Self help is great.
The attitude to improve yourself is wonderful!
However, the reality is that we do very little on our own.
When we talk about doing anything as an individual, what we’re discussing is are we receiving
direct help
or
indirect help?
Spiritual Awakening Help and Tips Guide
Direct help is when you talk to someone like myself, and you get responses directly related to you. A lot happens in a conversation. I, as a teacher with an external perspective, can show you things that you don’t understand or can’t see about yourself.
Indirect help is when you pick and choose what you want to accept from a video, book, blog, or something else. Other people put those resources out there for you. So you aren’t doing this by yourself. You are receiving the benefits of community, but they are strangers and aren’t directly engaged with you. Most have no idea about your actual situation. With some thing like learning another computer programming language and you already know how to do that, indirect is great.
When it comes to finding blindspots and stepping outside your ego, it’s problematic. While many of you want to believe that your intuition will choose correctly, your intuition is actually just your subconscious ego feelings and sensations. Your ego only tells you about your past, and it wants to keep you trapped there.
Self Help Problem #1: Familiarity Bias
Your ego chooses ideas and exercises that are familiar to you.
Maybe they’re not familiar to your intentional thinking ego, but some part of your subconscious feeling ego feels like you should do them.
The problem is that the ego keeps you caged in your known. The ego is about staying in the familiar with the assumption that
what is familiar is safe.
Of course some of you grew up in miserable situations. More unfortunately, familiar misery gets normalized to the point that you don’t realize that it isn’t healthy.
That typically means that when you seek self help, you choose tools that keep you trapped in the familiar misery or, at best, temporarily soothe you.
Eventually, many self-medication and coping tools lose their positive effects.
Self Help Problem #2: The Echo Chamber Effect
If you’re reading this spiritual awakening blog post online (and unless someone printed this out and gave it to you on paper, then you are), then you probably have spent more than a minute in online spaces. You are used to being given what you want to hear because the technology companies have been perfecting the echo chamber effect.
Even if an algorithm serves you bad news, a lot of people are comfortable with bad news and want to receive that kind of information and stimulation. You stay online or on that website.
Stimulation is at the heart of what a lot of the Internet is about. Stimulation keeps you entertained and engaged, and most importantly to tech companies, you continue spending money or cause advertisers to spend money.
Try this New Spiritual Tool: A Regular Media Free Day
When you try to apply self help tools, you have been hyper-oriented to want to hear things in specific ways.
Real help doesn’t necessarily echo what you want to hear.
Spiritual freedom takes you outside the limitations of your ego, and your ego won’t know what to do with that.
Thus a lot of spiritual self help does nothing but to reinforce long-standing ego beliefs and subconscious feelings. You stay trapped in your ego even as you spend hours journaling or meditating or something else while spending potentially tens of thousands of dollars.
Self Help Problem #3: Real-time Flexibility
Many self help options and resources give step-by-step instruction that speaks to a mechanical and rigid understanding of human beings and processes.
With such thinking, people journal for an hour a day.
People meditate for a half hour a day.
They go to their weekly therapy, and nothing is really accomplished.
In many situations, people are using self help tools with no real understanding of the purpose of the tool nor the greater goal to which they’re attempting to achieve.
In general, all people really want is to feel better.
But short-term relief is not an end to suffering.
This gets people trapped in cycles of feeling temporarily better, and then the spiritual self help tool “doesn’t work.”
They didn’t really understand how to use the tool because they can’t see themselves the way an external person can. Understanding the context you’re in regarding your ego beliefs, limitations, and feelings is critical to using a self help tool well.
If I’m dealing with a person who loves to hide, I am unlikely to emphasize meditation. Ego hiders love to meditate for hours or escape to spiritual retreats.
Left to their own devices, the ego hider person will meditate their life away and still suffer even after years or decades of meditation.
As we build a teacher-student relationship, the tools that I recommend change to help the person meet the moment. Things get dropped when they don’t make sense.
We remain flexible through surrendering to reality.
Rigidity (or sometimes a lack of definition in other self help tools) plays into the different egos that want to live by mechanical mindsets because it’s what has been taught.
Human beings are not machines.
Conversely, for the free-flowing people, you are not a leaf blowing on the wind. More often than not, transformational work is driven by going in the opposite direction. The rigid ego has to be more flexible. The free-flowing ego needs structure.
On your own, you’re unlikely to choose the opposite to your ego tendency much less to stay with it to truly benefit. Nor are you likely to understand how to apply flexibility.
Getting Direct Help
In short, yes, self help tools are great.
But they are limited.
They are limited by your limitations, and while I am biased as a teacher who professionally helps others, I want you to find the supports and direct help to get real results.
Do You Need a Spiritual Teacher?
Some of you need a physical therapist to help you see things about your fitness that they can best see. Many of you need a trauma therapist who will help you to understand the traumatized nervous system and thinking in which you’ve lived.
Whatever is needed is what you surrender to.
And there is so much about yourself that you can’t see, and nor can you do everything by yourself.
Human beings are communal animals
And there are people in your community who see things about you that you can’t and who truly want to help you be free of suffering and embrace the many joyful possibilities of life.
