I Did Inner Work For 1,000 Days. Here's What I Learned.
From the inner trenches...
Before we get started with this week’s deep dive, I just wanted to let you know that Cohort #5 for Clean Your Inner World is now open for enrollment. It’s going to run throughout the summer from June 12 to August 2.
Go here to get the full details.
Here’s the type of inner work I did:
Meditation
Sensing, Looking, Listening
Inquiry
Bioenergetics
Presence Process
Ideal Parent Protocol
Inner Child Work
Superego Work
Here’s what I discovered about myself, reality, and the (epic) human experience:
1/ If you want to master the world, start by mastering yourself. You never experience the world, you only experience yourself. The more you connect with yourself, the greater your connection with the world becomes because there’s really nothing outside yourself. It’s all housed in the same Awareness that you fundamentally and truly are.
2/ Most of society (me included) are still little children trapped in adult bodies. We grow older with age, but remain at the same emotional and inner development level. This is a shame because there is so much awe, beauty, magic, preciousness, and zest that arises from living life as a real human being. One year as a real human being is worth a thousand years as a limited and dull version of yourself.
3/ Inner Work requires hard work. Building a business and making millions of dollars is light work compared to the work it takes to face yourself and become a real human being. This can only be achieved through rigorous and relentless practice.
4/ You are being manifested. There is no separate doer. There is only one primary mover that makes everything happen. Where you are is exactly where you’re supposed to be. You walk a path that is unique to you. Cherish your movie and be where your feet are currently at. Bypass nothing.
5/ The ego is not the enemy. Without the ego, we would be in a world of trouble. It’s a normal part of human development and needed for human life. Problems arise when you become identified fully with the ego and lose sight of who you truly and fundamentally are. The ego is the tip of the iceberg of who you are. Not the complete picture.
6/ 99% of performance problems are due to identification with the distraught inner child. The lens in which you view the world shapes what you experience. Most of us are unconsciously identified with the distraught inner child and view all our daily duties and goals through this lens and it’s why we struggle to consistently perform. In order to live as the adult, you must befriend the distraught inner child. Shunning it and acting like it’s not there only means that it will continue to run you from the shadows.
7/ Working with a teacher is a real saving grace. “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.” Without a teacher, I would consistently fool myself into falling victim to various roadblocks that exist on the way.
8/ The light always is. But your conditioning keeps you disconnected from hearing the call. More you work on yourself, the more your conditioning dissolves. Leaving you open to the world of magic. Only thing in between you and infinite glory is who you take yourself to be.
9/ People who believe in God or don’t believe in God are both stuck in the same boat of belief. There is no need to believe in God when you can experientially use the tool of inquiry to know God. You can penetrate ordinary experience with presence and curiosity and open it up to its deeper spiritual depth. Once you do, you’ll realize there’s two worlds running in parallel (not really, but useful to think of it this way). The world of conditioning and the real world. Most people live and die knowing only the former, but real magic and true fulfillment that you’re in search of is found by making contact with the latter world.
10/ The present moment is here to support you. More you connect with it, the greater your access to strength, confidence, power, support, love, joy becomes. The less you connect with it, the more impoverished you start to feel (suffering from fear, worries, stressors).
11/ There is a fundamental ground of Being that you connect to when you feel your feet on the floor. “Ground yourself” is a literal expression. When you feel your feet on the floor, you are connecting to the spiritual ground of Being from which everything manifests. If you ever find yourself struggling with consistency or low on confidence, make it a habit to feel your feet on the floor as you live your life and watch what happens.
12/ Not wanting to feel negative emotions cuts you off from feeling positive emotions. The heart is an instrument that plays the song of the moment. When loved ones die, it plays the song of grief. When you bring big ideas to life, it plays the song of ecstasy. Not wanting to feel the grief will cut you off from the ecstasy.
13/ The mind is not the enemy. It’s a beautiful tool that is here to serve you and the heart. Put the mind to use. Don’t let the conventional mind use you.
14/ There is no place to go and there is truly nothing to do, but to be here fully and truly. This is the hardest lesson to learn on the path, but it’s also the most important. (This doesn’t mean that you don’t ‘do’ things and just sit at home all day. It means internally you drop all activity and become one with Life’s Will which is really your true will).
15/ The judgemental voice inside your head is not you and you want to defend yourself in order to liberate the creative dynamism of Being to unfold. The voice of the inner critic is designed to keep your familiar world intact. Only by telling it to fuck off (consistently) can you open up the familiar world to the extraordinary world.
16/ What every human being craves is union with Presence. Some people think they need to make billions of dollars, fuck 100 pretty girls, and conquer the world before they can rest in presence. Others realize no permission symbol is needed and presence is your birthright. You can drop into it now and live your life as that. Making millions, partying on yachts, living life fearlessly and boldly, but never forgetting that all the juice you crave comes from who you are (presence) and never the ‘contents’ of the world.
17/ Being fearless means being able to feel anything that arises with compassion. If you’re scared of something, you’re never really scared of that thing. You’re scared of the emotions it’s going to create in you and your inability to feel those emotions with honor and integrity. Hidden benefit of inner work is you’re forced to face all parts of yourself. From shame to terror to hopelessness to emptiness to anger to frustration to hatred to pure evil. The more you do, the more you realize: “nothing hurts me anymore, I am freeeeeeeeeeeeee.” (cudi voice)
18/ Most people are not interacting with you. They are unconsciously projecting their mother or father onto you and interacting with that. Most of us view the world in the same way we viewed our parents. If your dad was overpowering and terrorized you, for example, then you’ll project your dad onto the world and be scared of the world.
19/ Reality is non-dual, but duality is fun AF too. Once you realize life is a God dream, it loses its seriousness and allows you to enjoy the gift of duality.
20/ Real freedom comes from forgetting your (small) self and simply being as your true self (which cannot really be defined). All problems you’re currently experiencing, all stressors, all worries including the imagined fear of death are tied to your small self. By forgetting yourself, all these imaginary ghosts disappear. This is the beginning of freedom.
21/ You are trapped in a maze and the only way out is by following the truth because only the truth is. The more you love and live the truth that you know (on all levels from wealth to health to relationships to inner work), the more your life starts to unfold in a light and prosperous pattern. The more you deviate from the truth, the darker and harsher the pattern becomes. Reality is lawful and truth is the saving grace.
22/ God’s greatest glory is to see man fully alive. When you sit down to meditate, the entire cosmos meditates through you. When you light up with life and live fully, the entire cosmos lights up with life and lives fully. You matter.
23/ Presence and intention are the tools of magic. Digest the past, become one with presence, and set real intentions. Do this and it’s impossible to not live out the greatest adventure known to man.
24/ The body is where all the magic happens. You are not the body, but the body is the doorway to experiencing your deeper depths. Do not transcend the body. Embody it fully instead and move into it. More you inhabit your body, the more you inhabit your life and live fully.
25/ Reality is benevolent. All problems are uniquely your own and put there to assist you in becoming a greater being. Nothing is random. There are no mistakes.
26/ A human being becomes impoverished when he/she becomes disconnected from his/her source. Man feels empty inside, but he doesn’t want anybody else to know. So he tries to fill this emptiness with the fruits of the world, but no matter how much he accumulates, the emptiness never grows full because the fruits of the world cannot fill the emptiness. Only the truth of who you are dissolves the inner poverty.
27/ If you’re alive right now, the Universe wants you to be alive. Otherwise you would be dead.
28/ Spirituality is not separate from life. It is life. Breaking your life into separate categories of health, wealth, relationships, and spirituality is cool, but not the way. It breaks the dynamic flow of life into separate chunks that aren’t really separate. For the problems you experience in health are probably arising in wealth, relationships, and inner work too. Cease breaking life into individual parts and own all.
29/ You have inner and outer senses. The more you develop your ability to sense, the more you can start to smell, taste, see, and hear the inner world. Personally, I can only see and hear at times (rare) and have yet to smell or taste.
30/ Who you truly are is not weak, deficient, afraid, or incompetent. Who you truly are is the force that lights up the sun, makes trees grow, and runs your body without your conscious involvement (breathing, digestion, sleep, etc.) Nothing else exists besides that.
31/ If you’re not sensing yourself, you’re not really here. What is here is the lowest version of you. There is a capable, responsible, highly functional ‘adult’ you and there is a ‘child’ you and a hundred different ‘images’ of you. Only by being here now can you live as the adult. When you lose touch with the present moment, an inferior version comes out to live your life through you.
32/ You need to give to yourself what you want the world (or your parents) to give to you. The world cannot give you anything. Only you can give yourself what you seek. The source flows inside you. Drown in it.
33/ Transcending human life is not the point. The point is to live a real human life. To have real relationships, to write in a real way, to build real businesses, to create real experiences.
34/ The life of conditioning is boring. Think of it as programmed code. This code produces the same reactions to the events of life. As a result, your experience is quite limited and boring. Nothing new really arises. It’s all just a repeat of yesterday and the day before. This to me is as boring as it gets. Doesn’t matter if you’re living in the matrix of the employee or the entrepreneur – both boring if lived through conditioning.
35/ I have no idea if anything I shared above is true. The more you learn, the less you know. I’ll probably change my stance on certain things in the future, but as of right now… this is where I’m at.
Thanks for reading! :-)
Your friend,
/tej