I sat crying on my living room floor. I’d spent the past four hours deep in meditation, doing a Tibetan practice called Tonglen, which focuses on processing and healing the world’s pain.
At the end, I felt deep compassion for all the people suffering around the world, and this felt virtuous. But I also felt depressed. Like tears-streaming-down-my-face, still-sitting-in-my-pajamas-in-the-late-afternoon depressed.
“I’m becoming a better human being,” I thought. But I felt confused. Why wasn’t I overflowing with joy, like my hero, Mother Teresa, whose life-sized poster hung on my wall gazing down at me as I meditated. (I also had images of Krishnamurti, Gandhi and the Buddha sitting on my desk, plus piles of books written by all the world’s spiritual masters. Yep, I’m all about “go BIG or go home”. And I had my sights set on enlightenment!)
At the time, I figured the “problem”—the lack of joy—just meant I needed to work harder to get rid of my ego, so I could be “selfless”. Then surely I would feel lighter, and have one of those wise, crinkly-eye smiles like my heroes.
“Yes,” I thought, “That ego thing is causing all my pain. I must eliminate it.”
A More Efficient Way
Fast forward 11 years, and thousands of hours of meditation + various other practices, and now I know I had it, maybe not quite backwards, but definitely sideways.
Here’s what I learned:
The solution was not to get rid of my “ego”, but to change my relationship with it into something much more gentle and loving.
Why? Because, what we call the “ego” is actually our hurt inner self, also known as the “Child Self”. So when you send the message to your hurt Child Self that you want to get rid of him or her, it doesn’t go over so well! You’re left with a repressed, pouty, angry child energy who will then go to great lengths to get your attention by projecting unpleasant shit into your life.
This isn’t an efficient path to feeling lightness and joy. At least it wasn’t for me. Or for the arguably enlightened Matt Kahn, who created an in-depth video about this problem.
And since your Child Self actually guards the gateway to you feeling genuine joy and expressing your True Self in this world—your unique genius—that’s actually a recipe for disaster.
But it’s what most of us have been taught to do, so we’re all confused about why it ain’t working out.
And here’s the real solution: Love your Self.
Not just part of yourself. Not just the part that gets money and status, masters yoga poses, achieves things, or attracts others’ approval. And not just the part that’s all spiritual and shit, gives change to homeless people and drinks green smoothies.
But also the other parts. The part that gets angry when things don’t go well. The part that sinks into self pity and wants to eat chocolate croissants. The part that gets jealous and gossips. The part that doesn’t want to do much of anything except stay in bed. The part who’s still sad about that breakup from three years ago. The part that feels small and insignificant and wants to tell the whole world to go fuck itself.
You gotta love those parts too, because they are part of your Self.
They’re part of the story of this life journey that you’re on to learn new stuff, integrate that and explore expressing who you are at this time with all you’ve learned.
What Does That Look Like in Real Life?
If you’ve read anything by Louise Hayes, you’ve probably spent time awkwardly staring at yourself in the mirror saying “I love you”, and feeling ridiculous.
Louise had the right idea. After all, that’s how she healed herself and then attracted all the success she experienced after that. But from my own experiences, it’s better to have real conversations with yourself—both in the mirror, and throughout your day. An ongoing dialogue.
My inner conversations look something like this:
Okay, I know you’re feeling shitty today, but it’s going to be okay. I’m going to support you and give you everything you need to be happy and successful. I don’t know exactly what that is yet, but we’re going to figure this thing out together. Please don’t worry, because worrying just creates bad shit for you, and everything always turns out better than you expect anyway. Try to just enjoy being your Self today, because you’re so much more than enough—you’re fucking awesome. Now give me a smile. No, not a smirk, smartass—a real smile. Thank you! Now, let’s go do this thing! (Yes, my “wise adult” curses like an ex-con.)
The Different Parts of “You”
But wait, you’re probably wondering. Just who is the person here providing assurance, and who is it providing assurance to? Are there two of me in here?
Technically, there are three (and these can be broken down into more parts, but we’ll leave that for now). If you can get them all working together, your plans for world domination (or at least to dominate your own world) will be much more successful.
There’s an Adult part of you, which manages your life and makes sure you do what you need to do with regard to social and work responsibilities. It’s actually not a “self” but an “imprint” of all the things you saw adults doing and saying when you were growing up.
There’s a Child part of you, who is also your Primary Self (the persona that makes you “you”). This self is really particular about what it likes and doesn’t like, what it wants to do and doesn’t want to do, and it has certain beliefs about itself and its place in the world, based on what it learned from age 0-10 (approximately). Often these beliefs are not great, causing some kind of emotional “hurt”, which you may or may not be fully aware of.
Then there’s your True Self, which can only be expressed in this world through your Child Self. It is all about self expression, creation, seeing its impact on this world, play, connection and helping others.
If you’re a visual person, you can imagine that your Child Self is like a glass prism your True Self shines through, creating beautiful and unique displays of light in this world. As you heal the hurt parts of your Child Self, this light shines through brighter and brighter!
The tricky bit is that if our Adult part isn’t nurturing and supporting our Child part, our True Self never gets fully expressed. And that’s tragic, because that’s where all our joy and genius and purpose and potential live.
“The Kindest, Wisest Parent Ever” Exercise: A Shortcut
So, if you want a shortcut to happiness and expressing your genius in this world as your True Self, your mission is to spend the next week having an ongoing dialogue with your Self—your Child Self, that is.
To do this, you’ll need to imagine what the kindest, wisest parent in the world says to his/her children, and say those things to yourself all day long—and I do mean ALL DAY LONG.
Try this out for one week. Be relentlessly consistent. No matter how silly it feels, or pointless, trust me when I tell you that this is a mega shortcut to experiencing really good things in your life.
As my business hero, Marie Forleo, says—consistency creates results. Or as my dear friend, Kimmy, says: consistent behaviour creates magic. If you go to the gym once a week, you won’t get fit. Same with this. Unless you do it consistently, every day, nothing will change.
Make sure you keep a journal of any unusual things that start happening while you’re doing this practice. It will provide greater awareness for you, and those results will buoy your efforts.
This has transformed my clients’ lives in BIG and beautiful ways, so as weird as it may feel at first, I hope you’ll give a real shot.
Rise and shine as your True Self,
Shawn xo
- It taps you into your purpose + life's calling.
- This gives you focus + motivation + momentum.
- It comes with a video tutorial + mini-course.
- + 6 days of life-changing secrets on harnessing the power of your subconscious mind to do bigger things faster + happier.
