Practice – Nibana Life Coach

nibanaOctober 24, 2024October 24, 2024No Comments

Why it is important that we redefine “Integrity”

Components of Integrity

Integrity is a big part of what emotional adulthood is about.
Integrity with ourselves and Integrity with others
Integrity to our words
Integrity to our desires, feelings, and emotions
Integrity to our impact on the world around us

Conditioned Masculine & Feminine

Far too often, we either use our feelings and desires and skip responsibility to our word i.e. we don’t take into account our impact on people and the world around us if we don’t follow through on our commitments. This is our propensity towards the conditioned feminine.

We cling to our word aka commitments in such a way that we ignore our feelings and emotions and then torture ourselves in the process i.e. we do not practice self-love. This is our propensity towards the conditioned masculine.

In both cases, however, we are coming from a lack and acting out as an emotionally underdeveloped teenager while trying to act like an adult.

To be an emotionally mature and healthy adult means we need to be able to do both i.e. love ourselves & be true to our feelings, and be true to our word and commitment, and take responsibility for the impact of our actions on the world;

AND

When we make mistakes, clean up the mess we create.

AND

When we don’t know what we are doing, ask for help!

Every action and inaction has consequences and has an impact.

When we promise that friend that we will be there and then we don’t show up because we didn’t feel like it. It has an impact.

When we go against what our heart really wants and we do things just because we had committed, we have an impact.

It could feel like being stuck between a rock and a hard place.

What we often do, is, we either abandon ourselves and do things anyway because we have been conditioned (or trained) to be true to our word (This is pretty much how a lot of mindset coaching is about – “You are your word!”), or we abandon the idea of any kind of commitment because we believe any kind of structure is equivalent to a cage for our desire which needs to always feel free!

So, what is the answer?

I believe the answer is in the integration of the two.

A path that is an ongoing practice to live our lives in a way that we can stay true to our word and our heart simultaneously. When a situation arises that we can’t be true to one or the other, we use active communication and connection – both with people who are impacted by the change and with ourselves.

So, using the example above, if we promise a friend we will be there and we can no longer show up, then rather than just avoiding it we communicate and have an open and honest conversation about it. This also means that we own up to any impact we are going to have by changing the agreement. That is the courageous thing to do.

And, if we go meet that same friend because we made a commitment and even though what we truly desire is something else, then it’s our responsibility to have that conversation with ourselves and make sure that we don’t just abandon ourselves and our heart.

In the end, there is always an impact.

To be in integrity as an emotional adult is to be true to both our word and our feelings and emotions, to take ownership of the impact on others and on ourselves, and do whatever is needed to clean it up…..and also to be able to ask for help when you have no idea what you are doing 🙂

Practice

nibanaJuly 14, 2023October 24, 2024No Comments

The role of Archetypes in understanding ourselves

I have always been a big fan of learning about Archetypes ever since I started my own personal growth journey.

Archetypes really helped understand different facets of my own unconscious behaviours that I wasn’t in approval of and didn’t want to even acknowledge or see.

In her book – ‘Sacred Contracts’, Caroline Myss proposes that all of us have agreed to play out an energetic contract even before we are born, and the way we play out these contracts is based on how we live our lives.

The roles we play in our lives and how we relate to others and the world around us.

It is as if that in every connection we make we are playing out an already existing contract.

The way I have related to archetypes in my own journey is that there are all of these places that I was unconscious of, or didn’t approve of, within myself.

I understood them as my subconscious patterns or my shadow. I was (and am) confronted (or triggered) by these parts when I discovered them or someone pointed them out to me.

I had to investigate these behaviour and patterns and understand what was happening. I learnt about the shadow aspect of it and their exalted forms. For example, where do I play the role of a victim, or when I am at work I have to play the role of a good employee or a manager or a businessman. At home, I am in the role of a husband, a partner, a lover etc. And then in terms of shadow what am i ashamed of, what is my relationship with submission/domination etc.

A lot of people have covered the idea of Archetypes – there’s the 4 divine masculine archetypes: King, Warrior, Magician, Lover. Jung talks about 12 different archetypes based on our own unconscious and the collective unconscious. The Archetypes of the Enneagram. There are also different types of personality tests.

However, all of these, I believe, are a way of understanding:

Our own unconscious relationship to self
Our unconscious behaviour in relation to other people and the world
A collective unconscious that is being lived through us

So, the work becomes about understanding what is in our subconscious or unconscious mind and why are we not in approval of that part of us. The more we shine light on those parts the more we have to figure out how to be in approval of them.

What I really find interesting in Caroline Myss’ work is that there is a sense that in the collective energy these archetypal patterns already exist, and, we as humans, are the manifestation of these archetypal patterns. Through our lives and our interactions we are bringing something that was in the unconscious into the conscious.

There is also a sense that the transmutation and the alchemical process of bringing the collective unconsciousness into consciousness is part of some grand energetic unfolding, and we are all connected to each other and in our unique way solving the small size of the puzzle by bringing parts of collective unconscious into conscious.

When we look at life from this lens our lives become a journey of living our sacred contract via understanding of our own archetypes; and the reward for our soul – for doing our part and executing our sacred contract – is Eternal Bliss i.e. Nibana 🙂

Practice

nibanaJuly 14, 2023October 23, 2024No Comments

Karma and the Prayer Hack!

Growing up in India, talk of Karma was all around me. “You reap what you sow,” I would hear people say. I grew into adulthood believing that I needed to do good deeds to get good results later in my life. It was like a carrot and stick — “you better do good deeds or God/Universe is going to get you”.

Often, believers in Karma think about the cause and effect of their actions when making important decisions in life but also while their minds are running thoughts at 150 miles per hour. All sorts of thoughts — and I would say, predominantly negative thoughts, about how things can go wrong or might not work out or how they are less than someone else or not enough or not good enough in comparison to others.

Last year, one of my teachers talked about Karma and the seeds we sow at a micro level i.e. the kind of thoughts we think and the kind of assumptions we make — moment to moment. It changed my perception of how I actually create my reality. Every time I think that I am not good enough, I am in reality, sowing a seed in my subconscious and laying a path that will lead to me proving to myself that “I am not good enough”…and vice versa.

Now, while it was good to intellectually understand this, I discovered that it was a totally different thing to change my thoughts and start thinking, say, positive thoughts. Our brains are creatures of habit. Once we get into a habit of worrying, which many of us do from quite early on in our lives, it is extremely hard to change because it becomes embedded at a deep unconscious level.

For instance, I recently had the experience of an old childhood trauma being triggered. When I was a young man living in India someone had pulled a gun on me. I had spent weeks afterwards in a state of terror. Over time, however, the memory became deeply buried in my psyche. That is, until a couple of months ago, when something completely unrelated triggered the trauma, leaving me with a 24/7 fear-based narrative, running in my mind.

Intellectually I knew that I needed to change the narrative to something more positive but found myself unable to. It was almost like an addiction that I had no control over. And then one day, when I couldn’t take it any more, when my mind was consumed by fear and negativity, I felt that I had no choice but to pray. Thereafter, every time I had a negative or fear-based thought that I was conscious of, I reverted to praying. And every time I did so, my mind would calm down and my entire body would relax. After a while it got to a point that whenever my mind was empty I would automatically fill it with a prayer, which I ran in an infinite loop.

I don’t know if I have found a hack that believers have known for ever, or whether I have found a hack for Karma. However, I do know that after struggling with changing my habitual thoughts, filling my mind with prayer has pushed out the negativity and left me in a state of peace.