What do you truly want for yourself?

If you dive into this question, what comes up?

Maybe: a house, car, boat, successful career, to be loved, to avoid conflict !!!!!

But, what do you want that is deeper?

Maybe: Freedom? Peace? Joy? Happiness? Love? Clarity?

And what’s even deeper? When you allow the answer to arise from within?

I wonder: Nothing? Emptiness? True freedom? A state of love?

When you realise what you truly want then here’s some pointers on how to get it.

Consider how much you want it. Be totally unconditional about it. No trades, no negotiation. No doubt.

• Be committed to this. Every moment.
• Make this your focus. Let this desire guide everything you say, everything you do, everything you think.
• Be vigilant. Effortlessly vigilant.

We are human beings. We are conceived, we grow inside the mothers womb, we have a birth experience and then a growing up family experience. During this process we take onboard the internal state of our mother, the trauma of birth and the experience of growing and developing within the family. When we are little our brains as well as our bodies are immature. We sense we need to comply to what our parents want, in order to be attached to them, so that we can survive. We are unable to live and meet our needs ourselves. So we need those adults.

Trouble is that those adults also have their past experiences affecting them which may make them emotionally or even physically, unavailable to us.

Then things happen that we take personally. How else can we take them when we are young? It’s about personal survival. And in our immature way, we create strategies to keep ourselves safe, to avoid conflict, to avoid painful emotions, to get love. And so our ego develops.

These strategies stay in place as we grow up and grow older. But they may no longer be needed for survival. They no longer serve us. We have it worked out by then. Our brains have learned knowledge and techniques and we follow practices that support survival.

But the strategies themselves are still there and become limiting or restricting. We can investigate these patterns by using self-inquiry and by getting to the subconscious using compassionate hypnotherapy.

And there is still our ego!

Through self-inquiry we can also discover that we are not those ego patterns.

They are not who we are.

And therefore, it becomes easier to accept the ego and notice it playing out.

We can choose to:

• notice the pattern and stop.
• not follow those thoughts.
• not believe those thoughts.
• feel emotions in our body and let them dissolve in their own time.
• be willing to experience whatever is in inside us and outside us.
• listen to our body and support it.
• support our body to function by giving it nutrition, fresh air, sunshine, exercise.

And then, when we go deeper, there is no choosing.

There is just this moment and what’s here – there may be thoughts, there may be emotions, there may be body sensations – and they happen. But they don’t have to mean anything about you. You do not need to take them personally.

You can stay with what’s here and enjoy the richness of life in true freedom.

With love,

Annette.

PS. This is half an article that I wrote last year when I was invited to write an article, along with several other people, on Pointers to Freedom.