Evolutionary Blog

"Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at the moment."

― Eckhart Tolle

Often, we make the mistake of judging where we are at as wrong or bad. "I should already have _________ by now." "I am over 40 (or 50, or whatever age) and by now I thought I would have ___________ " or "I am still __________ ing! What's wrong with me?"

Nothing. Nothing is wrong. You know where you "should" be at this point in your life or in your development and personal evolution? That's right: exactly where you are. Do you know why? Because you can't be any other place. To think that you can be is to engage in a particular kind of self-invented torture.

Most of us know that comparing ourselves to others is not very useful. There will always be someone better than us and there will always be someone we are better than at any particular thing or in any area of development or in a chosen context.

It is a meaningless comparison.

But we often compare ourselves to another "other". That other is an ideal self. One we invented and then compare ourselves to, and shame ourselves for not being. Which is really pretty silly--because we made it up! We invented this "other" to torture ourselves.

This creates misery for us. And yet, how do we balance the reality of the gap between who we are and who we envision ourselves to be/come without doing so? If we truly accepted ourselves as "perfect as we are" wouldn't we simply stop developing and evolving ourselves?

The short answer is "no". The longer answer is that the very question points to a lack of understanding of what true self-acceptance is and what kind of experience it creates.

Self-acceptance leads to facing reality--good, bad, dark, light, ugly, beautiful as the reality as it is. In doing so--in building the capacity to stare into the mirror and gaze at ourselves with an objective and clear eye-we build the capacity to dance ...

It is a very delicate dance--seeing where we are and accepting that, and knowing where we want to be and having attention on closing that gap and doing so without moral judgment. But once that dance is engaged in, it allows for even more rapid evolution because we are no longer delusional or in avoidance, nor are we resisting nor are we driven by a compulsion to be a "better person".

Instead, we accept the reality as it is, allowing us to more rapidly see what needs to be done, and because we care about results, we do it--we step into the gap and the gap begins to get smaller and smaller.

We stop evolving to get something and we begin to evolve for the sake of evolution--to be engaged in the unfolding, creating a better world for all.

And it all begins with self-acceptance.


Details for the next Introduction to Advanced Personal Evolution can be found »here«

Here is a little gem for you. An insight and a practice. Watch this 2-minute video:

And you can download an iPad version »HERE«.

somebody i met was asking me if NLP processes can change an identity layer as deep as sexual orientation.

Great question. Several ideas about it:

There are some aspects of sexual orientation that may extend into identity structures, but I am uncertain about the presupposition that there is where it lays--in fact, after seing hundreds of clients, for some people it creates tremendous internal dissonance when they finally admit to their desires because it is directly in conflict with their identity structures. In other words, I disagree with the presupposition in the question.

this guy is straight and very open-minded. i think he genuinely wanted to know about the range and reach of NLP. i did tell him that i did a training with richard bandler in 88 or 89 where he *claimed* that guys (terrified of aids) had begged him to "make them straight" AND he said that he did that!

Bandler may have in fact done that.  Again, lots of "instant research" in the early days. But if Bandler did it and was bragging about it, I would be even more hesitant. Bandler once bragged in a video I watched about installing a phobia in someone so they would stop sitting in the front row. Ugh. However, there is a documented intervention [Laid out in "Heart of the Mind", I think] where a guy was effeminate, and supposedly gay, married, but did not enjoy sex with men [or something like that] and there was an event where he was going under anesthetic, struggled, and was put under. This was somehow tied to the effeminate-ness and cleared and his orientation "changed" to straight.

Again, not sure the guy was ever really homo-erotically driven.

NOW, i am open-minded, so i said i think that there are aspects of person's 'taste' for certain things could be altered and very likely even the cues for arousal. i am also aware that there is a big difference between chemistry/attraction and a constructed identity--so yes an 'identity' could be shifted. BUT I don't really know if the primary gender attraction could change.

Yeah. I agree with you here.

thoughts?

Of course.

If someone came to me wanting to change their sexual orientation/gender attraction, I would probably decline to do so. But I would do it elegantly in this way ::: Get into communication wiht the part of them that feels like something is wrong with their desires [assuming consenting adults] and look at the guilt and shame that must be driving the desire to change and resolve that to make them okay with their mutually consensual, alternative, yet natural desires. Thereby sidestepping what I consider to be a questionable intervention.

To me, that is a more ethical approach, rippling out to areas in every aspect of their life, creating internal peace, and avoiding making change that is motivated in the ways this request for change likely would be.

It is not the thing itself [sexual orientation in this case] that is the problem, but the relationship to it the creates it as a problem.
And again, just because we can, does not mean we should.

Self-acceptance being one of the highest and deepest contributions we can make to our clients.

Jason