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shadow-work Archives - Self-Help, Spirituality & Self-Esteem

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Self-Help, Personal Growth Tools

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Self-Help And Personal Growth Tools

Do you sit there and search for answers to help yourself? Do you think you are into self-help but deep down wish or wait for someone to save you, help you or make you better?

Do you fantasise about becoming rich, fit, funny or popular and think you will feel better then?

Helping yourself is about going inwards to discover what is true.

There is the truth of the way ‘It’ is which is more in the domain of spirituality, and then there is your truth that is more in the domain of self-help.

There is the truth of you as a seemingly separate object we call a person – your experience of life; your emotional truth, your perceptions and interpretations and ideas of the way you and the world are.

The Open Secret

And the secret of self-help is to start with being brutally honest about what is true for you in each moment.

If you are angry or sad or worried then let it be OK that you are having this experience. All experiences are valid, there are no right or wrong experiences. 

If there is something there in your experience then it is there, end of story.

Human beings get into trouble and cause suffering for themselves by denial and resistance.  Denial of what is there.  How silly when you think about it.  Denying what is actually there, resisting what is actually there.

When you become aware and more conscious you will see just how often you feel the impulse to lie.

You lie to yourself and this is usually not overly obvious to you. You act incongruent with your feelings and you think it is the proper thing to do.

Sometimes it is obvious and you make it OK for you to lie and perform. 

You often pretend.  You know you pretend.  You put on a performance to fit in a crowd or maintain a self-image.  Then afterward you head home and feel deep down that there must be something wrong with you if you have to pretend.

You have made yourself not OK enough because you had to pretend.

Your experience in this moment is valid! It is just as valid as the most popular person in the room. It is as valid as the most powerful person.

Your experience; your feelings and your thoughts are valid. This may not be the first choice preferred experience and given a choice you might choose something else, but the ‘part’ of you that would choose another experience is not going about this in the best way.

Have you ever stopped to notice there is a ‘you-part’ that wants another ‘you-part’ to go away or change?

For you to want to change there must be a split going on. One part of you is judging the other part as not good enough.

So What Is Self-Help?

Self-help for me is first of all becoming honest. Always be as congruent in your whole being as you can. Now, there are certain social and cultural norms and manners that dictate that we should not always speak our mind and pretend to be polite and courteous and put on a brave face. This is OK but I am really talking about YOUR emotional orientation to your feelings and experience.

As you sit there feeling ungrateful or ignored or abandoned are you OK with feeling these as a valid human experience?  Or, as you pretend to be gracious and confident are you silently stacking guilt and shame on top of the feelings of ungratefulness?

Why not just be honest in your emotional orientation to these feelings and say internally, ‘I am having these feelings and it is a valid experience?’

Maybe tomorrow, or if you are aware in that moment, you can get some insight into why those feelings are there and work to understand and release them.  However, the main point is to first be completely honest and acknowledge that what is there for you is there and is valid.

Remove denial and resistance from your tool box and learn to live freely. Part of this is the awareness to be responsible for your experience. I don’t suggest you chose these feelings and I don’t suggest you have done something wrong (which creates guilt) or you are something fundamentally bad (which creates shame) but you do need to recognise the truth.

The truth is that this experience in this moment is happening in your awareness. It is your experience, don’t blame others. It is happening now inside you!

Someone could call me and you ugly. I will not register any emotion. You might be devastated and sulk for two days. Whose responsibility is it for your devastation? You won’t have chosen to feel devastated but nevertheless that experience is there.  And it has all happened in your awareness and experience.

The hearing of the words, the interpretation and the emotional reaction has all happened inside you and so that is your responsibility. The external condition or occurrence did not come pre-packaged with these feelings you are experiencing.  How could they, they have not even changed my emotional state?

What remains is for you to notice your experience, take responsibility for feeling this way and don’t pass judgment over whether it is right or wrong to feel this way.

For one, the feeling will pass in a much shorter time frame and two, you will be more aware of why you reacted this way. Then, through many self-help techniques you can begin to remove the reason you reacted this way.

Your feelings are your teachers to help you learn about yourself. Your feelings will direct you to higher consciousness and inner peace if you accept and listen to them.  When this happens you welcome feelings.

Feelings are welcome because I use them to self-help me. I clear away more false ideas I have about the world and me.

As you remove the false ideas, simply be here now and welcome your experience, your inner peace grows, your self-esteem grows, you become more effective and happier and you return to feeling part of the world
and not a part separate in the world.

This is self-help for me.

Related Pages…

The Secret Law Of Attraction

The secret law of attraction is not so much as a secret as it is a universal law that brings to you the opportunities to experience externally what is in alignment with your attitudes and beliefs.

Having the law of attraction explained to you is not going to change anything within your life.  The beauty is that once you accept the law of attraction is as real as the law of gravity… Read More

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Prosperity Affirmations & Others

If you are searching for prosperity affirmations, or affirmations for self-esteem, weight loss, happiness or abundance, then what follows is the easy way to understand what you need to do, and it is much easier than I used to think.

When I attended John Assaraf’s weekend seminar at his beautiful Californian home in 2004 (before he went big into larger audiences, coaching and The Secret) I remember feeling frustrated because what I
wanted to achieve or have kept … Read More

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Self-Appreciation

Self-appreciation is easily achieved with a shift in the way you think of life. We each have our own unique talents and aptitudes. Some people’s talents are seen on the world stage, many more are only ever seen by one or two.  Here are four ways to see things differently in order to begin the
upward cycle of self-appreciation… Read More

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Developing Self-Awareness

Developing self-awareness is the key to self-help and overcoming poor self-esteem.  Any spiritual or self-help book worth reading will probably only make only two points important… Read More

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Your Body’s Dantien

Have you heard of dantien? How would you like to be more grounded and centred, even as you are
walking around and going about your day?  If you have meditated or practiced relaxation you will be familiar with the inner peace and calmness you experience after a session… Read More

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Gratitude Prayer

A gratitude prayer doesn’t have to be recited lines of verbal sounds coming out your mouth once a day.
A more powerful and authentic way to ‘ask’ is by feeling gratitude now… Read More

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Self-Empowerment

Here are four ways to self-empowerment. The best and easiest personal self-help exercises that I use every day and have helped transform my life are below.  None of these exercises are a quick fix forever. You become a product… Read More

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Acts Of Randon Kindness

Acts of random kindness by you have an amazing power to transform how you feel and to help low self-esteem.  You might wonder, ‘how does an action so self-less have the power to make YOU, the one doing the kindness, feel good’?  It seems counter-intuitive doesn’t it?  After all you are not receiving the kindness from others but… Read More

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Fear Public Speaking

If you fear public speaking, sure things may get better after you have done a number of speeches but if you want to actually transform yourself and your life so that the excessive nerves don’t come here are some tips… Read More

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Living In Gratitude

Living in gratitude for your fate as it appears now is a powerful way to transform your life and shift the perspective that has been holding you back…Read Four Ways Here

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How To Be Humble

Asking how to be humble is a good question.  However the answer is in the question.  In order to be humble, just be humble.  Perhaps a more relevant question is what is humbleness or what is the definition of humble.  Humble is acknowledging that anything you have or are is not really down to ‘you’… Read More

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EFT Technique

The EFT technique is a simple self-help routine anyone can do at home and is having results where nothing else has helped.  It stands for Emotional Freedom Technique.  It is also casually known as Tapping, due to the action of tapping on several acupressure points on your body… Read More

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Authentic Happiness

If you are lost, life is hopeless, pointless and without authentic happiness then this website is for you. Or maybe you just want more inner peace and contentment or a realization of the truth?

I know how you might be feeling. Do you have a bookshelf full of self-help materials? Self esteem low? Have an idea about your spirituality? Maybe you are searching for the umpteenth time… Read More

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Do You Care What People Think?

Firstly, you care what people think because you have a made-up identity.  This identity is not absolute it is just a whole lot of ideas about who you are and what image you like to portray to the world.  This is the secret to letting go of placing so much importance on what others think of you… Read More

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Mind

Mind is one of those things we assume we know what we are talking about, but we never stop to admit to ourselves we have no idea what it is.

What is it? Where is it? Why should you care?.. Read More

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Personal Responsibility For Your Life

Personal responsibility for your life and what you experience is critical.  It is one of life’s paradoxes that we think if we don’t take responsibility, and blame others instead, we will feel better or suffer less… Read More

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Radical Acceptance

Radical acceptance is a very powerful self-help principle to practice in your
life. Great inner peace and contentment comes when you know this way of thinking about life and you may find it a way of boosting self-esteem… Read More

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List of Personality Traits, Acceptance or Denial of Traits

admin Self-Help, Shadow Work , 0 Comment

List
Of Personality Traits

To Help You

Below is a list of personality traits and an explanation of why it is important to accept all the possible traits of a human being.

good or evil girl over a white background with an angel on one side and a devil on the other

One exercise that I have found extremely personally empowering is accepting and embracing yourself and your interpretation of yourself in every moment.

Denial of what you are actually experiencing creates suffering and contributes to low self-esteem.

Further below I will tell you how I discovered what I was denying and a simple and quick exercise to reach acceptance.

With each acceptance, old nagging worries and bits of suffering drops away and you are left me more peaceful and with higher self-esteem.

That isn’t saying there isn’t any pain, hurt or discomfort to be experienced in your life. These things are inevitable and a fact of life but suffering is something different to pain.  The distinction we are making is the extra suffering that you experience when your mind tells you ‘this shouldn’t be happening’ or ‘I shouldn’t be like this’.

In 2006 Debbie Ford’s book The Dark Side of the Light Chasers caught my eye on the library shelf.  I read it and didn’t do much with it. Twelve months later I got it out again and this time it meant so much more.  Of course reading is one thing and won’t bring change you have to change something about your experience in order to get change.  There has to a shift in attitude or the way you think about things.

Reading just adds more mind stuff to your long list of things you know.  When it comes to personal growth and overcoming low self-esteem there has to be a shift from within.

It’s into this inner-world you must delve and shine a spotlight.  Shining this light of awareness into the places that haven’t been seen= for a long time.

Shadow-Work

All human beings have displayed every trait, or they do display them regularly or could display them given they found themselves in a certain predicament.  Blame it on the human condition.

If you can stop judging anything you do or are as bad and move to acceptance, you are moving in an empowering direction.

To transform you need to have a shift in attitude from disliking some things in yourself and liking others, to accepting ALL things.

Murderer

So an extreme one to start with is to accept that you are a murderer.  For starters see how quick and strong the denial from your own mind is.  Secondly, consider a situation where you are put in a position where it is either you kill them or they kill you, or they kill your child. Can you accept that you are a murderer now after considering that? Of course it doesn’t make you a murderer in the outside world but still you have to accept that you have that potential trait within your experience and add that to your list of personality traits.

After coming to this realization I somewhat obsessively spent one month trawling through books writing down a list of personality traits.  I wrote down every adjective describing a human being and I worked to own, accept and embrace that each one has been or could be in my experience.

As you will come to realize the best teacher is your experience.  Continue to watch your thoughts and feelings from a place of non-judgmental awareness.  Whenever you have a contracted, closed, irritated or frustrated feeling with another or yourself, contemplate what the trait is. What is the word you would use to describe that person you are reacting to?

Add that to your list of personality traits.

From there I would use a hash of a couple of different techniques, which boiled down to

1. Get into a light relaxed state

2. Imagine myself walking into a lift

3. Turn and face the doors and see a whole lot of buttons

4. See the button that is clearly labeled the trait

5. See and feel myself reach out and touch the button

6. See the doors close and feel the lift go down until the doors open
automatically at a memory of when I displayed the trait

7. Accept the fact of that trait showing up in my experience

8. if I still felt resistance or through the use of a pendulum and ideomotor questioning I found residual denial of that trait I would redo the exercise.

If still no acceptance – which was very rare – I would use EFT (Emotional freedom Technique) for one or two rounds.

I collated a list of personality traits that totaled about 1,000; here are some you might want to try.

Aggressive

Angry

Arrogant

Complainer

Condescending

Controlling

Dependent

Helpless

Intimidating

When you collate a list of personality traits you do the exercise, accept it within, experience more peace and less judgment.