I’m going to start this post with the most important part, because if you don’t read any further than this, I still want you to have this take away:
If you get to decide what you think about yourself, why would you choose anything else but love?
What led to this thought?
I’ve been in a full “inner world” overhaul since early May. I participated in a three-day intensive workshop with the consciousness pioneer Dr. Joe Dispenza, whose work I had been following for years. I love his philosophies, but had never really gone that deep. It was time.
I (and ~8100 other people from 79 countries!!!) spent a long weekend in beautiful Basel, Switzerland, learning at the crossroads of philosophy, quantum physics, neurology, biology, physiology, and psychology with the aim of understanding, integrating, and practicing techniques to expand our consciousness and empower us to grow past our programming into whomever we wish to be. It was an amazing, life-changing experience. I totally got it. I experienced deep wonders in meditation and connection. I loved every second. I made new friends (Hi Elisabeth and Sherry, I love you!), experienced new states of consciousness, and simply enjoyed immersion in a practice that I feel to be “the real deal.”
After three inspired days, I returned to the life that the person I was before the workshop created for herself, including all the familiar, established circumstances, relationships, agreements, dynamics, and commitments. I returned to a life built on the previously available positive and negative thoughts, unlimiting and limiting beliefs, familiar emotions, established interpersonal landscapes, readily-available neuro-chemical cocktails, and long-established neural pathways. I returned to the life I had built, however I had (the beginnings of) a new awareness of the architecture and a fledgling ability to objectively perceive structures within my lived experience in a new way - and sense what needed to change. I could clearly see the “cobwebs” and outdated behaviors, and immediately recognized that I didn’t fit anymore in the life I had built. I returned to established structures, but I had changed. While deep shifts did happen during the seminar, the real work was/is in my life. My day to day is the fertile ground for deep, sustainable change. And that's what I've been up to for the last 6 weeks.
Some Context Re: Dispenza’s Philosophies
Now I won’t go into too much detail about Dr. Joe’s philosophies - he’s got many books and resources for that. What I've outlined here is in no way comprehensive and is only meant to provide a basic context. The basic philosophical idea is as follows:
Until we change our way of thinking, we live our lives creating a predictable future based on a known past.
Since 90% of our thoughts are repeated (and reinforce established neural pathways), this pattern makes wildly new experiences and core changes difficult and sometimes unlikely.
Experiencing the same things over and over leads to familiarity, causing addiction to feeling the same emotions over and over, which we use to orient our belief systems (and subsequent decisions) of right/wrong, possible/impossible, want/not want, etc.
In order to break this cycle, you need to retrain your physiology/psychology by going beyond body/mind/time/space matrix and entering “the void” where all possibility exists (done in meditation) and become acquainted with and practice other ways of being.
At the same time, you train yourself to notice your thoughts/feelings/beliefs/actions/reactions/decisions as they happen in your daily life and decide if that’s the experience you want. If so, carry on. If not, watch, identify, decide something new, practice it, and move on.
This process is very much “wash, rinse, repeat” as your inner changes begin to make visible shifts in your outer world.
Now, these methods weren’t invented by Dr. Joe Dispenza - and he doesn’t claim them as his own. In fact, he almost never refers to himself in his seminars at all, unless he’s telling an anecdote. He has teams of scientists doing legitimate testing alongside his work and always speaks of “the science” or “our team” or “we.” He has, however, successfully fused ancient practices with science in a clear, easy to understand way that opens miracle, possibility, and empowerment to even the most skeptical minds. In his words, “Science is the modern language of the mystical.” I can attest to the truth of that.
The practice has you constantly questioning what you think/believe/feel and asking you to decide if that’s what you want. This point is contextually important for later in my telling.
"When we choose something new, it’s because we finally realize that continuing to choose the same will bring us only more of the same experiences." - Dr. Joe Dispenza
My Time Since the Seminar
The last month and a half has been an intricate dance between who I was and who I am becoming as I slip and slide between my old way of being and the new. I’m experiencing an incremental dismantling of what I thought (was possible), believed about myself and the world, what I am accustomed to feeling, and what I want to experience. Now, this work is very aligned with the practices I learned in the Irish-Celtic Shamanism (and all the work I've been doing within myself since my early 20s), so they aren’t unfamiliar. The main difference is stripping away the animism/archetypal work and working directly with the quantum field (though many of my experiences have been similar to the shamanic work and I have even had my spirit guides/angels/helpers/ancestors show up in the quantum Dispenza work, too…. Many roads lead to Rome…). I find the work a valuable and complementary tool which serves a very different and yet similar purpose as the shamanism.
My (self-determined) practice has consisted of two meditations per day, landing me anywhere between 1.5 to 3 hours in meditation, plus a dedicated breathing practice of “pulling the mind out of the body,” which is analogous to awakening the “Kundalini Energy'' in yogic practices. Depending on which meditation I’m doing, I’m either aligning my body’s energy centers, fostering heart-brain coherence, working with brain and energy structures to expand consciousness, or tune into the quantum field in “the void” and reflect on calling in different potentials. Basically, I’m doing the immediate work of reconnecting my body to its own higher intelligence and letting it do its thing while I do the slower, more repetitive work of reprogramming my own brain. I’ve had good days where I feel connected to the whole universe, I’ve had days where I struggle and am very uncomfortably stuck - but I keep at it. Showing up is the name of the game here, and there’s no shortcut.
The Self-Love Piece and Point of this Post
I’ve actively worked on a number of core themes, however a main one has been self-perception. I know and understand that how I experience everything is rooted within me, and understanding how I experience myself is the place to start. It all begins within.
As with most humans on the planet right now (and maybe always?), my self-perception has been largely formed by external forces - and it’s unfortunately net zero to slight plus on good days, and trending negative on bad days. Part of this self-perception has been driven by social pressures uniquely specific (and often contradictory) to this time period and each one of my personal demographic points, with others have been driven by capitalism and the economic requirement for me (and us all) to participate in the need for more/better/new/other in order to keep the machine well-oiled and running. These preexisting philosophical and psychological agreements I’ve made with society (most made unconsciously btw) are now in the dismantling process thanks to the practices, which have me questioning everything I think about myself and life.
About a week ago, I dedicated my morning meditation “Tuning into New Potentials” to experiencing a reality where I love myself in all ways with full trust, acceptance, adoration, and joy - as I AM. It was a wonderful experience living for 45 minutes where I was in full acceptance of myself, without judgment, without any critique, just simple love. And one key thing I noticed: HOW MUCH MORE ENERGY I HAD. And I’m not even talking about woowoo energy (though, that too). I’m straight up talking about how much more time/energy/motivation/focus I have when my energy ISN’T flowing into the black hole of negative self-talk/perception. It frees up so much time/mental space. That experience alone was mind blowing. Anyway...
Fast forward a few hours, I’m at the sauna with my soul-sister Julie. We’re in Germany, which has a strong “FKK - Free Body Culture” and means you are completely naked in the sauna, as well as various levels of undress across the wellness campus, surrounded by hundreds of other people. As you can imagine, this is an environment which can spark deeply negative self-talk and harmful comparison and judgment stories - especially with a mind primed by a society that really doesn’t want you to love and accept yourself. However, having come out of my morning meditation focusing on self-love, my inner voices were more quiet than normal. Plus, the reality of deciding how I WANT to feel a la Dispenza was top of mind. So, I put whatever latent judgements there were aside and traipsed around the campus with Julie.
Our first sauna experience was lovely. We were in a medium-sized sauna room filled with about 30 people, enjoying a fragrant "four elements" essential oil and sound-bath. There’s nothing quite like the discomfort of extreme heat and a multi-sensory exerience to quiet down whatever residual thoughts you may have. After the sauna we both floated across the terrace feeling hot and loopy, and headed down to the cold basin on the ground floor. I sat in the sun for a few minutes, cooling off and enjoying the atmosphere, while the much more courageous Julie took the cold plunge. There, sitting alone, half-naked in the sun surrounded by other sauna rats, my wise inner voice spoke up and hit me with a truth bomb.
I/it/she said “If you get to decide how you feel about yourself, why would you choose anything else but love?”
It’s so simple. So obvious. Yet this simple choice eludes most of us - and certainly me.
However, at that moment, the inner work had stacked in my subconscious, my walls were down thanks to the heat, and the realization welled up within me, blasting into my conscious mind. I GET TO DECIDE HOW I FEEL ABOUT MYSELF. I GET TO DECIDE WHAT I THINK ABOUT MYSELF. No culture, religion, economic or political system, advertising campaign, influencer, potential lover, beauty standard, etc. can compel me to think any particular thing about myself. So why would I?
And the most interesting thing happened.
At that moment, I actually stopped seeing any of the other people. I stopped looking at their bodies and silently comparing. I stopped the scenarios unconsciously running in my head where I was listening to people’s thoughts of judgment about my body as I walked by (isn’t projection awesome?!?! lol no). My posture shifted. My mind quieted. And I felt a deep sense of peace. Everyone else melted into the scene and I simply was. For a few solid minutes I felt more comfortable in my body as any time before - even more than in times with fewer pounds/kilos, fewer years, and a younger appearance. I was living that existence I practiced that morning of full self acceptance and love. I was at peace. And the question I had asked myself kept ringing in my mind again and again:
If you get to decide how you feel about yourself, why would you choose anything else but love?
The answer is, you don’t. When you realize you are the sole chooser, you do choose love. Because you would never CHOOSE to hate yourself. If left to our own devices without outside influence, we will always choose what's best for us - and loving ourselves is the best choice. Choosing to love yourself is the only choice. And since you get to decide how you feel about yourself, and what you think about yourself, you do choose love.
It was a profound experience that is still unfolding in my own consciousness. And I fully expect the realization to deepen layer by layer until it's my fully lived experience.
Now I invite you to ask yourself what I asked myself and begin/continue the journey:
If (since!) you get to decide how you feel about yourself, why would you choose anything else but love?
What's your relationship with self-love?
I love myself so much!
I'm working on it!
I haven't started focusing on it, but plan to!
Comments