in a different costume, so I thought I was dealing with a new issue, but it was constant, never ending work.

So one day I changed my outsides by changing my career, thinking that would be the end to all suffering - and of course, it wasn’t. Things got so bad for me that my body started to protect itself from my constant internal struggle. I gained weight, my lymph nodes blew up to the size of golf balls and I was so incredibly unhappy. Any and all tools and management tactics were out the window. I had analyzed myself into a corner and my brain was just frozen with a habitual loop of unhappiness on repeat. Until one day I had an insight. The most beautiful insight that single-handedly changed my life. I was in the shower, I was riddled with so much anxiety that I had a hard time breathing and yet I was past any emotional release like crying. And BAM! It bubbled up. No one was in the shower with me, yet I was reacting as if I had emails in my face and co-workers yelling over me (which they never did in real life anyhow). And it dawned on me that what I was feeling was everything going on in my mind, not what was going on around me! For the first time in months I felt a shift inside me that brought more relief than any over-analyzing result I had ever come to before. If I could see it so clearly in this one moment, I could potentially start seeing my thinking for what it was in ALL the moments of my life!

How does this all connect back to spirituality, you ask?

After that fateful day, I was on a mission to unfold an understanding of the mind set forth by Sydney Banks and his work called the 3 Principles (when I shared my insight with my mom she excitedly proclaimed, “That sounds a lot like the 3 Principles!” so on I went). Syd would refer to the principles as spiritual principles, but they looked so logical to me and fed my intellect in such a way that I bypassed the whole spiritual part and took the literal understanding of how our minds work more to heart. One of the 3 Principles is the principle of Mind, also known as Universal Mind or Divine Mind. This was the most spiritual-esque looking one to me, but it made sense. The greater intelligence of all things that moves through us, around us and connects us; A little beyond my intellect at that time, but the examples he would use would make sense to me and the feeling it brought was immense. One example he used was when we get a cut on our arm, without any effort on our part, our body sends all healing elements to the cut to heal it. Of course there’s science behind what goes to the cut, but what is the actual force behind those elements to get it there? We don’t tell our body “Hey, body! I just got a cut, send red blood cells and new tissue to that gash on my arm!” of course not! That’s the energy of Mind.

As I deepened my understanding over the last few years, and as I’ve shared with you over the last 10 months, belief after belief revealed itself to me as thought, judgements about myself or the ‘way things should be’ revealed themselves as thought, urges and habits revealed themselves as thought, the way I interacted with others and my relationships with them revealed themselves as thought, fears, expectations, anxieties… ALL revealed themselves to me as THOUGHT! And guess where all of this has left me?

If thought has fallen away (most of the time) and it isn’t what dictates my interactions with the world, how I manage to maintain my happiness or how I move forward in my business or relationships anymore, what’s left?

The overwhelming knowing that was HAS me is what IS me. Universal Mind. And with my very own GPS system to navigate Mind - my Wisdom. The more I have seen this for myself, the more I drop out of my thinking into the beautiful feeling of peace and Wisdom within me, the more I see life unfold in front of me. An example of something that would make me incredibly scared and impatient in the past: I now can trust the gaps of space in my business that in the past would give me the illusion of things drying up, but now, knowing that Universal Mind is driven and fueled by love just as we are, I know that that space is a gift, it’s meant to be, for creating, organizing, rejuvenating - whatever it is that I need to be filled up to continue to give back and teach. There’s a knowing and a trust that I never thought was possible. And guess what?! It allows me to continue to LIVE, even in the moments that could press me to go outside of myself to try to hurry things along. It doesn’t work. It’s all inside-out. And it’s all spiritual. Though I can share an expansive array of evidence from my life that proves this spiritual energy exists, you can’t see it - but you can feel it. Even now, if you’re uneasy with trusting a greater Wisdom via your own Wisdom, if you feel peaceful reading this, it’s because it’s a truth that your spiritual self already knows exists, it’s just waiting for you to turn off the tv upstairs and hold hands with it. It’s OK to not ‘know’ things and still trust them to be true.

Pure magic over LA on a very ordinary day…

Take it from me, the previously proclaimed non-spiritual optimist. The moment you drop out of your personal thinking mind and start opening yourself up to seeing things differently - seeing a deeper meaning to life’s ups and downs - Universal Mind will show you the most immense, connected, love-filled experience of life you could ever imagine. Moments are full, interactions are magical, and gratitude and love knows no bounds - and all without any thinking effort whatsoever.

Here’s to you and all the magic that you are~

All my love and see you next week,

Jessie