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My near-death accident shook me into the awareness that not only had I veered off the road, I had veered off my soul’s reason for being here. Who was I? Who had I become in the flurry of gaining my PhD, while trying to be a wife and a mother? How had I allowed my essence to be destroyed and discarded in this way? It took me years into my journey to accept how much I had allowed my own worth and voice to be crushed by the men around me. I’m almost ashamed to admit that I was so blind and conditioned as to allow myself to be silenced in the ways I did most of my life. I almost don’t want you to know this side of me. I want you to project an aura of perfection, wisdom, and power onto me. Yet I also know that it’s only when I lay bare the honest truth about my own awakening process that you may be able to begin yours. Responsabilitatea în relațiile cu adulții presupune să nu ne mai așteptăm ca oricare dintre nevoile noastre personale să fie satisfăcute de celălalt, cu excepția cazului în care se dovedește contrariul. Îmi dau seama că sună rece și blazat, dar nu este. Este, de fapt, o afirmație plină de înțelepciune. Nu te poți aștepta de la nimeni să-ți satisfacă nevoile, decât dacă sunt îndeplinite două condiții - prima este ca respectivul să fie capabil din punct de vedere fizic și emoțional și a doua este să fie dispus și să-și dorească s-o facă. The birthplace of the ego is self-abnegation. It thrives when the inner self is ignored, denied, suppressed, and all but annihilated in favor of a force on the outside—typically the voice of others, especially our loved ones, the culture in which we are raised, or a system of beliefs that captures our imagination. Odată ce vom vedea potențialul tuturor tipurilor de comportament în noi, acceptăm cu compasiune posibilele elemente din umbră și extindem această bunătate și către ceilalți. Înainte să ne grăbim să-i judecăm, ne amintim să luăm o pauză și să ne punem pe noi însene în pielea lor, știind că singurul lucru care ne separă este situația de viață. Ne vedem natura umană subiacentă și creăm legătura cu situația lor, nu cu deconectarea. Așa ne ridicăm reciproc, construind puțin unul către celălalt, nu lărgind crăpăturile.
I understand when women are pissed off, outraged, frustrated. They have suppressed their feelings for so long that it makes sense when they bubble over and feel the need to scream, No more! Such women are often labeled irrational, emotional, and off the rails. They are likely to be socially ostracized. Scared that this might happen to us, we tend to avoid becoming so bold. Little do we realize that becoming a bold woman is our path to salvation. Self-love blossoms when we claim our experiences through our expression and our actions. Each time we honor our feelings and inner process, we declare self-love. When we rebel against culture’s embargo against our voice, we give ourselves and each other the space to be heard and seen. As a result, women and children live in a subconscious state of wariness around men. We grow up knowing men are in charge. With this comes the awareness that there is a potential threat when we are around them. Every female instinctively knows to turn away from a group of men in an alley. This instinct isn’t mere paranoia. It is an inner caution honed by strong cultural evidence of innumerable violations against us. Although protective, it is a burden that is heavy to bear. To this day, even in her forties, Trista has a challenging time expressing her inner world and feelings articulately. Both her husband and children often complain to her that they don’t feel connected to her because she is too harsh and rigid. Her teenage son, Matt, in particular had been entering into almost daily conflicts with her, which led her to seek therapy with me. It was only after much processing that she came to understand how her childhood defenses—emotional withdrawal and suppression—were now interfering with her ability to connect with her son.
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GF: Among the people supposed to have attained the awakening or approached it, history and tradition present us, on the one hand, examples of very refined, intelligent, cultivated beings and, on the other, with examples of uneducated monks sweeping the cloister-humble characters living that which the literate and the wise men speak of without having had the experience. SJ: First of all, it’s necessary to grasp that the awakening comes first in relation to the ecstatic and legitimate effects it induces. The supreme knowledge is of a radically different essence than the ecstasies and other extraordinary joys it’s likely to induce. It would be dangerous to concentrate on the ecstasies. Soul erosion is a gradual process—a slow, creeping, chipping away of our inner being, resulting in the inevitable death of all we know to be our truest selves. It’s a disease that begins in childhood and spreads contagiously, especially in women. Its symptoms include loss of power, authenticity, voice, and vision. Soul erosion is essentially an obliteration of our inner knowing. Each incident in which we suppress our inner truth, we engage in the erosion of our most precious treasure—our essence. Whether we are in a toxic relationship or not, or have been physically abused or not, the fact is we are a hairsbreadth away from this possibility. Don’t be fooled into thinking you’re smarter or wiser just because you haven’t fallen prey to an aspect of our patriarchy in a direct way. It’s actually unavoidable. If you are a woman in today’s world, you have felt it in some way or other. You may not recognize these experiences for what they actually were yet, but they happened and, trust me, they had an impact. There isn’t a woman I know who has escaped the crushing weight of the patriarchy in which we live.
Simply brilliant! Step by step and chain by chain, Dr. Shefali gives us a path to break free from our old patterns to arrive at a new destination: our truest, most authentic self." — MARIE FORLEO, New York Times bestselling author of Everything Is Figureoutable I understand this is currently a wildly popular book. If I were to rate the writing itself, completely separate from Dr. Shefali's assertions, I give it 3.5 stars. It took me a long time to realize the difference between taking on blame versus taking on responsibility. Whereas blaming myself kept me mired in fear, accompanied by my silence and complicity, taking responsibility allowed me to see my participation in my own victimization and rise up with courage and daring.SJ: Yes? So what? In the end, why should I give a damn if there’s a paradox? What’s important to me is to describe the phenomenon, not try to explain it. GF: What you say makes me think of something Jean Sullivan wrote: “Swindling: to convince others that the words aren’t very important because the spiritual reality is inexpressible and, thereby, to justify the platitude of mechanical associations. Yet, without language, that is to say with neither action nor creation, there is nothing.” task. Once the thing was intellectually got hold of, it was a matter of expressing it and thus having recourse to words. Therefore, I had to learn to write-not make grammatical errors and, above all, initiate myself to the oh so important usage of the semicolon (a must in French literature). That took a while-years, to be exact. Once one knows how to write more or less, it is necessary to pay attention not only to the meaning, but also to the color of the words. Two synonymous terms do not have the same color. It’s this attention to the color of words that differentiates the writer from someone who merely writes. The latter naively believes he has expressed his idea as soon as the sentence is grammatically correct and the words are logically aligned. But that’s not so! The act of writing begins when the intuition of the qualitative aura of the word, beyond its intellectual sense, springs forth. Yet, I did persist beyond good sense, showing a considerable aptitude for folly. Nevertheless, it would appear that this inner capacity to drive myself on like a madman was not without its virtues, for, all of a sudden, everything exploded. How can I describe the sudden nature, the total abruptness of the “event”? I detest using the word “supernatural,” but it’s the only one I can find that properly describes the suddenness of the awakening. With indescribable rapidity, I passed through to the other side of the mirror and found myself waking to an infinite wakefulness in my very center, in the center of that wakefulness which, itself, wasn’t an object but an intemporal act I was able to perform. I knew that I knew all there was to be known, that I had attained the infinite value, touched the essence of the essence of all things and of myself. . . I knew.
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