Pay Attention.

"PAY ATTENTION, BE ASTONISHED, TELL ABOUT IT" - Mary Oliver

The way to become wise is to commit to finding the truth even when it hurts your feelings or makes you uncomfortable. Your body will scream at you when you don't walk away from bad energy, bullshit, weird vibes, and sneaky shit, when you seek validation from those who invalidate your feelings, when you disrespect yourself to respect others, and when someone uses your body to fuck their pain away.

Most insecure people won’t find inner wisdom because they seek external validation, the insecure hide behind a dis integrated ego requiring a controlling security, an overwhelming desire for comfort and not personal growth and accountability and they seek ego massage and herd confirmation over truth.

Suffering and stress is a dis-eased choice due to forgetting, or not knowing, who we truly are. Insecure people often project (and protect) their insecurity by forcefully telling others they are wrong or who to be or they are afraid of anything outside their limited lived experience and narrow perspectives.

Fear and insecurity don’t control us by dominating our emotions. They control by convincing the insecure that a projecting ego and/or a win at all costs competing comfort is more important than true happiness or knowing the Real Self. Instead, get still and settle your spirit. Cease the rapid forceful ego projecting and reaching. Stop taking things so personally and get out of your own way.

Peace is the posture for clarity to come, for visions of personal growth to birth, and for solutions to be revealed. Our real nature, our whole unsullied, unadulterated consciousness is one of pure joy. What you may have accumulated along the way are terms & conditions that are not really you. You may have grown up in a highly competitive, perfectionist or emotionally dysregulated home where mere survival and self expression was challenging. This family of origin inherited "love" as attachment now becomes your unconscious default in adult relationships. These are the unhelpful inter generational patterns to unlearn and then expand consciousness in a return to wholeness.

When a man no longer confuses himself with the labels and definition of himself that others have given him, he is at once empowered, embodied, wholly universal and unique. Spiritual progress means unmasking yourself. Personal authenticity, to live by your core values with nuanced depth and subtle growth means to re integrate the facade of the artificial ego and begin to live as your own True Nature. Be YOU, Be unique, every one else is already taken.

We always have a discerning conscious choice of peace, joy and happiness, (over stress, worry and projection) once we wholly surrender to and know the True Nature of Self. 

Surround yourself only with people who are going to support and lift you higher as the deep inner peace we already are. We begin to feel more joy, as it is our natural state of being, when the fractured, dominant and projecting insecure ego is re integrated. This is what it means to "do the inner reflective work" and come wholly home to One Self. These are the teachings of  atma vidya, self knowledge, to Know The True Self as Your Own True Nature.