I Enterprise

I Enterprise

A guide to finding and fulfilling your life purpose

Important Caution

This book is not a substitute for medical treatment or psychological treatment of any kind. Please note that while all forms of healing are important, this book is intended solely as a ‘companion’ in the process of change in your life. It is not a substitute for formal medical remedies as may be necessary based on your need and condition whether it be physiological or psychological and you are advised to not consider it to be meant for fulfilling such a role either. The writer is neither a psychiatrist nor a doctor and the contents of this book are not intended to fulfill such a purpose either.

Publisher: Kaushal Media Corp

ISBN: 978-81-969030-9-1

©

2024 by Jay

Kaushal

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

First Edition

Published Paper Free

Made with love in India

“No matter how bad it is or how bad it gets, I’m going to make it”

-Les Brown

Thank you Les, your voice pulled me out of some of the deepest darkest days of my life, when I least expected the strength within me to overpower the darkness around me. I thank you for being the biggest inspiration when I was struggling for meaning, when I was struggling for things to hold on to.

Dedicated to the undying

Spirit of striving

For greatness

Through life’s

Deepest and darkest

Hours of loneliness

Table of Contents

About the author………………………………………….7

Introduction……………………………………………….8

Foreword………………………………………………….9

How to use this book…………………………………….14

Mission statement aka “Your Purpose”………………….16

Core competency aka Personal Power…………….……..21

Economics of Personal Power……………………………26

Commitment……………………………………………...36

Negotiation…………………………………………….....41

Contracts…………………………….……………………48

Renegotiation………………………….………………….56

Identities…………………………………………………..65

Historical data…………………..……...............................77

Internal Audit……………………………………………..83

Change…………………………………………………….88

Exercises…….…………………………………………….93

About the Author

Jay Kaushal has been working as a Life Coach for 7 years and has clocked 3000+ coaching hours working with 500+ clients from around the globe.

He is an avid blogger, vlogger, writer and content creator across multiple platforms and has a BTech in Computer Science, 2 PG Diplomas in Management and also certifications in digital advertising and sales enablement from Google and Hubspot. Jay has also studied Business Analytics at IIT Bombay.

As a Life Coach he has worked with young and seasoned professionals from all walks of life; from Doctors, Architects, Lawyers and Consultants, to Engineers, Musicians, Chartered Accountants, Marketers, PR professionals and Stock Traders.

As a Business Development Consultant he specializes in working with Small Business Owners, Entrepreneurs, E-commerce companies, Tech startups and Women Entrepreneurs.

Jay also takes a keen interest in studying ancient knowledge across ancient cultures and Sanskrit scriptures, Tantra, Spirituality, Meditation, Mysticism, Yoga and Healing. He is also a popular occult writer with a niche following from across the world.

He is also an expert mindfulness coach and meditation teacher and trains learners in a self developed meditation practice that he has built through rigorous devotion and discipline by studying meditation and self healing practices from across the world.

Introduction

If this book found you, I hope it can be the friend you need to help you understand how this entire world exists because you do.

If this book found you , I hope this is the sign you needed to believe there is more for you out there. There is more for you

Than getting up

In the middle of the night And not being able To sleep again

Because the stress of tomorrow Weighs so heavily on today

That you’re losing Even before You have the opportunity To put up a fight.

Foreword

When you listen to your favorite musical composition what do you feel? What do you feel when you are touched almost physically by the push of sounds from a violin, keyboard, viola, flute..? Each one separate, each one being produced by a separate person, each person lost in his own world focusing on just the immaculate execution of the notes in front of him?

What do you feel when you look at a painting and all its finest elements each of which have no meaning on their own but that together produce an effect no other painting can have? Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’ can be the only ‘Starry Night’. No other painting in this world, even the Mona Lisa can compare with what Starry night is.

That is your purpose.

That is what you are here to do.

You are here to reach the maxima of your expression and if it is weaving baskets that you are good at, so be it. Even if there is no one in this world who pays more than 10 cents for a woven basket, so be it. Sure you may have a family to feed and bills to pay. Get a day job if that be so but don’t give up weaving baskets if that is what calls out to your soul. If your hands move on their own and the straws intertwine magically as if they know already, their way around the frame; If it flows out from the core of your being, emptying you in the process, then that is what the universe has called upon you to do.

When you meet your purpose, it doesn’t fill you with anything. No, your purpose empties you out. It empties you out so you can connect with a higher source. Your divine purpose will empty you and evaporate your worries, sadness, anxiety and anger. Your purpose will empty you just like a flute maker scrubs, polishes and pokes holes into a piece of bamboo so music can flow.

Yes it will hurt, at first. Then it won’t.

If you believe human wisdom to have any sort of value then you need to believe that the collective wisdom amassed over millennia across different cultures has some sense to it at least. Maybe not perfect sense but some at least. Enough for us to be lead back to ourselves. Enough to help us discover what else is there. Enough to justify not walking off a cliff and killing ourselves this moment no matter how disheveled or battered your body or mind feels.

If there is a reason for you to be here then that reason is also strong enough for you to continue despite the challenges you face on the road. If there is a purpose to life existing here on the third planet from the Sun, in an average sized galaxy among billions of galaxies and planetary systems, then that purpose must also be strong enough for us to forge on despite everything.

Despite what they tell you or what you think of yourself I want you to believe there is a bigger reason for you than what you think. What they’ve told you to be.

There is more than meets the eye.

This is the resounding wisdom handed down by the wise ones who have lived over millennia and across generations of diverse cultures. That there is a purpose in all of this. That there is a reason we have been endowed with the gifts we have. That there is a responsibility towards our body and our life. That our life isn’t our own and that it was granted to us for a purpose.

That there is suffering in choosing not to live. There is suffering in choosing not to believe.

Most of all, there is suffering and we must accept it as a way of life but we must persevere because the meaning of life is far greater than suffering.

The meaning of your life is far greater than the circumstances you find yourself in. The importance of you, here, now is far greater than any of the trillions of random elements that could whack you dead this very moment. Yet it doesn’t happen that often. Why?

Zen masters believe your chores are to be taken as meditation. Sikhism believes that service is to be taken as your divine duty. Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Egyptians, Aztecs, pick any religion, any school of thought. The bottom line differs only marginally across religions.

The bottom line is there is happiness in the world.

But there is also suffering.

And why must you suffer?

Because it’s a part of existence.

And why do you exist?

Because you have a purpose!

What if I don’t fulfill that purpose?

Then you will suffer nevertheless.

Yes but what is the guarantee of that suffering?

Well, what is the guarantee of this one..?

The point is to realize that the simplest way out of the forest is to keep moving in a single direction out of the forest. You may choose to move around in circles and that’s great for as long as that rocks your boat. When it finally dawns upon you to do something about it however; to make something, create something or build something, you need to find a way out of this mess.

You need to find a way out of wherever you are and reach a better place. So they say!

The underlying thought is great but the ideas built on top of it have definitely been tampered with. They’ve been tampered with across religions and cultures but mostly they’ve been tampered with in the last few centuries since the industrial revolution happened and we all got busy.

It’s easier to believe that the simplest way out is a ‘way out’.

There’s another way though and that is the ‘way in’.

It is important to understand that both are complementary. The universe is duality and so is existence because all of existence is merely a subset of the universe not vice versa. You create nothing new but only that which already has a place in this world.

The words you use vibrate through air only because there is air to begin with.

If there is air there must also be a system of transmission or manipulation of this air.

So if there is oxygen there must be life and if there is soil, sunlight and rain, there must be forests. You don’t plant forests, you don’t cut tress either. You do nothing. You only act as an effect to the cause as you perceive it.

I say perceive because you as a human being are sentient and conscious therefore you have a deeper capacity of understanding than other beings.

You have this capacity because you are human.

It isn’t this capacity that makes you human and not everyone with a similar capacity would necessarily be human.

Why then are we violent?

Because we act in violence as an effect to the cause that is imbalance.

You could be violent because you are suffering from a psychiatric problem but even then the cause is the same, ‘imbalance’.

At a basic level, it could be that hunger has imbalanced you and you must now hunt to regain balance. It could be a competition of any kind such as sexual, regional or even intellectual. It could be as a result of natural competition such as that between siblings to survive and prosper in an environment with limited caretakers. On other occasions it could be a social, economic, political, geographic, ethnic, gender imbalance. Society isn’t homogenous and balance doesn’t last perpetually.

When you act out of your highest purpose however, you are at balance. You are at balance because there is no dearth of energy in the universe. It would all channel through you if you let it. It would all flow through you and power you on with the requisite courage, determination, grit and belief if you only knew in that moment of clarity what you aim to create.

Why must you create?

Because there is too much raw material. The entire capacity of the human body hasn’t been explored or known yet. There is a much greater capacity within you than you know.

There are sunsets waiting to be painted like that beautiful night in the south of France where Van Gough painted the famous ‘Starry Night’. There are rivers waiting to be described in poems, there are mountains waiting to be scaled and there is a vast expanse waiting to be explored.

You talk yourself out of these endeavors that touch you ever too often but not deep enough to stir you into action. Not as deep to stir you into action because they don’t permeate beyond your reptilian brain that seeks security and balance of the basic kind, such as food, mate and shelter. They don’t permeate beyond what your conscious mind perceives. At the sub conscious level maybe they do and deep down you know you want more and maybe even exactly what you want. However in keeping your attention confined to what is and what meets the eye you forget to tap into a deeper plane of existence and reasoning.

Therefore, your vast capacities as a human being lie untapped. With the decline of individual capacity comes the decline of collective consciousness. By choosing to focus on just your family, your needs and maybe the needs of your immediate community at most, you do them a bigger disservice than if you tapped into the infinite potential of what can be for everyone.

We move on through life never living fully because what we want, quite often makes no sense and what makes no sense, is quite often what pays the bills. Living this way turns a universe designed for abundance, an inherently abundant and plentiful universe in fact, into a zero sum game.

Refusing to grow and challenge yourself, refusing to find your purpose, weakens the chain of evolution for us all. How is that, you ask?

Everything around you has evolved to be what it is today because there was capacity for improvement. Greatness is therefore the maxima of your capacity to do what you can.

Yes, there has been change for the worse in this pursuit of greatness but there has also been change for the better. As long as we as individuals are committed to self growth, we as a collective unit shall continue to grow.

The day that stops is the day we stop evolving and the chain begins to break.

The biggest mistake would be to take human existence and society for granted. It wasn’t always around and it won’t always be around either. Even with the best data analysis tools, you cannot predict when something as subjective as social conscience changes in a particular direction.

It is possible that when that inflection point in time arrives you are that element in the chain upon whom it all depends. It is possible that on the last minute of the last hour of the last day that we all begin to plummet to descent, it will all boil down to how the last individual acted when confronted with a choice.

If you are out of touch with who you are, what you are supposed to do and what you are capable of doing and you are that last individual upon whose momentary judgment the balance hangs, we will fail as the collective.

Society is only as efficient as its capacity to care for the weakest. This is in fact how archaeologists and anthropologists determine how advanced a civilization was or how advanced a society was in a particular instance in time.

In advanced societies, human or animal, the pattern of caring for the weak is quite apparent. However, in declining and immature societies alike, there is greater proof of the weak and injured being left to die.

The question is: If as human beings, our biggest differentiation from other species is intellect then are we going to ignore all individuals who do not have the capacity to think beyond just their immediate circumstances?

Surely that isn’t a recipe for survival.

Surely the mark of an evolved human race, the mark of greatness must be a society that tends to the needs of intellectually and consciously stunted individuals with the same urgency as that of the physically distressed.

To do so, the starting point should naturally be you the individual.

The starting point should be ‘I’.

The starting point should be catering to the ‘I’ with the same rational, logical and reasonable set of values and decision making as if it were not merely an individual but a microscopic representation of the entire social structure defined around it.

We live in times when money and corporations dictate most things. Socialism and Communism for all their merits haven’t proven to be viable. Capitalism at its extreme on the other hand, tends to be apathetic and disconnected from the reality and struggles of the common man.

It is time therefore we each become the CEO of our own lives and run it with the same practical and analytical approach as the CEO of a successful enterprise. You are not just an individual. You do not have to do it alone. You are within you, a full blown enterprise. Your enterprise manufactures services to humanity and the raw material it uses is the only universally irreversible finite resource: time!

How to use this book

Within the pages that follow lies the capacity to change your life if you let them.

They say you must test a teacher thoroughly before you accept his curriculum. Once you do, you must surrender and realize that any process of learning if thoroughly surrendered to has the capacity to transform your life.

Consider this as the point when you take that decision.

Now, if you are still reading, then I promise you the journey ahead will change your life for the better. Even if it is a simple book you bought at a bus stand or a regional newspaper you bought at a tea stall to bide your time, what you believe in and immerse into has the potential to lead you to light.

If you let it.

If you read what is written within each module word for word and take the time to have internal conversations about the same, you will learn at the very least a fresh perspective of how to approach your personal growth journey.

If you do the exercises at the end of each module and do them honestly, giving them the time and effort they deserve, I can assure you that you will be able to establish a working and robust system of moving forward no matter where you are in life.

A system of moving forward in your journey of self empowerment, self love, self belief and self growth. A journey of coming home to who you are and who you are meant to be.

At the very least I believe this book has the potential to help you take another step in that direction. Maybe it will help a few of you go all the way. I cannot say. It isn’t for me to quantify how far or how much one needs to move in the direction of his or her higher self. All I know is if you can begin to understand better that there are ways that work. Ways that can help you move forward and use them to experiment moving forward with, you will move forward.

You will have an experience. It may not be that life changing experience you always wanted but at the very least it will be an experience in that direction.

So please commit to the journey. There can be no progress without commitment.

Buy a journal and use it to journal your answers and musings through the course of the exercises that follow at the end of each chapter or section. The exercises are all placed at the back of the book labelled in order. This is done to ensure that you can read the entire book in one go if you please without any interruptions.

If you are new to journaling, feel free to check out my free life coaching course ‘Live Limitless’ on my YouTube channel “Jay Kaushal”.

There I have explored and explained the three essential elements of my coaching methodology: Journaling, Support Groups and Meditation. They can form a good base to everything covered ahead.

Now, the length of the book has been kept short and crisp for two reasons:

Firstly, at the very least, if someone should come across this book on a day that he or she is free and with no pressing engagements, they should be able to easily finish the entire book in a single reading. It shouldn’t take more than a few hours to do that.

Secondly, the concepts in themselves are just food for thought for the reader as the bulk of the work will have to be done at the reader’s end. The bulk of the introspection and reflection will happen through journaling during the course of this journey. Journaling your responses to the module-end exercises in particular.

In time, I shall be holding live sessions on Instagram to discuss these exercises or I shall be posting them on my blog on coachkaushal.com

If you want to reach me personally with ideas or suggestions, I would be happy to receive them. My email address is contact@coachkaushal.com

Love, Jay

1. Mission Statement aka Your ‘Purpose’

“The purpose of your life is to live purposefully”

Unlike what they tell you, no one is born with a purpose. Not so much at least as a tree synthesizes light, water and carbon dioxide to create oxygen or a bullet leaving the nozzle of a gun moves towards a target.

Human beings are driven by a force much more complex than other co habitants on this planet. It is the capacity to envision life for the individual as well as the collective. Within each human being lies the potential to change the destiny of the entire human race. This is what makes us special.

An especially enlightened elephant may not be able to convince others in the herd to follow in his enlightened footsteps. Animals, no matter how intelligent are unable to break away from the more basic instincts that connect them to and dictate their survival.

Maybe someday in the future, chimps will evolve beyond baser sociological behaviors that relate them with men, such as waging wars, and advance to something greater like in the movie Planet of the Apes. Hopefully not!

But if there does occur a primate revolution I hope it is a peaceful one like Gandhi’s and Mandela’s revolution. Then again, there was just one Gandhi even among billions of human beings. There hasn’t been another Gandhi since. Even Mandela truly embraced the path of peace later. There have been many who claim to know the panacea for human suffering but is only the greatest that have the consciousness to understand an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.

Even the most gifted Orangutan however, wouldn’t be able to convince his friends to resolve matters peacefully. Human beings are the only ones gifted with the capacity of transforming billions with a single spark from a single member of the society. That’s the intersection point of individualism and collectivism.

Individualism is no different from conscious collectivism in the same way that what is good for a tree in the evergreen forest is good for the rest of the forest too. If you doubt it, imagine a tree

succumbing to a botanical virus and then imagine another falling prey to a structural anomaly that causes it to bend and twist into other trees. Imagine a forest where each tree suffers from a defect that is unique to it and you will realize the forest becomes more or less unsustainable.

A sustainable forest can only consist of trees where each one is healthy and robust. Where each one can bear its own weight and grow enough to keep up with the rest and maintain the uniform canopy and ecosystem. Imagine a forest of trees where there is no uniformity because some trees just couldn’t grow as high and strong as the others and you will realize this makes it impossible for other species to reasonably exist.

A group of chimpanzees swinging from branch to branch would fall randomly to their deaths because there would be no uniformity in strength or structure.

Am I talking about a socialistic view of creation then?

No. That perspective would potentially still find balance in all trees being just as stunted as long as they are all the same. It may or may not see logic in every tree growing as far and high as possible. It may not see logic in every tree rising as high and stretching as wide as its neighbor.

And so when we talk of society, there is logic in every human reaching his personal maxima and the bottom line of society being raised along with a collective striving for personal greatness.

Reminds me of the first prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, who on being asked by an American editor on what his legacy will be to a country of 400 million replied: “Hopefully my legacy will be a nation of 400 million capable of governing themselves!”

So let me burst your bubble with a ‘utopian realism’ when I say that your purpose doesn’t matter so long as you are successful in realizing your highest potential for personal growth. Do whatever you can, grow in any way you can. Financially, spiritually, intellectually or physically but grow!

Whether your purpose is to become the greatest social media influencer of all time or the president of the most powerful country in the world, a doctor, lawyer or painter, the fact remains. Your purpose is realizing your highest potential and to reach that stage, you must dig, dig and keep digging until you find gold.

If your circumstances and your intellectual, material and physical nurturing have only afforded you the opportunity to start your career flipping burgers at a burger joint then that is where your purpose is. You don’t have to retire doing that but whatever you evolve into be shall grow out of how you do what you are doing this moment. You won’t magically land yourself an internship in NASA without working hard on whatever your school, undergraduate and post graduate curriculum demand you do.

You won’t magically become a great film director one day if you haven’t built your work ethics along the way no matter where you started. If there are obstacles in your path then they become your path. It is your duty to embrace those obstacles with the same fervor and tenacity as you

would deal with challenges arising in your workplace working as the CEO of a Fortune company.

The presence of mind and foresight you would build running your own food truck could tomorrow translate into the confidence and management skills that set you apart as the head of a sales team. Understand therefore that ten cannot come before zero because zero is where you start.

Once you master zero however you join it with any number you can imagine and its value becomes ten times!

That is the power of slaving it out and weathering the storms in situations as you encounter them. If you can’t weather the storms at level one you can’t weather the storms at level ten.

Your purpose is not given to you..

Your purpose is revealed to you if you have become worthy of it!

If you’re drifting through life never focusing on the job at hand and carrying it out to the T, I can write it on a piece of paper for you and you can frame it and hang it on your bedroom wall that you will never be able to amount to anything of substance. Your legacy will just be a legacy of unfulfilled potential and broken dreams.

Sure, destiny may have planned for you to become great but you will never ‘claim’ that because you have to meet destiny half way.

No power in this world can help you remember something you haven’t first read. Unless of course it is the hand of God upon you. Unless of course, it is like the story of Gabriel lending the power of reading to an illiterate Muhammad. Even then you must realize, God helps those who help themselves. Even in that story Muhammad had been meditating in a cave for weeks in the first place, trying to connect with a higher power.

Even miracles can only meet you half way but you need to realize that you are that miracle. Your purpose is born of your expression of free will into this world. It emanates from you like the sound of thunder from lightening.

Then again, there can be no lightening and there can be no thunder unless there is a storm. When you launch yourself into and embrace the storms of life you appreciate and understand the power of expansion at your disposal.

The power to grow, the power to expand, the power to destroy the obstacles in your life and your constructs of what you are capable of and what you are not.

When you encounter problems, you struggle to find balance. When you struggle, you push yourself to be able to survive. In that fight for your survival you gain insights into your ‘personal power’.

The more you struggle, the more you realize what you are capable of. The more you realize how far you can stretch yourself. The more you fail, the more you realize what is out of your reach and what can or cannot control you. This knowledge is priceless.

People run away from failure and convince themselves to pursue simpler and lesser goals that neither excite nor challenge them thereby resigning to a life of defeat and slow decay.

People run away from learning these truths about their greatest potential because the thought of being proven wrong scares them.

If you only venture as deep into the pool as is easy to stand up in at the first struggle to stay afloat, you will never truly realize whether or not you know how to swim.

To learn and truly learn how to swim such that if you topple over a bridge and into a canal some day and are able to save yourself, you need to learn to swim in the deep end.

People whine about not knowing their purpose in life but you look at them and you see they want to explore their personal power, their hidden potential but from the comfort of their arm chairs.

Then you look at these other guys who are doing just as bad, who are pursuing goals way beyond what they are capable of, carrying a delusional idea of an impossible victory.

The right approach is to take risks and also learn continuously. Take the risk of betting on your learned knowledge during the process. Have a big heart to withstand defeat and an open mind to accept there is always more to learn.

Finding your purpose isn’t something you can do in just an online course, seminar or by reading a book or listening to motivational videos. If you think that just by reading this book you will find your purpose in life, let me tell you, you won’t.

At most you will be able to move in a direction towards that goal. At most you will be able to move with a greater conviction towards the pathways that your heart already knows are meant for you but your mind doesn’t believe in, yet.

Finding your purpose is like consciously putting yourself through BASIC training again and again and again until finally one day it doesn’t break you. Make no mistake; the process of self discovery is all internal. What you do in the external world, is test the self knowledge you have gained with the internal dialogue.

You keep setting targets; you keep trying to achieve them. You fail, you learn and you try again. You keep setting targets, you keep encountering problems in the pursuit of those targets and you keep getting stronger and stronger.

You keep running on the same track again and again but in different ways and with better technique and better practice, better conditioning until finally one day you clock 9.58 seconds on the 100m run bettering your 9.63 and you are the fastest man ever.

If you don’t approach problem solving with the same conviction and dedication as if you are already where you envision yourself to be, you can’t grow beyond where you are now. You can’t

become better, you can’t do better and you can’t become deserving enough for that unicorn.. your purpose.. to reveal itself to you.

You keep at it however and one day, you encounter a completely different problem, a problem others can’t solve but one you know naturally somehow how to solve and you do!

That is the day you have found your true place in the world. That is the day you have realized what you are here to do. If the pursuit of your current goals does not lead you to greatness then let it go. Do something else but don’t mistake letting go for slacking. Do whatever you do two hundred per cent. You don’t know when your purpose will reveal itself to you. Even if you think you do, you don’t. Think of it like Thor’s hammer. Only the worthy can wield it. In the same way, your purpose exists in a different dimension where you can only go when you are attuned to your higher self.

Greatness doesn’t mean winning a Nobel or becoming a billionaire. You could be a great teacher in a small school in a village, a teacher however to who most attribute their success and accomplishments. It doesn’t matter then if you sleep under the moon and the stars and eat bread with onions and salt because greatness is truly yours.

Do not let people talk you out of the pursuit of your personal greatness just because it is going to be inconvenient. Do not let debt, disease, divorce, hunger, depression, alienation, isolation, age, finances, education, intellect, failure or self doubt get in the way of you singing the song that your soul calls out to you to sing even if you sing out of tune.

The devoted know god, the ardent find him and the humble become like him.

There is nothing more humbling than the pursuit of your highest purpose, your highest goals and ambitions in this world. There is nothing more humbling than braving the journey of self discovery. Than finding out exactly who you are, with your limitations, powers, capacities and strengths.

Every day you wake up and compete against yourself.

Every day you fail or win, you go to bed and vow to do better the next day.

The next day you do better and then you vow to better your best.

You keep going and one day you most certainly fail.

One day you most certainly hit a wall.

And that day, that wall becomes the challenge that really counts.

It counts the most when you believe you do not have it in you to surpass it and you do.

It counts the most when you believe it is the end and you are proven wrong.

It starts however with you being proven wrong again and again and again about what you are truly capable of.

“Today is difficult, tomorrow is even more difficult but the day after tomorrow is beautiful. Most die tomorrow evening.” Jack Ma

2. Core Competency aka ‘Personal Power’

“Personal Power comes from self knowledge”

What is your Personal Power?

Your personal power is the expression of your ‘will’ in the world. It’s how you express what you desire, out in the world.

Being able to envision, perceive and define what you want from life comes from your Self Concept which is dependent to a huge extent on your Self Awareness.

Self-concept is the idea of who you think you are and a lot of it depends on other people’s feedback to your self-expression. Self-awareness is how accurate that idea is.

At low values of self-awareness, your self-concept is like a fun-house mirror version of yourself, often-times grossly idealized, but in some cases, quite the opposite.

At high values of self-awareness, the reflection of you in your self-concept looks more like the real you. Flaws, strengths et all in accurate proportion.

The more you are within your ‘personal power’ the more ability you have to increase your self awareness and subsequently iterate your self concept to better match incremental states of self awareness.

Your personal power is the connection you have with your internal resources to be able to bring about the necessary change in your circumstances and life situations to express your purpose in this world to the highest degree.

No one can reach a state of self realization and be completely in sync with their spiritual purpose or highest purpose without multiple iterations within their self awareness and self identity. This is where your personal power becomes critical to your development on the material as well as the spiritual plane.

Your personal power is your ability to take action to reach the highest possible state of self awareness wherein the highest state would be a state of perfect reconciliation with your soul’s desire in the world.

As with any sort of power in this world, expression of your personal power will be met with resistance from the world. This resistance can come from various quarters; it could be from your family, your circumstances, your physical body or spiritual blockades.

Different people have different ways of getting in touch with their highest purpose. Some people take the path of perfect surrender to the divine will such as in ‘Bhakti Yoga’. Others take the path of penance such as in ‘Tapa’ or self suffering through denial of worldly comforts.

Either way, the idea is to expand beyond the personal limitations you perceive through your limited self awareness.

As your self-awareness increases, you become more aware of the personal resources at your disposal such as a high level of intelligence or superior athletic skills. Your personal power can also be better utilized and increased to be able to evolve beyond the limitations of your past karma.

A lot of people have used this term for various purposes however the basic and most intrinsic meaning of ‘personal power’ always gravitates back to this: your power of choice or as we say famously in religious terms: ‘Free Will’.

The more you exercise your free will, the more free will you develop and the more free will you develop, the more problems you encounter because when you exercise your will, you’re in uncharted territory.

However, the biggest prize that comes with it is an incremental access to your self-awareness. Meditation is certainly one tool that helps in developing self awareness to a huge degree but even there, how much you meditate is your call. It’s your personal power you are exercising by committing to meditate 5 minutes every day, 7 days a week or half an hour everyday 6 days a week.

Most people stop exercising their will because beyond a certain point the problems that crop up with each thrust of personal power so to speak become exhausting and discouraging to deal with. It’s a lot easier to just ‘go with the flow’ they say. The point is, there’s a difference between ‘surrendering to the flow’ and surrendering because you choose inaction over action. While the former is a conscious decision that retains your personal power, the latter just fritters it away through non committal evasiveness.

However, exercising your will is not without consequences and its share of risk. My assessment is that self realization occurs in 9 stages. No matter where you start and where you are, you are constantly participating in this cycle. We all start somewhere and we all settle somewhere but settling somewhere is almost always the result of taking a leap, slipping off the ledge and then sliding down to settle at some point.

This ‘point’ is always changing because there are always risks associated with each action and they are incremental in nature. You can’t just ‘settle’ at a comfortable position in life. You can, but that’s another way. You would then have to exercise your free will each day to be at rest in state of total calm and surrender, disconnected from the perils of modern life.

This then, would again be an exercise of your personal power or free will.

It’s important to highlight as well that given a choice, we would always like to have what we want. It’s when we don’t get what we want in the first go that we have a decision to make; whether to go after it again or settle where we are.

So basically, your personal power in Newtonian terms would be to continue to remain in a state of rest or motion unless there are external forces of nature that nudge you otherwise. Obviously this isn’t and cannot be absolute as you are bound within the laws of nature which means you need rest, nutrition and that you’ll decay with each breath through mitochondrial action that releases energy and helps you synthesize your food.

Long story short, even if you chose ‘conscious inaction’, you would still at regular intervals, have to actively make a decision to survive or not. Let’s assume you entered a cave and began meditation. You can go as deep into meditation as you want but your body is rooted to the reality of this world. You would have to decide to which degree you want to support it by feeding, cleaning and resting it when the stimuli appear.

Therefore, the 9 stages of self realization coming ahead are pretty much universal no matter where you are in life. We are constantly engaging in this internal dialogue of decision making more or less along these lines as explained ahead.

9 Stages of Self Realization

Risk Aversion Phase

See, most people aren’t willing to bet on themselves and find the idea of chasing their dreams too ‘risky’. People will risk living in pain their entire life, constantly dreaming instead of risking the pain of failure in the path to building their dreams. It all begins with being averse to the necessary risk involved in self improvement. It all begins with you not having the necessary faith in yourself to achieve the life your mind knows you want, to feel fulfilled.

Disempowerment Phase

The result of this disempowering mentality is that people begin to cut corners in every area of their life. They just don’t feel they possess the power to do anything extraordinarily. “So why even bother?” they tell themselves. This mentality begins to creep into every area of your life like a disease. You begin to slack off at your job, your domestic responsibilities, social duties, your health and relationships. It’s so slow that you never even notice it.

Downward Spiraling Phase

After continuous risk aversion and disempowerment, you get so out of touch with your capabilities that life launches into a downward spiral which keeps pulling you further and further into the pit of dissatisfaction and denial. By this point, your dreams remain just that.. ‘dreams‘. A fictional idea of a life you could have had if only you’d stepped up to the challenge when you had the chance.

Denial Phase

In time, you become cynical of anyone and everyone trying to achieve their dreams and goals, and you become skeptical of succeeding at even trivial aspects of your life. You begin to radiate negativity in the environment around you and people just don’t want to be around you anymore. Of course, you don’t realize at all what’s happening because you’re in denial that you are the source of your frustration.

‘Crab’ Phase

Finally, this downward spiral leads you to pull other people back from achieving their goals like a crab pulling on the leg of another crab. This is because you know consciously or unconsciously that if others ‘make’ it, your own lies will be exposed. Your negative beliefs will be put under the scanner by everybody you’ve constantly been lying to and blaming for your failures.

Moment of Truth

Despite your cynicism, when someone from your life such as a friend, sibling, rival, goes for it and achieves her dream, your psyche is jolted awake to the reality of your life. At this point, the

walls of your denial stand breached by others’ success. You can no longer live peacefully in the bubble of denial you created for your life. Deep within you, your lies stand exposed to your own self. You can either break free from this cycle of failure and change drastically or break up from your self completely.

Self Denial Phase

If you don’t break free from the cycle of disempowerment at this stage, you begin to break your relationship with your self. You plunge into the emotions of self denial and self hatred. You begin to drive away anyone who can help you because you begin to feel that the pit you’ve dug yourself into is permanent.

With each passing day, you begin unconsciously to feel undeserving and unworthy. You begin to feel that you deserve your pain and that “Pain is a way of Life”.

You begin denying yourself basic pleasures you reasonably deserve or indulge too much in them and this manifests in extreme ways. Toxic relationships, Obesity, Self Harm, Drug Abuse, Accidents, Addictions, Overwork, Drastic Austerity… everything bad you can imagine.

No matter what you think, your drastic actions aren’t going unnoticed by people in your life. They are in fact, unconscious cries for help that the people in your life can see but your relationship with the self is so damaged by this point, you push away anyone who can help you.

Loss of Identity

At this point, a huge transformation occurs. It was imminent. And now it is permanent.

‘Drastic’ and ‘Massive’ don’t begin to describe it nearly enough. You will either rise from your ashes and turn over a new leaf or you will make the wrong choice and plunge into a permanent identity loss with extreme consequences.

People abandon their family and never return, fall into drug abuse, undergo indiscriminate sex change, religion change, sell off all their assets, fall into crime, fall into psychosis, schizophrenia… everything drastic you can imagine.

Establishment of New Identity

If you reached rock bottom in the ‘loss of identity’ stage and chose the right path for yourself, you have gifted yourself a new identity. The old identity has fallen away and this new identity shall grant you another chance to do things the right away and achieve personal greatness. This new identity is more in alignment with your inner truth.

However, if you made the wrong choice, this new identity will have to undergo the entire cycle of failure once more! What we are talking about here is… a life time of perpetual pain.. running away from the primary pain of self improvement…

3. Economics of Personal Power

“Time is a finite resource. Ration it.”

Einstein is considered one of the biggest geniuses of the 20th century because he saw something no one else had ever even thought of before. Once this new thought was introduced, physicists built up over it so extensively we wonder how they envisioned the universe before it.

Einstein introduced the relevance of the fourth dimension: ‘Time’.

Time, ladies in gentleman is the biggest differentiating factor between where you are right now and where you could’ve been. Time in fact, is the difference between who was where you are this very moment in the past and who will be right here in the future.

Think about the chair you're sitting in right now. It can definitely have its location accurately described by those three spatial coordinates familiar to us: x, y, and z. This chair, however, is occupied by you right now, at this exact moment in time, as opposed to yesterday, an hour ago, next week, or ten years from now.

In order to completely describe an event in space time, you need to know more than just where it occurs, but also when it occurs.

Basically, think along these lines on a more simplified perspective: If you wish to move through space you cannot do it instantaneously; you have to move from where you are right now to another spatial location, where you'll only arrive at some point in the future. If you're here now, you cannot be elsewhere at this same moment; you can only get there later. Moving through space requires you to move through time, too.

Long story short my friend, in layman’s terms, here’s how I want you to think about time from now onwards:

“You could always be somewhere else, doing something else. Everything you’re doing right now is keeping you from doing something else and being somewhere else.”

So everyone that you give your attention and time to, you need to get a decent enough energetic ROI or you’re just draining yourself of the energy you need to reach your goals. You need therefore, to learn to ration your energy resources well and remember that every event that you

are causing in the present moment is also resulting in a chain of events that will reach into your future and that you will have to deal with on some level.

You’re creating your future with every single second that ticks away. The present is actually just a fleeting feeling because we’re in the future with each passing second.

The idea is to utilize your time as if it is the only resource at your disposal. If you really think about it, money is just a byproduct of time not vice versa. If you could live forever you could out earn everyone that ever lived.

Chances are, if you had put as much money as you have in the bank today, in a tax free retirement fund when you were born, you would’ve been able to retire a millionaire a few years from now. In fact, depending on your current net worth and age, maybe even a billionaire!

Makes you think differently now about what you spent last afternoon doing, doesn’t it?

How you spend time has a direct effect on your personal power. You are either consciously spending or ‘investing’ your time into your life to reach your highest of objectives and attain the highest of goals or you’re unconsciously squandering away your power in a state of intoxication.

This is why indulgence in sex, alcohol and hallucinogens is looked down upon and considered taboo in many cultures because they take you away from self awareness rather than towards it. However, both have their role similar to that of sleep and quite controversially, there does seem to be a right way for indulgences but we’ll discuss that later.

The basic idea is for you to be very mindful of how you’re spending your time and if you are well rooted within your power to mindfully invest your time doing something that helps you ‘lose your self’ for a while within a limit, you are still in control.

If you find yourself struggling to walk straight after your fourth drink or skipping an important lecture because the hot girl from section C winked at you and told you she needed your help with her assignment, you’re at the mercy of anyone in that moment who is in their personal power.

You know how we are sometimes on a roll in life and then suddenly there happens some event somewhere where we just begin losing it? It all starts with having a bad day then a bad week, then a month, a year and ultimately you’re just hurtling down the proverbial stairs and you’re so beat you’re praying to reach the bottom because you don’t have the strength to hold on to anything anymore.

What do you think happened to you when you were cruising along in life firmly rooted in your personal power?

Well, a situation came along, such as drinking at a bar with your friends or skipping an important lecture you knew you needed to get to because of an attractive classmate who swindled you to ‘better plans’.

And you lost awareness.

Once you lose awareness, anyone at that moment who is firmly within their own personal power can completely over power you and manipulate virtually everything from thereon. This is how you get into toxic relationships and this is how you get into toxic commitments that drain you for years at a time.

Ever noticed how some friends are only around when times are good and nowhere to be seen when times are bad?

Yup, those people are the people, good or bad, who are firmly within their personal power and are using it to help/ use you.

This is also why there’s a famous quote:

“When the student is ready, the teacher appears. When the student is truly ready, the teacher disappears.”

If you’re lucky, someone powerful will come along to bring you into your personal power and leave when their job is done. Such people are highly centered and perfectly in sync with the source of their personal power. As an example, think of the Iron Man and his bionic heart that powered his suit or think of Yoda and ‘The Force’. Yes, it’s something like that.

They are so well connected with their source of personal power that they’re operating through time-space like a hummingbird. Instinctively making decisions, interacting with people and associating with the right energies to always stay firmly on course and maintain a heightened state of self awareness.

Think of a swan gliding across the lake without leaving any ripples behind. That is a lot what being connected to the source of your personal power feels like. A complete Zen state where you have perfectly reconciled the irreconcilable ends of your being and found the perfect balance to make them work.

I say ‘Make them work’ because no state of balance is ever perfect. Perfect balance is always a continuous state of arriving at perfect balance; which means you are on the edge of balance and imbalance yet perfectly at balance. Complete stillness would mean no energy at all and that would be lifelessness therefore perfect balance is less like an eagle gliding for hours and then flapping its wings but more like a hummingbird gliding across the garden flapping its wings at a hundred beats a second and flying forwards as well as backwards.

And so, if you went out of balance with your personal power and ran into a number of power swindlers at that precise moment, you’ll pay a lot more than you were ever ready for.

Sometimes it isn’t even swindlers, it is normal people who need what you have more than you do and get it as well because your energy is not powerful enough to hold on to what you lay claim to. It could be anything, money, possessions, position, people.

Most of the time people who lament that a ‘new guy’ took their place in the office or team just got pushed out because they weren’t holding on to what they had powerfully enough. They were too weakly rooted in their power and somebody well-centred just walked into their life and asked

them to do what they wanted to do, have everything they wanted to have, and they just gave it to them!

When you’re well centred in your personal power, you can look through people’s lies, you can see through people’s intentions and you can pretty much predict events in advance.

It’s because your personal power connects you at its highest form to your spiritual purpose, your highest purpose in this world and gives you the most ‘self awareness’ to reach that purpose and take the necessary action to chart your own course in life.

So here are a few things to consider as the economics of your personal power:

Invest your personal power in ‘growth making’ avenues.

Be ‘available’ to other people only when you truly want to be available.

Associate with other people who cause you to raise your vibration

Part 1: Investing your personal power for growth

Time is many things and it just changes as you change the point of reference or perspective for it. If time is a finite resource, to put it more specifically in economical terms, time is, for the factory of your worldly achievements, a perishable commodity. The value of the time you have on your hands is fast deteriorating. You have only a certain window of action within which to utilize time in your favor and make it work to your advantage.

Therefore, every single activity that you engage in, right from deciding whether or not to smoke that cigarette or whether or not to skip gym, remember that to get a good enough perspective of the value of energy you’re investing in it, you need to evaluate the effects against the most important parameter of measurement of value of action i.e. time.

Smoking a cigarette is injurious to health and that is an established fact. However, smoking a cigarette is also robbing you of fifteen minutes that could’ve been spent being engaged in another activity that would yield a payout compounded with time.

What other activities can you think of, off the top of your head?

Well, meditation is one. Look, you’re taking ten to fifteen minutes to smoke and add to those fifteen minutes of walking down from your office to the smoking area and the fifteen minutes walk back to your office. That is about a half hour you could’ve spent doing something way more rewarding to your personal power.

You could use that time to meditate and feel more centered within yourself. This would definitely aid the development of a higher self awareness which is where we’re trying to head in the first place.

You could also use the same time to check up on your investment profile or take a walk listening to whatever kind of music pumps you up and then use that momentum to go talk to that handsome guy from the second floor office, that you’ve really been meaning to ask out for the past few months but have lacked the courage to. Maybe because your confidence and comfort is tied too much to smoking and you’re smelling of Lucky Strikes when you are in the right frame of mind, probably stinking of cigarette tar at the height of your confidence.

Or, you could use this opportunity to drop into your boss’s office for some ‘advice’ and use that opportunity to form a better relationship with him and maybe get a few more details about his ideas on the quarterly marketing strategy for your region. Tell you what, if you drop in to his office regularly like that new guy who’s been ‘sucking up’ to him, maybe you could become his blue eyed boy and get promoted as senior manager to Susan’s sales region. Susan who?

Susan, who got appointed the new VP Sales of Asia Pacific Region 90 minutes ago.

Now the obvious question here is what if you have the kind of boss who likes to smoke and others who smoke are closer to him because of it than those who don’t? Should you start smoking to hang out with him more often? Isn’t that a great investment of your personal power? Isn’t that giving you compounded returns for your investment?

Well, any situation that is keeping you where you would rather not be, is a toxic situation and it’s draining your personal power bit by bit whether you realize it or not.

The best utilization of your personal power in an organizational culture where people are bonding over toxic habits, is to invest your spare time in finding a way out of there... ASAP.

Obviously though, as I said before, indulgences have their own place in life. Your job is to ensure you keep them at their place. Maybe you like to smoke a good cigar with a drink to relax. I cannot be a judge of what you prefer to indulge in but I can tell you this, be very mindful of these little indulgences. Detach from them every now and then and switch them around with something else. That way at least they don’t control you to the point you’re creating time for indulgences instead of when you have some time to relax.

Part 2: Be available only when you truly want to be available

If you observe, even in wild animals, the mother won’t feed her children until she thinks it is time for their feeding. Lions, Chimps, Giraffes, Cows whatever.. you’re not getting fed no matter how much you wail unless it’s time.

Take the same example with the Earth and farming. Even with the best fertilizers and the best genetically modified seeds, the best soil and every scientific progress made by man, there is no way to just grow crops for you at your time line. The universe will provide, the universe will deliver you with its bounty but not before it is time. There is a gestation process involved and you with all of your wailing and complaining cannot bypass that.

That’s how it works. Even rivers ebb and flow with the seasons and so does the light of the Moon. Even the signals to your satellite TV are off sometimes and you need to wait for them to be better synchronized with the satellite and the receiver until services can resume.

Even then, there are times during the year where it just isn’t possible and you simply must wait a certain period depending on your location until the satellite can position itself suitably to be able to relay the signal.

The human body is a lot like a heat engine and energy is continuously being generated and spent. As much as it is important for you to be mindful how and where to utilize this energy, it is important to be mindful of how you interact with other people’s energy.

Any imbalance introduced in your energy system can imbalance you in trying to balance itself out. As we discussed before, bringing yourself in a state where you deplete your personal power can also put you into submission to someone else firmly rooted in their personal power. This can have a wide range of consequences on your life that could be as trivial as missing an important phone call to major shifts such as losing all your savings in one night of gambling.

Boundaries need to be put up on the inside and not the outside. The ideal scenario is for you to resist answering the phone when you don’t feel like it rather than having to silence the ringer or put it on offline mode. However, if the imbalance has gone on for too long, it might be a while before you can do that. Until that happens, don’t feel guilty about exuding external boundaries such as turning off your phone after working hours or blocking troublesome accounts on social media.

Just know though, ‘healthy boundaries’ are internal and firmly rooted within the expression and concept of who you are and how you choose to experience life. In the same way that even the best biotech advancements cannot reduce the human gestation period of 9 months to 3 months, we cannot force our personal power to replenish at a faster rate than it will.

We cannot force our energy to cleanse faster than it needs to after interacting with say a sick or depressed person and we cannot force our physical body to replenish faster than it needs to.

In the same way, if there is an imbalance in some of your relationships, it won’t solve itself as soon as you recognize it. It will take time for it to balance out and in that time, you need to withdraw yourself and stop giving to the situation.

Part 3: Associate with other people who cause you to raise your vibration

If you move a magnet over an iron rod continuously in one direction, you will realize that you have magnetized it. It’s science really not conjecture or voodoo it’s just how vibration works. See there are tiny regions called ‘kernels’ in a magnet that are all aligned in a particular direction and that is what causes a magnet to attract or repel.

A normal iron rod with no magnetism of its own can become magnetic just by strategic interaction with a magnet moving along its length. It’s that simple!

Now, a magnet can also lose its magnetic power if say you put the north poles of two magnets together and leave them like that for a considerable amount of time. Similar demagnetization could be achieved through shock or damage.

Your energy system has a magnetic field of its own and every interaction with the energy of your body, called the ‘aura’ has the effect of raising your vibration or depleting your energy and your personal power.

Interacting with people who deplete your personal power will progressively have the effect of your aura being shaken whack off its alignment and your confidence depleting, self awareness dropping and ability to ‘follow’ through on your higher purpose taking a hit.

Basically, whenever you say Yes to someone or something when you would have liked to say No, you are doing to your energy field the equivalent of rubbing a magnet the wrong way with another magnet. This is something that you probably won’t even realize that you’re doing for a while if you’ve been doing it for some time. The same thing happens when you say No while you wanted to say Yes but didn’t because you probably chickened out.

With a single instance of saying no when you want to say no or yes, when you want to say yes whichever way you can manage to do so, will begin the process. Maybe in the beginning this would only be accomplished in a more practical and less idealistic way using outer boundaries such as turning off your phone or going no contact with the problem individual, but it will ultimately lead you to a situation where you won’t have to take the crutch of outer boundaries. Soon enough as you begin to streak these events up and listen more profoundly to which individuals you really want to say yes or not to, the feedback that you will get from yourself for saying yes when you really wanted to say No would be the equivalent of somebody hitting a bell with a gong.

Only that this is more of a figurative bell we’re talking about but still a very reachable, tangible space inside your mind which is the Inner Voice or the Intuition. This is precisely how so many successful professionals, entrepreneurs, artists and performers have been able to achieve a lot more than what their circumstances initially afforded them.

There is a trail starting where you are right now, leading you exactly where you want to be but you need to align your energetic compass to lead you there.

This energetic compass is your intuition and the more you drain your personal power in trivial pursuits and disrespecting your own boundaries, the more that compass will lead you in the wrong direction causing you to ask other people for the right way which will only further subjugate you to their whims and fancies.

We spoke earlier how time is a finite resource. Well, some people are just there to keep you from getting where you need to get in your time. There’s nothing bigger to waste therefore than your time doing something you don’t want to do or being somewhere you don’t want to be with someone you don’t want to be with.

That is why you absolutely need to place urgency on saying no when you really cannot say yes and also having the courage to say yes when deep down you want to say yes.

4. Commitment

“You are respected when you keep your commitments.”

Being able to say no when you want to say no may be the foundation of how you spend your time more efficiently. Having firm inner boundaries may be a byproduct of the more ‘conscious’ approach of how you spend your time. However after reviewing the solutions to the exercises of the last module, you may have realized that there just are some people in your life that you need to always be there for.

This set of people which varies from person to person but is ideally small enough to incorporate the fact that on a given day you may be the one disproportionately giving to all of them. On the other hand, this group must be large enough to incorporate the flipside that on another given day you may be the one who is disproportionately taking from them. The challenge lies in the dynamics being manageable enough such that your entire support group isn’t a liability to you when they need your help and when you need their help, you can ask them out for it without being a sizable ‘liability’ to any of them.

This set of people are your ‘pit crew’, your ‘inner circle’, your ‘homies’ so to speak, they’re your ‘A- team’, your support group.

Think of this group of people as an exception zone subject albeit to ‘fair use’ of your personal resources and power.

These are the people who are headed in the same direction as you or share the same core beliefs as you and/or form an integral part of your personal environment. They should more or less be able to grow with you so that they don’t drag you back when you’re putting in the work to move ahead in life. If your support group constitutes people who do not believe in the same values as you and aren’t committed towards personal growth irrespective of the career path they choose, they will just fall away. Also, keep in mind growth is measures mentally physically spiritually. Just because someone isn’t growing the same way or at the same rate as you on the physical plane, doesn’t mean they are not growing at all. If someone is growing spiritually and that is where their priorities are, you will still be more or less at the same energetic level. For example, a friend may not have the same IQ as you do but their EQ is so good that they are indispensable.

However, if people from your support group are no longer at the same net energetic level as you, they will ‘fall away’ like those additional rockets fall away when you’re trying to put a satellite in space. They boost you and take you to a certain point but if they can’t keep up with you, harsh truth is like it or not, they just fall away or fade away from your life. The reverse is true as well

and if you analyze your life you’ll see that there are so many people whose lives you too faded away from in a similar fashion.

The trick is to understand that you are an enterprise. Therefore, stop thinking of yourself merely as an individual with a personal agenda. The idea of reclaiming your personal power stems from the idea of boosting your self-awareness. The idea of raising your self-awareness as we discussed before, is the idea of uniting yourself with your soul’s purpose, the highest vibration of your purpose in this world as a human being.

When you function out of that frequency, your actions are invariably aligned with the highest good of mankind and this planet as a whole. That is what you are striving for even if your highest vibration aligns with becoming the best stock broker on Wall Street or the best quarterback in the NFL. Each one of us has a role to play and as we spoke about it in the previous chapter, each one of our actions has a ripple effect in our life and the events of the world.

Therefore, we will broaden our vision and awareness about who you are. You may be functioning solo but you’re a full blown enterprise.

And if you are the enterprise continuously involved in the business of manufacturing a superior service to humanity while utilizing the raw material of time, your support group are the management group helping you in the day to day operation of that machinery.

Now, your support group may not know the exact vision you have and they may not know the exact economics of the operation or trade secrets such as why you ‘click’ and what makes you stand out. However, your support group, like any management group will go through tough times when the enterprise goes through tough times and they will go through good times when you, the enterprise, go through good times.

It is important to know here that you are a part of the support group of all these people who are a part of your support group and so on and so forth. We are all connected so as to aid each other’s journey in self realization. That is the entire point of our existence on the material plane. Even if you don’t think in terms of reincarnation, you cannot deny the importance of ‘energy’ because we have a scientific basis for that belief today.

It would also be foolhardy to assume that your support group will always remain the same. Since we are all connected and form a part of each other’s support groups, you have no control over the people in the support groups of members who are a part of your support group.

Toxic beliefs and patterns in the support group of one your close members could possibly be bringing them down and lead them to break away or rather fall away because they no longer match your energy.

Then, it is also possible that your energy matches the energy and vibration of some members of an extended group and you are instinctively drawn to them and therefore, ‘vibe’. The point is, people will move in and out of your support group. The show must go on and the enterprise must keep running.

Your path to self realization must stay firmly on course and you can lift the people up around you and the people around you can lift you up but only to a certain degree. After a while, if the vibration doesn’t match, you just fall away into a lower orbit or into a higher orbit like an electron high on energy.

Now, what is the glue that holds a support group together? What is the glue that keeps a set of people together despite the odds and despite the personal circumstances and conditions, situations?

Have you noticed those people who are considered an integral member of the support group of a large number of people and somehow manage to maintain good relationships with people of opposing beliefs?

What is the magic formula that they’re utilizing here?

What do they have to offer to others that makes them so desirable?

How do they manage to maintain their personal power, their boundaries and their sanity?

Well, the secret element to maintaining any connection is ‘commitment’. Human beings have evolved to integrate security in their lifestyle in order for them to grow better. Living in social groups, graduating to farming from being hunter gatherers and having ‘jobs’, it’s all about an inherent need to be more ‘secure’.

So, ask yourself what is keeping your marriage intact despite the hiccups, the fights, arguments etc.? Analyze your oldest friendships and see what has been working for you despite the ups and downs through the vagaries of life?

The most important aspect in keeping any relationship strong is ‘commitment’.

Remember how setting personal boundaries was nothing but following through on commitment to your self?

That is how your relationship is with others. It is in many ways a direct reflection of your relationship with your self.

People who are considered reliable and committed are the people everyone wants on their team. Often these people have the problem of putting others before them and falling out on the commitments they make to themselves.

Now someone who can keep the commitments to himself as astutely as he can keep commitments to others is an ‘influencer’ in his or her circle or community. By influencer I don’t mean the new age social media meaning of the term but in the literal sense of the term. Such people have great influence and a far reaching influence at that.

Why is that?

Well, for starters, the interesting paradox about commitment is that it quite often means saying yes just to follow through on your commitment, even when you want to say no.

And it makes you say yes all the way, every day, all day, as long as you made the commitment for. First you make the commitment and then the commitment makes you.

While that can be energy sapping, it can also be extremely empowering after a brief learning curve when you learn which commitments to make and which to steer clear of.

If you made a commitment to your son to be there for his football match, your stocks as dad will dive big time if you can’t keep that commitment. As a result, this will have an instant or direct influence on your relationship with your son. Going back on your commitments makes you appear weak and it also brings you down in the other party’s eyes.

The biggest display of personal power is to be able to follow through on commitments no matter how difficult the circumstances, as a way to demonstrate to yourself what you are capable of. Do not consider it an unimportant trap or activity.

Commitment is an exercise leading you towards self realization.

No human being is regarded a person of virtue if they go back on their commitment. As an extreme example consider the Pope suddenly deciding one day that this lifestyle isn’t for him.

Imagine him going out on the famous balcony in the Vatican and declaring to his followers that he has decided to get married, raise a family and restart his life on a lighter note, somewhere in a warmer climate at that, living a simpler life sans the responsibility and the drama.

So maybe he ends up happy with his new found realization but then what about the people who formed a part of his support group, the people who formed a part of their support group, so and so forth? You cannot possibly imagine the colossal damage to the lives of people connected to you when you go back on your commitment. The bigger your persona, the bigger the damage of going back on your commitment.

Make no mistake about it, you are the leader of your support group.

Your soul’s mission, your purpose in this world is your ‘enterprise’. It is your brand. For you to realize your purpose in this world, for you to walk and stand firmly within your personal power, you need to gain access to a higher self awareness and then take the necessary risks to build upon it and challenge yourself to grow.

In the pursuit of this purpose, the people associated with you are making this journey with you and so are the people associated with them and so on and so forth.

When you abandon your commitments, you abandon an opportunity for personal growth even though it may very well have come at personal price. If you keep your mind open you will realize not all parts of you are supposed to make it to the next level. We are always changing and evolving as human beings and therefore some personal ‘prices’ are necessary prices to pay.

So when you go back on a commitment, you surrender your personal power and then you are at the mercy of anyone who is around you and who is within their personal power to manipulate you whichever way they see fit.

So what’s the solution?

Do not make commitments you can’t keep or you will lose people you want to keep in your life.

Here are a few things to always keep in mind when you make a commitment to anyone in your support group:

You might have to keep this commitment even if you fall sick. Would you be able to manage that?

You might have to forego other opportunities of growth and/or pleasure in order to keep this commitment. Would you be able to manage that?

What you’re committing to may not turn out in any way similar to what you think it will. Can you manage that?

Now, it is important to understand that being in your power doesn’t mean you need to be a jackass and dictate how things will be or won’t be. Quite often, when it comes to your support group, you will continuously be put in situations where you will sometimes have to commit to doing something for them against your wishes.

This is just ‘give and take’ because quite often they would be doing things for you against their wishes to support you or be there with you or just to give you company. After doing the exercises to the previous chapter you may have realized how it can be possible that there are people in your life that you are taking from disproportionately as much as there are people in your life who are taking disproportionately from you.

Remember that “None of us is as strong as all of us.”

Your soul purpose is not above or below the highest purpose, the soul purpose of any of the members of your support group. Strength lies in reciprocation and reciprocation stems from commitment.

Commitment flows from duty and duty is a form of love. If not the love for the person for the highest purpose of existence then, which is ascension of us all, of humanity. However, there needs to be a measure of how much to say yes before you say no even if it is duty or love.

Well, the easiest way out of it is to commit or make a ‘promise’ only when you realize you might have to give everything else including running into your favorite celebrity at a the mall and spending all day with him… just to uphold your commitment.

Well sounds a bit extreme doesn’t it?

It is, that is why, there is a priceless skill everyone must learn irrespective of their profession, age or natural aptitude for it.

That skill is.. ladies and gentlemen.. drum roll please..

The art of negotiation.

But before we get there, as usual, an exercise.

5. Negotiation

“Two kinds of people: Successful people and those who don’t know how to negotiate”

Negotiation, likes sales, is a life skill. People are stuck in situations they desperately want out of, conditions that don’t suit them, serving sentences on promises that are no longer relevant; living somebody else’s life.

We live in two extremes in the modern world where uncertainty is bountiful.

The first extreme is the set of people who absolutely don’t honor what they say. Their word is trash. It has no value and you can never trust them. Even for something as trivial as feeding your fish for the one night you’re scheduled to be away, these people just lie about doing it. They say yes to everything and then don’t do it. I call them the ‘false affirmative’ type.

Then at the other extreme are the people who say no to just about everything. Their reflex response to any request is negative. I call these people the ‘negative type’. They aren’t ‘negative people’ to be around. They just have a negative perception of reality and the future that prevents them from committing to anything. Even things that are well within their grasp or ability, they will just say no to it.

But then there’s the third type lying in the middle of these extremes which is the ‘negotiating type’. They focus on the outcome any commitment will generate and then negotiate the input based on the situation.

These people may say no to you at first and then go ahead and do your laundry for you anyway or say yes and then make excuses to minimize to whichever extent they can to reduce their commitment. These people have a dynamic view of reality and changing situations. They mould their actions and gauge their commitment to relationships, causes, interests and actions based on the cut everyone walks away with at the end of every deal.

Now, most people ignore the value of negotiation in building a successful marriage, a successful partnership or even raising successful children. Negotiation for most is a harrowing process that most professionals like Doctors, Engineers Architects etc. have no reason to master therefore they suck at due to sheer negligence. Then at the other end are the salesmen, the lawyers and the politicians who are having a ball negotiating on their feet with people who succumb to pressure inside one minute.

Ask yourself when was the last time you were asked to do something and you asked “Why?”

See “Why?” is the biggest step and the first step to any negotiation. ‘Why’ challenges the status quo as the proposer of the problem perceives it.

For example, your wife comes to you in the middle of the day on a Sunday when you’re busy watching the final of the football world cup and sipping beer.

“Honey do you have a minute? I need to talk to you.”

How do most people respond to that?

The reflex response we’ve learnt to generate in all relationships is the Yes/No response. You either say yes or no and there are relationships to guarantee the health of which you never say No such as the relationship between a boss and employee and husband and wife.

Most people who are responsible spouses will respond to this simple request for ‘having a word’ in the middle of the game, with a Sure/ Yes I’m listening.. or some might mute the television, more attentive ones might turn it off and then there are those who fancy playing on the edge who will just turn a deaf ear and say “Later”.

The right question here is to ask “Why?”

And why is that?

Well, anything at all you say after committing to the conversation will only put you at a disadvantage. You will lose both the comfort zone of watching the game comfortably and being involved in the solution of a problem that might well be you.

The most important question is a simple Why? What happened? Is everything ok? Is everything fine?

We give other people a lot less credit than they deserve. We just assume they are being careless or even rude sometimes by interrupting us in the middle of something we don’t want to be disturbed doing. Truth is that people, especially people nearest to you, in your support group, know a lot more about you than you think.

We would be a lot more willing to give people the benefit of doubt to begin with if we just knew we could negotiate any situation to retain our personal power and still do the right thing. To still be able to keep our commitments, be available to our support group and say No when we want to say No.

The thing is, to learn to shift our perspective towards the other person’s needs. Sometimes people really do need us bad enough to invade our personal space, our personal boundaries and our emotional space. Sometimes they do need us so desperately and they feel left out of our lives so desperately that they seek desperately to just find a way even at the cost of disrupting our inner balance for a while. Look it’s only fair because like it or not, we’ve all been there!

Returning to the example, by assuming that you really are needed by your wife and justifiably enough at that to be interrupted right in the middle of your favorite activity at rest from a long

week, you’re giving her the necessary attention she needs first up and then negotiating from there to remain within your personal power. (Right now the priority is the world cup final!)

If the problem really is a pressing problem that needed urgent attention, you’ve just scored yourself brownie points with that reaction and gained a strategic advantage in getting your spouse to open up to you better.

If the problem was a trivial problem that really shouldn’t have interrupted your game time but it did, the response from the other end to your heightened care will be met with care and you’ll be able to defer it at least till break time.

Here’s the thing to remember:

“People always respond in kind. This is a life skill more than a sales skill but a sales skill nevertheless that salespeople across the world have mastered to sell you expensive stuff over the phone on the first call itself at times.”

Let’s consider two scenarios following from the above:

Scenario 1

“Honey.. I need to talk to you for a minute.”

“Why? What happened? Is everything ok? Everything fine?”

“Oh yeah, I just wanted to say you left the shampoo bottle open..”

“Oh I’m very sorry about that. This won’t happen again. Did it spill? I’ll just go clean it up.”

“Oh no.. it’s ok.”

“Thank you so much. Just five minutes.”

Scenario 2

“Honey.. I need to talk to you for a minute.”

“Why? What happened? Is everything ok? Everything fine?”

“Well, the fridge broke and your parents are going to be here in half an hour.”

“Oh thank god you found out. I’m on it. Give me five minutes.”

Both ways, you get to watch the final ten minutes before half time without being judged. Most importantly, you get to stay within your personal power and within your personal balance as you do whatever is required in the moment with complete focus and mindfulness and trust me… zero resentment.

The kitchen could just as easily have caught fire and that is why your wife was calling you and you’ll be ready to respond to it appropriately. You would be ready to respond because you aren’t assuming things, you are responding wholesomely, staying well within your personal boundaries.

Remember that boundaries should be internal not external? Yes, that’s what this is.

Once you start applying this you’ll notice people begin to take you and your time a lot more seriously because they know you don’t joke around and you don’t encourage it either. What people don’t realize is that negotiation is not about power dynamics or manipulation or being petty.

Negotiation is about looking after yourself and being consistent. When you’re consistent in a relationship, any relationship you are in is taken seriously and this prompts the other party in the relationship to also be consistent because in a negotiation the other party always responds in kind.

When was the last time you picked up your team mate’s slack on an assignment and he reciprocated by helping you out on a chore at the domestic level? Logic says that someone may be incompetent at the professional level but competent enough at some other aspect of their personality to be able to help you mitigate a crisis in some other area of your life.

Remember what we talked about before? Your time is limited. Invest in people but invest wisely. Negotiation is understanding that your time and energy are finite resources and if they are squandered away without reciprocation beyond a certain point, you are in a dubious, uncertain or loss making investment.

You may as an investor, hold on to a few wild card investments in your portfolio but only a few because any more than the critical point will multiply your risks possibly even returns but gambling is never a viable strategy… in life as in money.

So the next time your below average team mate pleads you to pick up his slack in the workplace and you comply because you’re very good at what he does.. and times are bad, he probably won’t find another job if he gets fired etc.. remind yourself the company could be paying and should be paying at least half of his salary to you but isn’t.

Times could suddenly be tough for you tomorrow and if they are who will you turn to for help?

Well, it makes sense that it be the person who is costing you those precious minutes that you’re investing continuously into him without returns.

So here’s what could take place:

Joe: Hey Phil, I need your help on this project. I’ve never worked with this sort of data before. Can you please help me out?

Phil: Oh yeah.. it seems like it’s going to take a bit of time.

Joe: Really? I thought you were a master at this thing.

Phil: I am but this particular data set will take a bit of time to comprehend properly. The entries seem to have been done a bit arbitrarily and we need to ensure there are no errors.

Joe: So then? What do we do?

You: Well, I’ll take care of this but you’ve got to take care of ___ for me. It’s important and I won’t be able to do it today if I do this.

The idea is to never say Yes when you wanted to say No and the last thing you want is to get into a commitment you don’t want to.

But let’s examine, why do we say ‘No’ to things? We say No to things because our resources are limited right? Time is a resource. It’s a perishable item in fact. It’s just ticking away and it won’t come back. If we all had infinite time there would be no competition because we would have no drive to drain the Earth of all its resources and beat the other person to the top or across the finish line. Unfortunately that is not the case.

Therefore, we must say No from time to time because surviving in itself takes so much of our time. From bathing, grooming, laundry, washing the dishes and cleaning the apartment to commuting to work and dealing with other people’s problems who are close to you, there’s tons of stuff that leaves you gasping for breath.

So instead of saying Yes! and being passive aggressive about it later, or saying No! when maybe they could’ve genuinely used your help to accomplish something that they genuinely couldn’t have done on their own.. Just give them the option of doing something for you that balances out the resource use so you stress later and remain on track.

If someone doesn’t want to give you something in return for what they want then you’ve caught a cheater, a miscreant who’s trying to game the system by hoarding the one necessary resource: time

A person who games other people to do things for them while not doing anything for in return, is actually still making a trade.

Everyone is negotiating first get that straight. Everyone.

Even a mother is negotiating with her new born child on when he gets to suck her nipples dry. So is the child because he wants all the nourishment he can get and more. All of this is happening constantly around us and none of us actually ever notice it until we realize the singular resource that everyone is trying to play with: time.

It isn’t money. It’s time. Money is just a way to buy time that’s why people want more of it. That’s all. As I said before, I can give you a million dollars to enjoy in the last ten years of your life and you’ll still die a happy man but there’s no way I can give you 10 years of your life back with the love of your life.

So the so called ‘selfish person’ is actually negotiating with you in return for something that they think is precious that they bring to the table. You just don’t know it because you’ve never tried to negotiate with them. If you do, you’ll be able to analyze and understand people in a whole new light.

For example, your indirect superior in a team, let’s say the team leader has a habit of making you jump through extra hoops. The hoops you need to jump through to impress the Manager, the hoops you need to jump through to impress the upper management plus additional hoops to jump through to impress him.

Maybe he has been doing this for a long time and you never negotiated because you didn’t mind early on because you were new to the office and had a lot more time on your hands. Now, as time passed a new status quo was defined in which you became the star member of the team because of the fact that the team leader was so demanding of you.

Now, every time the occasion comes up to be promoted, somehow you never get promoted because why would you? You’re the MVP of the team and how would Bill’s team be the best team on the floor without its MVP?

Thing is, he has stopped recognizing the fact that he’s stopping you from growing by preventing you from taking charge of another team. He can’t see either that most of his duties as the Team Leader are actually being executed by you.

How did that happen?

Well, Bill thinks he made you. Bill thinks he took a rookie on the floor and made him the MVP of his team. You are where you are because of how demanding Bill is with you. Since you never objected, it just went on like that. Sometimes Bill would hand over the occasional game tickets that management gave to him and you reinforced this idea in his head that he was taking care of you. Well, this happened and that and now here you are standing in Bill’s office on Christmas Eve, catching up on his work while Bill is off vacationing with his family in Hawaii!

Now, someone would ask why doesn’t the management see it? Why doesn’t the manager see it and promote me? Give me my own team? Or make me Team Leader?

Good point. It’s status quo again.

You see, Bill is a great negotiator. You may be more talented at what you do but he knows that to get something you only have to ask. Bill’s team turns in the most profit among all other teams on the floor. Bill saw you and pushed you and made you the star of the team and simultaneously conveyed to management that targets are going to be over achieved this quarter. Bill made the Manager believe Bill was doing him a favor by improving his bottom line and sticking to his commitment while predicting the same in advance.

This happened for a couple of quarters and now no one would dare touch the winning combination. The manager thinks he owes Bill. You think you owe Bill. Bill thinks everybody owes him because he gets the job done.

How does Bill get the job done.. really?

By making everyone believe they owe him something!

That my friend is how you negotiate your way to the top, anywhere.

However, the thing about negotiation is the tables turn ultimately. You need to always be renegotiating the status quo because we live in a dynamic world. Our realities aren’t static they’re forever changing. In this scenario, let’s say you want to change the situation to ultimately be given your own team or replace Bill.

Replacing Bill is almost impossible in the eyes of the management. Why?

Is Bill the most talented? No certainly not.

It’s because if Bill were replaced then the status quo shall have to be renegotiated with everyone in the corporate structure of the company.

The Manager would have to renegotiate terms with you and the Senior Manager would have to renegotiate terms with the Manager and the Senior Manager would have to negotiate terms with the Area Manager and so on right up to the VP.

Negotiation is a gradual process. It’s not an overnight deal or a discount blitz. It’s bit by bit measuring the ground as you move forwards or backwards with another person until you each have covered just enough ground to be at a firm balance at least for a while. If the negotiation doesn’t end in a snug agreement it won’t last in which case it wasn’t a negotiation it was a proposition that was accepted and just made to work until it could hold up.

A temporary balance is no balance at all and no balance is every really permanent. Therefore, you need to constantly rebalance every situation not to be in a situation of power but to stay balanced within your personal power. That is the crux of negotiation.

6. Contracts

“Work with your contracts not against them.”

‘Contracts’ in our spiritual journey are the same as contracts in our material journey. It’s easy to dismiss events and relationships at a superficial level and just go through life carrying the perspective that “things just are the way they are and there is nothing more to them”. The other approach is to learn to look at things more closely and to try and understand the importance of what is happening to us through the patterns we find ourselves in continuously.

Heard of the famous phrase “Follow the money”?

It’s a lot like that in life as well. Follow the time you give to things and people in your life and you’ll understand who are the people you have contracts with in this lifetime carrying on from previous cycles of existence energetically.

As I said, time is a resource and money is just a subset of time. In fact, we are pretty much traversing here with the idea that time is the most important resource of all which is why everyone just wishes they had more time. When they think time can’t do it for them they rely on money to help them rise to the top in the scheme of things.

But we have debts to pay. Think of them as energetic debts or past life debts.

You can try to retain your personal power as much as you want but if your life path, your soul’s mission in this world is entangled with someone else’s, you can’t free yourself unless the contract is executed and the debt is paid off.

So take a hard look at your life. Just sit with yourself and analyze things for as long as it takes you. Are there people in your life that you just can’t seem to outgrow no matter how much you raise your energy, no matter how much you negotiate?

Or are there situations in your life where you just ‘find yourself’ all the time due to some reason and no matter what you do, are forced to make peace with?

See, we can be mindful of time being a resource, we can be mindful of using it and investing it wisely and we can learn to negotiate, we can learn to commit and build a solid support group to help us run the enterprise but if there are contracts that need to be honored, there are contracts that need to be honored and you can’t wiggle your way out of them. It’s just business.

You can however, renegotiate contracts; in the spiritual domain as well as the material domain.

This is where we will now take a more spiritual turn in our approach over the next four modules, to reconcile the ‘finite’ idea of time and this body with the ‘infinite’ concept of energy and universal power.

You see, the universe wants to give you what you want by default.

Think about it for a minute. You have evolved to be as you are today in a journey spanning millions of years to be better adapted to the planet in such a convenient and powerful way that now we’re all worried who will save the planet from us!

Even scientifically speaking, the entire universe is just built around cause and effect. Some effects arise from causes millions of years apart such as in evolution or petroleum but then look at the scale as well. Seems pretty justified don’t you think? Not a fluke or coincidence at all. Why then does it seem so preposterous to say that the ‘universe gave it you’ in response to what you ‘asked for’.

It gave a whole species opposable thumbs just to be able to build tools to hunt down their coinhabitants many times their size, I think there’s a pretty solid cause and effect relationship being executed here not much else.

At a spiritual level, your existence on the material plane is just to enable you to experience the simulation as best as is needed to enable your soul to grow. Most of the eastern cultures describe it to be so explicitly, and this philosophy finds special relevance in Buddhism and Hinduism.

Even if you don’t believe in religion or even spirituality but do acknowledge the presence of a higher power, you can relate with the basic idea of evolution wherein our purpose here as a species is to continuously improve our DNA to ensure our survival on this planet.

In this process, it is quite possible that we fail to overcome some challenges in nature or in our social behavior, collectively as a species. Meaning therefore, whatever we heal in ourselves, we transfer the knowledge of the same into future generations in the form of information transmitted via DNA.

In spiritual terms, this implies whatever we heal in ourselves, we heal in the collective; even if unconsciously we are all connected to the collective consciousness by virtue of being subsets of the ‘super-consciousness’.

Therefore, if any singular individual is creating conflict in your life, it is not he or she who is the cause of the conflict but you. If a singular repetitive life situation is ruining your life, only you are to blame. The flipside to it is true as well therefore which shows us that the problem we’re faced with is a problem we must solve not just for our growth but for the growth of the collective.

Remember that famous quote “Maybe God assigned you the mountain so you could show the world that it can be moved” ?

It suddenly makes so much sense in light of this new perspective doesn’t it?

Now, moving further, if you heal yourself of the self sabotage pattern you face continuously, you heal the people connected to you, you heal the space around you and heal the collective consciousness of its shortcoming.

Think of it like solving a software bug in an open-source software. If you’re facing a bug continuously maybe it is because you’re trying to push the software design in a direction no one else has pushed it before and you must learn to deal with it until you solve it, fix it and in the process make the whole program stronger for having solved and fixed a glitch.

But in order for you to be able to do that, you need to ‘renegotiate your contracts’ so to speak.

Renegotiating your contracts is in many ways similar to rewiring your habits or your patterns. It may sound complex but it’s actually quite simple. It may sound easy but it’s actually quite difficult, which is why we’ll do this in four steps starting here until the final step which is change.

So how do we accomplish this renegotiation?

First of all let’s go over a recurring pattern you’ve been stuck in life time and again. What is it? Maybe you always find yourself broke or maybe you somehow always find yourself in an abusive relationship. Maybe it’s both!

The easiest first step of inquiry is to analyze the direct consequence of this situation that you get caught in from time to time. Let’s say you find yourself broke from time to time, what is the direct consequence of that? Well you have to work more!

So let’s just say this ‘situation’ was a soul contract you made with yourself before you manifested on the material plane to be able to grow through. At the end of the day, as we have been highlighting throughout this book, the primary cause of our existence here on the material plane is growth. It could be growth from a soul level until it finds itself healed enough to be able to ascend altogether. From a mundane perspective, it could be learning how to acquire an evolutionary advantage. Whichever way you look at it, we are here to grow and decay in the process. That’s the dichotomy of existence.

Growth is all we have done since we were just a cell. That’s the basis of everything that happens in nature. The leaves of a plant growing in shade grow towards the sunlight to be able to synthesize sunlight better to better aid photosynthesis. Unicellular organisms multiply continuously until they colonize and consume. Even the most powerful energetic process occurring in nature that provides the universe with the necessary energy to keep running... thermonuclear fusion, involves two hydrogen atoms with an electron each, fusing into a helium atom with two electrons.

So one thing is for certain, whatever is happening to you, however unpleasant it may be, it is happening to aid your growth. The contract is to ensure your growth but like all contracts, it will place a restriction on you to execute itself which is what makes you uneasy.

So let’s figure this example which is actually quite a widespread problem:

If you’re constantly faced with a lack of abundance that means you constantly need to work to ensure your survival. This probably also means you constantly need to be frugal and adopt austerity measures.

Hmm interesting..

What if you did what you are being forced to do consciously?

Wouldn’t that help you retain all of your personal power and act from a zone of control and empowerment? Instead of stumbling and fumbling to figure out how to survive with this constant lack of abundance that has been imposed on you?

So, basically you’re executing the contract with your own free will and if you can just train yourself to execute it freely it has no control over you.

If darkness scares you and yet you somehow always find yourself stumbling and fumbling, running scared in the dark, why not fall in love with the dark in the first place?

Why not take as much time as you need to perfect your relationship with the dark and wait for yourself to reach a situation of control w.r.t the dark?

Once you’ve done that, once you’ve achieved that equilibrium sans the imposition of the contract, you are free from the contract. You have taken an initiative for self growth that is conscious and mindful. You don’t have to pay a price anymore. You’re free!

Let’s begin by taking the example of abusive relationships now.

Maybe your challenges don’t arise from situations but toxic people that you keep getting stuck with from time to time. Maybe these people are family members or close friends or colleagues or even a spouse or different people who somehow always end up treating you the same way.

In my experience in life and as a life coach, this is the biggest problem I’ve seen people have; with a solution so easy it would make the whole world a lot simpler if people could just open their eyes to it.

What does a toxic relationship make you feel like?

It could be a variety of things; abused, depressed, lacking self worth, lacking confidence... there is no end to how painful a toxic relationship can be.

However if you simplify, it really is just one glaring reality that underlines the emotional reality of all toxic relationships: feeling hopelessly alone.

A toxic relationship makes you feel more alone than just being alone itself. Primarily this is so because people can’t bring themselves to walk away or detach from a contract with another person wherein they feel so hopelessly lonely that they aren’t sure what they would be able to do even if they walked away.

Sometimes it isn’t easy to break the contract because you have a soul contract with another person in the way that you must care for them or always be there for them because they are physically incapable of looking after themselves.

So basically, they need you to grow and you need them to grow but you’re getting the rough end of the deal because the contract is unfair.

What do you do then in this case?

Well, in any relationship where there is a disproportionate give and take owing to an emotional or physical unavailability which could be in your control or not, the result is the same; one party ends up feeling overwhelming loneliness.

How do you learn to face the dark now?

You make peace with the dark. You spend enough time in the dark that you become one with it. When you do that, you find it has no control over you.

When something has no control over you, you’re in control. When you’re in control you just release yourself of the need to grow through a restriction. You just learn to do it yourself.

So if you’re continuously caught in abusive relationships that don’t meet your emotional mental or physical needs, just walk out.

Being alone mindfully and consciously is a lot better than being forced to be alone while being stuck with someone else who imposes loneliness on you.

Remember the purpose of a contract is to ensure your growth and essential growth in an area your soul does not have prior experience with by imposing on you certain restrictions that put you in a situation of servitude to some extent.

Now, since we are talking about contracts, there are also equal contracts in the more positive sense of the word wherein there’s an equal give and take.

It is also possible that you equalize your current soul contracts once you begin to consciously execute your end of the deal.

Sometimes soul contracts have to do with the most important entity i.e. time. A very good example of the same would be being born into a certain type of family. No matter how much awareness you bring into the situation, you can only walk away when you are capable enough of walking away. In your early life no matter how hard you try, you’re going to be dependent on them for a certain period of time.

So the contract ensures you cannot get out unless that particular time period is served. Maybe at the end of such a time period you want out but find yourself in an altogether different situation wherein you are forced to look after a family member because of some reason and you’re their only support.

This can be generalized to so many areas for so many different people in whatever situations they find themselves stuck in life. Often you may have stunning potential and growth prospects but it’s just these recurrent situations that just don’t let you move the way you’d like to.

So what do you do?

Well, you analyze the time aspect of the contract and try to understand what it is keeping you from doing and then consciously give it up!

If you have a kid with special needs and you’re a single parent who wants to better provide for their family and this entire situation gets in the way of higher education again and again, focus on what you can do instead.

You may not be able to find the time and give continued attention to formal study but you can learn. You can read and you can take online courses and develop skills and take certifications and you can grow with that.

Once you begin to do this, you reclaim your personal power and then you realize you can consciously release the need to go after something that imposes restrictions on you.

Once you do that, you may well realize that formal education is well within your reach now and you can accomplish it with less than half the time and effort as before.

Obstacles aren’t in your path, obstacles are the path.

However, to be able to understand where a contract is unfair, you need to be able to put in the time to analyze the contract itself. You can balance out a contract to a state of equal give and take once you consciously decide to put in the work on your own.

For example, in a time based contract such as having a child with special needs and let’s say having a child with special needs, early in your life. Let’s go further in fact, let’s say someone out there, god bless their soul and give them strength, got pregnant in their teenage and the father absconded. Let’s say the child born to them had special needs and the mother raised him on her own, living a tough life braving the stigma and the mental stresses of it all.

On face value, this situation is so unfair and crippling you’d think life is so unfair that sometimes you’re just dealt an impossible hand you can only at best survive. Then there are others who will try to romanticize the situation and trivialize the pain of the mother caught here in life’s tempest.

Even in a situation as challenging as this your options are pretty clear for you. They’re pretty clearly laid out for you to choose from in fact. You can either choose to live or choose to give up and abandon any hopes of making your life into anything you had imagined it to be before all of this happened to you and life caught you unawares.

Things aren’t happening to you and you aren’t going through them passively, things are happening and you need to adapt and build so as to account for the changes around you. That is life, that is survival. However, that is also growth.

That you had to go through what you did, is a contract you made to a person or yourself to enable you to grow in a certain way. What you see as an obstacle is not an obstacle but a pointer towards where and how you are expected to grow to reconcile with your highest purpose and your soul’s desire. It is meant to jolt you awake, to enlighten you to a state of heightened self awareness where you realize the futility of looking at things merely from the lens of what you see and how you want to see it while ignoring the higher meaning which is beyond just the flesh body.

Yes, you are the enterprise. You are the reference point of the world around you and you are the reason that your world exists.

However, all of that is useless and pretentious if you are never able to reconcile yourself with your true identity. You can quite successfully fake an entire life trying to stay above the surface or you can free yourself and tons of your personal power to achieve your highest purpose in this world and be of service to all life, not just humanity.

So coming back to our example, how should the young mother look at her life?

Well, the first point of analysis of her contract is to understand she has a time based contract with her child. She can give him up for adoption or she can choose to serve him, nourish him, care for him and raise him. Both of these actions will come with a time based repercussion. If she chooses to give him up, it is quite likely that she will take time to heal from the trauma and the separation, guilt, PTSD, depression among many other mental health issues.

This is something that could stay with her throughout her life and she will have to deal with it.

On the other hand, if she chooses to raise the child then she must understand the time based repercussions that come with living a life, a majority of which will revolve around her child.

Either way, from the moment the child was conceived, the contract between the mother and the child came into effect.

The direct consequence of this contract seems to be to compel the mother to live, dedicating her waking hours in this world living for someone else or at least, being less involved with her own self.

To find peace and stay within her personal power, she can now spend her life dedicated in service to her son consciously or if she decides to give him up for adoption, to once again dedicate herself to serve other children in need of care to reduce her guilt or trauma that will for sure come along with giving up her child no matter how unwanted.

Once this mother consciously makes a decision to execute the contract, she will find that her life opens up to her as if brand new.

If service to others must be the general theme of her life, why not make it the central theme of her life and consciously at that? Why not study subjects related to the same topic and help other mothers going through the same experience take better decisions?

Everything is still up for grabs in her life mind you.. from dating to partying and being happy and going on trips around the world. No one said she can’t do all of that, after all she has her entire life ahead of her.

But all it will take her is to understand the contract her soul had signed to ensure the growth of the collective and to renegotiate it consciously so that it doesn’t weigh her down but raises her up through life.

The next step in this process is releasing parts of you that don’t serve you and wear you down along with your decision making power.

But before that, some exercises:

7. Renegotiation

“All contracts can be renegotiated”

After you’ve regained power by your understanding of the soul contract you’re serving, you’re no longer hurtling into the same situation continuously without warning. With increased awareness, you develop an increased empowerment and reap a deepened connect with your life purpose.

As we discussed before in the first module, our focus is to develop our self awareness until we are in perfect sync with our soul’s purpose. When we are in perfect sync with our soul’s purpose, we are at our highest vibration and when we are at our highest vibration, we are the most powerful version of ourselves.

This can only come by pushing ourselves to go beyond our fears. Fears originate from our flawed understanding of personal limitations which are further, a result of our lack of self awareness. The more we venture into the unknown, the more it becomes known to us and the more we discover our true potential and calibrate our inner compass in alignment with our highest purpose as a human being. Ultimately, this purpose becomes perfectly aligned with what is for the highest good of all of humanity and highest good of all of life.

The first part looked at the elements of the ‘I-enterprise’ which is you and how you utilize time to turn it into your service towards humanity. This second part is more about the infinite nature of your existence and its reconciliation with the finite nature of your ambitions and problems.

Coming back, when you’re caught up in soul contracts that are making you feel ‘stuck’, the way to get out of this perpetual entrapment is to renegotiate the terms of the contract. How do you do that?

First you become aware of what the contract is seemingly forcing you to do every time. Then, you become conscious of the direct consequence of this contract and doing what you need to do, consciously. So if you always find yourself broke, the next time you get your hands on some money, you make a conscious decision to be broke and not use your money at all. Let it sit in the bank and just accumulate while you don’t use it at all. Now, the next step in the renegotiation process is to give something to get something.

How does that work?

Well, we’ll consider the same two examples we left with at the end of the previous chapter. Let’s pick up the case of the perpetually broke guy first. His contract enforces on him a perpetual state of lack, to strengthen him enough to not rely on money for deriving his sense of self worth.

He brings awareness into the situation and begins to live frugally not depending on spending money to give him the gratification he seeks.

Money could go on accumulating in his account now and he could win a lottery for all he cares but it doesn’t matter anymore with the new awareness he has brought into the situation. He has made a conscious decision to feel fulfilled and derive his sense of self worth through other things. However, what’s the point of this book if that’s all I have to tell you three quarters into the course?

If you’re afraid of the dark, be in the dark! That’s it?

Then everything we are talking about is inconsequential and all that there really is to life is just to make peace with what you’ve been given or not. So we cannot change anything? We cannot break out of what we’re bound to? Are we just condemned?

Well, quite a bit of that is indeed true and quite a bit isn’t.

There’s a reason you’re here and it’s because reaching this realization and perfect sense of acceptance takes many people a lifetime. Even then they are not even nearly healed from what they had to go through. Acceptance of what cannot be changed is the most difficult place to arrive at but the easiest place to begin regaining control over your life.

The first thing you need to understand is if you can accept what cannot be changed, if you can recognize that part of your life which simply cannot be changed, you can now function with the knowledge that everything else can be changed but that.

So let’s say you’re standing in the subway listening to music on your smartphone and chatting with your friend or browsing through Instagram. The train is almost about to enter the platform and you see a light at the far end of the tunnel, you step backwards to be safely behind the yellow line and queue up to mechanically board the train when it stops right in front of you and the doors open.

As anyone who routinely takes the subway, you probably know that there is minimum mental activity required in this process. Even if you do nothing, your muscle memory will probably lead you to a safe comfortable spot to stand or sit in the train. You could be looking at your phone the entire time in fact. On crowded platforms at peak hour in fact, you don’t even have to do that, it’s so crowded you are just whisked into the train by the crowd.

However, on this particular day something untoward happens. A woman standing a few steps away from you collapses and in the commotion that people in the queue right behind you rush to revive her, you look up from the phone and notice it’s Mrs. Kaul, your primary school teacher and neighbor. You pull out your ear-pods and make your way towards her.

“Hold on! Hold on! I know her you say. She has diabetes.. this could be a diabetic stroke.”

As you rush to her aid, the train arrives at the platform, people begin to board and someone pulls out your brand new smartphone that you had lazily tucked in your jeans back-pocket. You look back instantly noticing it gone, the train doors close and with it most probably, whoever stole

your phone. That smartphone let’s say also has critical data that you haven’t even had time yet to back up to the cloud.

Tell me now, even if you saw exactly in that moment, who it was who pulled the phone from your pocket and your eyes followed him disappear into the train just when the doors were closing would you have been able to act on that knowledge?

No, because you were busy taking care of other things that could be changed with your attention. Here, we’re talking about ‘other things’ where even an infinitesimal change in your attention could have a huge bearing on the outcome.

Maybe Mrs. Kaul’s blood sugar really was dipping and the knowledge of her diabetic condition really helped in that moment as someone handed you a snickers bar to feed her. Maybe she was dehydrated or maybe it was something else. Point is you being her neighbor and student and being right beside her in that moment could have a determining effect on whether or not she survives.

The thief ran away with something that cost you a lot of your hard earned money, memories, critical data etc. A lot of the data could probably still be salvaged if you had saved it somewhere else or backed up on the cloud. Even if not, the point is it helps to know this situation couldn’t have been changed.

‘Acceptance’ is key here. It allows you to focus on that which needs your attention not which you cannot change even if you paid attention to it. We find ourselves stuck in life dealing with the same toxic situation over and over because we cannot bring ourselves to accept where we are powerless and move on.

Yes there is great power in your free will. There is great power in your power to act, definitely! Sometimes though, the greatest test of your personal power is knowing when to step away. Most people don’t recognize their Achilles Heel. Most people choose to waste their lives battling this demon that grows stronger with each blow. Most people mistake diving back into toxicity again and again as bravery while other areas of their lives deteriorate begging for their attention. Even if you ran behind the thief he may or may not have been the one. You may or may not have caught a hold of him and you may or may not have been able to enter the subway before the doors closed. Lots of factors are outside your control there. This is precisely because the primary situation is one that calls for your acceptance not prudence.

You know what I think after applying my professional analytical skills through Business Analysis and Life Coaching for over 15,000 hours?

I highlight the hours here because it is popular opinion that to be an expert at something you need to have clocked at least 10,000 hours in practice of that skill. While I am still mid way as a Life Coach, I have more than sufficient experience overall in dealing with crises where the stakes are high. Whether it be a physical enterprise employing people or a one person enterprise that is your life, the rules largely remain the same.

You know what that is?

If you’re insanely diving into a toxic situation again and again, losing more and more of your power each time, more and more time each time, you’re blinded by your ego. That’s it. It happens to the best of us and it happens too often in the business world. Companies come into existence, for the first few years they innovate and after a string of success when they realize they are going to be in business for a while and that they have passed the initial obstacle course, usually the CEO decides to go big on a project to maximize gains.

The project a CEO picks at this stage, 5-7 years into a company’s existence is what makes or breaks it. See early on the stakes are high to survive yes but the stakes aren’t high collectively. You don’t have as much staff or static assets that you might lose playing recklessly. Later though, when you realize you’re a contender in the long haul and you want to edge out the competition, you speculate a little bit.

Speculation is good in moderation. Speculation is ok as long as you don’t get your ego involved. The problem here is however, what every gambler out there will testify to. Walking away is the single most difficult thing in the universe if you’ve won even once.

That is why the situation is toxic in the first place. It always looks like it is going to improve but it doesn’t and your ego doesn’t let you accept you’re wrong. You’re wrong even if you think you’re going to win this time because you won’t. It’s like going into a boxing match trying to knock out Tyson or trying to tire out Ali! Sure both things have happened at least once but never deliberately. In their primes though? Never.

It’s like never trying to make a straight buck in the stock market but only ever trying to short it. That can’t happen. Even the top stock brokers and fund managers who do that successfully with their sophisticated algorithms and programs and what not began their careers trading the right way. I could go on and on but you understand the point. Sorry to break it to you but if you’re stuck in a toxic situation in your life, if you’re stuck in a contract, it’s because you’re too proud to back out of it. Your soul is still caught up in old patterns of existence where it possibly worked out for you that way in a previous lifetime but in this lifetime you’re just meant to learn to let it go. You can still have it but before you do, you need to learn to let it go and walk away.

So now, the second thing you need to understand is when you’ve accepted what is and cannot be changed, you are free to attract what can change your life. It’s like you were stuck crushing over some person all through junior school to high school and college. Classic case of unrequited love, you never expressed yourself and they never cared. When they finally get married to someone else and you walk away from the toxicity you realize you’re 23, own a convertible, play the guitar like a god and study in Harvard Medical School. Know what I mean?

Let’s go back to the example of the perpetually broke guy. Once he realized that his soul contract just keeps him poor because he is somehow not blessed with a sound judgment of money or wealth, what he is left to fix is not his relationship with money but the relationship money has with every other aspect of his life.

For example?

Cut costs, live frugal and save.

If you don’t need money for stuff and you’ve stopped needing stuff because it needs money, you can just use money to make more money and actually not really have to work at all beyond a point.

Think about it. All that this man needs to do beyond a point is let the money accumulate and stop working as soon as his earned interest or dividend is enough to sustain his current frugal lifestyle.

The options available to him in fact are countless once he begins to look at the situation from the perspective of not his relationship with money but money’s relationship with his life. Make no mistake, he will continue to work as he does, that doesn’t change. To enforce the contract in fact, he has to engage in ‘thankless work’ so to speak, where he engages in working sans the fulfillment the earned income is supposed to provide.

What is he being called to do here? What are his options?

His contract is calling upon him to learn to live happily and frugally. Right?

Sounds like someone who could live a free life just volunteering, making the world a better place. Plenty of organizations who are looking for volunteers like that. They’ll feed you, give you a place to stay, have medical facilities in case you fall sick and all you have to do is work.. serve.

So what did this person have to release in order for him to be able to invite this prosperity into his life?

Well, he had to release relying on money for his happiness and security. He can have security but not through money. His security can be through the work he does and not needing much in the first place. Secondly, his happiness depends not on what money can do for him but in not needing it in the first place. His happiness is based on, his security is derived from, what he can offer the world. The universe has blessed him with such potential by just being who he is that nothing else is needed.

In the same way, if we take the example of the teenage mother, we see that she can enjoy the life that adulthood has to promise her. She will however have to let go off her childhood. Her childhood must consciously be released and let go of for her to consciously step into the role of an adult and the responsibilities that come with it.

This is not to say that her life will be bereft of the simple pleasures that we all experience through our inner child, from time to time. However, the carefree dreaming state of childhood where everything is possible and you don’t know what comes next ended for her as soon as she got pregnant. The sordid tangible unpleasant ‘to-do’ list is right in front of her to get chopping. As difficult as it is to see it for the opportunity it has, she will be free from her duties as a parent much before other people and although that will come with its pitfalls, it will leave her with

some time at the later part of her life to revisit the things her inner child yearned for before life took over.

Unless you can work on accepting even the harshest, most gruesome realities of your life that cannot be changed, you cannot begin to positively construct with what can be changed.

When you accept and release what you cannot change, you are instructing your body’s vital energy and your consciousness to grow in that direction. Not only that, you are instructing the universe to grow in that direction. Growth here means more about growing outing of needing it to be a certain way. When you begin to co create with the universe like that, you realize what needs to be done. The process in itself is very simple for someone not caught up in the contract.

It is similar to how you view a desperate housewife in need of help and protection from her abusive husband who beats her every night after he gets drunk. You see exactly what needs to be done in a scenario you are not involved in yourself.

Therefore, when you recognize what can’t be changed in a toxic situation you find yourself caught up in all the time, you are calling yourself out on all the devaluation in fact, of your personal power.

We are engineered by millions of years of evolution to survive. Sure, we do plenty of fancy things as individuals and that is what makes us civilized and modern and superior even to other species that don’t look at themselves through that much self awareness. However, in all that shebang that makes us human the way we are, we often miss the point completely; our goal is to survive.

Ask someone who beat cancer, survived a war, an accident or better still, all three. Don’t laugh, you will be surprised at the number of survivors out there. Case in point: the famous Malala Yousufzai. Anyone who has braved life threatening circumstances to claw their way back to life and hold onto their body will tell you it stemmed from a simple source: Focusing on what they wanted. Focusing on what was working for them in life. That is what keeps you going.

On the other hand, read about any person who promised so much more than the life they shortened with their own hands and you’ll see it was just an imbalance of the one thing not working out for them. You fixate on what you cannot change about yourself, and I promise you it will drain the life out of your years and then eventually, the years out of your life.

Look around you, I bet you can spot someone around you today, living life with a disability, with a greater zeal than someone who has virtually everything including a picture perfect body, except that one thing not going right for them.

You are more resilient that you can imagine. There are healing powers within the human body that scientists are still trying to unravel. Trust me, no one has completely figured out this perfect machine yet or they would’ve replicated us into millions of perfect branded humanoids you could buy off Amazon.

Did you know that as soon as the body senses that a punch is coming towards a certain body part the proteins begin to shift towards that side of the body to help cushion the blow or at least hit

the ground running with the healing process that would be required thereafter? Bet you didn’t know that. How would you? You’re not supposed to.

Do you actively digest your food? No. It just happens on its own. The body is designed that way. It does what it has to. The fact that you don’t have to know what is happening or how it is happening bears testimony to the efficiency with which it happens.

The human body has evolved over millennia to become the lean mean machine it is and you have survived; your ancestors were able to survive through cholera, typhoid, plague and what not because their genes beat the odds.

Then we invented medicines to help us beat the odds on things we couldn’t fight by way of our natural defenses alone. They say man made that; the body had nothing to do with it. Really?

The intelligence with which you thought up those experiments and formulae and tests and processes et all was a product of evolution wasn’t it?

Why or how do you think we evolved to become such a highly intelligent species?

Well, we traded off something to develop something else that could give us an edge while competing for survival with ruthless predators all of who knew how to climb, crawl, run, bite and tear their prey to pieces.

Over millennia, we evolved to have less body hair so vital systems would remain cooler under prolonged stress. We evolved to walk upright as our front limbs evolved for an increased dexterity imparted by opposable thumbs and fine motor skills. We developed the ability to run, crawl, swim and climb for longer periods than any other species.

How do you think primitive human beings hunted?

They ran and ran and ran after a prey until it got so tired all they had to do was walk up to it and hit it with a stick. Slowly they refined this process even further with weapons and tools thereby reducing the time taken for said process and ultimately they just learnt how to farm their food.

If you really think about that for a minute you’ll realize how none of them died out because they didn’t have sharp claws or sharp teeth. Sure there came apex predators from time to time that devoured tons of humans who didn’t know any better and the population dwindled for a while but they ultimately fought back and began to live together for protection, protect themselves with fire etc etc.

Point is my friend, ‘letting go’ is science. If we decide as a species to stop using our left hand over millions of years we will ultimately evolve to not have them or at least not in the way we have now. If you just cut off the left arm of every generation successively for millennia though nothing would change.

Why the difference? One is a conscious process and the other one unconscious.

In fact, let’s forget this controversial topic. Forget millennia, if you stop using your left arm you most probably will lose function of that arm in this life time. That’s the power of your conscious mind. You don’t need to govern what is happening seamlessly in your body or your life. You are born and your parents feed you and look after you until you can take care of yourself.

That’s the social norm and a characteristic of primates basically and it just happens on its own. If the parents of an offspring are unable to or unwilling to look after him the society adopts him and cares for him in the form of orphanages or such. This system exists on its own and is revised and improved as society improves with it.

You can live within this system and die trying to change that which cannot be changed and you would be a fool for doing so when there lay a gigantic opportunity within the ambit of that which you could’ve changed.

Because if you are going to cry about what cannot be changed in your life you might as well protest why guns kill people or why we drive vehicles so fast they could kill someone. It’s really that simple.

On the other hand though, you are free to try to change the system such that more and more people need strict licenses to possess guns and there are sufficient safety measures for pedestrians. Wherever you choose to focus, the energy of your body and the universe will follow you and respond in the form of growth. This growth may not be immediate but gradual and eventual.

Don’t forget that the purpose of a contract is at the end of it all.. your growth.

Through all that is happening pretty much by itself, your sole pursuit as a conscious human being is the search for a higher consciousness about everything that is happening within and around you. Choosing what to give your energy to and where to grow is both a conscious decision as well as decisive consciousness.

Not accepting what cannot be changed and diverting your attention to other more fertile areas of your life is not only being stuck in your ego but also self sabotage.

When viewed at this scale, your pursuit of aligning your highest beliefs with your most trivial actions to reconcile that which you know to be true about yourself with that which you perceive to be true about yourself is a mundane pursuit.

It’s like a chimpanzee looking at himself in a mirror in the jungle trying to find out if the chimpanzee in the mirror is harmful or not or himself.

You are looking at yourself in the same way through the circumstances of your life and the moment of truth will be when you understand the clearest picture is to be found in the ideas that challenge your existence to the greatest degree. A supposedly crippling contract that you’ve made with your soul is but the quickest path to self realization if you learn to look at it for what it is. The key to releasing yourself form the contract lies in how you read it, what you do about it and how you renegotiate it to level up in self awareness.

The key to renegotiate it and get what you want is to make progress in the direction of the intended growth and to do so you will need to release something in the process. Whenever you find yourself fussing about that which you need to release because you cannot change it, remind yourself that gorillas have bigger biceps than we do but can’t read or write.

Survival lead our ancestors to choose in the direction that enables you to be reading this right now while somewhere in a rain forest this moment, a gorilla is breaking a bamboo in half with his bare hands, for a snack.

8. Identities

“Reconcile conflicting forces”

My biggest complain about the law of attraction is that it’s too standardized. It does not take into account a scenario wherein you’re constantly manifesting what you want but realizing after you’ve manifested it that it’s not doing for you what it was supposed to. That’s why what’s most important is not the manifestation process itself but the place from which the manifestation is taking place.

Are you manifesting from your ego? Are you manifesting from your higher self?

Or are you not really a ‘manifester’ but a clairvoyant or clairsentient who can just sense the future and flows towards it?

That last part’s shocking huh?

It’s a legitimate concern. I’ve dabbled into spirituality most of my life. That has helped me come across all categories of manifestations and manifesting techniques and ‘magic’ so to speak. Not magic of the kind where you see things move around or appear and disappear. ‘Magic’, of the kind where it’s not reasonable as a matter of chance for something to have taken place. It is still perfectly explainable by applying logic.

It almost happens in the kind of way in which detectives are able to put facts together and arrive at what actually happened at a crime scene after the perpetrator has confessed. Then you go Ah! That’s what we were missing; and you realize no matter how many accolades you may have won for previous cases you solved, there’s always a case that comes along that gets closed because there isn’t enough evidence. Then when the perpetrator tells you how they did it, you see everything clearly that you actually ‘missed’.

See that’s the kind of thing that manifestation is proof of.

Not magically manifesting elephants or a Mercedes Benz but still almost within the framework of waking life. The question that begs to be answered is would you go on manifesting from your ego if you realized your higher potential has an infinite opportunity at manifesting something that can forever heal the collective?

Why would you want to manifest from an ego plane for selfish reasons alone, at all?

Yes perhaps to begin at first to see if it really works but later on you would probably realize let’s assume, after you’ve manifested the super model partner and the island and the manor and the helicopter or the jet that you could do more for the collective. Most people at that stage begin to dedicate more of their time into social service and politics and philanthropy.

Then there are others who go from millionaire to billionaire to multi billionaire. What’s their secret? Truth is nobody hates a billion dollars. Not even the communists. Money is a subset of time and most of the time of your life goes away dealing with choices you didn’t make. The rest of it goes away with you dealing with the consequences of choices you made; until you realize what the best use of your time could have been, your time’s up.

Almost everybody could do more if not differently with their time if they were given the intelligence they have now back when they started. You make peace with this fact but the fact remains. A multi billionaire could’ve probably been a trillionaire and he doesn’t rue the fact at all because a billion dollars in themselves are practically un-spendable.

So what’s the difference between the people who are able to manifest so much money for themselves and others who aren’t able to at all?

Well, if you’ve comes this far in the course you would realize that your contracts have a huge role to play and how you deal with them and negotiate and renegotiate them. People call it ‘kismet’, fate or destiny and they’re wrong because all three of them are actually different. Which we’ll come to soon.

Let’s decode manifesting a billion dollars first.

For starters not everyone needs a billion dollars to fulfill their life purpose or higher purpose. For example, what would Gandhi have done with a billion dollars even if let’s say he had somehow earned it in his life? He would probably have given it away. You could say he could have opened ashrams all over the world perhaps and propagated his idea of self sufficiency or helped India develop capital goods or machinery etc.

As hypothetical as this entire scenario seems let’s analyze the person for a minute.

What seems to be his higher purpose going by what you know about him even if fleetingly?

His higher purpose was peaceful defiance in the face of oppression. Satyagraha

All through Africa and ‘Champaran’ and then the entire country by means of his ashrams, he inspired people through the values of minimalism, self sufficiency and spirituality. His involvement as it was in his direct interaction with his followers was irreplaceable. Why?

Take the time factor again. He had a special sort of intellect and understanding of how organized systems of the imperialists’ work and he had a unique demeanor of guidance that wasn’t exactly replicated in his written or spoken work.

What is that? ‘Charisma’.

Charisma is that one thing which is a product of time and you cannot just build your charisma within 10 years of work; working ten or even twenty times as hard as someone who has been a charismatic leader for a decade already.

It’s like this; picture an enterprise that develops an innovative product that is unbeatable. It is unbeatable because it is the result of 10 years of research, development, hundreds of

experiments, iterations and everything from the groundwork to the distribution etc. is already in place for manufacturing it at a mass scale. Let’s assume this company launches this product or let’s say service and it solves a problem so unique in the consumers’ lives that the revenue of said company quadruples within a year.

Let’s say another company works ten times as hard and piles on ten times as many features as the first company and launches its product with a ten times bigger marketing budget. How long do you suppose before the second company topples the first company as the more charismatic company?

Well there’s no exact answer here but if you compare Apple iOS and Google Android you could say probably not even in 20 years!

It’s not like Gandhi or MLK or JFK didn’t have any ‘competitors’ for the ‘most loved leader’ position so to speak, it’s that they couldn’t be replaced as fast. That is why we say such leaders are once in a generation or once in a century. Sometimes they’re once in millennia and we call them ‘prophets’, even incarnations of God himself. This is probably why all three of these gentlemen were assassinated and most ‘prophets’ and ‘incarnations’ too die violent deaths or just ‘disappear’ from society. That’s because for those who don’t agree with their ideology or can’t undo their charisma, this is the only way to ‘balance the scales’ so to speak.

Now hand these great men a billion dollars and it’s useless for them and what they do because even if we crowd funded the next Gandhi, all the wealth in the world couldn’t just ‘produce’ someone with those traits or forget traits, the ‘charisma’ he acquired over his lifetime through acting the way he did through the choices he made in the times he lived in.

Therefore, the important point is to realize here that the execution of your highest purpose in the world may not need luxury yachts, billions of dollars or even millions of dollars or any money at all!

So the point is to ditch the philosophy of aiming at a point on the board and following the ‘steps of law of attraction’ standardized for everyone and working towards something and waiting and waiting for it to show up in your life.

Because as the Chinese say, be careful what you wish for.

If you were perfectly aligned with your highest self you would just be able to manifest things effortlessly. You’d just have to envision and receive. Well as an example and there are many who agree and many who don’t but the spiritual world is brimming with stories aplenty of human beings like Jesus, Moses, Muhammad, Krishna, Nanak, Sai Baba and yogis, saints, shamans and healers of the highest degree being able to manifest miracles in the physical realm.

There aren’t any stories like that for normal people or witchdoctors unless they’ve been dabbling with dark forms of the occult etc. making things appear. There are more ‘recent’ examples of people with exceptional healing abilities though, like ‘Chaitanya Mahaprabhu’ and Mother Teresa.

Furthermore, these powerful people, these prophets, great yogis and saints who are widely revered and ‘worshipped’ are quite often depicted manifesting instant healing with just their ‘touch’; like the famous story about Jesus feeding hundreds of people from a single bowl of rice and fish.

Now this is a documented verified person we’re talking about and there’s a lot more where that came from but well, extreme examples nonetheless. Let’s shift to one more realistic example to illustrate the point. A more explainable example I should say, of a documented person with historical and archaeological proof of existence.

The story of the Buddha taming an irate elephant is taken as an example to teach inner calm and its effect on the people around you, even animals. This seems pretty interesting and possibly one that could be experimented with. There are people like that even today, such as the ‘Dog Whisperer’ and the ‘Lion Whisperer’, working in a zone where only they can.

We would probably try the same and end up dismembered by an irate elephant but then those of us who are expert stock traders have made profitable trades in markets so tumultuous that it is the equivalent of somersaulting the Titanic over the iceberg. Even further, there are surgeons who have performed successful surgeries that probably only God could have, besides them.

The point here?

When you are in sync with your highest purpose you are manifesting at light speed and don’t need to put in work and wait and what not as they are saying these days in their proverbial ‘steps of attraction’.

Nah!

You put your fingertips on the keyboard and words flow out in perfect grammar and punctuation so much so that you don’t even need to edit the copy before you finalize it. You are pulling the proverbial arrow on the bowstring as you think and releasing it in the direction of the target as you decide what your target is going to be and it hits bang in the middle.

This only happens when you are manifesting from your highest self.

This is why we are going to discover here what the different forms of self identity are and the vibration with which they manifest in the physical world.

This difference is the reason many monks have described the feeling a perfect high or ‘bliss’ as opposed to the ‘high’ generated by hallucinogens that many resort to replicate that feeling of perfect ‘Zen’. Make no mistake, your ego is very capable of getting you all the worldly success you desire; it isn’t capable of reconciling you with your highest self though. It isn’t capable of emptying you out completely to the world, of taking you to the maxima of your personal power and manifestation ability.

That can only be achieved when you are firmly reconciled with your highest purpose. Robert Plant, the lead singer of famous rock band Led Zeppelin wrote and recorded one of the band’s most popular songs, “All my love” in a single take. He wrote the song after the death of his son

and as emotional as the entire experience was, it took just a single take for him to record it. Same thing you hear about Freddie Mercury recording “Show Must Go On” in a single take, as he was dying of AIDS.

This is manifestation. Isn’t it?

What else is it then? Great sportspersons, they come out and perform and perform in a way that blows away long standing records. Take Usain Bolt as an example here. Breaking a record and posing for the camera in his final stride at that! Mocking everyone else practically.

Take cricket batting legend Sachin Tendulkar with 51 international test centuries. The next best is Jacques Kallis with 45 and today’s batting great Virat Kohli with 29.

‘Greats’ are great because they act from their authentic self and then go on manifesting from that source, at light speed.

Mukesh Ambani the richest person in India, descendant of legendary ‘Dhirubhai Ambani’ the founder of one of the most powerful business groups in India, reportedly was a teetotaler and vegetarian. Investing legend Warren Buffet still lives at the home he first bought in Omaha.

The thing is, these people don’t need to manifest odd things that won’t give them pleasure, that won’t help their higher objective. Sure, they do have their own thing going. It’s not about saving money either as most people say. Could be but not necessarily because you analyze the kind of life they lead, all the money in there that appears so lucrative to most you forget it is just a tool for them to be able to execute their highest purpose. It serves no other purpose for them but that.

Mandela didn’t need a billion dollars to execute his highest purpose. What he needed was to spend 18 years in prison. This is where it gets tricky because you can’t understand why then do you have such suffering and misfortune if you are in alignment with your higher self.

Well if you study his biography you’ll realize he changed a lot as a person in those years of seclusion and even that isn’t meant to be the purpose of your tough times. It is part of the realignment process that you go through from the time you decide to come home to yourself and when you finally do.

The time in between is full of a constant flowchart of decisions that you must constantly make to reinforce your personal power and act out of your authentic calling. It isn’t easy by any means but once you are able to discover who you truly are and your “shadow aspect” to complement it, you are able to perfectly zero in on what you need to do to remain in your authentic power and check yourself when your vibration is falling below, to the ‘ego plane’.

The ego plane is where no spiritual progress occurs. The ‘higher plane’ is the opposite as this is where progress occurs continuously and you manifest fluently. The ego plane is painful and makes you realize every aspect of your limitations as a human being. The higher plane reconciles you with your divine power and imparts highest of attributes to your actions and vibration.

Then there is a third facet to your identity and that is your ‘inner child’. This is where your inner demons come from. This is where your sense of right wrong, security, vulnerability comes from.

This is where your sense of satisfaction comes from. Upset your inner child and be prepared to notice tantrums in the world around you. Placate your inner child and the juice of success, the satisfaction, the ‘fulfillment’ of your life begins to flow into your waking consciousness.

8.1 “The Inner Child”

Most of what you go through is not really conscious experience but an unconscious replay of childhood experiences. Left unresolved they can spiral out of control and tended to like a flowerbed, they will most certainly allow the shine from your inner self to shine through. Think of it like this for now before we explore this idea further:

Your inner child is the purest form of your ego self that arrived into the world without adapting to its ways. Expressing things in simple terms such as what is and what you want. That’s all.

A child on her own has no understanding of the world around her and her experiences are shaped by the inputs provided by her parents. Children of hardy parents tend to be exceptionally hardy or extremely fragile. Children of scholarly parents choose to be exceptionally scholarly or extremely practical.

Children of parents who have reconciled their inner child to her current needs and have done the necessary work, tend to mostly have a balanced sense of their self worth and needs. Alternatively, they could defect to being self denying which may be expressed in the form of altruistic behavior or self destructive tendencies.

These are just observations however, based on patterns. The fact that stands on its own from a spiritual as well as psychological stand point is that you have utilized logic to be able to suppress some desires which form part of your shadow self or as we say in psychology, the ‘Id’. You have associated yourself with some active desires which are part of your ego and associated with your self-identity. Then, you have further beneath that, gratifications delayed or suppressed for all the suffering and disciplining that you went through as a kid that are owed to the inner child.

When you’re trying to manifest things within your life, you are working with these three facets of your personality. Make sure what you’re trying to manifest is well reconciled with all three or you’re manifesting trouble more than satisfaction.

As always a few exercises to help you discover more.

8.2 “The Higher Self”

Functioning from the higher purpose is simple. It’s not easy but it is simple. All you have to do is flow. It’s when you cease to flow and drop down in vibration and fall to lower states of thinking, when fear begins to overpower your consciousness and you begin to go against that which flows naturally and encounter stress and anxiety in life.

The ego is very concerned about its survival and if you think you can sacrifice the ego proactively, you can’t because the ego knows how to protect itself. That right there is the paradox you’ll have to learn to fix. To not fall into the trap of ousting your ego or winning against your ego because the idea of winning and losing comes from the ego itself. The higher self and the higher purpose are the maxima of your individual development and if you fail to realize them, the soul is unaffected. The soul is not attached with your petty game of realization of anything in the world because it is experiencing everything exactly the way it needed to. Get this straight: Pass on to the other world peacefully surrounded by family, in a comfortable bed, a warm room and the security of your mansion or rolled over dead in a ditch without a dime in your pocket, the end is of no consequence to your soul. The soul can see through ‘the matrix’, the soul can see through your crap and it chooses to remain unaffected by any of it because your Ego does a very good job of giving you misery in all the ways possible throughout your life time.

Why then are we trying to do anything at all then? What is the point of all of this? This book and this course, these ‘steps’, ‘modules’, ‘exercises’ and this ‘process’?

The point of creation is to propagate. That’s it. A mango tree isn’t there because you need mangoes, a mango tree is there and therefore it produces mangoes. Then there are more mango trees because every mango has a seed. Each culmination is the beginning of a new cycle and your highest purpose as a human being is no different from the highest purpose of mango bud turning into a mango.

Here is a catch though; you are not just a Mango on a Mango tree. You are the entire forest inside a single seed.

That are thou. “Tat Tvam Asi”.

So it would be a shame if you decided to quit being the best version of yourself by forcing your ego into the process. At the end it is only ego that leads you astray and if it were easy to recognize when you are acting out of your ego, there would be no conflict in the world. However, there is a way to realize when you are connected to the source and deeply in communion with the ‘flow’. That state right there is the one to be in and there is no guarantee how long you can maintain it as even seeking to maintain that state is ego.

What is life then? What is your higher purpose?

It’s simple. Fall down seven times get up eight.

How then is that not ego?

Well it is the nature of everything that falls apart to come together again. The clouds burst into rain and gather again as soon as there is enough water to bind them together. The fields lie barren and become fertile again after they’ve been allowed to re-nourish themselves. People fall in love, people grow apart and people leave eventually, due to death, disease or their own accord; and then you grow fond of them all over again.

It is the nature of this world to disintegrate and reintegrate into itself over and over and over again until it has become the best version of itself and the same goes for you. Your life is nothing but a cycle of failure, success, crescendo and silences. What gets in the way of you repairing relationships that need repairing and walking away from situations and not good for you, is your Ego.

Once you find yourself attuned to your higher vibration, all you need to do is do things as they come to the highest of your ability. The supreme efficiency that comes with being in the flow state happens on its own and you can’t force it. If you’re forcing it, it’s ego.

How do you recognize it?

Simple, if you’re stressed about it, it’s ego. If you can’t sleep, it’s ego. If you feel depressed, it’s ego. If you feel trapped it’s ego. If you ‘re in any state of being where what you’re attempting to do seems to be going not ‘fast enough’ for you or not going ‘well enough’ for you, it’s the Ego spoiling the party. Give it enough chances to do that and it will spoil your life.

Make no mistake, as with indulgences, your Ego is also important to survive and thrive on the material plane. The point is to keep it in its place. You are not your job, degrees, body or petty achievements. However, all of them do have a place in your life. They deserve only that though: a place. That’s it.

8.3 “The Ego”

Fear lives where there is a lack of self awareness. The majority of your fear is based on things that have less than a per cent probability of taking place. Why then are they so overblown in your mind?

It’s because of the ego’s excessive attachment to protect itself. It was hurt some time before and it does well to avoid everything it can to guard against that one thing that hurt it. In many ways it’s just evolution. It isn’t even ‘Ego’ but a lesser form of it, the ‘Id’. The animalistic form of your unconscious reptilian brain that seeks to do little more than feed, survive and mate. Fear comes from a lack of self awareness in your abilities and truth.

At the highest form, your self-awareness reconciles your higher self with your self-concept so seamlessly that you stop perceiving anyone as a threat as you can see why people see you the way they do from their perspective. You can see why you see them see you the way they see you as well. The bottom line is therefore that as long as you’re functioning out of fear, you’re giving power to a fictitious reality that has total control over you. If you want to break free from these illusions and ascend to your highest purpose, you must return to the first step we took in the first chapter which is moving beyond your fear.

Now you have a better understanding of exactly what that fear was and how it rules your life and how to spot it. Great, because once you debunk the origin of fear you have gained legitimate ground over your mental faculties and reclaimed your power to a huge extent. What do we do with this power now?

Do we use it to fight?

Nope, that’s ego.

Do we use it to improve ourselves?

Yes.

How do we use it to improve ourselves?

By bringing light into the areas of our consciousness that have been stowed away in the dark. By bringing awareness into those areas of our life where we have weaknesses that we aren’t even aware of. Where we have fears that haven’t even expressed themselves yet.

How do we do that? By recognizing our ‘shadow-self’.

8.4 “The Shadow Self”

When things don’t go as per your security paradigms, the ego bursts into your shadow self and begins to throw a fit. Aspects of your ego entity that you use to engage with the world are flipped into reverse and expressed as your ‘shadow-self’.

It is difficult for us to get over a failure or error in judgement or being slighted, being called names or undermined even though we are well aware they have no control over us because of the construct of the ego. The ego construct prevents us from rising above a slight slip in diet but getting back on track again. The ego construct prevents us from taking a break from being ourselves and engaging with the world as another or withdrawing from engaging with the world. The ego traps us into remaining stuck where we are because all routes of escape and transformation are challenging to the ego and incomprehensible as per its security paradigms. So the approach needs to be to consciously understand that this too is a contract that needs releasing and actively giving up what feels comfortable, logical and familiar to us and moving towards our shadow traits but actively, with a balance.

If sooner or later the construct must fall apart and the shadow aspects emerge uncontrolled, then it is a good idea to allow them to emerge as a ‘controlled explosion’ or rather released slowly like reservoir water through the dam. The sense of control is merely an illusion and that holds true but power is in the sense of awareness and awareness lies in reconciling all aspects of our being; conscious, subconscious and otherwise into the single construct that stands divided as a riddle: our higher self; our authentic self.

If you are addicted to smoking and choose to ignore the problem by not admitting that you are addicted to smoking you will never succeed in quitting. To succeed in giving up smoking you will have to investigate the cause that makes you smoke. Therefore, if you must smoke until you can finally give up smoking you must smoke with complete involvement and mindfulness of every puff. Allow yourself and every bit of your being to experience and investigate what is happening within each moment as you light a cigarette, put it to your lips, inhale the smoke, savor the flavor of the smoke, feel it go into your lungs and repeat it until you have burnt out a cigarette. Give your self the opportunity to experience the tar being deposited within your lungs, your blood vessels being contracted, your breathing being impaired all for the high that can only be derived from the 69mm stick of tobacco that you hold between your fingers.

As you do that let’s say 10 times during the day, you will slowly begin to uncover the root cause of your addiction. Maybe it is loneliness and you just replace human company with your faithful companion, a cigarette. This could well be so. A lot of soldiers have reported forming a close attachment with their smokes during the course of war when they didn’t have any certainty of any sort about their own life or the lives of the people around them. Smoking and their packet of smokes provided them a way to ground and stick to the one constant thing that they could indulge themselves in through the action no matter what.

Maybe you’ll realize that you smoke out of anxiety or out of stress. You don’t really inhale the smoke as much as take comfort in the feeling of a lit cigarette being in your fingers and the periodic flicking of the ash.

Most people don’t do that though you know why?

Most people have spent a lifetime being embarrassed, afraid and scared of their own temptations, perversions, desires, bad habits and their ‘shadow side’.

You can never heal a wound without scraping off the dirt, the pus, dead skin and dirt off of it. You need to clean it, wash it and then you need to stitch it and bandage it. That’s how deep wounds heal. Deep wounds don’t heal with you just covering them and refusing to acknowledge their presence in your body. That’s how they get infected, that’s how you get gangrene. That’s how you get an amputation to heal it in the end otherwise it just spreads to the rest of the body and poisons your blood.

Most people prefer an amputation over the healing process because they’re too scared of recognizing their needs, acknowledging their needs and doing what they need to do to heal those needs.

Why is it so?

The answer to this goes back into the patterns of your childhood.

But more on that in the next section.

9. Historical Data

“All business models are flawed somewhere.”

It’s difficult to build a positive relationship with food if you’ve grown up being scrutinized for what you ate and how much you ate. The end product is almost always problematic either way. It’s the same with money and your sexuality. We’re carrying these imprints with us that we aren’t even aware of and actually have no say in because there is no manual on how to raise a child.

Sadly, that’s actually an unavoidable problem since children are like seeds where each one of them grows into a different kind of plant. Sure you share your DNA with your parents but you share 99.9% of your DNA with every other human being on the planet. So the fact that you share your DNA with your parents is not really as much of a direct consequence of your being their children as much as it is both of you being human.

Genes. Yes that’s different but even then, the direct dependence of your genetic makeup on that of your parents’ isn’t that far removed from the effect that your grand parents’ genetic makeup had on your parents. The sum total of genetic influences that you were formed out of if you really observe them, will lead you back to the age old ‘nature versus nurture’ debate.

If genetic makeup was the primary decider in the quality and level of your intelligence and physical capacity, the Nazis would have definitively taken over the world. Hitler with his obsession for forming a ‘higher’ race was involved in a lot of experiments in the Nazi era for constituting a ‘superior race’ of human beings all born out of ‘superior’ genetic material from the best of the best in terms of IQ and physical capacity.

In this regard in fact, a lot of experiments are believed to have been conducted covertly during the cold war era by both the US and USSR. The Romans, arguably the most powerful empire in the history of mankind actually resorted to in breeding in an attempt to keep the blood line ‘pure’. Similar misadventures have been planned by many civilizations although with the same result: Failure.

The thing to understand here is that the human body is designed to adapt. You can build muscle and get ripped to a 7% body fat maximum; you can also put on the fat and the muscle and become a strongman dead lifting 500kg or Sumo wrestler. You can slave away with your wrists and fingers bent at odd angles on a keyboard all day or be engaged in manual labor under the Sun with very little water and food until sunset. Whatever you’re aiming for, the key word is adaptation.

Now here’s where the most important part is about understanding your life and your journey on this material plane: your journey is chosen on par with your destination.

You can’t workout and build 17 inch biceps and then sit at a computer all day for the next year and a half and hope to retain all of that muscle. Similarly, even with steroids, you cannot build 17 inch biceps without working out, eating right and being active for at least two years. In fact, if you have a weak nutritional foundation and conditioning since childhood to begin with, you may never be able to attain certain physical goals.

You are going where you are because a large part of that journey was actually not in your control and you got a head start in that direction, right or wrong, by virtue of being weak and helpless as a kid.

As much as you don’t want to assign blame and look at your life objectively, you need to analyze your personal power and the I-enterprise with the perspective of just being at a particular place at a particular instance of time.

A lot of this is unconscious such as the prenatal development, early childhood care and general geographic and socio economic environment. As a matter of fact, a female fetus develops with all of the ova eh will need in her lifetime already in her ovaries. So basically, a female child is born with all of the eggs she will need in her life time. What that basically means is, you shared your grandmother’s womb with your mother!

Just think of the ramifications of something like that for a minute. The socio economic environment, nutrition, quality of life and food habits et all of your grandmother have an effect on how you grew and matured as a human being.

This is why ‘generational curses’ in a family are said to go back a long ways and it’s difficult to break out of them. However you are not just a slave to your inherited genetic material once you become conscious of who you are, where you came from and what you can do to change it.

You are an enterprise. Remember?

You take time as a raw material, an essential resource and transform it into the end product which is your service to humanity. In this process the most critical element is?

Time.

Even then, 9 months of the vibrations however they were as absorbed by your mother as a fetus in your grandmother’s uterus and 9 months of you being a fetus in your mother’s uterus plus let’s say 3 years or 4 until you couldn’t walk or talk; none of that was in your control.

Even eight years until you were 12, then you hit puberty were still not actively in your control but every day in your life since you began to think and choose for yourself, began to defy, show dissent, lie to get what you wanted and fight and quarrel, manipulate people for what you needed is all on you.

‘Re-parenting’ is digging deeper into the understanding of why you do things the way you do and how you can optimize the processes of the I-enterprise.

To a lot of people, working on their dreams seems like an impossible task because they are not well versed with the economics of the production process. They don’t know or have never tried to apply their mind to the process of deciding how much time it will take them to build what they want to build and develop what they are capable of developing.

So where does this imbalance arise in the first place?

Well let’s just say as a child you are an apprentice at this ‘trade’ and the first examples to learn from are the people you grow up looking at: your parents.

Secondly, a lot about you and what your mission is going to be, is defined by what abilities you perceive, possess and are genetically handed down to you by virtue of being born in the family line.

However the nurturing you receive has a lot to do with how you develop these things about yourself and this is where ‘parenting’ comes in. The shaping of your psyche by constant reassurances and reprimands over what is acceptable or unacceptable behavior shapes your understanding of ethics and values. Most importantly, it shapes your perception of what skills to develop and which ones to let go in the day to day process of growing up.

For example, as a 12 year old kid you may have been uncommonly agile and flexible for your age and were capable of climbing down from the attic, finding your footing on window sills and the drain pipe. You had the potential to develop this skill further and slowly progress to higher buildings, more complicated structures, tall trees, who know?

But your Dad caught you sneaking out in this fashion one day and he grounded you and gave you an ‘ultimatum’. You were made to understand by means of a social ‘tool’ known as the ‘scolding’ in a barrage of aggressive words accompanied by aggressive expressions that this was unacceptable behavior and you were not to repeat it again. To your developing inquisitive brain, this was an indication to develop another skill perceived as more acceptable and so you gave up this natural skill in favor of conveniently ‘lying’ about wherever you needed to go.

Now on a flipside consider a scenario wherein put in the same situation, your Dad took notice and in awe of how flexible and acrobatic you were, took you by the hand and dropped you off at a gymnastics coach. Let’s say for the next six to seven years you worked hard on calisthenics and flexibility training and freestyle gymnastics and ended up going viral in one of the freestyle videos you shot of yourself.

Both developments come with their own set of complications and you can never be prepared for all points of the spectrum. Yes, as far as the scope of this section is concerned, you are especially ill prepared for all the things that you weren’t parented for. That’s what we need to recognize and fix on our own as adults, as we look to improve and transform our lives and expand beyond the horizons that we have bound ourselves to.

One of the biggest hindrances in this process is our own ego which prevents us from accepting that there are still things about our personality that cannot be fixed. The cactus isn’t suited for tropical rainforests and frangipani trees would wilt inside a day under the desert Sun. This

doesn’t mean one is greater or better than the other, this simply means they are who they are and can only be who their environment has allowed them to be.

Another ego trap is not wanting to change at all and looking at your past with resentment. Not wanting to give yourself all the things that you couldn’t receive as a child and looking at others who have them by virtue of their environment with envy is like nurturing poison.

Of course all of this is easier said than done. How can we even begin to uncover which is which?

How do I know that which I am good at, is the best I can be at it? or alternatively, if what I’m good at is actually my worst trait even though I may be better than the rest? What if I live out my entire life thinking I’m the best at something while the biggest gift that was to come forth from within me that was meant to be a gift for not just me but the collective, all of Earth, all of humanity.. this gift just lay undiscovered because I failed to raise myself above who I was conditioned to be?

How much of you as you are and the life as you live it is really you? How much of what you do and what you accomplish is you and not who society conditioned you to become?

That’s a very deep question and the basis of our discovery of personal power. When you begin to work on yourself enough and reach a plateau you realize you’re right at the beginning once again. There’s still work to be done and there’s still a lot of discomfort with it, a lot of fear and a lot of uncertainty. Every choice you make you need to keep making consistently over a period of time for you to see what you need to see. If you don’t, you will not see results at the end of it all.

The deeper question we’re trying to answer here leads us further back to our past.

Why do we choose the things we do?

Which of these choices aren’t natural choices but induced choices as a result of our upbringing or limited world view when we were developing as kids, interacting with and learning from and through the world via the filters of parenting that were there albeit differently for each one of us?

One way is to learn to separate our ego from the self and understand there is a difference between my and mine.

Your concept of ‘mine’ develops before your concept of ‘my’ comes into place.

‘Mine’ defines belonging and having. ‘My’ identifies a separate autonomous entity that is connected to you by virtue of proximity to your environment wherein neither may belong to the other but they both exist as a double ended relationship that you both are a part of.

Another way is to learn to understand that your approach to things are only a result of your parents’ approaches to the same things one way or another but also coping mechanisms. We live within security paradigms that we don’t want to discard because they protect us from the ugly side of our personality, the untamed raw side, the shadow side.

Maybe the reason you are so particular with money is because your parents were careless with money and you’ve seen first hand what damages that can cause. Or perhaps your parents were

extremely careful with money and taught you the same things. Considering how most children are dependent on their parents until their teenage, that’s a solid 17-19 years that you just can’t ignore but that’s the thing.

Almost none of us find the healthy awareness of our parents’ roles in our lives until we’re in our mid life. Even then most of it comes and goes, you eventually outgrow those patterns the more and more you go higher up in the hierarchy of your own family than your biological family, the one you were born into.

Choosing not to have your own family is a conscious decision too that originates from your nurturing. Finally, it all boils down to seeing through with clarity in all the ‘contracts’ in your lives until the hard reality hits you: Your job as a parent is actually just to make your kids ready for the world. It is their job to grow continuously and beyond the ‘support structure’ that you provide.

The Earth has provided what you needed in vast amounts and plentifully at that. If the human race needs more sophistication in the minerals it needs for producing vast amounts of nuclear power or fortified grains and cereals, heavy metals and superconductors for research and inter planetary travel, by all means take the initiative.

You can’t just blame the Earth for being a restrictive planet!

So yes, if you really look at it, we only burn fossil fuels because that is most of what is available here to be used as fossil fuel with minimal effort. We learn about electricity, magnetism, charges etc. only later and so couldn’t have suddenly progressed to clean fuel.

The starting point is a starting point because that is all it is precisely, a starting point. To innovate and expand is to understand we’ve only evolved within the somewhat limited framework of things given to us by virtue of our nurturing from the environment.

How do we expand beyond that then?

Well by asking basic questions along the lines demonstrated above. In the Earth example here for instance, is colonizing Mars an egotistical venture just to prove that we as humans are ‘capable’ of going that far or in line with our higher purpose as human beings?

Is working to stabilize the development here on Earth to equitable and inclusive measures a more realistic projection of our strength or more in line with our deepest strengths and highest of dharma?

We know what we know as a human race as a result of where we had the chance of being in this point of time. If we had been born on an entirely different galaxy where there was Sun all year round and ten fifteen moons to gaze at in the night time, would we look at our dharma and our purpose differently?

So maybe then thinking about going away to a different planet isn’t such a bad idea because of the fresh perspective it may provide and the increased sense of personal power and self healing it

might accord wherein humanity could finally feel within control of its destiny having started anew on its own terms, afresh.

Point is this is short lived and much of it is really ego because unless you’re God, you’re always dependent on someone for something. Everyone that you’re dependent on has their own chain of input and so in the end, to grow you need to heal beyond what you know.

10. Internal Audit

“Regular internal audits reveal discrepancies”

This section of the book came first actually and everything else came later. On its own however this section means nothing unless you have the knowledge of everything that comes before and after. After you have that knowledge however, after you have the ‘awareness’, you are ready to change.

Intrinsic to every process of change is the first step. The first step is awareness. Even for drug users who go to rehab, the first step of the process of rehabilitation is accepting that you have a problem. While accepting may not really be the right word per se as acceptance is very subjective and it takes you a long time to really ‘accept’ something. Awareness, if you really look at it, is a more spiritual definition of the concept of acceptance.

If you are rolling through life unconsciously, never stopping to ask yourself the important questions that need to be answered, about how you got there, where you’re headed and what you feel in this moment, it is quite likely that you’ll never have the opportunity to understand what works for you when it does and what seems to be working but is masking cries for help underneath.

In the approach that we have taken thus far, we have not resorted to the age old methods of analyzing problems from external perspectives but challenging the premise of what makes us take our lives and actions trivially. The premise that it affects us alone and not others. The premise that our life is just the life of an individual and we are not in any way accountable to the collective for our individual fate. This is a very important point of reflection because even if they knew, no one would want to accept the responsibility of even their most trivial actions on the course of humanity.

However, as you can see by now, this is not so. You are not merely an individual; you the individual are a reflection of the entire human race in its smallest unit. You the individual are not here by chance living and working and breathing just to feed yourself. Consciously or unconsciously, you are an enterprise consistently engaged in using the single scarce commodity that makes the world go round; time and with it, manufacturing your service to humanity, your service to this planet and the universal consciousness with the help of your support group.

So therefore, as a conscious enterprise, it also becomes your responsibility to demonstrate just how responsibly you can go about that process of turning time into your highest offering to the human race.

To do so, the most important thing you need to do is to inculcate awareness into how you function. When you apply all of the principles that we have explored before this chapter, you see how awareness exists at multiple levels. From understanding your place in society to understanding your place in the food chain and evolution, awareness takes you deep within who you are and connects you far out from where you think your influence ends.

When you begin to change however, this grand understanding goes for a toss as you are blinded by habit.

Now habits are probably the hottest topic in the world of self help for at least the last 100 years. Just type ‘habits’ on the Amazon book store or Google it and there are probably more books there than there are words in the average bestseller on the topic.

Even so, nothing is without reason. That habits are an obsession for the average individual striving to change himself is based more on logic than it is based on fad. Our approach to self improvement is based on the premise that the human mind is predisposed to routine and in the process of searching for balance, we integrate habits into your lives. These habits can be ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and if they are bad we must ‘break’ them and change them to good habits that help us get more done and become better versions of ourselves.

Probably to someone not introduced to the approach explored in this course in the previous modules, this might seem like a perfectly plausible explanation. However, knowing what you do now and within this novel approach that we’re taking, what do you think is the purpose of a habit? What do you think is a habit at all?

If you really look at it, a habit is just a way of doing something. It’s what you would call in enterprise terms, a ‘process’. A process currently in effect may not necessarily be in line with industrial best practices but if they work well enough for the enterprise and fit into the enterprise culture, they become a part of the organization’s identity.

When I think about habit, the first thing that comes to mind is writing code. In computer programming, your code is important in that it should do what it is supposed to do. However, this is true only for the beginner stages when you’re probably the only one working on a project that will at best be graded by a single person and deployed for a single client.

As soon as the size of the project begins to increase and multiple programmers quite often across the globe begin to get involved and thousands sometimes hundreds of thousands of clients begin working with something you’ve coded, it is no longer about what works. It is about what works and keeps working without other elements having to work more than they should, without other people getting confused on how it is that you’re able to do what you do.

Great code is as easy to understand for others working on the project that will probably never meet you or ever even know what you sound like, look like, as it is potent in getting the job done and well.

The narrative changes completely however when you compare programming languages to each other.

There are programming languages that are clean and orderly and neat and tidy with clear rules, clear syntaxes such as C++ and C. Then there are orcs and goblins with magical powers but jagged edges and crooked dimensions like PHP and Java.

Ask a C++ programmer what he thinks about Java and he’ll tell you most probably he hates how ‘disorganized’ it quickly seems to get. Die hard programming nerds will tell you PHP isn’t even a proper ‘language’ to begin with. Then come the new age Python aficionados like me. People who believe that the more automation there is and less frivolous code writing, the better.

Long story short, an expert C++ programmer may have bad habits he gets away with because his language allows him that latitude. He may not be able to get away with the same things in Java and vice versa. Your habits aren’t really bad habits for you if they work for you and from your frame of reference allowing you to function and do what an enterprise does:

Take a scarce commodity, add value and sell it to people who need it to solve their problems.

The reason however you need to change your bad habits is because your bad habits can be bad for you. Now this is as subjective an issue as it is moral. How can we know which bad habits are worth changing and which ones aren’t really all that much?

Isn’t that the basic question about ethics and morality?

The answer has more to do with why something should be done rather than how it is done.

‘Awareness’ is the key here.

If you’re a sportsperson with a drinking habit it will cost you a game sooner or later. If you analyze it you’ll see that it makes perfect sense. Alcohol is a diuretic that can cause dehydration. As a sportsperson the most essential thing for you is to perform at peak performance. That can only happen with adequate hydration and nutrition. Binge drinking also interferes with sleep and poor food choices. Before you know, one thing leads to another and you find yourself cramping on the day of an important game because you had a few extra drinks the night before and passed out on a bag of Cheetos on your couch!

You’re cramping, the erratic posture your body was in all night and the inadequate hydration and high flavor, less nutrition diet puts you at an alarming risk of injury. You jump to take a shot at the half time mark and land on your ankle the wrong way and your season’s over.

Alternatively though, let’s say you’re a salesperson who makes about 200 cold calls every day and gets shot down by at least 80% of those guys. You head home at the end of the day and you need a natural suppressant to help you zone out of life and numb your mind for a bit. Alcohol probably not the best solution isn’t that critical for you to avoid. Quite honestly, it could help a lot. Meditation could as well for sure but why be such an extremist. Life is balance. Focus on your service to humanity.

However, this is quite often why people working in high pressure jobs such as the police, military and sales are quite often hooked to cigarettes. While that is obviously a bad choice

health wise, with the pressure that they face every minute of their job, they figure they have bigger things to worry about.

Doctors and paramedics also have some of the most taxing jobs but you won’t see many with a smoking habit. Why is that? Well it’s impractical with the nature of their job that causes them to attend to so many people one after the other. You can’t find enough time to feed a smoking habit with the time critical nature of the tasks involved in your job. Also, imagine a surgeon with shaky hands because he’s been operating for four hours and it’s time for a smoking break!

The concept of ‘bad habits’ therefore is very subjective and that is why most of us can never really get down to changing a lot of our habits. You need to have a convincing argument for yourself to understand that your habit is keeping you back from achieving the highest level of success possible in your domain.

It is here that I find a very interesting basis of decision making by building on top of the work of a fellow self help writer Stephen Covey from the “7 habits of highly effective people”.

You see, according to Stephen, the tasks that you need to perform everyday are arranged in a 2*2 matrix. They are classified as critical but not important, critical and important, important but not critical and neither critical neither important.

While the tasks in quadrant one, ‘critical and important’ are the ones we have no choice but to perform as quite often our jobs depend on them, it is the tasks in the important but not critical quadrant that really form the basis of our life journey.

Now, the reason for time management is to be able to understand that there are important tasks that we need to get done. These important tasks are related to our basic service to humanity whatever it is. It could be becoming the best heart surgeon on the planet who figures out novel ways to restart frozen hearts without a heart transplant. It could be becoming the best motivational speaker that inspires a generation of people facing the gravest challenges in the middle of war, pandemic, strife or recession. It could be selling insurance to help people mitigate life challenges and unforeseen events. It could be anything.

The point is, your purpose is for you to reconcile yourself with your highest purpose and become your higher self in this time period allotted to you on planet Earth. That will only happen when you work on yourself.

Working on you is subjective again but it is simple nevertheless. Working on yourself could be as simple as sitting in a single spot and doing nothing, absolutely nothing at all until you are aligned with the ‘Tao’ perfectly. Alternatively, working on yourself could be moving past your fears of intimacy and forming meaningful relationships. Working on you requires time and it involves work. Work involves getting important stuff done. Getting important stuff done requires time management. Time management requires a critical eye for detail that helps you release the fragments that do not serve and integrate the ones that do.

So, where do we start offloading habits that do not serve us?

Habits that prevent us from achieving and performing tasks in the second quadrant, the important but not critical quadrant, are the tasks that are sucking our life force out of us without our knowledge.

You are an enterprise and these processes are the ‘leak in the system’ that you need to plug or your entire enterprise will crash sooner or later because you won’t be able to acquire a strategic advantage.

Unless an enterprise can continuously expand on its strategic advantage, it cannot grow. If you’re not growing, you’re stagnating. If you’re stagnating, you’re declining. If you’re declining, you’re going to shut shop eventually.

Go back to chapter one and go through the slow process with which we lose our power and collapse into identity loss.

11. Change

“If change were easy no enterprise would fail.”

“The problem is not the problem. The problem is your attitude towards the problem.”

If you have habits that are leaking your time and resources and keeping you from becoming the best version of yourself, the important thing to do is to explore the cause of those problems.

Awareness is where you begin to realize that the efficiency of your assembly lines is sub par. Attention is where you begin to understand why you didn’t notice it before.

Let’s say you have a video game addiction. Sure, you need to work to pay your bills and maintain a decent standard of living. However, you have zero social life and a vitamin D deficiency because you are a computer programmer during the day and video game addict at night.

Finally one day you realize you could do so much more as a programmer if only you spent those after hours attending conferences, meet-ups or webinars. This awareness that your time is underutilized because you have a video game addiction that is weighing you down, leads you to look towards other ways to utilize your time.

However, change isn’t linear and implementing a new process is tough on the get go. What do you do? You begin to explore the cause of the problem first.

What caused your video game addiction in the first place?

Now that it’s established that the obscene amount of time and money you spend on procuring video games and extensions and controllers, Ultra HD screens and consoles is detrimental to your highest purpose, let’s explore why you do this in the first place.

Maybe it’s because you are an introvert and your need for adventure and thrill is fulfilled better in the virtual world than the real world.

Maybe gaming is your real passion and you work your job just to pay your bills.

Maybe you’re trying to mask a deep rooted feeling of lack by keeping yourself occupied and alienated in your free time so that you don’t have to deal with the real issues that wear you down. This is a process that is actually called hypothesis testing and is applied in a lot of research methods.

The idea is for you to explore different scenarios that challenge your understanding and assumptions about a problem or ‘process’. Then you conduct and exploratory analysis and reach the root cause of the problem you are trying to fix with the current system no matter how flawed. One of the biggest inefficiencies in corporate systems, the real difference between successful multinational enterprises and ‘wannabe’ and failing multinational enterprises is their approach to problem solving and challenging their understanding of the problem.

In expanding to geographical locations far removed from their own cultural origins, quite often enterprises try to over compensate by rebranding themselves to gain better traction in the target market.

Quite often such branding may result in their brand image being depleted.

What makes you you, is what makes you unique. It is what attracts your support group to you and it is what makes you have a unique vision of how to service humanity. Your unique solution is deeply rooted in the unique problem you face. Your problem comes with its own set of coping mechanisms and some of them are bad some good some not so much.

If automobile companies can sell the exact same product with different security standards to match the markets for which they are intended, you the enterprise can have your own concept of how you service humanity.

Problem is what makes you do what you do?

What makes you put your finger in your nose?

Is it because you’re a recovering smoker who is still accustomed to hand/ finger activity which is being directed elsewhere or is it just that you have generally stuffy sinuses and digging your nose seems to provide some concept of relief?

When you pay attention to why you do what you do, you can change it, you can swap it with a more powerful or suitable coping mechanism that improves your internal processes.

If you’re a smoker and you’ve ascertained that smoking is a bad habit indeed that is keeping you from going higher in your career, it would help to understand just why you smoke in the first place.

In my personal experience, being an ex smoker, I realized smoking just provided me a convenient excuse to zone out for fifteen minutes and not listen to people around me sometimes mid conversation. Other times, to bail on repetitive tasks midway and go catch a break.

Smoking was a way for me to make time for myself and the fact that I needed to resort to a habit as unhealthy as that to be able to take time out for myself shows just how weak my personal boundaries were.

Took me a while to work on it with a lot of failures and relapses but ultimately I just found out a better coping mechanism: posting stories on Instagram or going through my accounts, doing my bills or listening to a song and going for a brisk walk.

Then came the long nights spent in solitude thinking and contemplating, studying and writing. I realized one of the most effective things smoking did was give me the illusion of some company. Something to escape to even from something like writing that is an escape for me from everything else.

Vaping helped at first, then herbal shisha then tea then green tea and now they all just lie around on my work desk. The need to turn to any of them for company is slim and periodic at best. I just watch an episode of House when I’m taking a rest and that helps me more than anything else. I find relating with the solitary nature of the protagonist a lot more relatable and his dependency on substance for sanity makes me want to go one up and avoid that to feel I am at least in some way compensating for the lack of medical genius he has.

If you study your mind it will tell you exactly why it needs what it needs including its phobias and fears. Problem is, we’re so quick to dismiss bad habits that we never really get down to discovering how they came about in the first place.

Do you delay paying your bills until the last moment?

What could be the cause of it? Maybe you are extra cautious with money, having made errors in the past and paying people just stresses you out. Maybe you’re used to a very orderly way of doing things and you promise yourself every time to verify the billing at your end before you clear it but you just don’t find the time.

Do you roll around in bed after waking up in the morning and beat yourself up over it later when you’re getting ready and dashing to work at the last moment?

Maybe your body needs the extra rest or maybe you don’t enjoy work as much. Maybe you don’t sleep well at night or maybe you have unrealistic expectations of yourself from watching a ton of self help seminars and self improvement books that make you believe only people who wake up at 5 am are successful and everyone else is losing out!

Jimmy Wales, founder of the biggest free encyclopedia Wikipedia, sleeps 8 hours every night and he said so actually in one of his AMA sessions on Quora. Einstein slept 8-10 hours too. Warren Buffet makes sure he has free days planned for himself with no appointments so that he has enough time to sit and think.

The problem is not the problem. The problem is your attitude towards it.

Next time you face resistance from yourself over something you expect yourself to do but aren’t able to, ask yourself with compassion why you act like you do.

Ask yourself with love and genuinely try to understand why you are acting the way you do.

Remember, the ego has pretty strict boxes for how things should be, how people should be, how you should behave and how you should act.

Sometimes your higher self is just directing you to flow with the tide

This reminds of a very interesting story by Alan Watts about a man who visits a Zen Master to find a solution to his habit of smoking.

“Master I smoke a lot. I wish I could stop smoking!” he said.

“Well then stop smoking” said the master.

“I try but then I start smoking again” said the man desperately

“Well then smoke” said the master.

“But I would really want to not smoke as much.” Said the man frantically feeling unable to get through to the master.

“Then don’t!” said the master.

Confused but with a replenished resolve to give up smoking, the man bowed to the Zen Master and went back home.

A week later he came back , shaking with withdrawal symptoms.

“Master I really need a smoke” he said fidgeting and unstable.

“Then smoke!” said the master.

So the man decided to have complete faith in the master and lit a cigarette. It gave him some relief and he sat down next to the master for a few hours peacefully.

“Master I don’t want to start smoking again !” he said, worried.

“Then don’t!” said the master calmly.

Finally after a series of exchanges the man arrived at the solution to his problem. The right solution here is to stop smoking only as much as you can. If you fall back into the habit, the idea is to accept that you fell off the wagon and get on the wagon again. Ultimately, just because you are attentive to what you are doing, you are able to let go of the habit.

In my mindfulness coaching sessions, I take the same approach in helping learners calm down and pay more attention to what they do and how they do it.

The process of training your mind, says renowned meditation teacher Andy Puddicombe, is a lot like reining in a horse. You cannot do it all at once. You cannot do it all in one day.

The process is more like tying a wild stallion to a pole in the middle of a big field, with a long rope. A long enough rope that the horse doesn’t have the absolute freedom that he otherwise had in the wild but not so short that he begins to feel the absence of that freedom quite apparently.

In time, in the course of the next few weeks, the length is reduced gradually until the horse is standing at a spot in the same field grazing grass not feeling bound or captured at all.

The mind is like that. If you try to restrict your mind to do something, even with the best of your intentions, it is likely to rebel. It is likely to conjure up fears and tantrums like psychosomatic

illnesses and symptoms of all kinds. Sometimes the apparent stress may actually manifest as an illness. This is why heroin addicts may actually die of withdrawal if the process of detox is not carefully conducted.

If you’re patient however and attentive to why you do what you do and how you do it, you begin to realize subtle clues about reigning in the wild mustang that your mind is.

There’s a famous quotation that comes to mind:

Go and love someone just like they are and watch them turn into the most amazing version of themselves.

That someone is you! The way to change is self love.

Exercises

Journaling Exercises For Module1

Write down 5 things such as hobbies, activities and skills you would love to develop but don’t.

Write down your reasons for not doing those things on the right side and opportunities for growth if you do them on the left side.

Write down 5 of your biggest failures on the right and what you learnt from them on the left.

Write down 5 of your biggest successes on the left and why you think you succeeded on the right.

Journaling Exercises For Module 2

What 5 things do you want to accomplish right now that have a level of risk that scares you?

These can’t be the same 5 things you wrote in the previous chapter.

What do you like/ hate about yourself? (5 points)

What does your support group like/hate about you? (5 points)

What are your strengths and weaknesses? (5points each)

Journaling Exercises For Module 3

Count carefully how many times throughout the day you said yes when you wanted to say no. Carefully write the names of the people who caused you to disrespect your personal boundaries willingly or unwillingly.

Write 5 things that these people do for you that make you feel grateful to have them in your life.

Write down 5 instances when these people helped you out of a personal difficulty.

Write down 5 things that you do for these people.

Write down 5 times that you helped these people out of a personal difficulty with or without them asking for your help.

Journaling Exercises For Module 4

Which member of your support group keeps the most commitments?

Which member of your support group do you keep the most commitments with?

Which member of your support group have you broken most commitments with recently?

Which member of your support group has been breaking most commitments with recently?

Go over the 5 recent commitments that you made and followed through on and write the names of the people who were involved in each one of them.

Journaling Exercises For Module 5

Designing negotiation exercises without an audio visual format is very tough. Optional exercises are available for free download on coachkaushal.com

Journaling Exercises For Module 6

What are the ‘contracts’ of your life that you find yourself continuously caught up in?

What are some direct consequences of the contracts of your life?

Write down 5 negative and 5 positive consequences of those contracts in your life.

Journaling Exercises For Module 7

Close your eyes for 5 minutes and think about the top 3 things resolving which would fix your life.

How long have you been trying to fix them?

According to you, write the top 3 reasons why you haven’t you been able to fix them.

Given a chance would you walk away from them?

What do you want? Write the top 3 things.

How long have you wanted these things?

Why do you think you haven’t been able to get them till now? Right the top 5 reasons.

Which is easier? Addressing the causes why you can’t get them or walking away?

How would you advise a friend facing the same choice?

Journaling Exercises For Module 8

Write 5 desires you have that actually leave you miserable for not having.

Write 5 desires you have that you are absolutely sure you will receive.

Write 5 things you manifested in the past that you realized later you didn’t really want.

Write 5 things you have been manifesting for a while but haven’t shown up in your life.

Write 5 things you manifested without even trying too hard once you decided to.

Meditative Exercise For Module 8.1

Think about 5 things that you don’t like about your life right now.

Think about the 1 thing you most want to do this moment that doesn’t make any sense to you.

Journaling Exercises For Module 8.3

What are 5 aspects of yourself that no one knows?

What are 5 aspects of your personality that deeply embarrass you?

What do you secretly desire but keep yourself from desiring?

Journaling Exercises for Module 9

What entities in your environment do you have a ‘mine’ relationship with?

What entities in your environment do you have a ‘my’ relationship with?

What are some things you would never do?

What aspects about your life are ‘non negotiable’?

Journaling Exercise For Module 10

Review your responses to exercises up till this point and look for recurring patterns. Is there something that stands out?

Journaling Exercises For Module 11

List some of the habits you have. Good or bad doesn’t matter.

Why do you engage in these habits? List 5 reasons for each one.

How many of these habits are in alignment with your highest version as you imagine it?

How many of these habits are deterring you in your journey to achieve the highest version of yourself?

If you were to change any habits which new habits would you like to replace them with?

How will you show yourself love in this process of change? Finalize one habit for the same.