An Allegory of The Inside-Out Understanding

I'm Back! Yes those of you still following me know I've been inactive for quite some time, but I'm happy to announce that I'm overhauling the site to support you better and more regularly than ever before. I will be offering brand new articles, videos, and Audio Programs based on understanding both The Three Principles, and A Course In Miracles.  Stay Tuned for more regular content coming soon!

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With this first post in over a year, I really just want to start at the very beginning with what my mentors and I call the Inside-Out Understanding. My grounding as a spiritual teacher and coach comes from this one understanding. The fundamental premise of this understanding is that our experience of life is 100% created within a Mind, and this Minds' natural state is Peace and Love.

99.99% of people simply do not know or understand this. How could so many people not see something so essential?  Well, In order to illustrate this, I'd like to invite  you on a journey with me:

Imagine for a moment that you are a brand new member of the human race and on a planet completely foreign to you called Earth. As everybody does when they are new to being human, you want to try to learn as much as you can about how the human experience works so that you can make the best of your time here.

It doesn't take long before you discover the line where all of the other newcomers are shuffled. Apparently there is a rigorous orientation process that every new member must go through. Included in that are a large variety of  classes all under the heading, "The School of Life". This is a required education designed to assist all human beings to learn everything they need to know about how to have a wonderful experience of life. The desk clerk explains to you that a wonderful life, is a life full of unimaginable peace and love and connection with everyone around you. Which, of course sounds amazing right? Well it gets even better, because the "School of Life" comes complete with a full and comprehensive user manual. A gigantic text that accompanies all of the classes you will eventually take.

Naturally, upon hearing this, you become very excited to begin your education.  Soon you find yourself eagerly taking your seat in your very first class. Because you want this wonderful life so much, you pay very close attention and absorb everything you can that the teachers have to say.

The first thing you notice is that all of the classes have very strange sounding titles such as, "how to find the right mate, so they can give you love", "How to make enough money in order to feel permanently safe and secure", or "How to become physically attractive in order to experience self-esteem." The classes sound compelling and worthwhile, so you read every word of the very lengthy and complex course materials.

However, As you are busy studying and taking exams, something occurs to you as "odd" with the professors.  None of them seem very happy themselves, at least not consistently. And your peers, who seem every bit as eager to learn as you;  all seem to be experiencing more and more discontent. In fact you yourself seem less peaceful overall.  A question begins to grow in your mind, "why do the classes seem to be having the opposite affect of what they are intended to do?" But, not one to ask too many questions, you push your curiosity to the background and continue on with your studies.  Eventually, after a long time and a good deal of hard work, you earn a degree in what the humans call, The OUTSIDE-In Understanding. It's time to go create a wonderful life!

As a new graduate, you pour yourself into creating the life that you were told you needed in order to have a wonderful life. You spend years building this life and you discover that it's harder then you thought to get the circumstances of your life to look just"right". You've had varying degrees of success, but even the successes didn't seem to bring the kind of peace and ease that had been promised to you by your teachers.

At this point, you start to suspect that something is very wrong here. For a moment you consider that maybe something is fundamentally wrong with you, but you look around and quickly(or not so quickly) discover that you are not alone in your fruitless search for peace and love. In fact, the world is full of people who are miserable a good portion of the time.  And all of these people seem to be engaged in the exact same activities that you were taught to be the keys of happiness.  And to top it all off, the people in the world who have actually achieved the golden standard of Circumstances, well they didn't seem all that peaceful and loving either.

Finally it occurs to you that maybe there is something wrong with the user manual itself. Maybe it is just incorrect somehow? Where did this thing actually come from anyway? Who wrote it? With these questions in mind, you decide to look into it.

 Right away you discover that nobody has any clue as to the true source of the material, even though pretty much everyone has a theory. So, you set off on a journey to find some real answers. Little did you know, this would  take you to every corner of the globe, and consume many years of your life. How could it be so hard to find the Truth!?

Finally, after decades of searching, you stumble upon an ancient library that is packed full of texts from a different age.  So, you begin to pour over these ancient manuscripts, some thousands of years old. Eventually, you come across what seems to be the original user manual, covered in dust and heavily rotted, but still readable. To your horror, the title reads, "How to NOT have a wonderful life : The Outside-In Mis-Understanding."

It slowly begins to dawn on you that the sorrow and suffering of the world has all been a result of a simple mis-translation. You can't help but to break down into uncontrollable sobs. Your years of hard work and effort and endless searching, all wasted. The entire population was literally engaged in practices designed to create misery, thinking they would actually lead them to joy. It was the blind leading the blind.

But then, in your grief stricken state, the glimmer of another book catches your eye, this one even older than the first. As you pick it up and dust it off, you see that this title reads: "How To Have A Wonderful Life: The Inside-Out Understanding".  As you slowly open it up with shaking hands, you realize there are only a few words scribbled on this ancient manuscript.  "You ARE that which you are looking for!"

All of a sudden, a sense of deep and profound Peace washes over you, that you had not felt for a very very long time. And yet, you can't help but recognize, I am Home.

Love and Light,
Tyler

Sleight of Mind: How The Truth Behind Life Remains Hidden

"We shall not cease from exploration, and at the end of all our exploring, will be to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time."-T.S. Elliot

My work as a Transformative Coach, contrary to popular belief, is actually very simple.  It can be boiled down to me pointing out to people the principles behind the human experience. That's it! Of course, it does require that at some point the client actually looks to see if these principles are true in their own life; which of course they are, otherwise they wouldn't be principles.  As we glimpse these deeper truths behind life, it has a transformative and discernible impact on our lives moving forward.

Inevitably, after people hear that, I get asked the question, "If the truth behind the human experience is so simple and transformative, then why doesn't everybody just see it and begin living wonderful lives?"  The answer is, the truth is difficult to see because of the illusory nature of the human experience.  This is what I have recently been calling Sleight of Mind, which is not all that different from sleight of hand.

Enjoy the video lecture accompanying this article.

Most people know that sleight of hand is something appearing to be one thing, and in actuality is something different.  Sleight of hand artists want us to believe that they are performing some act that defies the laws of physics, such as making an object disappear into thin air, or making themselves levitate off the ground.  We commonly refer to these tricks as "magic", however in "reality" they are simply manipulating certain characteristics of observation and perception, so as to make themselves appear supernatural. The most basic form of this is to create a distraction, and then while people are busy looking at the distraction, the practitioner performs another action, hidden to the observer, in order to give the illusion of something else entirely.

A very commonly used example of an illusion is the Wizard from The Wizard of Oz.  The character of the Wizard is made out to be some supernatural entity capable of great feats and solving the problems of all of the inhabitants of The Land of Oz.  He appears in many different forms such as a giant disembodied head, a beautiful fairy, and a great ball of fire. It turns out that he is actually none of these things, and is in fact an ordinary con-man from Omaha Nebraska.  He simply used a lot of elaborate props and sleight of hand tricks to make himself appear "great and powerful".  We often refer to him as the man behind the curtain.

Another, more naturally occurring example of an illusion, is a mirage.  Wikipedia says "A mirage is a naturally occurring optical phenomenon where light rays are bent to produce a displaced image of distant objects or the sky.  The most commonly talked about mirage is when we think we see water in the desert or during a heat wave, where there is no actual water. In this case, sand is literally appearing to us as water. But that of course does not make the sand into actual water. That is the nature of illusions, they aren't in truth what they appear to be.  A trick of the light if you will.

So, you may be asking, what do illusions and sleight of hand tricks have to do with living a wonderful life? The answer is, an awful lot. Let me first define a wonderful life for the purposes of this conversation.  Everyone will have slightly different definitions, however in my experience, if you dig deep enough, you'll find everyone wants to have deep and lasting experiences of Love, Connection, Ease and Peace of Mind... so let's go with that for now.

Illusions have everything to do with living a wonderful life, because the illusions of the Mind are the only obstacle to Peace of Mind, Love, and Well-being. The problem is, we don't know that our Mind is in a perpetual state of trickery, so it doesn't even occur to us to question our own experience of life. If we are willing to take a second look and examine how exactly our human experience gets created, we begin to see that there is much more to us than meets the eye.

The human race suffers from a single illusion, one big sleight of mind trick, appearing in countless different forms in order to carefully conceal itself from our watchful eyes. It is simple, we live a 100% internal, psychological existence, and we think it's a primarily physical, bodily, circumstantial existence. In other words, we BELIEVE that the source of our experience is coming from everywhere except the one place it actually is... within. We think our pleasure and our pain, our love and our suffering, our peace of mind, and our stress are all thrust upon us based on where our body happens to be, and what other bodies happen to be doing and saying around us.

Our experience of life, gets created not within the body, and not within the brain, but within the Mind; a non spacial, non temporal force that we can't even begin to conceive of right now from our current belief systems.  Within that Mind, the content of our experience(emotions, opinions, judgments, beliefs and memories) is made of Thought, and that get's brought to life through our Consciousness. Hence the three principles of Mind, Consciousness, and Thought.(to learn more please check out previous articles and videos of mine)

The reason that this is all very illusory and difficult to accept as true, is because of the simple function of projection.  You see, our entire experience of life is playing out in a Mind, but because the eyes and other senses of the body only look outward, we can't observe that mental experience with our physical senses.  So our internal experience is not only internal, but it's essentially invisible to us; and if it's invisible, then it becomes very difficult to examine in the way that we are used to examining things in the world.

We, as human beings, have two things going on in every moment.  An internal experience playing out in the mind, via thought and consciousness. And then we have circumstances playing out in the physical world. But, instead of seeing the truth, that their is no causal link between circumstance and state of mind, we project that internal experience out onto the world as if it were one gigantic movie screen, infinitely larger than any imax theater could provide.  The result is mass confusion.  What we get is, people's internal experiences APPEARING as though they are playing out in the world, but they really are not. This is the very essence of an illusion.

A movie projector is a beautiful analogy because it really does look like an entire world and story is playing out on the screen in front of us, but it's not.  It's a projection of sound and light through film onto a screen. We have the same thing happening in our minds, only the whole projection and film reel are hidden from us. That is, until we learn to look with our Minds eye, and not the body's.

The implications of this misunderstanding are significant to say the least.  We have an entire world culture thinking, believing, and behaving as though the human experience gets created either entirely through circumstance, or as a combination of circumstance and psychology.  Not for a second stopping to consider, What if it's all in the Mind? The odd and insane behavior stemming from this one mis-understanding is infinite and endless.

The good thing about illusions is, once you see through them, they will no longer have the same impact on us. Once we know what's really going on behind the scenes, we won't ever be fooled in the same way, or to the same degree again. As one of my teachers(who I'm failing to remember at the moment)said, "If you are crazy, but you know you are crazy, then you are not that crazy."

There's more good news. It turns out, that not only are we Minds(not bodies or brains), but we are of a Divine Mind. The fundamental nature of the Mind from which we come is Peace, Love, Joy, and Oneness.  When we allow our minds to slow down, and become clear, we naturally begin to experience those deeper feelings that are what make up a wonderful life.  We are the very thing we are searching for.

There's only one catch, and that is that we can think, believe, and therefore experience(because our experience is 100% in the Mind) anything, even if it's not true. Because of the sleight of mind that we all experience, we can be miserable, stressed, hateful, cruel, jealous, and depressed. These are but passing storms, all the while a deep and profound sense of well-being lives within us all, quietly waiting for a break in the weather; a weather that we unknowingly cultivate and invest in.

We don't believe we are divine because of all of the misery we experience. As long as the source of that misery appears to be OUTSIDE us, we can't let it go WITHIN us.   It is an innocent misery, because we simply don't know how the mind works.

The key to seeing through any illusion, is being willing to look. Get curious. Get suspicious of what you think you know about the human condition. It's okay if you don't know how or where to look, all it takes is a little willingness. There is more love and beauty residing in the collective human Mind than you could even begin to conceive of; and the wonderful thing about it is, it's unconditional.

If you look closely you'll see it.  It's there for everyone to see. Look for it in your brothers and sisters; your fellow human beings. We are all cut from the same cloth. This is not some obscure philosophy, but the truth.  Don't simply take my word for it, the truth about all of us is there waiting to be seen.  You may simply have to wade through a bit of mental trickery to discover it for yourself.

Once we begin to see the depth of illusion that we've been living in, we will naturally see what is behind the curtain of our personal thinking.  What we find, is not a conman from Omaha Nebraska, or sand that sometimes looks like water, but a deeper love and more profound peace than we have ever known. It is our spiritual birthright; yet, so is the capacity for free will.  We can choose to remain mindless and deny who we are deep down; living out the rest of our days in misery. Or, we can allow the truth of our Mind and Spirit to shine through. Our essence is infinitely patient, and no matter what we go through in life, regardless of how solid and real the illusion may seem, the truth will be there waiting for us... always!

Love and Light,
Tyler

The Role of Spirituality in Coaching

NEWS:  I am currently accepting new clients in my private coaching practice after a little hiatus.  If you have been on the fence about entering into a coaching relationship with me, please Contact Me, and I'd be happy to have a conversation with you about signing up, and what all will be available to you through our coaching. 

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"If you can discover one spiritual fact, it will change your life forever." -Syd Banks

When I first started out on my journey as a coach, I was hesitant to share my personal understanding of spirituality. I was afraid of what people would say if I used words like God, or Spirit in a coaching conversation; so I did my best to keep the conversations grounded in the physical world. I spoke with clients about goals, and we developed strategies to meet those goals. I used techniques and processes to motivate and inspire people, while also holding them accountable.  And yet, I never really addressed the human spirit directly.  After all, peoples spiritual beliefs are their own and who was I to question them?  However, I had begun to notice that this type of "performance coaching" had only been yielding moderate results. Sure, frequently I was able to help people achieve their goals, but that never seemed to make any significant difference in their lives.

I went on this way for some time, until I had some personal insights into my own spiritual nature. Those insights took me from an intellectual understanding of spiritual principles, to having a personal experience of transformation. It was then that everything changed for me, and my coaching was never the same again.  I stopped being a "performance coach" over night. I literally could not coach that way any more even if I had wanted to. My work was now firmly grounded in my new found spiritual understanding, and it has only deepened since then.

Now, in order for this to be useful for you, I need to address the question: what is spirituality?  This word can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people so let me clarify what I mean by it. One of my favorite definitions is one of the most simplistic: waking up to the truth of who we are; no more, no less.  It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with religion, and it's far more practical than most people realize. If you want to dive a bit deeper into this conversation, check out some of my other articles like Are We a Body or a Mind?.

So, what does this particular kind of spirituality have to do with coaching? In my experience... everything.

Most coaches, are Performance Coaches.  This is how I was originally trained, and it is simply helping people to get what they want, without being directly involved in the getting. These coaches are catalysts, creative spark plugs, motivators, and strategists.  And while this can be extremely useful in helping people achieve the goals that they set for themselves, it rarely helps people to have a more wonderful experience of life across the board. Of course the client will make changes, but they are almost always temporary, and usually go away shortly after the client stops working with the coach.  This also tends to breed a form of dependence which I personally always found a bit icky.

There are a handful of spiritual principles that are pretty reliably absent from this form of coaching.  Either the coach doesn't know about them, or doesn't really understand them in any meaningful way. These principles are "constant properties" of the Mind or Spirit(I use these terms interchangeably).

Here is a summary of some of the spiritual principles from which I coach and teach, they are incredibly simple, but often very difficult to fully or even partially grasp. Take your time with them, open your mind, and you just might understand them for yourself.

Spiritual Principle # 1: Our entire experience of life, is created within our own minds via the forces of Thought and Consciousness.  Let this sink in for just a moment.  There are some pretty significant implications to this principle which I can't even begin to do justice here.  Let's suffice it to say that, we've been taught that our experience of life comes from outside us; from other people, places, events, and circumstances; essentially, the actions we take, and the things that happen to us. This is not true, and we have all of us been taught incorrectly.

We have developed habits of thought that make it appear as though our experience is coming at us from the material world, but that is an illusion. We live a psychological existence without even knowing it.  None of us are born with a user manual for how the human experience gets created, but if we had been, this first principle would be in it, front and center.

If you don't understand this principle as a coach, you are innocently going to mislead people into thinking that the answers they are looking for, are indeed "out there" in the world.  You will in essence, be helping to perpetuate a lie which says... "If I can just get really skilled at getting what I want in life, then I will hold the key to happiness." Every person who believes this lie(almost everybody on the planet, whether they know it or not), is going to struggle because of it. As a result, most coaches are inadvertently serving to keep people looking for their happiness, peace of mind, and well-being where it is not!

Spiritual Principle # 2: Human beings can think, and believe anything! This is a wonderful creative capacity of the mind, that we have mistakenly used to imprison ourselves. This power allows us to take thoughts and ideas that are fundamentally false, and turn them into what appear to be gospel truths. If you don't believe me, go look up the modern day flat earth society, or the group of people who deny the Holocaust ever happened. These people aren't crazy, they are simply using the infinite capacity of the mind to delude themselves in a much less subtle way then the rest of the population does.

These delusions are known as false beliefs or false idols.  Instead of using thought to create and extend ourselves, we end up using it to limit who we are.  We attempt to make something that is unconditional, conditional.  These thought conditions are placed on our own happiness.  We then forget that we were the ones that created them, and simply go to work to fulfill these completely fabricated conditions. Some very common ones that you might recognize include(but are not limited to): not having enough money, not an attractive enough partner, not being treated with "respect", not being loved enough as a child, not having a good enough job, not having a romantic partner, or having a physical disability.  This list could be infinitely long, because we have an infinite capacity for new thought.  Unfortunately, this also means we have an infinite capacity to create false conditions, believe them wholeheartedly, and then act as if they are true... ultimately wasting most of our time.

We have been taught to believe by a very well meaning but incorrect world, that to experience a deep and profound sense of well-being, we first have to meet certain conditions in the world. This is a lie. And yet, most of the world experiences this as true, because of the power of the mind to deceive itself.  And yet, the problem isn't just that we can deceive ourselves, it's that we don't know that we have that capacity, so we go on living our lives,  assuming that:   Belief = Truth.

This ability to experience something "as if" it were true, is the very reason why people experience a sort of "imitation happiness" when they fulfill their very own made up conditions.  Our mind tells us, meet this specific condition and you'll be happy; and therefore we experience it as somewhat true.  The problem is, a new condition or idol is very quickly created by us to replace the old one. There is a part of the mind dedicated entirely to this process; I call it the condition factory.

Think about it, have you ever struggled your way to a goal that you thought was instrumental to your happiness or peace of mind, only to get right back to work on another bigger and better goal soon after?  So long as we are stuck in this cycle, we never fully experience the peace of mind that we believe achieving our goals will get us? This is the condition factory hard at work.

We were simply never taught that these conditions on our well-being are made of our own thinking, not brick and mortar. Without understanding this as a coach, we might be able to help people get what they "think" they want, but we will never be able to lead them to the kind of lasting peace and love that they are truly looking for.

Spiritual Principle # 3: Every single human being has innate well-being and peace of mind. This is a principle feature that is woven into the very fabric of who we are as spiritual beings. You might even say it is a gift from God.  Our spiritual well-being is quite literally, unconditional. Nothing has to be done, accomplished, or obtained to experience this innate health.   I have found this to be 100% true, no exceptions.

Here's the catch though; because of the first and second principles, we can think and deceive our selves into believing that there are very real conditions, and therefore we will cut ourselves off from the flow of who we are. Not in any permanent way, but it is as if we had pulled a wool over our eyes, and thought the sun had been destroyed. If we think and believe that we are fundamentally flawed, broken, and scarred beings, we will consequently have that experience.

The good news is, there is nothing that has the power to alter, change or damage our innate health. Innate means it is built in and cannot be taken away under any circumstance. We, as human beings, have simply deceived ourselves into dreaming a terrible dream that we are separate, lonely, miserable, broken people... and there is no hope for us. Or, perhaps we think there is hope for us, but it will only come when we have met all the conditions imposed on us by the big bad world. All of this is but a dream; and fortunately, what happens in a dream, matters not. The dream can have no lasting impact on the dreamer. Everyone has the potential to wake up tomorrow from a life of misery and be happy.  The only thing there is to do, is to recognize that we are dreaming, and we will begin the process of awakening.

If you as a coach, don't know that every human being has innate mental health, then you might be tempted to treat people as broken and needing fixing; instead of spending your time pointing people toward the truth of who they are.

I can't conceive of any coaching or teaching relationship that supports people to transform their lives, in which these principles are not present.  Other practitioners will likely use different words to describe these principles because the words themselves are meaningless.  It is the truth behind the words that makes all the difference in the world. All you have to do is see them for yourself, and it will change your life forever.

With all my love,
Tyler

Forgiveness and The Three Principles

"I Forgive my brothers and sisters for what they have not done." 

-A Course In Miracles

Forgiveness is a word that we all use in our society and we all agree it is a good thing... but most people really struggle with actually forgiving.  We hold onto resentments for years and sometimes even a whole lifetime.  I find these struggles are primarily because people don't fully understand what true forgiveness is, and how it comes about.  So, my request to you is to set aside what you think you already know about forgiveness, and lets take a fresh look at it together.

To watch my video lecture on True Forgiveness click here

One of the reasons we don't really understand forgiveness is because we usually only take a look at it when we are in the midst of some heavy duty resentful thoughts and feelings.  When we are having this particular kind of thought storm we don't see things very clearly.  We don't have access to wisdom, creativity, or forgiveness for that matter.  It's like looking through a heat haze, nothing is clear.

Here is the Western Worlds' version of forgiveness:  It starts with something happening in the outside world... the world outside of our heads that is.  More specifically when someone says or does something that we don't like.  We then get upset AT that person or those people. That's what we call resentment by the way... specifically targeted upset feelings. We then, without even realizing it, justify our upset feelings.  In other words we think our upset feelings are appropriate to the actions taken by the other person. It is specifically because of this justification that we hold onto our resentment, often for years at a time.  From this place of justified resentment, then, and only then, do we attempt to practice forgiveness... either because we think we should, or because we are just tired of feeling so lousy when it comes to the other person.  This usually doesn't go well, so we end up living in limbo between trying to make what they did okay, and secretly resenting them for what they did.

lets take a real life example... something pretty heavy duty like an infidelity within a monogamous relationship.  The way it usually goes is our partner has an affair, we find out about it one way or another and then we get very upset.  Some part of us wants things to be okay again so we often try to forgive them, but we don't really know how.  The first path that many of us take is we try to mitigate the upset feelings by physically leaving, but never really forgiving.  We don't realize that our upset has nothing to do with physical proximity so we continue to suffer, especially when we have to interact with that person, or simply when they cross our minds.  Often it manifests in future relationships as insecurity and general distrust of other peoples behaviors.

The second of the two paths is that we choose to stay in the physical relationship, and struggle to forgive them. Often for years, we live in resentment, and they live in guilt.  We want to trust them again, but our experience of betrayal was just too painful, and so we often make it all the way to the end of our lives without having ever fully forgiven that person.

Now, that may not be the exact version of forgiveness you have, but I'm guessing it is close.  The bad news is, that is most peoples experience of forgiveness.  The good news is, that it is not true forgiveness, and there is a much better option available to you.  All you have to do is see through some very common assumptions about the whole process.

The first assumption is a big one, and may be hard to see at first... so stick with me.  We think that other peoples actions have a causal relationship to our emotional experience.  In otherwords, we believe that another person can actually be guilty of causing us misery and emotional pain.  This is the very reason we feel justified in our resentments... because we think they are based in reality.  We think that every action somebody takes or word that somebody says has the potential to damage us emotionally. This is fundamentally inaccurate, and it's not how human beings work.

What does this mean?  It means that no person, place, or thing can cause another person to feel upset, resentful, sad, angry or any other feeling.  Our emotions do have a causal force and it's thought and only thought!  Every thought we have has a corresponding feeling. This truth about the human experience is a huge component of my work and you can learn more by checking out my videos on The Three Principles.

The fact that we don't experience what other people do or say directly, actually has an incredible impact on our understanding of forgiveness.  It means that resentment and upset feelings are unjustifiable. Let me be clear, there is nothing wrong with upset feelings, and we will all experience them from time to time. I simply mean that whatever you are feeling, whether it be resentment, or betrayal, or anger or anything else, those feelings can never be a result of somebody elses' actions or words.  They can only ever come from our own thought.

The good news about us only feeling our thinking is that we are cabable of opening up to new thought, beautiful thought, loving thought, and forgiving thought in any moment... regardless of how egregious we think the other persons behavior may have been.  We can't force it, and we aren't in charge of what thoughts come into our head, but because our minds will always tend toward love and peace if left alone... that is not a problem in the least bit. We simply have to look in the direction of new thought.

The second and final assumption that we are going to question is the very notion that something can be done "to us" that needs to be forgiven in the first place.  This could include literally anything from physical abuse, to emotional devastation.  This question is really the question of who we are(To explore this in more detail check out my article on Are We A Body Or A Mind)?  

The truth is, our physical bodies can be horrible maimed, tortured, and even killed. But we are not our bodies! This means that even if somebody does something very unpleasant to our body, our essential spiritual nature isn't even scratched in the process.  This doesn't mean you don't protect and take care of your body the best you can.  It simply means that the essence of our identity is never in danger even if our body is. 

As far as emotional pain is concerned, we already know from the first assumption discussed that nobody can make us feel emotional pain because that can only ever come from our own thinking, even if it looks like it's coming from outside us.  However, it's really helpful to know that, although we experience those strong feelings... it doesn't mean that we ARE those thoughts and feelings.  A very common cultural myth is that, we think if we have certain feelings over and over again throughout our lives, that those are a big part of who we are. We say.."oh, I'm a resentful person" or "I'm a depressed person." But the truth is, not only are we not our bodies, but we are not our painful thoughts and feelings either.  Sure, we experience them, but they have absolutely zero lasting impact on the true nature of our MIND and SPIRIT.

Regardless of what we've been through either physically or emotionally, the Peace of Mind, and Love that is our true nature can never be harmed or altered in any way. It is the very essence of who we are.

This simple yet profound understanding has huge implications on the whole idea of forgiveness.  It means that we are all spiritual beings, and even though we can experience physical and emotional pain, we are all of us, extensions of the Mind of God, which can't be altered by anything that takes place within this physical world.

The question then is, if we are truly spiritual beings, and nothing can ever harm that spirit... then is there ever anything that requires traditional forgiveness? Is there anything worth resenting people for as  an unconscious form of punishment and protection?  My experience is no, which leaves us with this...

True Forgiveness is nothing more than seeing the truth of who we all are.  The truth that your apparent attacker is innocent of all spiritual wrong doing, as are you equally protected from any spiritual attack...  Our true nature is unharmable even if we can experience great physical and emotional pain.  

All there is to do, is get back in touch with our essential spiritual nature. The more we see and experience this, the more naturally we will forgive.  We won't hold grudges.  We won't tend to hold onto resentment.  We won't feel the need to protect ourselves emotionally because we know that's not who we are.  We will trust in our wisdom to protect our physical bodies as best we can... and if something does happen to those bodies, we know that it has only happened to the body, and not our Mind or Spirit.  And if we become aware of ourselves holding onto painful feelings because of something somebody else did, we will very quickly see that it is a self induced suffering that will simply pass if we stop holding onto it.

We only ever need to look toward the truth.  The truth that what the Mind of God has extended to all of us is everlasting peace, love and oneness. We simply have forgotten this truth, and it's the only reason we ever suffer.  True forgiveness flows naturally by simply understandiing that we are all truly innocent... even when there is the illusion of attack and guilt. 

Until next time, I wish you all the love in the world,

Tyler

Are We A Body or A Mind?

"As long as you perceive the body as your reality, so long will you perceive yourself as lonely and deprived."

-A Course In Miracles

In my life and my work, I've found that the vast majority of our struggling and suffering can be boiled down to one thing... a case of mistaken identity. A fundamental mis-understanding about who we really are.

Most people have thoughts about who they are, but they are almost always inaccurate. That's one of the things that you'll learn from exploring my work, is that just because you have certain thoughts about yourself or the world, doesn't make them true. It just turns out that the truth really is the only thing that will set us free. Consequently, it is worth seeing where we are wrong about ourselves, and where to look for truth.

Click here to watch the transformative video!

One of the most common examples of mistaken identity is that we think we are our bodies.  We live in a body obsessed culture, so it's not really any surprise that this is the case.  If you pick up 9 out of 10 magazines, you will find multiple articles on staying fit, losing weight, fighting old age, prolonging beauty, or covering up blemishes.  

The industries associated with the body, drive a large portion of the worlds economy.  Just think about it... everything to do with food, clothing, exercise, sex/pleasure, anti-aging, medicine and pharmaceuticals are all associated with the body.  It's all about having a better body, younger body, sexier body, more athletic body,  or a healed body.  

There are thousands of myths surrounding the body, a few of which I'd like to clear up before I get much further. Most people think that having a healthier, younger, more attractive body is the source of a more wonderful life.  In our society we think beautiful bodies have more fun, they have a higher level of mental well-being and peace of mind, and they experience a lot more love and connection in their lives.  But, as someone who worked in the health and fitness industry for many years, believe me when I say that most of the personal trainers, fitness instructors, models, nutritionists, and health experts are every bit as insecure, anxious, self-conscious, and miserable as everybody else, and more often than not, more so. 

The body is a false idol, and we have been taught to worship it.

Here's the bad news that none of these health and beauty industries are keen to point out: your body is designed to decay, and will absolutely 100% die some day. "No-Body" makes it out of this physical world alive.

We are not our bodies, and yet we have bodies. I would never tell you to neglect them, treat them poorly, or forsake them... for that is simply another form of worship.  When we worship the body, either through special love or hate, we identify ourselves as a body, and in doing so, create tremendous limitation and suffering, because it's not the truth of who we are.

If you were to believe with absolute certainty that you are a body and nothing else, here's what's on offer:

• You get to be separate from every other human being, destined to wander the earth trying to connect with other separate bodies, but always in vain... because sex is about as close as it gets when it comes to bodies, and most of you know just how fleeting sex can be when you are looking for a deeper connection.
• You get to look forward to certain death.  Endedness!  You, ceasing to exist.  
• You get to suffer from insecurity and low self-esteem because you think you are your body, therefore your very being is something that is slowly decaying and accumulating more and more maladies.  
• If it's not upon you already, you will almost certainly be plagued by illness, disease, and pain.
• If you believe you are a body, all of the desperate attempts to prolong death, and hold onto your youthful appearance make perfect sense.  But if you are not a body, it is totally insane.

It's a pretty bleak picture indeed, if you were your body.  But here's the good news, you are not a body.  None of us are.  We are all of us, a Mind.

Now, let me be clear.  We are not a brain... which is very much a part of the physical body and does what the Mind tells it to, just like the rest of the body.  

The Mind is something else entirely.  It is of spiritual, non physical origins.  According to A Course In Miracles, we are simply extensions of the Mind of God.  A mind so powerful it can conjure bodies just like we conjure bodies in our dreams while we sleep at night. We worship the body, and yet it is simply a puppet, and the Mind is the puppet master.

There are actually two aspects to the mind, which I will discuss further in another article, but suffice it to say that the aspect representing who you really are turns out to be beautiful. Our true origins rest in a Mind that knows only love, peace, and joy. It knows nothing of the experiences of separation, suffering, and misery. All of our problems stem from us having truly forgotten our mighty source. We are asleep to this truth, and so all there really is to do, is begin to wake up to it.

We are all of us deeply connected to this Divine Mind, so beautiful that any and all words fail to do it justice. All I can hope to do is point you in the direction of it.  Rest assured, however, that as you identify yourself more and more with this Mind, your life will get more and more wonderful. 

As you begin this journey of self discovery, know that it can't be found in the the physical world, which is a world of false idols. The body is simply one of the predominant idols of this world. Idols, will not and can not replace the extraordinary beauty of the mind. This leaves us with only one choice... remember who we are, or continue to suffer.

On this journey, it's important to know that we can only really look in the direction of this Mind, by knowing where not to look first. All you have to do is keep looking and exploring. There will come a point where you can't help but glimpse the truth of who you are.  And from that point on, you can never unsee and never forget that beauty.

It is in your identification with this truth, that you will find your freedom. Unconditional Love, Peace, Joy, Connection... these are not states that can be attained or manufactured, nor do they need to be.  They are what your mind is made of.  They are what you are made of.  And all you have to do to unveil this truth, is to look for it, and as you see it more and more clearly, you will recognize it as your home coming.

Right now, most people have placed their allegiances, too heavily in the body and the world of false idols to recognize this truth. Lay these allegiances aside.  They have only caused you suffering. With patience, time, and a little vigilance, you will come to see that all that you ever wanted to get from the body, you already are as Mind.

With all of the love of the Mind

Tyler

The Form vs The Formless

"The field of the finite is all that we can see, hear, touch, remember, and describe. This field is basically that which is manifest, or tangible.  

The essential quality of the infinite, by contrast, is its subtlety, its intangibility. This quality is conveyed in the word 'spirit,' whose root meaning is 'wind or breath.' This suggests an invisible but pervasive energy, to which the manifest world of the finite responds. 

This energy, or spirit, infuses all living things, and without it any organism must fall apart into its constituent elements. That which is truly alive in living systems is this energy of spirit, and this is never born and never dies."

-David Bohm, Physicist(one of his favorite passages from his own work read at his funeral)

Please enjoy my latest video coaching blog on the distinction between the world of the form/finite, and that of the formless/infinite.  Please note this is a longer video.  As with all my videos, the best way to absorb the information is to listen like you would to a beautiful piece of music and just see what insights and new thoughts come to you.  Insights are transformative... analysis is not.

There is no written article associated with this subject. Click HERE to see more free video blogs on transformation and living a more wonderful life. For information on personal coaching, click HERE

Love and Light,

Coach Ty

Problems vs Logistics

"Life is a contact sport!"

-Sydney Banks

As a professional coach, most of the people I work with, initially have a laundry list of problems in their life that they think need fixing in order for them to have a more wonderful life.

People come to me with money issues, relationship issues, health issues and anything else you can think of.  They think those are all "problems", but there is actually two different things occurring simultaneously that we think are the same thing.

First, there are Logistics.

Logistics = Physical Circumstances = Life outside of our heads

Things happen in the world.  People we love die, children get sick, car accidents happen, parents get divorced, money is lost, volcanoes erupt, and weather can destroy entire cities. However, none of these things are problems. They are simply circumstances.  They are logistics.  Life just is. I'm not saying don't do anything to change circumstances, but the nature of circumstance is change regardless of whether you have a hand in them changing or not.

The second thing going on is Thought. If you've explored any of my other work, you know I talk extensively about the thought feeling connection.  Our entire experience of life is being created from the inside out via the three principles of mind, consciousness, and thought.  In other words, we feel our thinking, not our circumstances.

Please enjoy the video blog associated with this article here:

Problems then are really just unpleasant thoughts and feelings that we have about our circumstances or the world.  That's it, that is all a problem  is.

In other words, we don't experience what happens to us, we experience what we think.
Thought = Feeling

The truth is, every single human being on the planet has a set of circumstances and those circumstances will continue to change no matter what.  But there are no inherently good feeling circumstances, and there are no inherently bad feeling circumstances.  There are no right and wrong circumstances.  Those are judgments, and a judgment is simply a particular kind of thought form.

Problems don't exist until we think! 

I think the next logical question would be, who gives a rip? Why does any of this matter?

Well, it matters because if you look around and think your life is full of problems in the outside world, you are going to go about trying to solve your problems in the world of form.  That's great except, problems don't exist in the world of form. They can't be solved by looking where they are not.  In other words, if the source of any problem is thought, then the answer is something to do with new thought.  If the answer to circumstances is logistics then look to logistics.

Attempting to "solve" our problems through changing our circumstances, is a lot like hunting dragons.

Imagine your job in life was to go slay all of the dragons in the kingdom.  It was commonly known that defeating all of the dragons was the key to having a wonderful life in this particular kingdom(Even though, nobody had ever actually accomplished it). You would probably pick out your weapon of choice, put some armor on, psyche yourself up a bit, and go out there and hunt and destroy. Over time you would learn all sorts of dragon hunting strategies, and you'd study their tendencies, and you'd hope to get better and better at slaying dragons.

But over time you noticed that dragon behaviors were very erratic, unpredictable, and random.  You also start to observe that for each dragon you successfully slay, another one is there to take it's place.  You begin to question whether you have really killed any dragons at all.  You get discouraged because there seems to be a never ending stream of dangerous fire breathing dragons. But each day, you keep putting one foot in front of the other because everyone knows you can't be happy until all of the dragons are gone... right!?

Now imagine that you wake up one day, and realize categorically and absolutely that there never was any dragons.  They were only ever an illusion, and your true nature was actually happiness the entire time, you just didn't notice because you were so busy hunting dragons.

We human beings think, and then we feel our thinking, and then it comes alive in our consciousness.  We project thought out onto the world, and our thoughts begin to look very significant, very important, and very real.  When our thinking looks real to us, we lose sight of the truth of who we are; beautiful spiritual beings with unlimited creative potential.  And when we lose sight of the truth behind the human experience...  we go dragon hunting.

You see, instead of projecting dragon thoughts onto the world, we project our own personal problem thoughts onto the world. We see things happen and then think "that's not okay... that's not right... that's wrong... evil... immoral...mean spirited... inconsiderate... disrespectful...harsh... cruel!"    But all of those things are an illusion of our own thinking coming to life behind our very eyes.  It's all thought.

If you know that a problem is simply the shadow of a thought, you aren't going to exhaust yourself fighting something that isn't there.  You won't make your life about righting a wrong, or fighting an injustice... because those are just more dragons.  All of that energy can be redirected toward creating from a place of love and peace.

People inevitably get to this point and say, well, if we aren't actively looking for problems with the world and trying to solve them, won't the world essentially become a terrible place?  

The answer is no and I'll tell you why.  When people are not spending the majority of their time up the their heads worrying, and fretting, and problem solving, and putting out fires, and analyzing, and judging(All Thought!) we begin to sink back into our spirits.  We get back in touch with our own innate well-being that is always shining even behind the clouds of our thinking.  Our creativity, and wisdom, and natural connection with other human beings springs to the surface, and we begin to naturally engage in activities that are life sustaining.  You will do things simply because it occurs to you to do them... because your wisdom nudged you in a direction.

Your life will not fall apart when you stop trying to solve all of your personal problems and the problems of the world.  You will engage with life from a place of wholeness and well-being that you never thought possible.  Your particular set of circumstances will look like nothing more than logistics.  Not good or bad, right or wrong, should or shouldn't...    just logistics.  And as thoughts arise under the disguise of problems, you will simply allow them to come and go, just as you would a passing storm. Your life will truly be, problem free.


With all my love and light,

Coach Ty

P.S. If you enjoyed this article, don't forget to check out a host of other Transformative videos and articles on my site.  If you are interested in coaching with me send me an email at CoachTylerThurman@gmail.com and we'll set up a consultation.

Thriving In Relationships

"The moment we see that every feeling is just the shadow of a thought, we stop being scared of our feelings and just feel them."

-Michael Neill

Relationships are, without question, a huge part of every persons life.  We are in constant relationship with other people at home, work, the gym, the grocery store...  any walk of life you can think of.  So, when I talk about relationships I mean any relationship you can think of, not just romantic ones.

At first glance, relationships might seem complicated, but they really are quite simple; and here's why they are simple... They don't exist in the way we think they do. Linguistically, the word 'relationship' is known as a nominalization, which is a verb or a process, that we talk about as if it was a noun, or a thing.

Please enjoy my latest video blog on Thriving in Relationships from back in November.  It is particularly relevant again as we are all thinking about our relationships here in the States on Valentines Day.  

We talk about relationships as if they are OBJECTS or ENTITIES that exists beyond the two people in relationship.  Honestly though... do you really believe there is some invisible thing that exists out there called a relationship? No... of course not.

The truth is, it's just a convenient expression that we use to lump together all of our thoughts and feelings about another person. We are constantly RELATING to the world and other people... but there is no separate entity called a relationship.

However, if we think, and talk, and behave as if relationships exist outside of our thinking, then we are going to think, and talk, and act in the strange ways that we do around relationships.  We say things like "I'm depressed because of my relationship,"  "My relationship is stressing me out," or even "My relationship makes me so happy!".  We even go to therapy to try to 'fix'  and 'work on' our relationships!

The reason trying to work on relationships doesn't usually pan out, is because there isn't actually anything there to work on. Attempting to improve something that doesn't exist is at it's best confusing, and at it's worst downright disastrous! This is why relationships appear so complicated... because we aren't even clear on what they are!

Let me simplify it for you.  A relationship is made of thought.  That's it.  If you are having issues with your "Relationship" and you aren't looking for a thought solution... than you are looking in the wrong direction.

There very simply is no THING called a relationship .  There is You with all of your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors and they are in no way linked up to the other persons thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.  Understanding this is hugely relevant to thriving while relating to other human beings.  You will no longer attribute any of your good or bad feelings(love, joy, connection, misery, heartache, fear, anger, sadness, depression, stress, etc.) to "The Relationship, orThe Other Person."

The answer sounds too simple but here it is: The number one factor for determining your well-being in relationships is UNDERSTANDING where your feelings/emotions come from.

When you blame any part of your experience of life (Thoughts, Feelings, or behaviors) on the other person, you will not thrive in relationship.

If you want to have largely wonderful relationships, the only thing you have to realize is they are in no way the source of your feelings.  Your emotional experience has nothing to do with your partner, kids, boss, family, friends, or any other person on the planet.  Your emotions come from thought.

Our minds work only one way, Thoughts  ----Create---->  Feelings

Our minds have a thought-feeling mechanism, and we don't know it because the mind works to project our feelings on everything and everyone we can see, touch, smell, taste, or hear.  Your entire experience of life is being created and then projected from the inside out.

What difference could this simple understanding possibly make on relationships you ask? All the difference in the world!

Consider every argument you have ever had with another person. What is the one thing that is always present in every argument or fight? Either one or both of you had "Unpleasant Feelings"(insecurity, sadness, frustration, fear, anger, stress, upset) and then inaccurately attributed the source of those feelings to the other person. We want to make the feelings stop... so of course we go to what we think the source is... the other person or "The Relationship"!  We try to change their behavior, their way of thinking, or even their emotions so that we can feel better.  We would be wrong though, because feelings/emotions don't come from any aspect of another person.  They come from our thinking and our thinking alone.

(Thought ------Creates-----> Feeling) 
It only works this one way.

It does not work in the following way...

Other People's Thoughts, Feelings, or Behaviors ---Create--->   Our Thoughts ---Create---> Our Feelings

Let's look at it from the perspective of attributing our pleasant feelings to other people.  Consider the emotions we describe as grief, heart ache, loss,  and abandonment.  These are all a result of attributing our pleasant experiences of love, peace, joy, and contentment to other people.  That other person then inevitably physically leaves(i.e. death, divorce, break-up) in some way shape or form; taking those feelings with them.  The interesting thing is, if we didn't inaccurately attribute our beautiful feelings to other people, we wouldn't experience the misery of a physical loss or separation.

The source of our feelings of"connection" and "love" when in the presence of other human beings is not because of some magic fairy dust that exists between certain people and not others.  It's because we are spiritually linked to every other human being on the planet, regardless of whether they are physically present or not.  Spiritually there is no separation, we simply have the experience of being separate when we obscure that connection with thought.  When you are up in your head thinking about stuff... pleasant or unpleasant... you are not in touch with your god given connection to others.  And the reason it looks like it's there more with some people is because you have a lot more thinking about certain people, which clouds the connection.

In other words, we have the experience of being disconnected because we experience what we think... but just because you experience your arbitrary thinking, doesn't actually make it true.

No person, circumstance or thing can ever take away your spiritual essence. You are Love and you are connected... it's not a commodity you get from other people, it's the essence of who you are. 

Why is this a transformative idea? Because it's not just an idea, it's the truth.  You are making a paradigm shift; a quantum leap.  You are going from living a large portion of your life based on a lie, to living your life based on the Truth!

The greatest and most pervasive lie on the planet is that your emotional experience of life comes from something other than thought: other people, relationships, jobs, bank balances, houses, pets, traffic, weather, politics, disease, the News... you name it.  The truth is... we are all walking around feeling only our thinking...and we just don't know it.

If you could truly see that there are no emotional germs being spread from one person to another;  If you could truly see that your well-being has nothing to do with other people in your life; and, if you could truly see that your essence is love and connection, then you would be free of all of the conditions you yourself have placed on your happiness, love, and peace of mind. You would be free to love the world and all of it's people with all of your heart.

So, my not very profound advice to you would be... look to the truth of the human experience, and it shall set you free! 

With all the love in the world,

Coach Ty

On Playing to Play

"A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push."

-Ludwig Wittgenstein

As a Transformative Coach, I find it curious that as my clients begin to see the truth of where their experience of life comes from... (The Inside-Out); they often get really confused about what to do with their lives. However, upon further reflection, in a culture that is built on the pursuit of happiness(as it clearly states in the United States Constitution), it makes sense to be a bit confused when you discover that happiness and well-being are your true nature!

Upon seeing this truth, some questions come to mind: Why would you do things you don't want to do when you know you can have a beautiful experience of life right now?  Why would you suffer and sacrifice your way to success when you know that your well-being is your natural state? What do I do with my life when I know that, "there" is not better than "here"; simply different?

These questions begin to point to a completely new paradigm that is, for the first time, based on the truth of the human experience.  The truth being that our entire experience of life is being created moment by moment, through the thoughts flowing in and out of our heads.  As my mentor Michael Neill says, we are in the midst of an Inside-Out Revolution.

This is the great unknown we are dealing with here; and it's worth spending some time exploring it. Don't be too quick to fill in the blanks of these questions with your habitual thinking.  I encourage you to let them be filled in by the infinite intelligence behind life. But just for fun, let's explore one of them together.

As my clients begin to see the truth that we live in a thought created experience, they inevitably begin to ask me a version of the question, 'If having "better" circumstances and more external success can't make me happy , then what do I do with my life?"

The best answer I've come up with so far, is... why not just play to play?!

We've been conditioned to believe that winning at the game of life is really important, and inexorably linked to our happiness and well-being.  But as you come to see the illusory nature of this idea, then playing to play seems to be a much more viable and enjoyable option.

Remember when you were younger, there was always at least one child who was obsessed with winning.  They usually took to things like cheating, dirty play, and poor sportsmanship.  When they won, they gloated and taunted, and then wanted to play again, so they could feel good about themselves some more. When they lost it was an earth shattering affair because they had associated their identity with the outcome. They almost certainly stopped having fun, and overtime, nobody wanted to play with them.

Now, consider most young children, before they have been taught the arbitrary and subjective ideas of winning and losing.  They play for the sheer joy of playing.  Their imagination and creativity run wild.  The games they play evolve and unfold as they play them.  They step boldly into the unknown, somehow knowing that answer to the question "what next?" will always come to them as they forge boldly ahead. They don't care about winning because somewhere deep down they know that winning doesn't really exist outside of their own mind.

If you watch these children, you will also notice that they play full out!  They often play harder and with more freedom and clarity than anybody who is even slightly concerned with a particular outcome.

We were born to play, and create, and live in the divine unfolding of life.  It is our very nature.  Yet somehow we've been taught to either play it safe and move very cautiously through life. Or we play to win, 100% attached to outcomes, completely forgetting that we arbitrarily made up the rules and marked the finish line ourselves.  We forgot that we are the very thing we have been searching for all this time.

As we begin to remember what was forgotten, most of the goals, and achievements, and outcomes you've been striving for simply lose their appeal. We stop playing to win because we know that "winning" is just a different outcome, not a better one.

Ironically, as we begin to play to play, and outcomes mean less and less, the creativity, freedom, and joy that we play with leads to winning more of the time.  You may have also noticed that when you play well with others, winning the game of success is much easier.

In an inside-out world, you can't build a wonderful life out of a bunch of miserable moments and a handful of goals reached.  A wonderful life is the result of a lot of individual moments of beauty, love, connection, joy, and wonder! Fortunately,those moments are the essence of who you are.  When you see that, all that's left to do... is play.

Love and Light,
Tyler

P.S. If you are interested in working with me one on one, call my office(503-389-3778) or email me(coachtylerthurman@gmail.com) for a complimentary coaching consultation.

Navigating By Spiritual GPS

"When you discover even one spiritual fact, it will transform your life forever."

-Sydney Banks

Please enjoy my latest Video Coaching Blog on The Spiritual GPS.  To view more videos, click here.

As always, if you are interested in exploring my work on a one on one basis, please contact me for a complimentary consultation.

Love and Light,

Tyler

Why Would You Let Fear Stop You?

"Feel the fear, throw-up, and do it anyway!" 

-Michael Neill 

I had a conversation the other day with one of my mentors, in which I expressed my frustration that I was continually letting my fears get the better of me. The pattern was, I'd think of something I wanted to do, feel fear, and then not do it... pretty standard human tendency, is it not? Perhaps the only difference for me was that I knew without question the source of my fear was thought and could only ever come from thought, not from the big world outside of my head.

This bamboozled me.  I thought that seeing the truth of fear and it's source would either make the fear go away and I would take action, or I would laugh in the face of it, and then take action.  Neither of which occurred for me.  I knew it was just thought, and still didn't take action.... WHY!?!?  So I did what any reasonable person would do... ask for help.

I called my mentor and the conversation went something like this:

Me: I'm sick and tired of being afraid all of the time, and more importantly letting my fear stop me from doing what I want to do in the world. 

Mentor: What is it you think you would be doing if you weren't afraid?

Me: Well, I'd be calling people I know and offering them my coaching services.

Mentor: What kind of a difference do you think you could make for these people?

Me: After working with me, I'm pretty certain they would have much better relationships, health and well-being, more peace of mind and less stress, more energy, make better decisions, be more creative and successful in business. 

Mentor: It seems to me if you can really transform people's lives in the way you say... then who cares about you and your fears?!   

Me: Hmm, It does seem a little silly when you put it like that... but what about when the fear comes up, because I know it still will... what then? 

Mentor: This may seem like a naive question, but why let fear be the thing that stops you? I mean, I've worked with a lot of people at the top of the entertainment industry, and many of them throw up from fear before they go on stage, and then they go on to deliver award winning performances. Why not just Throw Up and Do It Anyway!? 

Me: (silence) (Insight) Wow, you mean my fear doesn't really have anything to do with taking action?!   

Mentor: Yeah, it seems to me that fear is a thought, and action is action. Sometimes you'll take actions and there will be fear present, and sometimes you take actions and there won't be any fear.  There is no inherent link between the two.

Me: Wow, I think I'm going to go make some calls. 

After this conversation not only did I reach out to a number of people in my contacts list, I also had a couple of really valuable insights that I really want to share with you.

The first and probably most important was that all of this time, I'd been treating my fear very much like a stop sign.  In other words, I thought that whenever I felt fear in my body, that meant stop, don't take action, it could be dangerous.  As opposed to seeing the truth that fear just meant I was thinking fearful thoughts and had absolutely zero to do with what actions I took. I had simply never learned to act in spite of feeling fear in my body... as those entertainers had.

The second insight, was that I had been mixing up this kind of worry fear(not based on actual physical dangers) with an actual awareness of danger.  Most of our fears are just worries that even when manifested would have no impact on our physical well-being.  For instance, even if my fears about calling people came true and I did get yelled at and hung up on... I'd be none the worse for wear.  That is different than an awareness that comes when you are in real physical danger like if you come upon little bear cubs in the forest, or almost step on a rattle snake.

The worry is worthless and not only doesn't protect you, but holds you back and blocks your creativity and clarity of mind.  The awareness of danger is extremely valuable and in my experience is often accompanied by a real clarity and knowing what to do in the moment. Distinguishing between these two "fears" is a worthwhile endeavor.

It will also serve you to realize that the true value I got for myself came from my own insights... not the words of my mentor.  Perhaps you have noticed this in your own life, but those things that have true lasting value pretty much always come from within you in the form of an insight, aha moment, or a light bulb going off in your mind.  So, even as you read these words, don't try too hard to intellectualize what I'm telling you, simply look behind the words to the truth.

It is my sincere intention that these insights I've had will help to facilitate your own insights that will allow you to move forward with your dreams and aspiration.  If you haven't yet had your own insight into fear and the nature of thought, simply look to the unknown, or look where you don't know where to look. (Also stay tuned as I'll be having an upcoming blog about the nature and value of insight.)

As you go the way of life, and have a strong desire to do something but the fear seems so real and overwhelming that you could puke... best case, you notice it's just thought, the feeling goes away and you take action; or, worst case you just throw-up and do it anyway!?

P.S. Just as an aside: You might revel in the power of thought to make you nauseous in the first place... but perhaps that's a conversation for another time ;-)

Have an amazing journey

With Love and Light,
Tyler

The Psychological Immune System

All of our minds have a self correcting mechanism. Learn all about it in my latest video blog!

With love and light,
Tyler

We Feel Our Thinking, Not Our Circumstances

"Most men spend their entire lives fishing, never realizing that it wasn't fish they were searching for"

If you've experienced any of my work than you know that I speak about the inside-out nature of the human experience more than anything else.  For some people I talk about it to the point of nauseam, but I assure you, there is a reason. Understanding how the human experience works, and the principles behind it, is the closest thing I've ever found to a magic wand. When people get even a glimpse of the truth, everything transforms, and their experience of life gets more and more wonderful in a very permanent way.

The societal "outside-in" myth is so pervasive, that simply seeing through that myth to the truth, leaves most people transformed forever.  So if you don't have a major AHA moment right away, stay with it, and keep looking in the direction of your mind and your thoughts. You'll know it when you see it, believe me!

Okay, let's get down to business. Possibly the most significant part of this Inside-Out understanding for me, is that we can only ever feel our thinking, not the world. In other words, our emotional, feeling experience of life can only ever come from thought, not our partners, our kids, our jobs, or our bank balances.

Every thought has a corresponding emotion or experience that comes with it.  They are two sides of the same coin, and you can't have one without the other.  Another way of thinking about it is, if we have a scary thought, we'll feel afraid.  If we have a sad thought, we'll feel sadness. If we have a stressful thought, we'll experience stress... and so on.

This is probably the most difficult part for people to grasp; there are no scary, sad, or stressful circumstances.  The world can't makes us feel those feelings.  There are no inherent feelings in the world, they can only ever come from thought.

Now, when I say that, most people say "wait a second, I don't think I really believe there are ZERO scary, sad, or stressful circumstances!" After all we've been taught all of our lives that our lot in life has a huge impact on our quality and experience of life... does it not?  Well, fortunately, we have all been innocently deceived.

It's the blind leading the blind. Our parents didn't see that the source of our experience was thought, therefore, they passed it on to us.  We're all blindly trying to improve our circumstances so that we can have better feelings.  Never actually stopping to consider... maybe that's not how it works.  Maybe it's all being created from the inside-out.

This conversation always makes me think of one of my favorite quotes by Eric From who said "Just because millions of people share the same form of mental pathology, does not make those people sane." In other words, simply because 99% of the world acts as if this is in Outside-In universe, does not mean they are correct. It does however give us a reason for why very few people bother to investigate for themselves; it is just too pervasive of a myth for most people to question; much like the old saying "whoever discovered water, it wasn't fish." However, that pervasiveness is exactly why it is so worth questioning.

Now, while some people will just flat out disagree with me, other people will hear me talk about this principle of only feeling our thinking, and they will nod in agreement.  But what most of them are actually hearing me say is, "I mostly feel my thinking" or "My thoughts have a big influence over my feelings."

That's all well and good, but it's not what I'm saying.  I'm actually suggesting that the world cannot cause us to have any emotional experience.  The source of all of it is thought. 100% of our experience of life is being created through thought.

Another way of looking at it is that, in the absence of scary thought, you will not feel fear... regardless of the circumstances.  Without a sad thought, you will not experience sadness.  Without a stressful thought, you will not experience stress.  It is that simple, and when you truly see it, it is profound.

As it so happens, this is ridiculously significant.  When we don't understand this, we human beings spend 99% of our time trying to have a better or more wonderful experience of life; and our main strategy is trying to get better circumstances.  All the while, we don't see that our experiences and emotions can't come from the world outside of our heads. Most people never see this, they just keep trying their whole lives to get better and better circumstances.

You may have noticed that one of the problems with this is that you can't get better feelings from circumstances, and circumstances are often really difficult to create exactly the way we want them. In other words, not only are our circumstances not the source of our experience, but we also don't have that much control over them.  That's why so many people have the experience of achieving a long time goal that they struggled and sacrificed to accomplish, and they end up saying to themselves "This is it? This is all there is? I don't feel any different. Why was any of that worth it?"

Alright, let's switch gears and look at why this inside-out understanding is so hard to see, because there is a reason, and it's completely innocent.  The reason is that it's so much easier to see the world outside of our heads.  The world in front of our eyes is big and bright, and colorful, and feels solid. Everything going on behind our eyes is not as clear.  If we aren't used to looking in that direction, it seems fuzzy and dark. So it just doesn't occur to most of us to look there, even though that is actually the source of our experience of life.

What happens is that things happen in the world, and then we have a feeling.  Because we see the circumstance much more easily, we naturally associate the feeling with the circumstance. The missing link however, is thought.  It's invisible to us, but it's always there, and we are always feeling it.

Some of my mentors who are practitioners of this work, speak about our lack of seeing as a Trick of the Light.  Consider you see something that looks an awful lot like a monster and so you get scared.  You might try all sorts of strategies to attack the monster, or avoid the monster.  Or you might try to ignore the monster and simply cope with it by drinking, or smoking, or eating.

Now consider that upon closer examination you realize, the monster is simply a shadow of a stuffed teddy bear.  The light was simply projecting around the edges of the bear and creating a shadow image on the wall.  The moment you see this, all of the strategies and coping mechanisms you engaged in before become meaningless.  When you understand the nature of light and shadows, you will know that it would be silly to try to do something to change it; because it's just a shadow.

Well, our feelings, emotions and experience of life are all a shadow of our own thinking. All of those outside-in strategies for trying to change how we feel don't makes sense any more the instant we see that we are only ever feeling our thinking.

Once we begin to actually see that our feeling experience of life is all going on in our heads, it gives us a more useful direction to look in. Because if you think your experience is coming in large part from outside us, then, when we don't like our experience, that's the first place we are going to go to try and change it. And when it doesn't work, we think, "well, I just have to get MORE money, or a BETTER partner, a FULFILLING job, or a BIGGER house." Many people play this game for their entire lives.

When we are looking in the right direction we have an opportunity to see how things really work, and then take that into account.  The truth, in this case, is our most valuable asset. And the first truth to notice is that we feel our thinking not the world!

Tune in to my next article to learn more truths about the Nature of Thought that will set

Wishing You Great Love and Joy,

Coach Ty

P.S Don't forget to check out my new Video Coaching Series to develop a deeper understanding of the Inside-Out nature of life!

Self Esteem From The Inside Out

50% off 3 months of  Transformative Coaching starting March 1st - March 15th.

Don't wait to transform your life! Contact me for more information.

Also, Watch my New Free Video series on everything from Wonderful Relationships to Eliminating Stress.

Finally, if you want to see me live, I will be speaking at the Albuquerque, Body Mind Spirit Celebration on April 27th, and I will have a booth there all weekend, so come say hi!

------------------------------------------------------------------------

"The Truth Shall Set You Free"

--unknown

Growing up, I always thought I had terrible self-esteem. It seemed like the older I got, the worse it got.  I was terribly shy, and insecure. I was afraid all the time. Afraid to talk to new people, make friends, express myself, and even afraid of talking on the phone.  I attributed this all to low self-esteem and I thought that improving my self-esteem was the answer.  After all, the world was telling me that was the answer, so I spent most of my childhood, and young adulthood attempting to improve and fix my "self".  

At first I decided, well maybe if nobody sees my faults that will help.  So I tried my best to hide from the world  The more I hid, the more insecure I got and this cycle continued for many years. Even the people closest to me didn't know me... because I was hiding even from myself.

When I realized hiding wasn't the answer to my self-esteem problem, I thought I would try to accomplish and succeed my way out of it; of course all the while hiding what I thought were my faults and insecurities.  So I set my mind to excelling at school and sports, and I did a pretty good job. I thought that this had to work... and while I did look pretty appealing to the world, I was as insecure as ever.  

Next I tried fitness.  I thought, well people with really attractive bodies look happy and have lots of friends right? Maybe I should try that.  So I learned all there was to learn about body sculpting and I focused really hard on that for a few years.  My body sure started to look good, and I started to get more attention from the opposite sex; but after years of going to the gym at 4:30am and 100's of protein shakes, I realized I still felt fundamentally broken inside.

Then I discovered the self-help and self-improvement world.  You have no idea how excited I was, because I thought for sure these people would know how to fix me; they are experts after all.  I dove into it with a passion unlike I had ever experienced before. I read 100's of books, took courses, got certified in Neuro-Linguistic Programming and coaching.  I studied past lives, psychic phenomena, meditation, and mind programming.  I devoured everything I could get my hands on.

I was convinced I had found the answer to my problem.  Except, every time I would come up for air from studying and searching, I noticed those old feelings of depression and insecurity, and wishing I was different were all right under the surface.

I then began to hear whispers of this thing called innate mental health. There was this whole group of people that I somehow had never heard of in all my years of self-help, that were speaking about how there was nothing wrong with me.  People like Sydney Banks, George Pransky, Michael Neill, Bill Petit, Roger Mills... all telling me I was never broken, I just thought I was. They said, I have innate mental well-being, I just can't see it for all my thinking.  They spoke about how we only ever experience our thinking, not the world.  And they said my thoughts were subjective, arbitrary, and illusory.  They said my insecure thoughts would always pass and give way to my wellbeing... if I let it.

I had spent so many years convinced that I was broken, that I never bothered to actually check and see. It never occurred to me to question which "self" I was trying to get more esteem for? I was so damn busy trying to fix myself and improve myself, that I never thought even once that maybe I was just fine. And not only was I just fine, but was a spiritual being untouched by the dramas of my life, simply clouded over with thought.

It was then that I think I surrendered.  I let go of trying so hard to improve myself and raise my self-esteem. When I let go, a funny thing happened. I began to actually get glimpses of the wellbeing that these teachers and coaches were telling me about.

And then, a sense of peace and well-being came over me unlike anything that I have ever experienced. I knew instantly that I was home. I knew that this was my true nature.  I saw for myself that, that which I had been searching for was actually my true nature.

I also saw that the me I was trying to improve all those years was nothing more than a shadow of a thought.  Yes my personality was neurotic, and insecure, and troubled, but it was completely made up of thoughts that I had accumulated over the years; and my thoughts were no more real than a dream.

That background of peace and well-being has stuck with me every day since.  Of course I still experience the ups and downs that come with being a thinking creature, but I just don't take them so seriously any more because I know who i really am. I still feel insecure sometimes, but I know it'll always pass without me doing anything about it.  I know that when I think I need more self-esteem, I'm simply caught up in my thinking in the moment. All there is to do is simply see the truth that behind all the thought is a beautiful divinity of which we are all a part of. A spiritual essence if you will that Sydney Banks called Mind.

It's that Namaste Place. My favorite definition of the word Namaste is that: I honor the place in you where the entire universe resides. I honor the place in you of love, of truth, of peace, and of light; and when you are in that place in you, and I am in that place in me, there is only one of us.

When we get a glimpse of the nature of how thought works, and your most essential nature... all notions of self-esteem, and fixing one self, just blow right out the window.  They don't make any more sense than it would make sense to try to fix a shadow that looks like a monster.  When you see the shadow is simply a trick of the light, you will smile, be on your way, and go about enjoying your life.

Wishing you great love and joy,
Coach Ty

P.S.   50% off 3 months of  Transformative Coaching. Sign up between March 1st - March 15th.

Don't wait to transform your life! Contact me for more information.

Also, Watch my New Free Video series on everything from Wonderful Relationships to Eliminating Stress.

Finally, if you want to see me live, I will be speaking at the Albuquerque, Body Mind Spirit Celebration on April 27th, and I will have a booth there all weekend, so come say hi!