For as long as you carry layers of mask – you will not meet the right people for you. The mask diverges you from the right people for you. The image that the mask creates, will attract people who like the image. If you want to be liked and loved for the real you, then do not build an image in the eyes of others. It is a brave choice but it guarantees results.

We all have different aspects of us, some of them we like and other aspects we do not like about ourselves. We have a superconscious aspect which tells us what the right way to think and behave according to our culture and subculture, according to our religion, according to our family and friends and work colleagues. This superconscious aspect is great for getting us quick wins in society, as it is very good at saying the right things, doing the right things. However we have aspects which are the opposite of the superconscious. These are three main aspects which we do not like at all and we deal with them by ignoring them, shutting them up, pushing them away, silencing them. They are very embarassing aspects to ourselves and to others. These are the mundane, the profane and the painfully ordinary aspects of us. The mundane aspect is the super boring aspect of us, which reduces us to the most basic levels of existence – the food, the sleep etc. The profane is the cynical, the disrespectful, the unholy, the perverse, etc. The painfully ordinary is the super super ordinary about us, which is too painful to us to look at. It gives us pain every time it comes to our consciousness and it can hurt others too.
So we are embarassed by these three uncomfortable aspects of ourselves and we push them away, we reject them. But they are still there and they are functioning powerfully on the back chambers of our consciousness, in the shadow of our consciousness. And for as long as something is on the back and in the shadow – it has a full reign of power and control. The only thing that stops it from having so much power is to bring it into our awareness and to accept it that it is integral part of who we are. Once it is accepted and admitted to ourselves and the world, then it is no longer functioning, it is no longer powerful. But accepting it is not a trick. If acceptance is done for the purpose of reducing that undesirable aspect of us, then it will not work. It has to be truly accepted. It has to be truly admitted and loved. Yes, Loved. Then the monster is silenced as it becomes a loved member of the family of all your aspects. This integrated You, is the authentic You and the ticket to all kinds of success in life – relationships, finances, health. Without accepting and loving your embarrassing aspects, you will always be in situations where people and circumstances are pushing you to reveal those aspects, pushing you and pushing you. The more we avoid integrating those aspects, the more we will be surrounded with people who provoke us to reveal those aspects to the world. If you want to avoid those dislikable people who seem to be getting the worst of you, start loving and accepting your mundane, profane and ordinary aspects. Then you will see a marked shift of circumstances and situations in your life – you will no longer be attracting those kind of people. The people in your life will become much nicer and much easier to deal with. Why? Because as your authentic self begins to be unfolding to the world, you will start attracting more and more of the people and situations who are a match to your authentic self. Try it. It works like a dream. This is the most powerful and effective tool of creating your desired reality.

Ok, so you have done the cognitive understanding that you were an active participant, co-creator, designer and an engineer of your relationship. You may have even understood why you have created that relationship, and what challenges you have set yourself up to overcome through it. However the emotions are not so easy to calm down with cognitive understanding. As useful as it is for your future success in relationships and for your growth as a person and for your development as a successful-at-relationships man or a woman, the cognitive understanding does not do much to cool down the emotions of love and sadness and missing someone. The cognitive understanding does help us with the feelings of being hurt, because it makes us aware how we have participated in that game of being hurt. It is a game, it is not real. This needs to be clear. Every occasion of being hurt by your partner is co-created with you to make you strong enough to stand up for yourself, to make you strong enough to choose You and to accept You, if they are not accepting you, to stretch their lack of accepting you and liking you and loving you so much so that you finally find it intolerable and you finally get it that you need to love yourself first before you love another, that you need to respect yourself first before you get into a healthy relationship, that you need to be compassionate and caring and kind towards yourself first before you can attract the right people for you. So these are the functions of the cognitive understanding.

The cognitive understanding does not do much to efface the love we feel for someone if we still love them and to help us stop missing them. The emotions run on a much deeper layer than the cognition so the cognition is not enough to reach that deep. And with the emotions of loving someone and missing them, come the emotions of fear from being alone, fear from the future, sadness, desires to hold on to that person because of these fears. So we need to do some emotional work. And this work is very simple and counter-logical. We accept whatever emotion arises and we stay with it. Accept it and stay with it. Accept it and stay with it. Matt Khan says “Whatever arises love that” as the map to successful navigation through rocky emotional landscapes. I have not reached the level of enlightenment of Matt Khan yet, however intuitively I feel very agreeable to his statement, and what I find useful is to go in a direction of multiplying the feelings instead of trying to reduce the feelings. And this technique I was taught by the Stanislavski school of acting. When a human tells herself/himself not to feel something, that feeling escalates higher and higher. So when an actor on stage has to perform a certain emotion, he tells himself not to feel that emotion. That is the inner talk of the actor – exactly the opposite of what he wants to portray. This is the curse of humans. We are not very good at portraying straight forwardly our emotions. It always comes out exactly the opposite to what it is intended. For example, someone wants to look sexy and carefree, if they start trying to achieve that – they will look silly. No one can achieve to look sexy if they try to look sexy. The main prerequisite of looking sexy, is not to try at all. There are other ingredients to looking sexy, it is a more complex formula, but if one thing needs to be done to look sexy that would be – not to try to look sexy. Not to try. There is failure conceived in the trying. So, if we are not going to be trying anything, because that does not work, then logically the opposite should work. And that is fully accepting, fully embracing the Now, the Present, the feeling at this moment. Breathe in and out and accept it. Breathe in and out and stay with it. Don’t run away from it. Stay with it and locate it in the body. See where it is located in the body. Direct your consciousness to that place in the body and observe it. Observe the pain that this emotion is giving to that place in the body. Breathe in and out and observe it. Direct your breathing towards the painful place in the body and breathe into it. Breathe into it. And just accept it. Then talk to it lovingly and caringly, with the sweetest, gentlest possible voice you can do without trying. “I love you” “Thank you” and repeat it as many times as you wish and keep breathing into it. This is the effective processing of emotions. You send acceptance, love and thanks to the emotion and to the body which contains the emotion. Not running away from it, distracting from it, or filling the empty space with new material. And no trickery – “hm, ok if I want to get rid of this emotion I have to accept it first and I have to love it first, so let’s do that then”. It will work only if the acceptance and the love are sincere and only if there is no goal-directed-ness towards reducing the emotion. We do not like it when we are upset someone to tell us “calm down”, so why do we tell that horrible ineffective, devalidating, devaluing, disrespectful, dishonoring statement to ourselves? Why don’t we trust that the emotions as uncomfortable they are and as obstructive they are, come from a deep, mysterious place within us which deserves all the respect and honour and validation and acceptance in the world. Trust it. Trust yourself. Trust the sincere and authentic nature of your emotions. Love them, respect them, honour them. They are part of your Authentic Design which is far too unique, enigmatic and deep to be reduced to some socio-cultural expectations of what emotions are appropriate and what levels of emotions are appropriate. And if you want to subside your emotions because they are disruptive in your daily life – then you need to see them as protestors in the streets with loudspeakers shouting at the government. You are the government and your emotions have something to say to you. If it has come to this point where they have got so loud and are shouting – you need to take responsibility for that. How did you neglect them along the way, how did you neglect your inner world, your deep feelings along the way. Why did you neglect them. And this is not done to reprimand yourself, but to better understand yourself. Did you feel the need to trade the fulfillment of your emotions with some other kind of security. Many people do that – they get a well-paid job, they leave a less paid job where their feelings were comfortable, for the financial security of a new job, and on the new job the emotions don’t feel comfortable. Or choose a partner who provides the financial security and leave a partner who offers an emotional security, then the emotions feel uncomfortable. These are just 2-dimensional examples, it is not given that less-paid jobs are more comfortable to the emotions than higher-paid jobs, nor is it given that financially supportive partners are not good with emotional support. The examples are just to show the direction of the self-exploration so that we to understand how and why our feelings ended up so strong and so out-of-control. And we will discover that it is our own mismanagement and neglect of our sacred emotional inner worlds. So back to some cognitive work of self-reflection and self-searching. In Cognitive Work During the Ending of a Relationship, I discuss that process in detail.

When you look at your successes and losses in relationships, in career, in health and in finances, do you have the feeling that you are getting the best for yourself or do you feel short-changed and settling down for second, third and fourth best? Or you may be one of those 12% who stay with their partner just because they could not be bothered to find someone new. The OnePoll study (2007) of a cross section of British society found that only 1/3 were married for love.

Where on the journey to getting the one you love, are you? And what would it take to get there? Famously revealed by the same OnePoll study, 55% said that before they got married they spent more on clothes hoping to impress their dates, and despite that, 23% would not marry their spouse if they had a second chance.

All of this trouble with getting what you really want and what is best for you, comes from one very common belief among people that they are unworthy, that they don’t deserve the good things in life. It is so common and so natural to many people, that it is hardly noticeable and when they reflect on the causes for not getting the best, they would consider anything else but their own lack of self-worth. It is too deeply buried in our unconscious minds and too difficult to uncover and make it conscious. And for as long as we do not have a conscious awareness of our belief of unworthiness, it will operate in its full strength, and it will influence the outcomes of everything we endeavour whether that is dating, relationship, getting a job, managing our finances or looking after our health and wellbeing. The only thing that de-activates this very potent belief of unworthiness, is bringing it to our conscious awareness and undoing the deeply entrenched patterns of thinking, feeling and behavioural responses. I am skilled to detect the feeling of unworthiness in you and reveal to you how it activates your unsatisfactory situations in dating, in relationships, in career, in finances, in health, the exact habitual pathways of thinking, feeling, perceiving, speaking and behaving, along which it activates and maintains your distance from getting what you truly want and what you deserve. As you become aware of these, you begin to shed the old limiting skin of unworthiness, and you begin to emerge as a new version of You – a Deserving-the-Best version, which greets you with gifts, rewards and happy surprises, to show you that you are on the true path. I then guide you how to de-activate the most resistant aspects of the old unworthy you and how to allow the Deserving You to take full authority over your life to create the best reality for you.

As an inhabitant of this planet your main role is to be You. A plant does not aim to help the world, it just is itself, and by being itself – it unfolds its natural beauty. In this way as a bi-product of being itself, it makes the world a more beautiful place.

I use the metaphor of the plant often when working with human beings, because life is life and it is very useful before we start flying and aiming for big achievements, to remind ourselves about the fundamentals of existence on this planet. Nothing can be achieved without getting the foundations right. A plant needs to have a strong root to grow healthy and strong and beautiful and to survive the environmental factors. The same is applicable for a human being on this planet.

An orange tree does not work to produce oranges nor does it run after people trying to give them healthy delicious fruits. It is being itself, revealing its true nature to the world in stages, transforms from one stage to another, on one of which stages – fruits come into existence. Humans enjoy looking at the stage of the blossoming for its beauty and collecting the oranges at the stage of fruition.

When you are being You, you will transform from one stage to another, at some stages you will be more productive and more useful to others and at other stages less so. Nothing can be judged as useless or bad, as everything is part of the whole. We can’t speed up a stage that is not manifesting blossoms or fruits, we can’t improve it, we can’t correct it. There is nothing to correct in you, to work on in you, to forcefully change in you. When you are ready for change your transformation will be done and you will arrive at the next stage.

This is the natural life of every being on this planet and this natural cyclical nature of manifested and hidden, manifested and hidden fruits and blossoms, needs to be acknowledged, respected, accepted, revered and understood as it knows what it is doing and it is not underachieving. It is just being organic.

From then on, you can fertilize and increase your fruits and blossoms, but only after you have learned to respect and accept the natural organic cyclical nature of life. Without that respect and reverence to it, you will not be supported to jump straight into increasing your blossoms and fruits. Humans are very good at disrespecting nature and trying to fly before we can walk. The wrong thing is always the lack of acceptance and respect for the organic cyclical nature of life.