Most of the videos that I create
are aimed at helping you to recognize and change
patterns that are detrimental to your adult life.
Now of course what this means
is that we have to go back to the origins.
Back to where these patterns began,
why they began
and how they began.
Inevitably this is going to take you back to your childhood.
it's going to take you back to your interactions
with your primary caregivers.
For most people, this means your parents
and your family of origin.
For the sake of fully comprehending
what I'm about to present you in this video
I'm gonna ask you
to not debate me or each other
for this particular moment,
on the concept of right and wrong in general.
And I want you to look at the idea
that the path of awakening is inevitably going to take you
in the direction of seeing what your parents did wrong.
What those before you did wrong.
Maybe what society itself is doing "wrong".
Because until this point of awareness
they are unconsciously instilled in you,
unless you become aware of the let's call it, wrongness of these patterns,
you're going to simply perpetuate it.
You're gonna pass it on to the next generation.
You're gonna pass it on to all the people around you.
Here's the problem:
people are absolutely terrified
that if they become aware
of these patterns that are detrimental,
if they admit to the wrongness of what their parents did,
that they will somehow lose
connection love and closeness
with their parents.
This means that social cohesion
becomes the excuse to make excuses
for detrimental patterns,
as well as the excuse not to change.
This also seriously unfortunately
means that the majority of people
who are automatically drawn towards awakening,
being able to see these patterns and changing them,
are the people who
often didn't feel a sense of belonging,
a sense of love,
a sense of connection,
a sense of closeness.
And their willingness to go in this direction
is indicative of the fact that they have less to lose.
I have to say here that it is not inevitable
that when you start on this path of awakening,
when you start to look at these detrimental patterns in your family unit
that you will absolutely lose connection and closeness
and all of these things.
In fact, multi-generational healing is only possible
when you are able to step back
and really objectively evaluate these patterns within the household.
And doing this awakening process where you're looking at
these detrimental patterns and shifting it together,
Actually can bring you closer to your family.
There's a lot of factors
that go into why that happens for one family
and why it doesn't for another.
For those of you that have a dogged determination
to hold on to that closeness
and belonging with your family
to such a degree that you have the very hard time
looking at these negative patterns within your family,
you're gonna have no issue with today's exercise.
However, for those of you
who feel like any form of connection,
any form of closeness with your family
just leads to pain,
today's exercise is gonna challenge you immensely.
People are black-and-white thinkers.
There are many reasons for this.
The state of cognitive dissonance
that is caused by holding contradictory beliefs,
ideas, values or perceptions,
causes us distress.
It makes it very hard for us to feel in alignment
and to make decisions that feel right.
Here are some examples:
We love to smoke cigarettes,
but we know they could cause us to develop cancer.
We think blacks are poor,
but then we run into one at a five-star resort.
We love a political candidate,
then find out that they have sexual kinks
that contradict our sense of their character.
We find out that someone murdered someone else,
but they also run one of the most successful nonprofit companies
which just so happened to have saved hundreds of lives.
If we see our parents is all good,
we have established a mental and emotional harmony.
We can go to Thanksgiving dinner
and excuse away or justify any negative pattern we see
and feel great about our family.
If we see our parents is all bad,
we have established also a kind of mental and emotional harmony.
We can refuse to go to Thanksgiving dinner
and invalidate any positive pattern we see
and consider ourselves justified in cutting them off
from our life entirely.
We begin to feel torn,
when we see both the positive and negative about them.
Awareness is a two-sided coin.
We live in a universe
that contains a lot of contrast
and a lot of polarity.
This means that on the path of awareness
we have to develop "And Consciousness".
We have to develop the capacity to hold
opposing extremes
and seemingly contradictory truths.
The feeling of being torn
between different extremes
or seemingly opposing truths,
feels a lot like being stretched.
Now we should pay attention to the sensation of stretching
because it often occurs in conjunction
with personal expansion.
True awakening requires you to expand wide enough
to be able to accommodate extremes and contradictions.
This in fact makes contradictions complimentary.
In the moment you acknowledge a contradictory truth
or state of being and expand wide enough
to be able to hold both
you have disidentified with both extremes.
You have a cease to become either/or
and instead have become the thing that is holding both.
By holding both instead of aspects of yourself being separated by them,
you've created a state of integration or wholeness within your being.
You have also stepped into the realm of choice.
Essentially "And Consciousness"
becomes the unifying factor.
To understand more about this watch my video titled:
And Consciousness (The Modern Day Replacement for The Middle Way)
It is very damaging to not recognize
and change these detrimental patterns
that have been handed to you by your family,
by your parents, by society at large.
Do you want to know the flip side of this coin?
It is also damaging to not recognize and accept
the beneficial positive patterns
that have been feeding into the way you are today.
Ways that work.
As far as expansion is concerned,
the idea is to continue patterns that benefit you
and to change patterns that don't benefit you.
All things in existence
contain both polarities
of negative and positive.
And even that can't be a black-and-white statement
because in some situations,
what would be negative in one situation,
is positive in another and vice-versa.
What does this mean?
It means that your parents
contain both negative and positive within them.
It means they did things right as well as wrong.
I want you to understand that when you came into this embodiment
you opted into a deck of cards.
I will debate you in the future
about the value of those low value cards,
but for the sake of really grasping the concept,
understand that this deck of cards you inherited upon your birth and upbringing
means that some of those cards are crap and some are awesome.
For example:
Let's say you were born Mexican.
Being born Mexican may mean you adopted a pattern of constant guilt.
However, being born Mexican
may also mean you adopted a pattern of festivity.
Today we are going to make a practice
of deliberately looking for those "awesome" cards within the deck.
Your assignment for this week is the following:
To become aware of the positive polarity
of your parents
and this includes what they did right.
To take this further,
just like you do with negative patterns,
see how what they did right
created a positive outcome in who you are and your life today.
For example:
Maybe your mother did amazing with holidays.
She was great at decoration.
Awesome at gifts.
She made it a wonderful time for you.
So now you're a kind of person that doesn't have a lot of pain around holidays.
You're the kind of person who creates
a special occasion for everyone else in your life.
You're the person who's awesome at decoration.
You're the person who can put these things in your year,
so you have things to look forward to all year long.
Maybe your father was amazing at money.
He taught you the value of never being in debt.
So maybe today you're one of those very rare individuals
who is not in debt.
And in fact, feels financial security instead.
So you can grasp this concept better,
I'm going to give you some examples from my own life.
Both my parents have an incredible work ethic.
It is something that they instilled in me very very young
and it's the main reason why today
I have such a high work ethic.
Both my parents were animal lovers.
I mean obsessed with animals.
Not only were they very knowledgeable about them,
we had them everywhere
and they also were volunteers for the Humane Society.
To say that I have been around animals all my life
is about the understatement of the century.
I have a vast knowledge about them because of it.
I have incredible comfort around them because of it.
My life is rich because of it.
And also it's made it so I'm not as uptight and controlling as a person
that I probably would be without them being in my life.
Neither of my parents
ever stood in the way
of me achieving something.
In fact,
their general modus operandi
was to get out of the way and let me do whatever the hell I needed to do.
Both of them have a high respect
for personal purpose and calling.
As a result,
I'm not burdened by that same internal limitation
of the concept of "can't"
like most people are today.
Now if you can't tell,
that has served me immensely
and it will continue to do so.
To switch this up a bit,
I'm gonna focus on each of them individually.
Let's start with my mother;
My mother who is an activist,
refused to raise myself and my brother to be ignorant.
Therefore let's say we ever went on a trip.
She refused to let us just sit in a five-star resort.
She was the kind of person who wanted to immerse us
in the culture of wherever we went.
And that meant both good things and bad things.
So I remembered this one trip,
when I was in Mexico when we were young,
she dragged us in the middle of a really poor side of town,
where I was walking through this collection full of vendors.
These people had to take care of very sick loved ones,
old people, also sick infants.
Some of them completely covered in pox.
And I watched these street vendors
selling at the same time as having these people,
these family members underneath their tables,
so that they could take care of them at the same time.
Now it was shocking for me and needless to say
in my childhood I absolutely hated this.
However now looking back on it
I think it's the best thing she ever did.
because it is a big reason why I'm such a humanitarian today.
And I don't live in a narcissistic mental bubble of a reality
of only what I myself have experienced in life.
My mother comes from an intellectual family.
She is also a feminist.
What does this mean?
It means that she celebrated debate.
Not only that, I was congratulated
and even rewarded for forming very strong opinions.
How is this benefited me today?
Look at my entire career.
I can now stand up on stage as confidently sharing my opinion.
This is not just a big push in terms of my own personal empowerment,
this is also a push for the empowerment of women worldwide.
Now let's move on to my father;
My father comes from a line of diplomats.
As such, he developed a real skill and talent for oration.
His speech patterns influenced me,
his diplomatic way of dealing with things,
especially when it came to communication,
his way of teaching,
influenced me.
My father is the one who gifted me with the power of speech.
And by the way,
that is the reason why I am able to convey
such complex concepts in the universe
in a way where you can understand them simply.
My father is an incredible skier.
He was a ski racer when he was younger.
It's always the way I'm going to remember him
and it was a great way for us to bond when we were younger.
He passed this on to me.
He taught me how to ski when I was 2 years old.
Skiing saved my life quite literally
when I was 18 years old.
I went on to become a professional skier.
And now it's like my favorite way to spend time,
besides doing what I love doing most, which is this career.
It's also a way
that I now bond with my own son.
Now, it's your turn.
And before you get into this,
I want to say that if it triggers you to even think about
looking at what your parents did right
or looking what's positive about them,
I want you to ask yourself: "Why?"
I want you to ask yourself the following question:
What bad thing might happen
if I see the good or the right in them?
You'll find that when it comes to this type of an exercise
where we're forced to look for the positive or the right and things
that we want to completely reject,
because closeness or connection with them feels too painful,
what's actually happening here is that we're adding meaning.
So let's say that I see this good thing in my mother,
and so it means: _________
What is it? "I have to have a close relationship with her."
It's wrong that I am deciding to stay separate right now.
I mean, what is it that you're making that mean?
It's always the meaning you add on top of the experience,
that is creating that pain
or that resistance that you have, to doing an exercise like this.
For those of you who don't really understand this concept
of adding meaning to an experience,
I want you to watch my video this titled:
Meaning, The Self Destruct Button
To do this exercise,
get a piece of paper and write down
as many positives as you can come up with about your parents
and all the things they did right.
Then become aware
of how those things positively influenced you
and positively impacted who you are and your life today.
There's also a way to work this backward
if it works better for you.
You can look at your life right now,
the things that you like about yourself,
the things that are really working,
and trace it backward to see if maybe those character traits
or those things that are actually working for you in your life,
might just originate
in things your parents did right.
No matter who your parents were
or how objectively bad they did at parenting,
there are positives and negatives about them.
There are things they did right
and also things they did wrong.
And the person who has the greatest chance at awakening,
is the person who can see both sides of that coin.
The person who sees both sides of that coin,
has the greatest capacity
to see what doesn't work
and to discard it,
and to draw on those resources
that actually do exist
for positive in your life.
Those positives that came from
the influences around you.
Have a good week
Subtitles by: Tanya Duarte www.tanyaduarte.com