If you want to change what you experience, you need to change what you experience from yourself and what others experience from you.

You can make new choices.

To get new results you must make new choices.

To understand you must be willing to look beyond all that you have believed up to this point in your life.

You must be willing to reach out and to trust that what others are saying, as foreign as it seems to you, has value and worth and can make sense on the other side of your denial and dissociation.

It will all make sense when you rid yourself of the stockpiles of anger, hurt, and vulnerability of your past and begin to forge a strong sense of self and identity in the here and now.

Denial, dissociation, fragmentation, avoidance, and excuses, along with feeling, “poor me” will only continue to increase your pain and your need to escape it at all costs.

Healing is about finding the real you and then living with integrity.

A world that holds you in its grip in such as way as to squeeze life out of you.

What you need to know is that you are truly the master of that world, from the inside out. You are the one whose hands are squeezing.

When you realize the power that exists within you when you aren’t throwing it away in the avoidance of your pain.

Suppression of feelings is something that everyone does.

Avoidance of feelings also implies avoiding responsibility for them, not always done consciously, but because we lack the knowledge to confront life directly.

We don’t know how to experience life fully, so that there are no lingering, unresolved energies.

When we forcefully try to exclude pain from our awareness, by any number of evasive or self-defeating behaviour patterns, what we are doing is rejecting ourselves because the pain is a part of ourselves.

Anger, for example does not dissolve when suppressed, but remains as forceful as when originally felt except that it is no longer in our field of awareness.

Thus suppression interrupts the natural flow of energies and can be trapped in the subconscious.

Suppressed feelings can then manifest and create events in unsuspected ways leaving us ruled by hidden forces that at times are overwhelming and uncontrollable.

We become guided by unconscious urges, which may lead to irrational, usually self-destructive behaviour.

We are attracted to the wrong people, reject the right people, and become compulsive, addictive, and unreliable; despite our best intentions. We accumulate unresolved energies.

Suppression leads to repression, which is the same as suppression except that there is no conscious awareness of the feeling or the avoidance of it.

Repression is a common ailment of the modern world because we are constantly striving outwardly for happiness.

Life has become anxiety driven, and we lose sight of what our real feelings are – positive or negative.

These patterns of avoidance and suppression may have formed over earlier life, which often makes it easier to take responsibility for where you are at now; rather than blaming your childhood or your parents.

With this perspective even family experiences become catalysts to making you conscious of what was already latent within you.

The family is essential in shaping our ability to reach our potential.

Many believe that we are born with natural shame that serves to protect us from unwanted access.

For example, we blush when we feel embarrassed or unprotected in a social or public situation.

Natural shame is our core boundary and is the foundation of our freedom, self-discovery or self-actualisation.

In contrast to other feelings, shame is an experience of the self by the self.

When our natural shame, which guards our privacy, is violated we can take on a false, pretend self that is shameless.

Shamelessness takes two forms: we act shameless by trying to transcend our limits, we try to be more than human, we act perfect, we act arrogant, we act righteous, we act authoritarian & we act in patronizing ways

At the other extreme, we act shameless by being less than human.

We let others violate us or we violate ourselves.

We become shameful failures, victims, and addicts.

We become so hopeless that we lose all sense of limits and as a result we believe we are defective and flawed.

This toxic shame, whether it is righteous or depraved, prevents us from feeling whole and realizing our gifts and capabilities.

It does not protect our wholeness and our identity, but instead tears them down.

This can leave us feeling inadequate and forces us to be secretive about what is authentic in our lives.

Toxic shame causes us to lose face, which we must then try to save.

Often to try to save face we avoid or go into hiding and live constantly covering up our pain. This can create an arsenal of secrets, which can layer upon each other developing a false sense of self.

For example, if I were to let you see me as I really am, you would see that I am defective and you would reject me.

I must therefore remain silent.

This shamelessness is unnatural, socially determined and learned.

In Indo-European languages there are generally two or more words for shame that differentiate between natural an unnatural shame.

For example, in French, pudeur means shame as modesty whereas, honte means shame as disgrace.

How do we release suppressed energies that are creating patterns of self-sabotage and illness?

We are all familiar with the feeling of being split and working against ourselves despite our best interest.

We try to avoid negatively perceived feelings that are a part of us: ike anger and fear.

This stems from the concept of who we are and who we would like to be.

We fight against the self-destructive qualities and thereby self-reject.

By not accepting the darker side of our nature we perpetuate negativity instead of releasing it.

 Acceptance is no doubt a challenging task and to transcend we must integrate those parts of our lives we find painful and would like to avoid.

This adds a new facet and dimension to our existence.

Integration can be achieved through a variety of techniques, but the key is to practice the art of loving yourself regularly.

When you perceive yourself with acceptance and unconditional love you open up the creative process.

Make life your canvas and it will transform and shift your inner world.

When you re-condition your mind-set to accept conditions, you are not resigning yourself to endure conditions that may need to be changed; acceptance means only that you have stopped resisting what your experience is now.

In this way you allow growth to occur.

When you resist you perpetuate the very conditions you are fighting.

We are all basically the same; we all have an unconscious, yet idiosyncratic self-negating tendencies keep us from reaching our maximum potentials.

Rarely do we fully realize the higher side of our nature, the love and creative centres, or do we relate to others or ourselves directly without projecting suppresses energies.

We must recognize the truth without becoming pessimistic.

We are as we are because life and consciousness are evolutionary, fluid and ever changing. We are all works in progress. Our capacities only reflect our current levels of growth.