This is a topic that concerns us a lot in our work at the Learning Love Institute, which we founded [where, how many?] years ago.
Many people come to us who are crippled with fear and insecurity, uncontrollable anger, painful relationships, troubling anxiety, and even depression. And understandably, they would like a quick fix to overcome this pain.
Also, quite a few of our clients have done ayahuasca and iboga ceremonies and felt that they really benefitted and got deep insights. The trouble is that they often are not capable of integrating these deep insights into their daily lives and particularly into their relating.
What is in the way is often an idea that there isn’t any need to indulge in or even feel fear, pain, or shame because they aren’t real. This might lead to avoiding, denying, and even invalidating painful states or childhood wounds of shame and fear that show up in our daily lives. It might even cause us to shy away from anything, particularly deep intimacy, that could bring up feelings that are uncomfortable.
This is very unfortunate as the understanding is missing that conscious growth and expanding into love and life naturally will bring up a lot of buried pain, fears, and insecurity that can’t be avoided. And not only can’t they be avoided, they provide the perfect ground and energy needed for deep transformation.
Years ago, I (Krish) was also drawn to psychedelics like mushrooms and LSD because they gave me glimpses of transcendence. And perhaps I wouldn’t have been drawn to find a Master and to recognize him when I did find him if I hadn’t had those experiences. In the past, I also didn’t find any value in feeling my insecurities because I thought that it wasn’t necessary to spiritual growth.
But there came a time in my own process when I realized that I didn’t want to bypass my “stuff.” I wanted to be fully present to whatever came up in my consciousness – joyful or disturbing. Unless I was willing to face my vulnerability, I couldn’t truly allow someone to come close. And to be in the kind of relationship that Amana and I are in and have been for the past 26 years, I also needed to understand and feel how I could get triggered and then find ways to be with the trigger when it happened.
That is the basis of our work.
Here’s a simple model we use to teach our approach to bringing more light to different inner states:
It’s a simple drawing of three circles – an outer circle, a middle one, and a center circle. The outer circle represents all our strategies to avoid feeling fear, shame, or pain, and all our compensations and power games. The middle circle represents our wounded vulnerability, which holds our fears, shame, and loneliness. And finally, the center is our essence.
Most of us live much of the time in the outer circle because it contains our survival strategies. But when we get triggered, depressed, anxious, or emotional, we’ve landed in our middle layer, in our vulnerability. When we don’t run back to distractions, defenses, or addictions, but when we hang in there and allow the feelings of the painful spaces, transformation happens.
When we work with the middle layer, we work with penetrating three wounded states – three trance states that can take over our consciousness. This topic is so important because understanding and working with these wounded states helps us to build a healthy foundation for intimacy.
These states are the absence of self-love, being driven and taken over by fear, and the feeling of inner emptiness and loneliness.
The first wounded state to explore is the loss of self-love. Our task is to develop a loving sense of self based on the appreciation of our uniqueness and gifts and learning to live our truth.
We recover our self love by discovering a deep acceptance and appreciation of ourselves, and our uniqueness, gifts, passions, and limitations. In our healing process, it’s crucial to learn to feel, understand, and embrace this wounded part of us, take some perspective from the way it can take over our thinking, feeling, and behavior, and realize it isn’t who we are but something that happened to us.
It also helps to envision our creative alive self, to commit to regularly moving our body, and to take manageable risks. In this way, while shame may not disappear, our sense of self changes. Shame may arise but it ceases to have a grip on our life. We come back to ourselves, find ways to express our creativity, and live our life according to our highest truth.
The second wounded state is fear and shock that can deeply affect our mind and body because of early traumas of neglect and intrustion. We transform fear by surrounding it with love, breathe into it and pay close attention to our body sensations when it comes up. Also, we need to notice and chose to ignore any limiting negative beliefs that can sabotage us such as “my fear too much,” “it will never end” and so on.
As we breathe into it, it naturally transforms, bringing a deep relaxation, aliveness, and vital energy. This brings us a sense of mastery that we’re no longer a helpless child in spite of what happened to us in the past.
As we open to deeply feeling fear, we not only become more empowered, we also go from a state of feeling helpless to accepting helplessness. We realize that we’re basically not in control of the bigger picture and recognize the fragility and vulnerability of being alive.
The final wounded state to explore is a inner feeling of disconnection. Our task in processing this wound is discovering inner connection and flow without depending on receiving it from another or from any outside source. In relationship, this means to go through the fire of opening to deep and meaningful connection to someone while allowing ourselves to feel the pain and frustration when we’re not getting what we want and expect.
When we’re in spiritual bypass, we want to skip over this middle layer because it’s uncomfortable. Paradoxically, however, if we stay and feel the feelings of fear and insecurity, accept, embrace, and eventually expose them, we automatically connect with our essence.
There are important reasons why we would want to bypass this painful middle layer. It’s not easy to accept ourselves when we feel insecure or afraid. But we’re all insecure and afraid. It makes us human when we allow ourselves to feel our vulnerability. It opens us up, makes us loving and lovable, and paves the way for love to happen.
To find true peace inside and especially if we want to sustain deep love with another person, it’s so important to accept our triggers and our emotionality, understand how they’re related to our past, and then find ways to come back to center.
It’s naturally easier to feel centered and at peace when we’re sitting on a meditation cushion but it’s when we get triggered that our meditation really gets tested.
So, in our experience, altering our consciousness with a substance might be helpful to give us insight and take us deeper into our emotional and spiritual growth. The dange is that we might be using it to pass over our wounds. Substances, plant medicines, and spiritual practices can certainly give us glimpses of being out of our personality, mind, and out of conventional reality. They can also take us deeper into what we need to work through and a lot depends on our mindset when we undertake a journey and how it is guided. (Set and Setting.) But, we have to integrate these experiences into our everyday life – our creativity, relating, body awareness, and meditation, Until the light gained from a substance, a teacher, or a practice is our own light, we still have to do the hard work of learning to love ourselves in all our humanness with all our defects, fears, shame, and pain.