by Matt Kahn
Whether or not you enjoy or agree with your mind has really nothing to do with why it’s overactive or consumed in doubt, fear, pain, or judgment. Spirituality should never be confused with obedience training. Your goal is not to wrestle your mind into submission or pry your heart open with any degree of force. The invitation that has been sent your way is to recognize everything, including the activity of your mind, as an opportunity to love. You can think of incessant mental noise as an alarm clock. Its purpose is to wake you up by reminding you of the perfect moment to embrace your mind with unwavering heartfelt support.
From this deeper space of harmony, you are not blaming the mind but responding to it in the way that love would reach out to a five-year-old in pain. As I often say, if it’s not the way you would talk to a child in need, it shouldn’t be the way you talk to yourself.
As you engage with your mind, like a parent consoling a child, a feeling of safety allows your heart to expand. Once the alarm clock of your mind has done its job by properly informing you of the next one in line to be loved, it becomes silent until another reminder is needed.
Just as you don’t have to anticipate running out of gas because there is a gauge in your car to track the level available, there is no reason to stress or worry about loving yourself when emotional reactions or an overactive mind already act as the perfect signals to alert you.
Above and beyond any degree of understanding, the greatest demonstration of your true divine nature is a body that feels safe enough to participate in life with openness and enthusiasm. When you have aligned with the most exciting possibilities that have been awaiting your arrival, you remain relaxed and responsive, no matter how tumultuous the world appears to be or how triggered anyone becomes.
Discovering Safety by Slowing Your Breath
Another sign of an overstimulated nervous system is shallow breathing. Just as the mind is as noisy as the heart is closed, the breath is as shallow as the nervous system is overstimulated. As your breath slows and deepens, the mind is returned to silence while the heart is permitted to open. Simply by taking several mini-breathing breaks throughout the day, you cultivate an ability to feel instinctively safe wherever you go.
Let us explore the breath as a potent healing exercise:
If you’re unsure how to slow or deepen your breath, just inhale through your nostrils in a more relaxed way than usual. It might feel like you are taking the time to savor the in-breath as if there’s something fragrant to smell. Notice how the breath instinctively slows when your inhale is drawn inward like a sweet aroma. Once your inhale reaches its natural peak, simply pause for a moment, and then let the breath out gently through your mouth. You can imagine the exhale like a child slowly blowing bubbles out through a drinking straw. Again, draw the breath in through your nostrils, hold it for just one moment, and then exhale gently through your mouth.
By breathing in through your nostrils, you welcome in the delicious fragrance of your divinity, holding the breath for a moment to savor the magnificence of life and then letting it out as blessings of compassion, joy, and ease for one and all. As your breath slows, you are liberated from any tendency to control the behavior of others, no longer insisting that harmony is when people match your vibration of consciousness.
Requiring anyone to meet you where you are is an easy way to forget the unique journey of others. While you may have encountered obstacles that were easy for you to face, these same obstacles could be insurmountable challenges in someone else’s life. While it is understandable to desire someone else to meet you at a complimentary frequency in order to connect, it’s important to take the time to breathe slower than they are breathing so that you are able to experience your own vibration of consciousness instead of being sucked into their unresolved patterns.
An easy way to recognize the speed of someone’s breath is by listening to how quickly they speak. Shallow breathing tends to elicit fast-talking as well as a lack of enunciation. By slowing down the pace of your words, you are freed from needing to rush sentences together in an attempt to have a final say. When in the presence of someone who seems defensive, distracted, or unable to meet you in an openhearted manner, just speak more slowly and breathe more deeply to become a better listener in their life than they may be for themselves.
The greater interest you show in others, without needing to interrupt anything they say, the more you allow them to feel authentically seen and heard. This increases the likelihood that they will find the motivation to hear and see themselves more often.
It is important to remember that no one is capable of taking a genuine interest in you until they’ve become the one who offers themselves the support, kindness, and care they yearn to discover. This helps you see your interactions with others as opportunities to slow your breath and practice the act of listening as an engaged form of meditation.
Equally so, your response to what anyone says offers additional chances to speak out loud the words you’ve always wanted to hear.
Even when someone else’s life circumstances do not match your history of experiences, there is always common ground discovered on an emotional level. Instead of focusing on how different they seem from you, take the time to ask yourself: “What do I emotionally feel in their presence? Can I remember a time when I felt that way? If so, what are the words I wish someone had been able to say to me that would’ve made me feel so much better? Can I be the one who offers those words as a chance to heal both hearts?”
No matter how anyone responds to your kindness, just by repeating out loud the words you didn’t hear often enough or never heard at all, you guarantee yourself to be the one who exits each scene of life more healed, aligned, and expanded than the moment before.
By savoring your words, slowing down your breath, listening with greater interest, and gifting others with your personal love statement, you anchor a higher vibration of consciousness. As that occurs, you invite the subconscious mind of another to do their best to match your frequency instead of getting pulled into its patterns by unknowingly matching the speed of their words or shallowness of their breath.
This is why many conversations quickly escalate into misunderstandings. When conflict arises, two people often wrestle for dominant positions through accusations and demands. Along a heart-centered path, a conversation is an opportunity to be more aligned with your true innocent nature. It is a chance to practice speaking to others the words you’d like to hear more often and listening at a deeper level than others may have heard you before.
Because your subconscious mind doesn’t recognize the difference between the words you say to yourself and the words you speak to another, conversations become an essential way to rewrite your inner programming while gifting others with the compliments that support their healing.
Whether you’re engaging with children, interacting with relatives, or meeting the ongoing demands of work, each environment has been created by the Universe to help you transform so you can live in harmony, as the love that you are.
Guided by the Law of Polarity
One of the most effective ways to raise the vibration of your relationships is to engage the law of polarity. Through this universal principle, you are able to better understand the balance of opposing forces. Instead of matching the energy of others, you merely do the opposite. If others shout, you choose to listen. Since shouting can only occur through shallow breathing, you slow down and calm your breath. When others are tense and rigid, you relax your body. If others complain, you respond with a compliment. Even if you feel dominated by the energy, words, or actions of another, the law of polarity inspires you to back away and give them more time and space so they can be with themselves on a more intimate level.
By learning to do the opposite whenever stress, pain, or blame arises, you are holding a sacred space for every heart during life’s most critical moments of healing.
This also helps you learn that you don’t need anyone to act in a certain way in order to feel the harmon
y, bliss, and joy that life always provides. While it makes sense that a partner is the one who supports you the most and offers you all the love you could ever need, the difference between feeling seen or ignored is more so a reflection of how often you love your own heart.
It is common to unknowingly ignore the requests from your own innocent nature while waiting for a partner to treat you better. When this tendency influences you, there are endless ways in which you envision everyone becoming better characters in your life, if only they would listen more intently or learn to act differently.
When the demands you have in each relationship inspire you to be the one who acts upon them, the law of polarity assists you in finding space to gift yourself and others with the nurturing support and engaged listening that no amount of negotiating with others can ever guarantee. While such a universal law has the potential to shift relationships into greater depths of intimacy, it is never intended to be used as a way of loving yourself privately while hiding from a relationship you are completely afraid to end.
Often, as energetically sensitive souls, we can be more focused on other people’s feelings or reactions than following the wisdom of our own inner guidance. There can even be a belief that says “It’s not a conscious break-up until they are okay with setting me free.”
There can be such a fear of hurting another or being the contributing factor to someone else’s despair that you unknowingly stay in broken relationships, not seeing how the most loving thing for both hearts is to go your own way. No matter how anyone responds when your highest truth is spoken, each moment of sharing acts as catalysts of spiritual growth for the evolution of everyone involved.
Spiritual Codependency
It can be normal for energetically sensitive souls to linger in outdated relationships in an attempt to help others process the pain of loss. No matter how attached you are to another person or how deeply that person clings to you, such a dynamic only invites more toxicity until you are able to walk away and make time for the innocence that calls out for your attention.
No matter the time or energy invested in any relationship, the law of polarity allows you to hold sacred space for the healing of any heart without getting lost in spiritual codependency. This frees you from the tendency to stall your own evolution by waiting for others to be okay with the choices that may only feel right for you. Even when a choice that appears so right to you seems to hurt another, this is the humbling nature of life’s most profound healing being revealed. Despite how badly you feel for someone else’s pain, there is no reason to feel guilty when only gifts of expansion are given. Even when you don’t know how to be okay with decisions that others reject, that becomes a life-changing opportunity to follow through with your inner guidance while welcoming codependency as the next one in line to be loved.
It is vital to remember you are never turning your back on anyone; you are merely facing in the direction of your highest potential. While it may feel as if you are abandoning someone in their most dire moment of despair, you are being guided by the Universe to give proper distance, which for many people, is the only way to turn inward and discover their innocence at a greater spiritual level.
Through the law of polarity, you come to notice every single character who enters your reality is an animated flash card of personal growth. Each one helps bring this cosmic principle to life by inspiring you to do the opposite in response to those who lash out or shut down. Each of those personal encounters becomes an invitation to breathe more slowly, speak more softly, and act more graciously as a way of coming into greater harmony with the light of your divinity. This allows you to feel safe in your body, not as a result of personal circumstances, but based on how compassionately you are willing to respond to the situations at hand.
It’s as if your innocence only understands the world you see based on your responses and reactions to it. Despite how anyone around you chooses to be, the difference between perceiving a life of synchronicity versus a world of endless stress solely depends on how you speak, breathe, and move—from one moment to the next.
6
Exploring the Ego
WHEN YOU WAKE UP out of ego, it is not as if there is some “thing” you have actually transcended. Instead, you see through the façade of everything you’ve assumed or have been taught about your ego. The recurring theme in a spiritual journey is awakening out of every conclusion, belief, and reference point, including those created out of your most-treasured moments of clarity. This occurs at every stage of exploration until only the truth of love remains. Since everything but love is relinquished, why not put aside any insight, practice, or course of study by allowing your heart to lead the way?
While ego is the imaginary identity of an overstimulated nervous system, it’s important to provide a more practical understanding of what this actually means. When rooted in a heart-centered journey, you are able to make sense of your life, but in a way in which nothing needs to be admonished, punished, persecuted, abandoned, or avoided in the name of your highest spiritual growth. This is not to say that what you’ve learned about the ego from traditional paths is incorrect. It’s more about that you have arrived at an exciting point in history where you are ready to expand your understanding of ego in a more universal way.
In many traditions, ego is viewed as the personality of the body. Through helping many people cross over into the afterlife, as well as through communication with those who are already on the other side, I’ve discovered that the personality goes way beyond the boundaries of the body, as an aspect of the soul.
The personality is an individuated expression of eternal light, celebrating the uniqueness of divinity in form. In my experience of communicating with beings after they’ve crossed over into the afterlife, they appear to me still in the shape and form of the person from their human incarnation. In some inexplicable way, when I am able to connect with their consciousness, I converse with the essence of a soul just as you would have a conversation on the phone. In the beginning I thought it was just my imagination, but when the messages that were conveyed to me were validated by their loved ones, it helped cultivate a wellspring of respect for the endless potential and magnificent capabilities that dwell within each of us. During my conversations with souls, they appeared with the same personality traits, quirkiness, and humor they embodied when they were here in form, but within a larger context of what they may not have been aware of during their lifetime.
By understanding the personality as an aspect of the soul, it liberates you from being ashamed of your traits and characteristics. No matter how far you travel in your spiritual journey, your unique qualities are not eliminated by evolution but enhanced to their highest potential at the rate of your expansion.
You are not here to achieve a state of transcendence in which you have no personality—because not having one would effectively deny the very uniqueness that you are bringing to the world. Everyone has a unique personality, which carries a one-of-a-kind vibrational frequency that no one else in history can deliver to this planet. Like a color of a rainbow that no one else can illuminate through the beauty of your being, you are bringing to life a special remembrance of truth as a gift provided for all. Even if you are dwelling in a personality that feels limiting or painful, you are working on behalf of the Universe to explore this side of the emotional scale to build up momentum and catapult into higher vibrations of conscious expression.
No matter how low you go into the agony of victimhood, this is only part of a miraculous journey where you rise out of the ashes of fear, shame, and regret to shine a light that heals every heart.
When Personalities Become Inflamed
If reality is like an ocean with the waves representing various personalities that crash and collide from one interaction to the next, you realize that both the ocean and the waves are equally a part of one eternal truth. If you hold a more classical definition of ego as the personality of body, you may assume the ocean must become void of waves in order t
o be what it already is. Just like waves cannot crash or collide in such a way that will cause the ocean to drown, your personality is never in the way of recognizing a truth that always exists within you. This helps you understand the nature of ego as a conditioned tendency to be lost in an inflamed personality structure due to an overstimulated nervous system.
Typically, the word inflammation is associated with the different ways that bodies respond to their environment. This can include reactions to certain types of food in which allergens are capable of producing an inflammatory or toxic response in the body. Ego is what happens when the personality gets inflamed. For example, when you see someone who is angry, they are in a state of emotional inflammation. To say that they’re in ego may be a true statement, but through the eyes of the Universe, you are able to see how they are having an “allergic reaction” to their conditioned state of being. This means ego is much like an allergy toward the unconsciousness that each of us came here to resolve. When the ego is active, the innocence within you, or within anyone else, exists in an exaggerated manner. As you love what arises, you heal your vibrational allergies to joyfully live on an evolving planet, no matter how quickly or slowly others around you seem to grow.
When you start to see ego as the inflammation of the personality, you notice how often you can become “puffed up.” Whether puffed up in righteousness, defensive postures, or in response to the evidence of injustice, an inflamed personality creates an exaggerated perception of life. When living with an allergic reaction to the vibration of the planet, an exaggerated level of consciousness causes you to oscillate between spiritual highs and emotional lows. This can create much suffering until you cultivate love as a potent form of energy medicine to return your personality to its original form.