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If there is one profession that seems to be needed more than ever, then it’s psychotherapy. Even therapists need therapists. To put it more bluntly, we are all insane. We are insane because we are raised and live in an insane world.
This is not to say that insanity is bad or wrong. It simply is the normal way of life for most of us.
If you doubt what I say here, commit one full day to listening to your thoughts. Now imagine you would share all those thoughts with everyone around you. What would the people around you say?
Most likely, they wouldn’t vote for you as the prime example of sanity.
This, by the way, doesn’t mean that you are your thoughts.
Your thoughts are a spontaneous occurrence that you can’t control. If you disagree, how about trying to control them for a day? Or turning them off completely for a day? Or how about locating the thinker – the source of your thoughts?
Seriously inquiring into the nature of thoughts can quite quickly show you that you are not in control of your thoughts (even though you can have the experience of control) because there is no you separate from your thoughts to control them (it seems a bit of a paradox, I know).
Nonetheless, the content of our thoughts determines how we feel to a significant degree depending on how identified we are with them. The content of our thoughts and level of identification are both the result of our conditioning.
Conditioning is the keyword here.
Self-Therapy Is About De-conditioning Yourself
So, when I say we all need therapy I don’t mean therapy in a traditional sense where you are something broken that needs to be fixed. Even though I said all that stuff about us being insane, ultimately speaking nothing is wrong with us.
What you are cannot be fixed because it was never broken. If anything is broken then it’s society and if you feel like you don’t fit in, congratulations!
Aldous Huxley put it well, in his book, Brave New World Revisited:
“The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does. They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.”
The good news is that sanity is possible. Sanity is freedom from conditioning. Ultimately, it’s freedom from yourself.
The therapeutic work to sanity is the deconditioning process.
In my humble opinion, this should be the goal of any real psychotherapy. But because there are not enough therapists for all of us and even fewer therapists who help you on this journey of not adjusting to society but freeing your mind from society, we need to be our own therapists.
The Principles of Self-Therapy
We need to master the art of self-therapy, and this is what this article is about.
Here I’ll introduce you to powerful and necessary principles to escape the prison of your mind. This doesn’t mean there is an actual you inside an actual mind prison. By escaping the prison of your mind I mean seeing through the illusion and delusion your mind has created for itself.
The goal is not some improved self (although you’ll most likely be happier) but the reversal of all the conditioning (the false beliefs) you’ve been programmed with which influence your life in ways you’re not aware of.
This is what may be called the spiritual awakening process. But the self-therapy I’m going to introduce here is not full of clichés. At times, the work is going to be uncomfortable, rough even.
This is a part of it and usually can’t be avoided.
But if there is anything worth doing in this life then it’s this: Waking up from the dream of yourself. Waking up to your rightful dimensions.
And whether you are already on this journey or have yet to take your first step, the principles you’ll find here are a good reminder for anyone.
If you’re willing and burning to claim your birthright of inner freedom, then I welcome you on this journey.
Radical Sincerity
Self-therapy sounds like something you lack the skills for.
You don’t.
The first and most important step is sincerity. But this sincerity can’t just be a half-assed sincerity. You need to be radically honest with yourself, no bars hold.
In the beginning, this might mean that you have no idea what being really honest with yourself means. We are not only used to lying to each other but to ourselves as well. And it’s not the big lies that are the problem here but the small little undetected lies we don’t even recognize as such.
We usually tell these small little lies to avoid friction. You might omit one piece of information when telling a story to someone because you know this piece of information will rub them a certain way.
You do the same to yourself when you try to plug the distress at the core of your being with soothing affirmations like “I’m sure it’s fine,” or “It’s not that bad,” or “I’m okay.”
These ointments for your sore emotional body might seem harmless and even quite useful for avoiding pessimism so that you can keep going. But for the purpose of deconditioning yourself they’re the blinders that keep you from acknowledging your condition sincerely.
Without an unwavering commitment to being honest with yourself, your mind will create trap after trap after trap for you. You will find yourself in the same behavioral loops you have been in for a long time, constantly wondering what is wrong.
The answer is that nothing is wrong. Or to put it differently, everything is wrong.
And a good first acknowledgment can be that you don’t know anything. Take an honest look at yourself and the world around you.
What do you know for sure? What is going on? Is any of this making any sense to you?
If you start being honest with yourself you might realize that you have no idea what you’re doing and that you never had any idea what you were doing.
You might also realize that you don’t know what you want in life and that you’ve been merely chasing mirage after mirage. And, of course, you’ll realize that you don’t have the faintest idea about who or what or where you are.
Willingness to Face Suffering
Honesty leads to pain. There is no way around it.
If you have spent a lifetime lying to yourself, even if you did unknowingly, which is the norm, you will encounter a whole lot of uncomfortable things.
This is probably no longer unconventional advice but if you hope to understand yourself to any degree you need to suffer. By that, I don’t mean the suffering you’re already engaged in. I mean conscious suffering.
Conscious suffering doesn’t mean that you need to make yourself suffer. It simply means to no longer hide from the parts that can cause you suffering.
Most of us are suffering and most of us suppress some of our suffering. What I mean is most of us are only aware of a fraction of our suffering.
What you need to do is get all that suffering out into the light.
This is an important point: At the beginning of your self-therapy journey, progress is usually not measured by suffering less, but by suffering more (overall though, suffering will, of course, decrease significantly).
If you try to brainwash yourself into being happy before being brutally honest with yourself about how you feel, you’re making negative progress.
I know because I’ve been there. I thought I was on a spiritual awakening journey and I thought I was doing great because I felt good. At least on the surface. What helped slap that silly grin out of my face was facing the fact that my life was a lie — an intricate web of avoidance, make-believe, vanity, and refusal to see.
To reduce the consistent subconscious suffering that feels like an itch you can’t scratch, you have to suffer consciously. Become aware of that underlying tension and anxiety that follows you wherever you go. Drag it out into the spotlight.
What is it and why is it? Are you perhaps less satisfied with your life than you claim you are?
Maybe deep down life feels like a great burden to you and you haven’t allowed yourself to consciously acknowledge that (for me that was the case). As you can see, radical honesty leads into suffering. It leads you to the parts you have been avoiding.
Laser-like Focus
When you have identified some part of yourself that was in the dark, you can now focus your attention on it to properly investigate it.
Focus is one of the most useful skills anyone can have. It’s also one of the skills we are actively and passively destroying.
The more we spend time with quick information, jumping from one thing to the other, the more we are reducing our capacity to focus on one thing for an extended period of time.
Focus is important in self-therapy because it allows us to penetrate the layers of illusion that keep us in our limited and stifled view of the world and ourselves. Trying to do this work without the least bit of focus will lead you into all places but one — the core.
No issue can be solved for good by pruning its branches. We have to get to the root.
Practically speaking we have to bring one issue/belief/conviction into focus and then start digging:
Where does that come from? Is it true? How am I experiencing this issue/belief/conviction? How is this defining me? What is the me that’s being defined? Who is doing the defining?
Focus is necessary because you have to think for yourself. You can’t be lazy about it and hope other people will solve this for you. You are in your own unique jungle of obstruction and you are the only one that can hack yourself free.
Focus is your razor-sharp machete. No vine of delusion can withstand the slashes of discernment.
A lack of focus is like a butter knife. It might do something but it’ll probably take a while and who knows how much time you have.
Sensitivity About Yourself
One of the biggest hurdles in this work is that you don’t know yourself at all and thus don’t know how to approach yourself. In the beginning, you don’t know what’s driving you, what’s hurting you, what you want, where you are, when you are, what you are trying to get away from, and so forth.
You’re pretty much in the dark.
This lack of sensitivity about oneself is best seen in personal development.
The premise is you have to improve yourself (whatever that is) and whip yourself into shape with effort and determination. If you are not where you want to be it’s because you haven’t optimized yourself enough. You are not working hard enough on yourself and the world around you.
This strategy of turning your mind and body into your slaves (whose slaves, am I right?) might make you more successful and better functioning by society’s standards. But does it solve the core issue?
Does it eliminate the consistent nagging anxiety? The sense of unworthiness? The feeling of restlessness? The suffering that is sure to come?
No, it doesn’t.
Contrary to self-improvement, this work works best with sensitivity. You have to know when to push and when to pull. Sometimes effort is right, other times relaxation is the key. Although focus is necessary, defocus has its time and place.
You’re not trying to become a perfect human being, nor are you trying to be a success in the world’s eyes. You want to see what you are underneath all the layers.
Essentially you want to be what you’ve always been. For that, you must see everything that tells you you’re not supposed to be what you are.
Instead of fighting yourself, you have to understand yourself. And you can’t understand yourself if you’re always trying to change yourself without even knowing what’s being changed.
Determined Inquiry
To understand yourself (your false self) you have to inquire into yourself. To get the most out of it, make inquiry you’re constant companion in daily life.
In every moment, pay attention to yourself.
Be aware of how you feel. Notice when something makes you feel bad and ask yourself why. Pay attention to your habitual automatic thought processes and see what drives them.
A particularly useful step is to become aware of all the vanity — the constant pampering of your self-image. See how whatever you are doing is primarily about feeding into your image as a good (or whatever standard you have) person.
Do you really care about the things you love or do you care about the image of yourself as someone who cares about these things?
Whenever something snatches your attention and pushes you around, ask yourself if this is true. Is that what you are?
But most importantly, pay attention to what is consistent. Try to find what you are by chipping away at what you are not. Pay close attention to your thoughts, emotions, and senses.
What is the common denominator?
Use thought in a focused manner free from the distorting influence of emotion. Use it to find the right question, and when you have found it, destroy it. The autopilot thinking that most of us live our lives in is useless.
Whenever you’re not using thought consciously, let it go as best as you can and experience the world unfiltered from your constant narration.
With time you’ll see that there is nothing ever wrong with the world. When you are with your experience as it is without the conceptual overlay, there is hardly anything wrong, ever.
Inquiry is the heart of self-therapy. It’s where you put all the previous principles to use. Inquiry is effective when it’s sincere, focused, and skillful. Know how and when to use your thoughts and know when to pierce through concepts.
Crossing the Line
There is no one-fits-all approach for self-therapy. The principles stated here aren’t how-to’s but capacities you have that will help you find your own answers and see beyond your conditioned life.
There will come a point, which I call crossing the line.
This is where you’ll no longer feel like you’re in control or need to do this. The process will take on a life on its own and you’ll automatically move in the right direction.
You’ll no longer be primarily guided by egoic volition but by an overarching intelligence. When you cross the line it’ll be easy to recognize how and where you’re conditioned, and what and how actions are driven by conditioning.
Crossing the line might be called surrender. This is when the whole process gets a flavor of allowing in contrast to making happen.
This is also where virtually anything can help you open the next door in your self-therapy endeavor. No longer are wise books, wise teachers, and wise goo-roos your only source of keys.
Suddenly keys are found anywhere.
Anyone and anything can be a reminder, a finger pointing, a wake-up call. It’s as if everything around you becomes your personal transpersonal existential therapist.
Now all that’s asked of you is to pay attention and keep your eyes open.
Luka
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Wonderful and as always radical as hell! Grateful for your wisdom and the way it’s being transmitted to me 🙂 The beautiful paradox of enhanced suffering meaning progress, starts to make a little more sense for me. Only one way to go — through it!
Thank you so much Luka for your radical clarity and honesty!
Como siempre Luka!!! Claro y fuerte, cómo el agua cristalina y la espada afilada. Gracias por encontrarme.