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Table of Contents
Introduction........................................................................1
Chapter One
Walking the Path of Spirit..................................................13
Chapter TwoMental Integrity.................................................................42
Chapter Three
Emotional Integrity............................................................72
Chapter Four
Physical Integrity.............................................................102
Chapter Five...................................................................144
Spiritual Integrity.............................................................144
Chapter 6........................................................................166
Creatively Intending Your Life........................................166
Chapter 7
Mastery............................................................................190
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Integrity:
1. An unimpaired condition: soundness
2. Adherence to a code of moral, ethical, artistic, or other
values
3. The quality or state of being complete or undivided:
completeness
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Introduction
What Is Spiritual Integrity andHow Do I Get Some?
Have you ever made a commitment to yourself and not
followed through? Do you wish you had more energy and space
to create change in your life? Are you often confused about what
your purpose really is, or how to manifest it?
Are you ready to step into your innate fullness and
integrity?
Spiritual Integrity is a path to wholeness. When we live from
our own Spiritual Integrity we follow through on our commitments
without stress, confusion, or fear. We are constantly inspired andenergized to respond to change with eyes wide open. We are clear
about who we are and where we are going. Our actions are in
alignment with our heart. Each day is a playful co-creation with the
Divine. Life is good!
Many of us learn what integrity is from the outside in. We
take on rules and beliefs that are handed down from our parents
and grandparents, church, schools, and communities. Often
these rules are not in alignment with who we are, or are
completely contradictory. And yet we still try and "be good" and
follow what the outside world tells us we should be. Or we rebel,
throwing our energy in the opposite direction without really
knowing what is true for us.
Spiritual Integrity teaches us how to reclaim our truth
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from the inside out. At our core, we each have a beautiful andunique essence and purpose. But we cover this shining light of
clarity and inspiration with layers and layers of other people's
opinions, thoughts, and desires. We live not who we are, but who
we believe others want us to be. We ignore our own truth with
the hopes that we will be accepted and loved if we are "nice." Or
we spend all of our precious energy fighting other people's
opinions.
Spiritual Integrity is about the willingness to go deeper
into yourself to find out who you are, beyond the walls of the
known.
This book will not tell you what your integrity is. There is
no handy list of rules in the appendix that we believe you should
live your life by. We are not concerned with what your concept of
Spirit is, whether you pray to God, Allah, or the wind.
Rediscovering your own Spiritual Integrity is a journey inward to
align your mental, emotional, and physical being with your own
spirit. As you recover your mental, emotional, and physical
integrity, your individual spirit will spontaneously align with its
Creator. And it is in these moments of aligned grace that the
pure potential of humans is revealed.
Spiritual Integrity is a re-membering, a weaving of our
scattered parts into a solid whole. We step back into our Spiritual
Integrity when our thoughts, actions, and emotions stem from our
essence, rather than our strategies and old patterns. Each of us
has tasted integrity, those moments when we feel open andaligned with our highest selves. These times are the ones we
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look back on and say, "Yes, that was my integrity. That waswholeness. That was my essence shining brightly in the world."
Our desire is to share experiences and practices to help
you completely rewire your system so you are aligned and whole
in all areas of your life. We want to support you in not just
seeking those fleeting moments of ecstasy, opening or security,
but to find your willingness and faith to reclaim your full Divine
self; mind, body, emotions, and energy.
Mental integrity comes when you release your judge and stop
punishing yourself. You view yourself with compassion instead of
criticism. You learn from your mistakes gracefully, and can quiet
your minds chatter so you consistently hear your own true voice.
Emotional integrity allows you to release old hurts and find
forgiveness for yourself and others. You are no longer trapped
by the past. Anytime you are triggered by outside events and feel
emotional pain you do not blame others, but use your tools to
clear and open back to emotional fluidity.
Physical integrity arises when your actions align with your
heart, not your strategies. Each of us takes on a strategy to help
us understand the world around us and make us feels safe.
When you understand what your primary strategy is and how you
physically act it out in the world you come to a place of choice
rather than habit. Choice is the foundation of physical integrity.
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Spiritual Integrity is a cellular recognition that you are not yourmind, emotions, or body, but the light that illuminates from within.
As you move more and more into Spiritual Integrity your mind,
emotions, and form become sweetly transparent, so the
luminous light of your spirit radiates out.
Reading this book will give you a clear, simple pathway to own
your Spiritual Integrity. It will not be easy. There are many
obstacles and fears between where you are now and who you
truly are. Our intent is to break down the process in such a way
that you know without a doubt, I can do this! We know without a
doubt that you can be free from false integrity, and that you can
actually enjoy the process!
We know because we have walked this path for many
years, both together and separately. We have coached many
students to not just think about but actually do the work
necessary to reclaim their fullest expression. It is simple, but not
easy, to step back into your Spiritual Integrity. When you shift
from wanting things to be different to doing the actual work to
transform yourself, each day will be inspired.
Heather Ashs Journey to Integrity
When I moved to the United States in 1984 to go to
college I was a shy, determined person. My dreams were to
become a large animal veterinarian (that lasted until I realized
the pre-requisites I would have to take), to go to the Olympics (I
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was an avid horse-back rider in Dressage and Jumping), to be awriter (though I didnt know what I wanted to write.) What I really
craved was for people to like me and for there to be no conflict in
my world. Though I had strong beliefs I was easily swayed by
other peoples opinions of me, often confused about what I
wanted, and clutched on to my romantic relationships as a way
to give my life meaning. Most of my actions came from
unconscious beliefs and habits. Life was hard and filled with
struggle.
Ten years later I was teaching European shamanism
and fire walking at UC Davis, studying with don Miguel Ruiz, and
part of an amazing spiritual community. I was just beginning to
understand the idea of awareness and reclaiming energy. During
this time I worked as an office manager for several different
companies, went through many growth-filled but difficult
relationships, and moved every year or so. I went on every
journey and workshop with don Miguel that I could, and was
dedicated to running experiments to break any limitations I had,
including cutting off all my hair, moving to Hong Kong with my
parents for a summer, and working at a financial investment firm;
going into silence for 40 days; and (after my hair grew back!)
dying my hair blonde and wearing sassy clothes for a year. Life
was good and I knew what I wanted, even if I did not have it yet.
Ten years later I supported myself by teaching Toltec
Shamanism, and I was the Executive Director of The Toltec
Center of Creative Intent, a non-profit religious organizationwhich I help start in 2001. I had trained ten teachers who were
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sharing my 6-month intensive program, SpiritWeavers,throughout the United States. This gave me the space to write
my first book, The Four Elements of Change. I was in my first
solid, loving, and sexually fulfilling relationship ever. I was living
with my partner in a beautiful apartment ten blocks from the
Toltec Center, and co-teaching journeys to Teotihuacan, Mexico
and Peru with my friend and mentor Gini Gentry. Life was great,
and I had manifested most of my dreams, and then some.
Right around this time came a huge pivot point in my life
around my own integrity. Raven and my relationship had evolved
over the years from student teacher to teaching peers, to
business partners (Raven helped me publish my book and we
created Teo Publishing together), to roommates. We were great
friends and support for each other, and both of us where in other
primary intimate relationships.
One day I realized that I really wanted to be in
relationship with Raven. Our paths and outlook on life were so
compatible, we had the same dreams and visions, and our
feelings for each had kept deepening. Yet we were both in other
relationships. My getting clear about my integrity started an
amazing spiral of events that completely changed my life.
I was scared to be in relationship with Raven because of
what our community would think, but I finally followed my heart
and jumped in feet first. We did a hand fasting (commitment for a
year and a day) ceremony in Peru soon after we got together.
The result of my getting into integrity in my relationshipworld, and being with Raven who is an incredible being of intent
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and power, was that I started to clearly see where else I was outof integrity. I could hardly look at it, but I could see that my
relationship with the Toltec Center was out of whack. Several
people in the community were upset that Raven and I got
together, and I started feeling that I was bad and should give the
leadership role away, and share it with others in the community. I
couldnt quite let go, and no one was really ready to step up, so it
created a very messy organization! By the time one of Ravens
first teachers came to try and help us sort out the tangles, we
were one big dysfunctional family. Her recommendation to me
was that I should shut the Toltec Center down and start over.
I resisted what she saw and struggled to make things
work. This was my baby, I could not just walk away! I couldnt let
the teachers and community down! I had to make it work! And I
tried. Lots of meetings, lots of emotional processing, lots of tears.
I wanted to control what the outcome would be, that somehow
we would pull out of this and all become a big happy family
again. I learned that I had a hard time being confronted or
challenged, and began to see that my stress level around
wanting things to be perfect had hugely affected the
organization. One day I had enough distance to look at the
Toltec Center and see that this incarnation of it did need to die. I
met with the Board of Directors and we realized that we would be
bankrupt in two months if we didnt shut down the office and
release all of our staff.
The dissolution of the Toltec Center of Creative Intent inBerkeley was a hard blow for me. And it gave me the freedom to
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re-invent myself from the inside out, not based on a role I wasplaying in community. Raven and I lived in New Mexico for a
year, and then we went on the road in our RV for a year,
teaching across the United States. During this time I hardly
wrote, and kept allowing the old Heather Ash to die. At times it
was really challenging to not try and control how others
perceived me or know what was next. I learned to trust. I learned
to surrender, and to not need to be known or important or
special, or to expect people to like me. I learned to simply be.
During this time anything that was not completely in alignment
with my integrity fell away. I lost some dear friends, hurt some
people, and came out the other side much wiser and more
centered.
For me, the result of letting go of control allowed me to
drop beneath my fears to recapture my own integrity. My life
looked great from the outside, but on the inside I was driven by a
need to be perceived as a good girl, and in anxiety and fear
around making the Toltec Center survive financially. As messy
and difficult as it was at times, I am so grateful to this time of my
life when everything broke open and I took the space to get to
know Heather Ash. Life is amazing!
Understanding and validating the truth of your own
spiritual connection is what walking a path of integrity is about.
Spiritual Integrity is about both knowing what your best is and
doing it, while understanding that in a world of change and
impermanence your best will not always resolve the issue at
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hand or count for much at all. But you do it anyway, because it isyour joy to do your best.
Spiritual Integrity is being present for life in all its
manifestations, fully engaged, yet totally un-attached to the
outcome of what you are doing.
Spiritual Integrity invites you to quit trying to understand
what is happening to you and start living what is happening to
you. Spiritual Integrity is about fully living life with delight, paying
attention to your experiences with curiosity, and engaging with
your being from compassion and detachment.
When you are in your Spiritual Integrity you move
beyond worrying about what others are thinking or if you are
good enough into being in connection with the divine at all times.
There is no compromise when you are in your integrity. Why
would you compromise your connection to Spirit? What would be
more important than your connection to God/dess? When you
are in Spiritual Integrity the answer is NOTHING! Nothing is
more important than maintaining your sacred connection to
Spirit.
Anytime you put something between your own spirit and
the Divine, it is a sin against God/dess. When your connection to
the Divine is more important to you than anything else, you are
free. Life is simple. Decisions all revolve around whether this
thing or that thing will serve you closer to God/dess or will pull
your attention away from her.
Evaluating everything from this standpoint it is easy tomake decisions. It only gets complicated when we start doing
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things for others when we know that is not what we need or wantto be doing.
So, if everyone started living from their integrity and not
from outside rules, would society break down and there be
chaos? The answer is an emphatic No!
A spiritual being in integritys openness and compassion
knows no bounds, because true integrity stems from the essence
of who you are. Spiritual Integrity is the art of letting go of reward
and punishment and experiencing the Divine by BEING the
Divine as fully as possible in each moment. When you stop
worrying about the past or future and bring all of your energy
present now, you can ecstatically walk the path you have chosen
to embody God/dess. Yes!
When you begin the divine dance towards your own
Spiritual Integrity you will find your self-respect and self-love, and
it will bubble over towards others. Life will keep getting yummier
and yummier!
Spiritual Integrity is a path to wholeness. To move into
integrity you must first honor where you have created separation
internally, and find your willingness to do something different.
Then you can discover and reclaim all aspects of your integrity:
mental, emotional, physical, energetic, and spiritual.
Spiritual Integrity doesnt come from dogma, or
rationalization. It comes from practice, from actually walking the
path you talk about when you get together with other spiritual
folk. The concept of walking the path is not the walking of thepath. They are different things. One of them leads to a life of
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purpose and inspiration, and the other is just another clever wayto suffer.
To walk any path certain things are necessary. Primarily,
you have to be aware of your circumstance and willing to tell
yourself the truth about them. Living out a fantasy life will not set
you free no matter what path you walk. Once you understand
your circumstance you have to be willing to put as much energy
into changing it as you put into creating it in the first place. This
means you have to be willing to take action.
Finally, you have to have faith. You have to have trust
and be willing to surrender your will up to something greater than
your small self. Otherwise you will always make decisions based
on your ego-personality, whose view is so filled with limitation it
will always lead you into suffering. You would think we would
figure that out fairly quickly, but amazingly most people live out
their whole lives listening to the chaotic voices in their head and
making decisions from there even though it causes them pain
and separation from life over and over again!
Lets look at the obstacles along your path, and how to
cultivate the awareness and willingness to gracefully and lovingly
discover your truth. This will form the foundation for reclaiming
your mental, emotional, physical, emotional, and spiritual
integrity. You can do it!
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Chapter OneWalking the Path of Spirit
Obstacles, Strategies, and Willingness
There are usually only two reasons someone steps onto
a spiritual path. The first is a search for meaning, a quest for
something more to life than the day-to-day grind our lives put us
through. When we realize that the drudgery of living the way we
have been taught to live causes us incredible suffering, we begin
to listen to our deep sense that there must be something more.
The second reason someone steps on to a spiritual path
is when an event (usually something pretty dramatic) occurs that
shows us something that is so far out of our normal reality that
it forces us to question our assumptions about what life is allabout. When nothing we have been taught can account for what
we have experienced, we seek answers beyond our knowing.
It is important to recognize the impetus driving you to
look for something different in your life. To really change, you
must be clear that it is more important for you to find out the
meaning of life than it is to live in your safe and comfortable
world. This drive must be very strong, or the obstacles you face
ahead will inevitably overwhelm you. The truth is, your life may
take a strong turn for the worse if you step on the path to
awakening and do not follow through with it to the end. The
reason for this is awareness.
When you are fast asleep in the dream your socialization
has created for you, even though things are not great you are
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only dimly aware of your discomfort. The wool that has beenpulled over your eyes by the agreement of everyone around you
as to what life is about is a powerful sedative that keeps you
from realizing you are suffering.
When you step onto a spiritual path the first thing that
will happen is you will become aware of all the ways things are
not so great. You will see all the ways you are torturing yourself
into believing you are a limited being in a limited world just
slogging one step at a time through an endless morass of
judgment, victimization, boredom, drama, and pain.
To arrive at your own inner integrity, you must be willing
to see the depth of the pain you are creating for yourself before
you have any chance of changing it. This is a fact that we would
all like to avoid, and the avoidance of it is how we got ourselves
into this predicament to begin with.
There is light at the end of the tunnel. You created this
reality you find yourself in and you have the power to change it
into something beautiful and fulfilling, but you have to want it,
you have to REALLY want it. You have spent years creating this
lie of your limitations. Your old structure has a lot of energy in it,
and it will take a lot of energy to change it. First you need to
become aware of the predicament you are in, mapping it very
carefully, and then rounding up your energy to undo the
limitations you have created. Then you must create a new intent,
a new dream of how you want to be in relationship to yourself
and the world around you.
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Understanding the ways you constricted your reality willhelp you to cultivate the awareness, willingness, and yippee!
necessary to break out of your structure. So here we go
Reality as you experience it is controlled by your
perception. Your perception is controlled by your belief system -
how you were taught the world is supposed to be. This belief
system filters almost all of your experiences by filing,
interpreting, and limiting your perception to what is previously
known about the world.
Your belief system is based on your personal history. It
holds your perception hostage, and keeps your energy locked up
in structures it has created to define and limit your view of reality
to what is known and safe. What you learned to believe in the
past becomes the filter of the present, narrowing your window of
perception by discarding the unknown or distorting it to fit into
your comfort zone of the familiar world.
How we Create Beliefs
Beliefs are created by assigning meaning to events of
the past and projecting them onto the present. For a myriad of
reasons you assign meaning to events to help you understand
the world around you rather that just allowing an event to happen
without judging or trying to explain it. You are forced into this
pattern of assigning meaning by the nature of your socialization
into a society/family/peer group. These different types ofsocialization groups generally operate on a system of
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punishment and reward (in one form or another) that makes youfeel unsafe in your environment. You interpret the information
that caused the punishment to occur as bad i.e. unsafe, and
come up with strategies to keep from being punished again. You
also interpret information that caused you to be rewarded and
create strategies to get those cookies again.
One of my first memories of being punished (Heather
Ash) was when I little girl in school. We were coloring, and the
crayons I was using had become blunt. I started to tear the paper
so more crayon would be exposed. I remember feeling happy
and eager to do my drawing, and mesmerized by the different
colors of crayons. Suddenly someone came up (a teacher or
assistant), slapped my hand, and yelled at me for ruining the
crayons. I was devastated, and felt like my world had just been
shattered. I stopped what I was doing, found a crayon that was
sharp, and pretended to draw.
What came out of this experience was a feeling that if I
did something others perceived as wrong, I would get punished. I
knew that tearing the paper on the crayons was not wrong. But
obviously that did not matter! All that mattered was what others
perceived as wrong. So I began to watch very closely to see if I
could figure out what other people were thinking of what I was
doing. This was one of the early seeds of my pleaser strategy.
A child could also take the idea that all that matters is
what others peoples perceptions are and take on a controller
strategy by holding the belief I always have to be right ineveryones eyes. This would snowball into making everyone
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else wrong, or an elaborate system of internal control in order tobe right.
Another child may have taken this incident and decided
adults are unpredictable and cannot be trusted. From this seed
thought a whole strategy of isolating would grow. I am only okay
when no one notices me. They would become quiet and
invisible so they would not get in trouble in the future.
Or a child could take this same experience and decide, I
really do not want to be here, and I do not want to be feeling this
fear and confusion and start to daydream of a better place.
When they came back into the room, they might feel, well, I did
not like crayons anyway and go take someone elses markers as
a way to stay away from the feelings of fear that arose.
These strategies become your perceptions framework,
and you empower them with the ability to keep you safe. Soon
they take on a life of their own, jealously guarding their narrow
window of perception and striving to keep you from looking
beyond it for fear of being punished or made wrong again.
Each person is socialized slightly differently. We all have
a different set of life experiences that influences our belief
structure, and that structure is what controls our perception. In
other words, what we consciously and unconsciously believe
about the world is what we experience. We filter out anything
that does not fit our belief structure, making our "reality" a self-
fulfilling pattern that repeats itself regardless of the differences in
external stimuli. Let us look at the following example of fourfriends to explain this further.
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Suppose Cindy grows up in an environment where herfather expresses a lot of anger at the family, yells at them and
beats them all regularly. Cindy eventually responds by standing
up to her father and as a result gets thrown out of the house.
Anytime she senses someone being emotional she is highly
critical.
Joan grows up in a family environment where it is never
ok to express any anger, and anyone in the family who does is
shamed and told they are being immature and inconsiderate of
others. She spends most of her time reading books or going for
long walks with her dog, Max.
Sherry, on the other hand, was brought up in a family
that supported healthy expressions of anger. She was taught
that it was okay to express her feelings, and her mother and
father modeled this by expressing their irritation without blaming
others. Sherry feels okay when her parents are upset with each
other, but when they are upset with her she gets scared.
Vanessa lived with four different foster families by the
time she was fifteen. She spent much of her days fantasizing
about finding her real parents. Anytime anyone in her world
became angry she would think, My real parents would never be
angry at me.
These four women are walking down the street together
one night and the couple walking in front of them suddenly starts
arguing and yelling at one another. All four have a totally
different experience of the event. Cindy gets very angry and triesto jump into the couples argument, vehemently defending the
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woman. Joan turns her head away, feels embarrassed and triesto sneak away from the scene. Sherry doesn't understand what
the big deal is, they are just arguing, what is everyone else
getting so upset about? But when Cindy starts yelling at her, she
feels guilty and tries to make everyone feel better. Vanessa
doesnt even notice the chaos, because she is dreaming about
her parents and thinking about getting her haircut. When she
does realize what is going on it startles her, but then she
immediately starts wondering where the woman of the couple got
her dress.
Each woman has a completely different experience of
the same event. Different emotions move through them, and they
visually and auditorally filter the information presented to them in
the form of this couple, to the point that if you listened to their
descriptions of the event you wouldn't have any idea they saw
the same thing. Cindy, Joan, Sherry, and Vanessa each take
their past experiences and project them onto present situations.
This forms a personal filter through which they witness any event
whose stimulus is a display of anger in any form.
Making Sense of Strategies
These women are not just reacting to their experience
around anger. This story is a snap shot of how we each filter
information through our beliefs. We react to situations not from
our integrity, but from strategies that we took on as young
children to make sense of the world and know how to react to it.
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When you are in Spiritual Integrity you align with yourtruth and act with love from your own moral code. The moral
code you soaked up (actively or passively) from your parents,
society, friends, and religious community is often contradictory,
outdated, and no longer in your integrity (if it ever was!)
Returning to your integrity is a process of clearing out your old
agreements of who or how you should be and learning who you
want to be. To be truly free you must deconstruct all the false
beliefs you are holding and rediscover your truth at this time of
your life.
Many of us believe that we are in our integrity when, in
fact, we are not in alignment with our essence, but with a
strategy. Strategies are fixed patterns of energy that we adopt at
an early age. Often our strategies become the basis for our
sense of security. But this is a false foundation, a place where
integrity is confused with feeling safe.
As a child, you took on a core strategy because it helped
you make sense of the world, and because it worked! As you
matured, these strategies become more and more habitual.
There are gifts in every strategy, nuggets of wisdom, however;
strategies limit our energetic capacity and keep us from growing
and maturing into our Spiritual Integrity. They sap our inspiration
and lock us in a shell of behaviors that are comfortable and
predictable, but are between us and our authenticity. And they
are not much fun either!
From studying our students and our own lives we havefound four main categories of strategies: controllers, pleasers,
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isolators, and distracters. Each of us uses all of them sometimes,and has one which we use as our core strategy that is activated
when we are uncomfortable or insecure.
The purpose of our core strategy is to keep the world
manageable and to create a sense of safety and stability.
CONTROLLERS feel safe when they are in control of the world
around them or their own internal world. Controllers can be great
leaders and visionaries, but often their gift is used to squash
uncomfortable situations, to force people to do what they want
them to do, and to limit expression. Controllers manage their
own and others' emotions through subtle or blatant domination or
manipulation.
DISTRACTORS keep themselves safe by staying busy and
checked out. Instead of feeling their feelings or facing discomfort,
distracters spend hours at video games, doing projects/hobbies,
talking to friends, anything that can be a distraction! Distracters
have a great gift at multi-tasking and are often mentally nimble,
but their energy is easily scattered, and they have a very difficult
time focusing and creating what they want in the world.
ISOLATORS habitually hide when they are scared or near an
uncomfortable situation. This hiding may be a physical or
emotional retreat. When triggered (or before there can be any
trigger), isolators head for the safety of the hills. Isolators oftenhave a very strong connection to spirit and an excellent sense of
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self, but they are split between a yearning to be deeply seen andunderstood and a desire to be invisible. They habitually constrict
their energy and their life force.
PLEASERS believe they will only be accepted and safe if they
are helping others. Pleasers constantly scan other people's
reactions, wanting to make sure that everyone is happy. Their
gifts are sensitivity and an aptitude for sacred service, but when
they are in their strategy they become hyper-vigilant and outer-
focused. The result is they often feel victimized and resentful.
Pleasers feel lost when they are not caretaking or acting to
satisfy the perceived needs of others.
Can you tell which strategy the women used in response
to the couple arguing?
Cindy wanted to control the situation. She jumped in,
defending the woman. This made her feel safe by giving her the
illusion that she could resolve the situation. Her father was a
controller, and so in order to feel empowered in her difficult
situation she became a controller as well. She tried to control her
fathers mood and defend her family from him, and went on to try
and control everyone elses emotions. When there is any hint of
emotional tension or confusion in her world, Cindy feels unsafe.
She creates a sense of safety by squashing her own emotions
and being highly critical of herself and others.
Joan learned that any expression of emotion is not okay,and she interpreted this to mean that expressing yourself in any
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there will be one main strategy that maintains a false sense ofintegrity/self-identification.
Strategy Quiz-o-Rama
Now is the time for real honesty. The more honest you
can be with this exercise the easier it will be for you to start
undoing the unconscious actions you take from your strategies.
You will be taking this quiz for yourself, but to get the
most out of it, pretend that the person you are responding about
is a good friend of yours. Find your witness/objectivity and review
your life through your best friends eyes. Get as quiet and neutral
as you can and then put a number next to the statements. Place
a 0 next to the ones that the person never does and a 5 next to
the ones they always do, and a number between 1 and 4 for
actions they take varying amounts of the time.
Section 1:
They do things for other people even when their schedule is full
and they dont have any time for themselves. ___
They talk about other peoples process and lives all the time.
_____
They get resentful when other people do not appreciate what
they have done for them. _____
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They get upset with people being selfish. ___
They at least say a partial yes to even the most outrageous
requests of other people make of them. ____
The significant people in their lives are very controlling and/or
demanding. ____
They always ask what everyone else wants to do when you go
out to dinner, movies, or other social activities. ____
Section 2:
Their work and/or home environment is very neat and organized.
______
They always have an opinion about almost any topic. _____
They get upset when their preferences are not met. ______
They are always organizing groups, meetings, and other events.
_____
People often get irritated with their bossiness. ____
They appear to be very disciplined, and always have a lot ofthings going on. ______
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They spend a lot of time convincing people to do things their
way. _____
Section 3:
Their work and/or home environment is messy and disorganized.
____
They are constantly multi-tasking. ____
They start many projects, but finish very few of them. ____
They are always reading books, going to movies, watching TV or
going shopping. _____
They are usually living beyond their means. ______
They are very funny and relieve tense situations with humor.
____
Their thoughts jump from topic to topic, and they have a hard
time staying focused on anything for long. _____
Section 4:
They are often shy around meeting new people. ____
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In social situations they often pull books off of shelves and read
them, look out the window, play with dogs or children, or drink a
lot and leave early. ______
They love doing things by themselves. Most of the things they
would consider relaxing involve getting away from people.
______
They are often grumpy, and they walk around with a frown on
their face even when they are not grumpy. ____
They feel superior to others, and often feel misunderstood.
_____
They love animals, plants, and nature, often more than they like
other people. ______
They usually take off or disappear if other people are displaying
a lot of emotion. _______
Add up your scores in each section. The one with the highest
amount is your core strategy. Section one is pleaser, section two
is controller, section three is a distracter and section four is an
isolator.
Work with this strategy in all the coming sections. Ofcourse, you will have elements of each in your makeup, but the
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core strategy is the first and most important to unravel! If youhave any doubt ask a good friend or family member which one
you are, most of the time we can easily identify which strategy
someone we are close to is. (Much to our chagrin its pretty
transparent to everyone around us what motivates us in the
world It is only our fear that makes us believe we are
actually succeeding in hiding it from everyone.) Or just pick one
and work with it!
Getting Bigger
Our unconscious strategies crimp us into a role. It is like
wearing clothes and shoes that we outgrew long ago. The shirt
binds us under our armpits, the tight pants make it hard to move,
and the shoes are killing our feet and making us unsteady. But
we pretend we are not suffering. We are determined to make this
outfit work, damnit!
Yes, taking those old clothes off can feel frightening after
years of adaptation! You have learned how to make the best of
them. But they are crippling you! Hello!
Gary was a classic isolator. He lived by himself and
rarely interacted with the outside world. He was quiet, shy, and
timid in social situations. When he did stretch himself and try
new adventurous things he opened up beautifully, but would
often then feel scared and vulnerable afterwards, since he was
breaking his structure by being intimate with others. Since he didnot see the pattern that having an opening experience was
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followed by vulnerability, he would get overwhelmed and shuthimself down again by drinking heavily. When he came out of the
binge, he would feel guilty and so isolate even more.
While he was a wonderful artist he kept his work to
himself, secretly dreaming of bringing his work to the public but
not taking any action.
Through our advanced apprenticeship program, Gary
began to understand the underlying causes of his isolating. He
saw that while isolating was familiar, he was cutting off his
passion and hiding his true self. We invited him to assist us at a
class series, and while he was terrified, he agreed. While he still
wanted to stay hidden, he trusted our guidance and went where
it was uncomfortable over and over again. Over two years we
kept encouraging him to get in front of people and teach as a
way to break his fears and smallness. And he started getting
inspired about his own artwork. All his time being alone had
actually created a strong connection to his own source and a big
vision, he had just been afraid to access the power to make
himself known in the world.
A new idea started percolating: what if he took the studio
he had built as his private place to shoot photographs and
created a public salon for artwork? And he could then have the
first public showing! Over three months he probably tried to pull
out of his show three times, and each time we reminded him it
did not have to be perfect, it was about getting out into the world,
and even if he only had four pieces and only a handful of peopleshowed up, it would be a huge success.
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And it was! Garys first show in ten years opened witheighteen brilliant photographs printed on canvas, about fifty
people, and four pieces sold in two hours! He went on to sell
several more pieces and bring his photographs to a larger studio.
He now plans to expand his work in the United States and
internationally over the next four years.
He also continued teaching and is now one of our top
teachers and coaches. He remarked to me recently, I used to
say I hated community, and now I am so thrilled to have people
around my house and be part of so many peoples lives. I am
definitely not an isolator anymore!
His movement from unconscious strategy to conscious
purpose came from dedication, faith, and willingness over and
over again to be in uncomfortable situations. You can do the
same!
Beyond Strategies: Discovering Your Purpose
In order to return to your Spiritual Integrity, you must
move beyond your core strategy. Yet your core strategy is so
woven into the fabric of your being that it will take focused action
to untangle what is your true integrity and what is a strategy.
Often when you begin to unravel your strategy the
response is... but how else could I act? What should I do?
Instead of living unconsciously from strategies masking
as our integrity you can consciously align to a key factor ofintegrity: A clearly defined purpose.
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Usually there are only two reasons we do not alreadyknow our purpose. The first is we have never looked, and the
second is that we do not want to know because then we would
be responsible for it. We would often rather stay with the
discomfort of being afraid, apathetic, and blaming than take
responsibility for the discomfort of knowing we are not living our
highest path. We are always at choice you see, no one will force
you to live out your Purpose, you have to actively choose it
before it will be your experience of life.
There is no more important task than finding your
purpose. Purpose gives your life context. It allows you to see
your unconscious beliefs reflected in actions that are clearly not
toward your purpose, but away from it or distractions from it.
Purpose inspires us to be more than our story, to strive toward
giving it all up to God/dess, to make every action a sacred one
that brings us more in touch with our divinity.
We have to be able to face the truth to live our purpose.
The first thing we find (of course) is that for the most part we are
not living our purpose, we are living out some story based drama
that doesnt serve us, our highest purpose or anything else
except the maintaining of the drama.
Your purpose is not a trap. The words you use to
describe it might change over time, but the feeling of living your
life as fully as you can, in alignment with your deepest integrity
does not. The description of that feeling might be different every
five minutes, but the feeling of being in alignment has a surety of
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knowing that does not waver. You are the gift being given as fullyas possible.
You yearn to give all of yourself to your purpose, it is
agony when you cannot. That agony is the suffering all traditions
talk about. It is the uncomfortable knowing that you are out of
alignment with your essence. That there must be something
more to this than the meaningless high drama you find yourself
wrapped up in. There is! Deep down you know this; you know
you were meant to live a Divine life full of meaning, peace, and
joy.
A great step in moving toward that is to find your
purpose and devote your life to living it. After all, what else is
there to do? Are all the ways you are wasting your time right now
really that important? Important enough that when you die you
will be happy with how you spent your time?
Knowing your purpose is the anchor that keeps you on
the path of living the divine more fully in each moment. Purpose
gives your energy a focus, it gives you inspiration, and it pulls
you forward when things get difficult. The art of believing in
something without attachment gives form to energy, and allows
your creations to move you more toward who you want to be in
each moment, rather that creating things that move you deeper
and deeper into the suffering of believing in your limitations.
Purpose helps you move from unwillingness to
Willingness, from despair to Joy, from senseless activity to
Sacred Action. By bringing your purpose to bear on all thedecisions you make in your life things become uncomplicated. It
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either serves your purpose or it does not. When you believe inyour purpose there is no confusion about what to do next. You
just focus on your Purpose and let the next action arise from
that.
Purpose is another way of saying faith. It is having faith
that indeed this life does have meaning. Your purpose will never
be what you think it is, it will always be what you feelit is.
Purpose is not a detailed plan taking you from point A to
B. It is a feeling state that brings you fulfillment and directs your
actions toward your highest expression in each moment.
Living your purpose is being your purpose in each
moment. The goal is the continual manifestation of more of you
in each moment. Come out and play! We want to see more of
your true self, more of your incredible gift. Why not?
Purpose is giving your gift as fully as you can in each
moment. It is giving your presence in service to the Divine. It is
being conscious and aware of the god force flowing through and
around you in every moment. Knowing thyself, knowing yourself
as Spirit incarnate, as the One, whole and complete in each
moment.
Purpose is the understanding that while we will never
intellectually grasp the fullness of this life we can be it by living
our highest ideal in each moment. Purpose is the deep knowing
that life is a mysterious and magical pathway back to our
essence. Giving our fullest gifts is the outward reflection of that
inner essence we find at the core of our being, beneath thepersonality and mind play of the illusion we have created.
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Dedication to purpose is the warriors pledge tothemselves that they will strive to honor their own integrity by
being impeccable with their words, thoughts, and actions.
Cultivating Your Willingness
With purpose comes willingness. Willingness to deal with
the discomfort of life, understanding that discomfort is just that, it
doesnt mean you are doing anything wrong, it is simply what is
happening now (or not), as you live your purpose.
We are so narrowed by our core strategy that we often
see no other options. And as we start to challenge the strategy,
we feel insecure and out of control. This is where willingness
comes in. Instead of becoming overwhelmed and confused, you
can learn to consciously cultivate your desire to live your
Spiritual Integrity, beyond strategies. Your willingness will be the
fuel as you untangle your strategies and learn new channels of
behavior.
By cultivating conscious willingness, you will stay steady
through the uncomfortable places as you unravel your authentic
integrity from your strategies. Willingness does not mean you
have it all figured out or you know what comes next. Willingness
is a state of opening to anything that arises and staying present
with whatever your mind, emotions, and body is doing.
Willingness has to begin somewhere, and that
somewhere is the truth. Not where you wish you were or thinkyou should be, but the truth of where you are really at in this
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moment. You need to be truly willing to tell yourself the truthabout what you want to transform in your life.
If you are like most people, there is a part of you that
doesnt want to change, that is invested in the strategy you have
created, and that believes fully that your strategy will keep you
safe.
To return to your Spiritual Integrity means you must be
willing to be uncomfortable, to step out into unknown territory.
The desire to do this cannot be faked. You need to know to the
depths of your being that it does not serve you to hold to these
limitations, even though you do not yet know how to live without
them.
Our willingness to change is in direct proportion to our
willingness to experience discomfort. It is the search for the
illusory state of being comfortable all the time in life that keeps
us from truly exposing our unconscious limitations and changing
them. Our search for comfort is often completely a lie. We tell
ourselves that we feel more comfortable when we act from one
of our strategies, but the truth is we are causing ourselves
incredible discomfort by being out of integrity from acting from
the strategy. The strategies are usually just a deflection into a
type of discomfort that we are familiarwith, rather than a type of
discomfort that is unknown.
The discomfort we feel in breaking our unconscious
patterns is no greater in any way than the discomfort we
experience from playing them our in the world, we have justgotten familiar with the former and placed a matrix of fear around
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the latter. The real difference is that one type of discomfort keepscycling an endless wheel of suffering and the other type of
discomfort breaks the pattern of suffering and opens you up to
new possibilities. This creates the space for you to get into your
own integrity and not suffer from the actions you are taking.
Ravens journey of moving through his pleaser strategy
exemplifies working with discomfort.
In the beginning when I was enmeshed in the strategy I
felt like I had to say yes to anyone who asked me to do
something for them. Not only that, I had to figure out what other
people needed and if at all possible provide it for them before
they even asked for it. What this was like internally was a
constant state of low anxiety. My internal dialogue was always
talking to me about what I needed to do for other people so they
would accept me, love me, give me affection and approval.
This low state of anxiety ran inside of me most of my life,
causing me incredible discomfort all the time. Much of my
internal dialogue revolved around what other people might need
of me and how in the world was I going to provide it for them,
how was I going to do all of these things that everyone wanted
me to do so that I could feel safe, loved, and so people
respected and valued me. With this internal dialogue came a
constant stream of ideas around not having value, how I needed
other people to validate me or I was nothing. I always felt a
sense of low self worth unless someone was acknowledging me
for something I had done for them.
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Of course, many, many times I would do something forsomeone and they wouldnt acknowledge it (or it just was not
important to them) and I wouldnt get any validation for doing it.
And many times I did get validation. But if I didnt get the
validation I would tell myself that I just hadnt done a good
enough job, that I hadnt answered their problem, or hadnt given
them what they needed to a full enough extent, which is why I
didnt get the validation. So I would try harder and create more
anxiety and worry about what I could do to please people rather
than noticing some people validated me whether I pleased them
or not, and other people didnt validate me no matter what I did
for them.
When I began to understand this and began working to
break my pattern of saying yes to everyone I took on certain
commitments at different times around telling people no.
Sometimes I went for weeks at a time without doing
anything for anyone else. The discomfort I felt during those times
was really high. My judge was constantly telling me you are
being self-absorbed, selfish, you are being mean, you arent
taking responsibility for things There was a big internal
discomfort around breaking the pattern, but looking back I can
see that this discomfort was really minor in comparison to the
constant state of anxiety I had around pleasing people.
When I stayed with the discomfort and held myself
through it, I finally broke the habitual pattern inside myself of
saying yes no matter what, and came back to a place of beingable to say yes and mean it. I shifted into being able to do
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things for people because I truly felt like doing it for. I no longerhad any regard for the outcome or a need for them to tell me I
had done a good job.
What opened up for me was a place of incredible Divine
service. When I do have the spaciousness to say yes to people
now Im saying that yes from a place of knowing it serves my
purpose and my connection to Spirit. Because of this when I go
into service I can bring all of myself, all my awareness, presence,
and power into what I am doing, because I am not concerned
with what their response is going to be. I am not constantly
watching the people around me to see if they approve of what I
am doing or not.
Today I make my decisions from a place of my own
integrity, and that is a place of incredible freedom and lightness.
It is a place of opening into each action that I do for another
person as a service to God/dess. So my yes is an incredible
yes that serves me and the other person into God/dess the most
that I possibly can in each moment. When I say yes to
something I put all of myself behind it, and I feel totally fulfilled by
taking the action, regardless of the outcome. This is liberation!
What it took to get there was my willingness to go into a
lot of discomfort in the form of my internal judgment and holding
myself through the disappointment of anyone I had
unconsciously set up this care-taker dynamic with. The
unconsciousness pattern of saying yes to everything anyone
wanted had to be consciously broken. The pattern createdanxiety and limitation in my ability to respond to other people,
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caused me incredible suffering, and made me in-effective in theworld because my energy was scattered everywhere, to
everyone else in my life. The pain I felt for a year of two in
completely breaking this pattern was nothing compared to the
pain I felt from playing it over and over, year after year, in a spiral
of despair and lack of fulfillment from life.
So our willingness to step out of the known and into the
unknown, to take new actions that we havent taken before often
comes from the acknowledgment of the amount of suffering we
are causing ourselves by playing these strategies out over and
over. It is the coming into awareness of the anxiety that was
created inside of me by worrying about whether I was doing
enough for others for them to like me that became the stimulus
for me to change. Bringing awareness to the places that you feel
out of integrity is the greatest motivator for having the willingness
to change them.
This book will inspire you to become bigger than your
strategies. From a place of purpose you will learn to explore your
inner structure, understand where you are in your own journey of
mental, emotional, and physical integrity, and become fluid in
untangling any limitations to letting your Spiritual Integrity shine
through.
At the end of each chapter we share specific tools and
practices. We call these explorations to support you in entering
this work with a light heart and a big does of curiosity. You are
welcome to read through the entire book first and then look at
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the explorations, or read the explorations and do them one at atime. Make them work for you!
INITIAL EXPLORATION
Strategies and Willingness
Spend the next few days witnessing your strategy. How
does it play out in your life? How does it affect you? Play with
being inspired by the brilliance of your strategy, not overwhelmed
by its strength. Notice how it served you in the past, knowing as
you gain awareness of the ins and outs of your strategy, you are
gaining power over it.
Ask yourself: Are you willing to learn to live beyond your
strategy? Are you willing to break a long chain of ancestral
patterning? Are you willing to take the risk to do what needs to
be done so you can live from your integrity in every aspect of
your life? What do you need to do to cultivate more willingness?
Finding Your Purpose
Two ways to find your Purpose:
1. Do a writing exercise, asking the question What drives
me, what is my passion? What am I passionate about?
After doing the exercise, cross off everything that
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involves getting something from another person. Nextcross off anything that is a reflection of what others think
about you. What is left will be your purpose. If nothing is
left then go back and look at what feeling state inside
yourself that you are trying to create with your actions
toward others. That will be the lead in to your purpose.
This might be a word, a sentence, or a paragraph that
embodies your passion.
2. Do a 3-5 day Vision Quest. No food, out in the
wilderness, alone (or in an empty room with no
distractions if you cant arrange wilderness). This is the
old-school way. Pretty much guaranteed you will know
what is important to you and what is garbage by the time
you come out. See Tom Browns book below for more
information on how to set it up.
Resources for Finding Your Purpose
If you need more resources try the methods in Tom Browns
Vision Quest, David Deidas Way of the Superior Man, James
Redfields Celestine Prophecyor Lance Secretans Inspire.
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Chapter TwoMental Integrity
Making Your Mind Your Ally
Mental integrity comes when you release your judge and stop
punishing yourself. You view yourself with compassion instead
of criticism. You learn from your mistakes gracefully, and canquiet your minds chatter so you consistently hear your own true
voice.
For most of us, the mind is not a helpful ally on our
journey, but more like an obnoxious tyrant that taunts us and
constantly tells us where we are falling short. While our minds
are designed to help us move through the material world, to
figure out how to do things, and to look after the survival of our
physical bodies, most of us struggle with various types of mind
torture: comparison, judgment, victimization, projection, fear, and
disaster thinking.
A mind left to its own rule is rarely in the present
moment. If you watch your mind for a few hours you will see that
your thoughts jump from past to future, crazily trying to keep you
safe by pointing out all the bad things that have happened, or
telling you all the bad things that could happen in the future. Or
you spend your time fantasizing about how it was or how it might
be, without opening your eyes to what is in the now!
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Your mind has taken center stage, telling you that yourstrategy is your integrity, and that what it perceives day to day is
the whole truth. Not so!
Our fundamental mistake is that we identify ourselves
with the mind, rather with our boundless essence. We have
given over the control of our perception of reality to a tool that is
only one tool in a vast toolbox of consciousness. We then called
this tool me and left behind our vastness. This limits our
existence to a narrow band of vision, and buries the light of our
essential nature.
To access your Mental Integrity, you must completely
rewire they way you relate to your mind. The mind out of integrity
runs you. The mind in integrity is a tool cradled by the warm
hands of your awareness.
Mental Integrity means knowing to your core, not just
with your mind, but with all aspects of yourself, that you are not
what you think you are! Your vastness cannot be contained by
thinking. Creating space between your little mind and your
spiritual essence is the first step towards reclaiming your
integrity. In many traditions this is called cultivating your Witness,
finding the still small voice, or detachment.
To systematically rewire your mind to support you on
your journey to Mental Integrity, it helps to have a model to map
where you have been, where you are going, and how to get
there.
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The Spiral Path
Toltec teacher Gini Gentry first introduced us to the
concept of the spiral. She was using the idea of a spiral to talk
about how when we are learning to speak our truth we go
through different periods where different things are true. For us it
became a model for describing all the different aspects of our
path toward personal awakening, including our path to mental
integrity.
The Spiral is the best visual form and concept we have
run across as a model for incorporating this idea of constant
change into how we conceptualize our spiritual path, our path
toward integrity and awakening to our true potential and
essence.
The Spiral gives us a beginning point and an endpoint.
The loops of the spiral help us see that we are involved in a
process, and that process has stages (designated by the loops
of the spiral) that are both independent and at the same time
connected to the overall path.
By taking this to heart we can build a roadmap to
achieving full inner and outer integrity. This spiral path can also
be mapped onto any individual process we are moving through,
whether it is our coming into integrity with our mind or emotions,
learning to speak our truth, dealing with past trauma, or how we
work through our issues around power, money, and control.
As with all models it is a picture of the truth, not truthitself. As such it has limitations. A model cannot describe every
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individual situation, or take into account crossovers betweendifferent issues. It can give us a powerful place to start, and a
way to place what others have learned into an easy to
understand format to use as a guide for our own development.
Walking the Spiral
The fundamental nature of this place we find ourselvesin, this world of form and spirit, is one of change. Change is the
one constant we can point to. Everything is in flux and change all
the time throughout our lives. Much of the fearful illusion we lead
our lives in is based on the unfortunate idea that we can
somehow find a place of stasis in our lives where nothing is
changing, everything is stable and secure and safe. Such a
place does not exist! The function of this reality is change, it is
simply not part of its design to stay motionless and static. It is a
dynamic, mysterious, and wonderful place, and it is ALWAYS
changing.
Once we grasp the nature of change the next thing we
need to understand about the spiral is that different things are
true at different points along it. Our point of perception changes
as we move along the spiral, thus our whole frame of reference
changes as well, making things true that before were false and
vice versus. Truth is a verb! It is completely based on your frame
of reference as to whether things are true or not true.
Lets look at perception in terms of color for a moment. If
each loop is a different color then the world is totally flavored by
that color while you are in that part of the loop.
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So when you are in red the whole world is red. Theworld is not green or blue, because the framework of green is
not available yet, so you cant take it into account in your
perceptions. Thus the actions to move through the red part of
the spiral are different actions than you will need to move
through the green part of the spiral. The tools you will use and
the actual things you will need to do to continue your growth will
change over time. You must have the fluidity to change with the
situation or you will inevitably get stuck in dogma and tradition for
the sake of tradition instead of as an honoring of what was done
in the past.
Working within this spiral model fosters internal flexibility
and compassion towards others and self. No one is better or
worse, we are all simply at different parts of the spiral of change
and transformation. Another gift of the spiral is increased
knowing about where to apply your energy, based on where you
are on the spiral.
The spiral of the mind starts with complete unconscious
identification with the mind and our strategies, and moves
through three loops: honesty, acceptance, and clarity, before we
wake up as pure presence, a state of no-mind, where our mind
dissolves into the ocean of pure awareness.
Mental integrity is not about being at the end the spiral,
but honoring where we are in the spiral and doing our work to
continue to move more and more towards pure presence. When
we show up with ourselves where we are at in our process, and
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can witness with love the various stages of our own evolution,we are in our integrity.
The Spiral of the Mind
At the beginning point of the spiral of the mind we
believe everything our mind tells us. We unconsciously live outour strategies and beliefs, and do not realize that we are filtering
everything we perceive. We absolutely believe we are our mind.
So how exactly does the mind run this show, anyway? A
part of your mind is memory, a part is awareness of your body, a
part runs the body, one half creates things, and the other half
catalogues things There is all this stuff going on, yet there is
something we identify with as me, as this is who I am. That
part of your mind is what the Toltec call the internal dialogue.
Psychology calls it your ego, yogis call it your little self, we call it
your Center of Rational Attachment Problem (CRAP for short).
Just kidding! Lets settle on internal dialogue, as this describes in
a real sense what exactly is going on.
This internal dialogue maintains your sense of I or self.
It is you constantly talking to yourself, telling yourself who you
are (stupid, fat, not enough, too muchthats just brilliant isnt
it?), what is happening (as if you didnt already know!), and what
might happen (most of which it is wrong about). In short, it is a
non-stop, mostly cyclic loop of thoughts that you decided you
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needed to do at some point to fit in with all of these lunatics youwere surrounded by.
We create our strategies early on by watching and
responding to the people around us. The problem is our mind
cleverly starts repeating all the things we need to remember to
do in order to be okay. I need to be perfect. I should be quiet.
I must stay busy. I have to fight to be safe.
Over time we start thinking that the repetitive thoughts
are who we really are, not just a momentary strategy. We
became attached to what it is saying, forgetting that the mind is
just a memory device, not something that could actually perceive
the world directly. Thats right, most people have deluded
themselves into thinking they are actually a bunch of post-it
notes!
What we miss is that our internal dialogue is always
filtering everything through our strategies. Because of this, it is
not only several steps behind what is happening in this moment,
it is seldom accurate! Most people do not realize that when
spiritual teachers talk about staying present, being in the now,
enjoying this moment, they are not talking about your mind doing
that. Your mind cant be in this moment completely, because that
is not part of its function!
The minds function is to interpret data that has come in
from your senses and present it to you in packets of information,
packets that have been separated out from the whole, packets
that it has deemed worthy of your attention. By the time the datahas come in it has been sorted, rewritten to be something
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presentable as language, then spoken back to you as what ishappening, the event your mind is yakking to you about has long
since passed. It is now a memory, not what is happening in this
new moment!
The best the mind can hope to do is to record something
where you were actually present to play back to you later.
This is a very important thing to understand, because
your mind only has a concept of the endpoint of the spiral, it has
no direct experience of it. Since the mind works to create
separation, it cannot grasp the wholeness of your being, it
cannot directly experience Spirit.
Mental Awareness
The first loop of the spiral of the mind moves us into the
realm of awareness. Instead of believing our thoughts and
strategies, we begin to question them. This questioning allows us
to begin telling ourselves the truth. In this part of the process we
begin to realize that we are not in control of our thoughts.
This dawning of awareness is the key to mental integrity.
With awareness you will learn to become conscious of what is
happening within and around you. You will feel your body, be
aware of your environment and what is happening in it, and be
paying close attention to what your mind is trying to get you to
do.
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The part of you capable of doing all of thatsimultaneously is what comes present. it is not your mind, it is
the seed of your consciousness, pure awareness.
But before we can get there we need to know more
about this internal dialogue we have placed between us and the
direct experience of reality. We need to understand that even
though it is a complete illusion, it is also a powerful force in our
lives, for we have given it the power to filter and distort
everything we perceive about the nature of our existence.
In its natural state the mind really does function like a
wave. When it is needed it arises from the ocean, exists for a
while as it performs its function, then subsides back into the
ocean. Our identification with the mind distorts this function. We
artificially try and keep the mind in existence at all times and
mistakenly tie our survival to the wave. We feel our existence is
threatened any time that identification is challenged, or any time
there are gaps in the constant flow of thoughts and identifications
we create by associating who we are with the mind.
Our beliefs form the foundation for the minds
artificial existence. (AE for short) Beliefs are the identification
and attachment we have linked to the concept of I as
something distinct and separate from the One. The process we
are involved in is the removal of the identification with those
beliefs, bringing us to a place of simple choice in the moment.
From a very young age we are taught the first lie on
which all other lies are based: that there is somethingfundamentally wrong with us that keeps people from accepting
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us fully or loving us completely. We are taught that we must DOsomething in order to get affection, love, and acceptance from
those around us. We are taught that we are not whole inside of
ourselves, and that we need to get approval from others to be a
complete and whole being.
This lie in whatever form it takes for you is the basis for
all the subsequent stories we tell ourselves about how we have
to be in the world. It is the foundation of all the strategies we
come up with to limit ourselves, to conform to what other people
think and feel about us, and to modify our behavior to be more
acceptable to others.
The only way to change these behaviors and stop
punishing ourselves is to become aware of what we are actually
saying to ourselves internally. There is no way you can change a
limiting behavior if you cant see that you are doing it. There is no
way to change the stories you are telling yourself without first
really listening to the stories. You cant get out of hell unless you
realize that you are burning and it is painful. Otherwise you dont
have any motivation to get out. You stay unconscious of the pain
and suffering and just plod along until everything suddenly ends
with your death, then you look back and think what the hell was
I thinking? Why did I do that to myself when I could have been
living in Joy and Presence with all the incredible gifts this life had
to offer?
The blessing is that we all have the opportunity to wake
up before our death. It is never too late; all we need is the desire
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to really see the truth, and we are on our way to creating changeand transformation.
This loop of the spiral is challenging, because it asks us
to face the suffering our mind is causing us with its judgments
and fear. We often spend our lives pretending that we are loving,
kind, and happy to the outside world, while we are hateful, mean,
and depressed on the inside.
We must be willing to really listen and observe what we
have created in our internal world. It takes great strength and
determination to admit to what we have created. Without this first
step, nothing else is really possible.
Sometimes it takes glimpsing ourselves through the
eyes of another to be willing to be honest with ourselves. We
may return from this glimpse unsure about what to do next, but
the peek beneath our mental chaos becomes our inspiration.
Raven and the Experience Unconditional Love
When I (Raven) met my first teacher I was incredibly
aloof and cynical about life. I had sunk to the depths of hell
internally, bored and disillusioned with life, everything seemed
empty to me and I equated that feeling with my self worth. I had
none as far as I was concerned and I hated the feeling of that.
In the world I would never admit any of this. I was
cheerful and easy going unless challenged by something. Then I
worked to force people to acknowledge what I had done forthem, yet when they did in the next breath I would negate that it
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was any big deal or that what I had done had any value. I huntedfor approval from others so I could feel some sense of worth, yet
I unconsciously chose to hang out with people who almost never
approved of me.
After a very few encounters my teacher had a
conversation with me that changed my life forever. After walking
me through what I described above he said, Raven, I know you
think you dont have any self worth. I want you to know that I do,
that I believe 100% in your intrinsic value, in who you really are,
and I want you to trust in my belief when those voices in your
head are telling you that you are worthless. He said it all with
such tenderness, with so much openness and at the same time
such a fierceness of energy and intent it truly blew me away.
For a moment I experienced myself as he was
experiencing me in that moment, and I saw the illusion of who I
thought I was so clearly. I was not the limitation of the form I had
created. I was the pure consciousness he talked about as the
endpoint. And that consciousness had infinite value and that
value had nothing to do with anything I had ever done or thought
or would ever do or think. It was eternally, infinitely whole and
would never be affected by what I thought of myself. The
experience was both incredibly humbling and loving at the same
time. I knew I mattered to my teacher and to consciousness in an
indescribable and paradoxical way that my mind would never
understand.
This was my first glimpse at what unconditional lovemight be like. Love not as an attachment of the mind, love not as
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an attachment to an emotion, but love as pure being, as divinity,with no distinction between the lover and the beloved.
From this opening, I was inspired and supported to
continue to be honest with my teacher about what my mind was
actually saying, instead of pretending everything was okay. This
cleared the way for the next two loops in the spiral, acceptance
and clarity.
Acceptance of Mind
The second loop on the spiral of the mind revolves
around acceptance. We have to re-train ourselves to stop
judging our mind, but to accept the ebb and flow of thinking. We
begin to shift our attention away from the thoughts themselves,
and into witnessing what arises without attachment.
We have to approach telling ourselves the truth from a
place of accepting what is without judgment. This takes practice!
The initial tendency is always to start seeing what we have done
and go Yuck, this is so disgusting, how could I have done this
or Oh my god, there are so many places Im out of integrity, how
will I ever clean this up? or I cant believe how screwed up this
society is/my parents are/ my teachers were. Reigning in this
kind of judgment is fundamental to being able to continue with
the process.
Acceptance allows us to find the place inside of
ourselves that can forgive what we have done and what hasbeen done to us. The truth is that we had little or no chance of
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not creating these limiting structures, since they are part of ourearliest socialization. We didnt have the strength as children to
resist them, and before now we never had the awareness to
even notice they had been created.
If we start down the road of using our truth telling to
punish ourselves we immediately fall back into the trap of the
limiting beliefs again. The judgment/punishment is built in to the
structure of those lies-- it is designed to keep you from
challenging them, and it is the first thing that will arise when you
start telling yourself the truth. Start by being kind to yourself,
accepting where you are with no blame or need to punish. This
will move you into the second loop of the spiral of the mind.
There is often a lot of confusion around the concept of
acceptance. Acceptance is not a passive state of hopelessness
about your situation. It is not a place of giving up on yourself. It
is also not some la-de-da state of everything is light and love
and great just the way it is. Acceptance is an active state of
honestly looking at what is going on, taking responsibility for it
without judgment, and working to find a place of openness and
inspiration to explore something different than what you have
created in the past.
A great experience about acceptance happened to me
(Raven) at a circle of Fire celebration in 2001. Toward the end of
this weeklong event with Don Miguel Ruiz we did a beautiful
ceremony, a spiral dance orchestrated by Heather Ash. During
this ceremony I came face to face with everyone there (some
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200 people) after having just had an incredible heart openingexperience during the earlier part of the ceremony.
For the