Disolve Denial and Awaken the Potential of an Authentic Life

Many of you are expressing that this start of the year of the snake has been a very important time for soul searching and experiencing breakthroughs of profound awakenings, and alongwith this comes recognizing the depth of resistant patterns that have been sabotaging your abilities to manifest your spiritual potentials in previous years.

On my Facebook page, I commented that often there are gaps between where we think we are in our lives and how we actually behave-and how these illusions can lead to illness and other states of imbalance. I encouraged you to make two lists, one that is a list of what you believe about yourself and how you are living, and another about what your actual behaviors are. So many of you shared your lists and encouraged me to blog about the discussions that have come about as we've talked about these lists.

Here are few excerpts pulled from the lists:

"As health provider, I think of myself as following the path of health and fitness, yet when I list my behaviors, I see that I regularly skip health check ups, and engage in emotional eating with foods that are not ideal for health.

"I see myself as nonjudgmental and caring, yet my grown kids notice that I tend to behave in demanding or critical ways when I am in restaurants or dealing with others in a service role, or project negative things like imagining judgment or criticism onto others-so I see that indeed I behave in judgmental ways and often project this without even realizing it. It's like there is a lens of who I think I am that seems clear but when I take off that lens, I see who I am and how I am moving in the world is quite different than what that lens presented.

"I think I'm a person who embraces change, but when I look at my behaviors, I see that I behave in resistant ways that focus around denial, then I become reactive when I realize I feel thatI'm being caught off guard by life's circumstances. Yet, those around me see these changes coming long before I do.

How do these gaps form between our actual behaviors and how we think we are moving through life and who we think we are?

Our egoic selves often are driven by emotional patterns and the energy flows of an external world that is out of balance. Emotionally, we may not even be aware that we are aligning with negative messages of our societies, and allowing these message to influence our behaviors. Messages around how we define success and view ourselves based on comparing ourselves to those who are entrenched in a materialistic focus, can create depression, anxiety, frustration and a disconnect between our three dan tiens, our physical, emotional and spiritual energy centers.

Eventually, this disconnect creates situations that result in financial challenges, relationship erosions, and health issues, all reflections of chronically living in denial of truths. Yet, our egos and left brains may create wonderful stories to convince us that we are not out of balance.

What is the most common emotional patterns that we engage in when we undermine our potential in a subconscious way? Denial. Denial is the illusion that we are living truth when in fact we are hiding from truth.

We think that if we follow a set formula of behaviors that success is a guarantee-and we tend to resist anything that presents a different set of behaviors. For example, if one has used a certain style of exercise or diet for years but yet as the aging process happens, one finds that it is suddenly challenging to maintain ideal weight, we still cling to the same old routine of behaviors around eating and movement and resist getting into new routines for years.

Similarly, we may also cling to behaviors in relationships that are no longer serving us well. Thus, some of us hang onto an illusion of "family closeness and loyalty" and maintain close ties to family members who are negative, discounting and toxic. This is a special kind of fantasy-the idea that if one is loyal enough, and tries hard enough to be maintain relationships, that healing will one day occur such that one will have the support and love that one has always craved from these people Thus, people stay tethered to toxic relationships within their families, companies and social lives.

Some of us may also be tethered to the idea that success is defined by the ability to reach out to help others through having a high level of material resources to create altruistic foundations and influence many people-this is certainly a compassionate vision but also one that is an egoic trap because it is still based on the energy of the money cycle that this world revolves around, in terms of making one's spiritual influence dependent on having material resources, when the truth is that even the poorest person can have a profound spiritual influence on many people.

Many of our great spiritual teachers did not come from a position of having amassed material resources. Their gifts came from the strength of their spiritual cultivation and they taught not in churches and huge expensive buildings but in the natural world.

Having said that, there's absolutely nothing wrong in amassing wealth but you must understand also the energy that comes along with it and the system from which that money comes, for you cannot balance the inherent off-centeredness of the way money works in our world in terms of your behaviors if you are unaware.

Although criticized for being extreme, this two hours documentary does a very good job of describing the energy and flow of money not only in this country but globally:

Zeigeist, The Addendum (you can find under documentaries on services like Netflix where once it was difficult to gain access to the information on this movie).

The modern world in which we live is not governed by a higher energetic vibration or spiritual focus but is dominated by the endless pattern of consumption and chase after the money cycle, which is a diminishing versus replenishing cycle and is a system based on illusion. All we have to do is look at the stock market to see how the cycles of money are artificially manipulated in large part by perceived versus "real" changes.

Many of us imagine that we can be aligned with spirit but also be a part of the machinery that leads to high consumption, debt and stress. We convince ourselves that our homes, health and personal lives can be in disarray but that we can still be "successful." This is classic denial in action for it keeps us believing in fantasies and disconnected from the way that energy really works.

Success on a spirit based level, flows from the awareness of how cycles of consumption influence the energy in our lives. Breaking free of denial is a process of reaching deep to find the courage to realize that you have been drawn into the preprogramming of our society that focuses on material consumption, and that your alignment with this energy has created an erosive versus a replenishing and ourishing cycle in your life. Let go of denial and embrace your true and full potential as spirt beings in human form.