This book by Dr. Shefali is truly incredible as she discusses the transformation of waking up and coming to an awakening within yourself!

The time of the awakened woman

There comes a time in the life of a woman. When she discards her old ways like tossed shoes in the garbage. When she shreds her list of ‘shoulds’ and obligations. And when impossible expectations are burned in an incinerator

There comes a time in the life of a woman when the approval of others once jewels now turn to pennies in her sock. When the hunt for another is now replaced by a hunt for herself. And when parental tentacles of tradition no longer define her truth. 

There comes a time in the life of a woman when her desire to fit in with the crowd dissolves. When her manic compulsion to be perfect vaporizes. And when her obsession to be voted popular eviscerates. 

There comes a time in the life of a woman when she no longer fears conflict but faces it boldly like a lioness. When she guards her authenticity as fearlessly as she guards her babies. And when she drops the role of savior knowing she can only save herself. 

There comes a time in the life of a woman when she no longer cowers in the shadows of her unworthiness. When she no longer plays small so others can feel big. And when she swaps the role of victim for the role of cocreator. 

There comes a time in the life of a woman when she unabashedly and boldly occupies her ultimate sovereignty. When she finally feels free to claim her space in the world. And when she redefines compassion as unequivocal self-love. 

There comes a time in the life of a woman when she finally releases her childlike dependences on others. When she dares to rewrite a new mandate of living for herself. One that says: I release unworthiness and fear. I divorce servility and passivity. I divest inauthenticity and enmeshment. I end the pretense of being someone I am not. And from now on I declare…

I will ascend into my highest power. I will embrace my greatest autonomy. I will celebrate my deepest worth. I will embody my fiercest courage and manifest the most authentic me. The time is now. I am ready. To awaken into my renaissance. 

 

We all yearn to be free, yet we feel encaged in our daily lives. This book promises you a path out of the cage toward a new vision of yourself. To awaken and evolve means to deeply understand ourselves. This involves befriending the parts of us we may not want to see, especially our pain. The pain comes from a dismantling of old belief structures and ways of being. 

Put your emotional seat belt on before getting on this ride. When we shift into a new awareness, we tend to go through a severe disorientation. 

Soul erosion is a gradual process- a slow, creeping, chipping away at our inner being, resulting in the inevitable death of all we know to be our truest selves. It’s a disease the begins in childhood and spreads contagiously, especially in women. Its symptoms include loss of power, authenticity, voice, and vision. Soul erosion is essentially an obliteration of our inner knowing. Each incident in which we suppress our inner truth, we engage in the erosion of our most precious treasure- our essence. 

As it is with all of us, the death of who we originally are is replaced by a persona we commonly call the ego, our false self. Most of us grown up thinking of this as our true self. Little do we realize that we are creating an entire life based on a false foundation that will have several emotional consequences for years to come. There isn’t a person I know who has escaped the replacement of their authentic self with a persona, the mask behind which their true self lies largely dormant. This happens more so with little girls because of the overarching patriarchy we live under, where boys are allowed to “just be boys”. Our young girls, on the other hand, are trained to fit a rigid prescription early in life. 

So conditioned are women to abandon any vestige of inner truth for the sake of fitting into what our parents or culture want for us that we go through life unaware such a split even exists. Most of us grow into adults unaware of the false ways we have adopted in order to get our needs for love and worth met. Things stay much the same under the guise of “good enough”. As children, we were unable to self-advocate.  

We contort ourselves until we match the picture others have of us such that their picture of us becomes our own picture. So great is our thirst to be seen and validated by our parents and our culture that we succumb to the ego’s powerful and instinctive lure, slowly burying our authentic nature in the process. The result is a false identity, which we now present to the world. We think it’s who we are, but it’s really only a facade we wear to ward off the fear that we are unworthy and unlovable. 

Can you imagine how this awareness of a potential threat shapes our psyche? Whether we had a father who simply raised his voice occasionally or one who indulged in mad rages, we learn to instinctively protect ourselves around the males in our lives. This takes a toll on us and fundamentally shapes how we develop. 

The first step begins in calling the fog a fog, distinguishing it from reality. By my taking the blame, the other could stay comfortable and, therefore, happy with me. Fear is the ruling emotion in our fogged-up state. Because we live in fear, we don’t call out the toxicity for what it is. I saw this cycle of fear-blame-shame in my own life. Each time I didn’t stand up for myself out of fear, I beat myself up for days afterward. It was only when I could own my fear that I began to awaken. 

I understand when women are pissed off, outraged, frustrated. They have suppressed their feelings for so long that it makes sense when they bubble over and feel the need to scream, “No more!” Little do we realize the becoming a bold woman is our path to salvation. As long as fear eclipses the language of our soul, we continue to be puppets to external forces. 

Over time, and with enough trauma, the ego cannot cover up all the cracks going on and what emerges is a “mid-life crisis”. The rock bottom experience. It signifies the potential death of the ego. The reason why rock bottom hurts so much is because our ego’s facade has cracked under pressure. Our usual habits and strategies no longer work: they have bottomed out. We now feel emotionally bereft. This new place feels scary and threatening. Who are we without our usual egoic defenses? If only we realized that hitting rock bottom and undergoing the cracking of our ego is the portal to our rebirth, we wouldn’t dread it so much. Because we don’t trust this is all happening for our own betterment, we resist. 

A shedding of the need to be validated as a rescuer and fixer needs to happen. To release those around you from giving you the ego fix. Growing to love yourself more and beginning to say no more often is the healing path.

When we give into culture’s manipulation, playing safe and playing small, the patriarchy stays in power. When a woman tells the daring truth of what she has endured, she moves away from being mired in individual fear toward a new emotion-love. She declares, “I love myself. I am worthy of being heard. I am more than the sum of my past. I trust my voice.” I challenge women to shift from fear to love. When one woman manifests the courage to speak up for herself, like a tidal wave, she clears the path for other women to empower and emancipate themselves. It may take time because we are unaccustomed to hearing ourselves speak our truth. 

Straying from ourselves began decades before we became an adult and entered a relationship. If we are lucky, we see the pattern and wake up. While it isn’t something we are consciously aware of, most women are trained from early girlhood to crave what I call the triple threat: the need for approval, validation, and praise. The problem is that others have played the central role in our psyche more than we ourselves have. This is at the root of our sickness. The extent to which we are carved and curated by others is shocking. I’m referring to an intense and radical confusion about who we are at our core. I am speaking of our common tendency to obliterate our identity for the sake of what others and culture demand of us. Who are we when stripped of our cultural conditioning, free of our identification as someone’s daughter, sister, wife, or mother? It’s extremely important to understand our blueprint as women. No matter our geographical location or our income, or whether we were raised on a farm in Pakistan or Ohio, we were, to varying extents, formed by this blueprint. 

However they were passed on, in whatever language, the fact remains that we women are conditioned to hold ourselves back and give of ourselves to ensure that the needs of others, especially men, are met before our own. As a result, we often suffer exhaustion and burn out. We find ourselves irritable and cranky with little awareness of why. We need to go deep within ourselves and understand the severity of our divorce from our inner being. Only then will our transformation flourish. Part of the awakening process requires that we hold up a mirror to see every belief we falsely hold and every dysfunctional pattern in which we addictively participate. 

The truth is that no one likes to see themselves as having been molded by culture and, even less, do we relish hearing that most of what we believed about our role as women is a lie. It requires a long look within, where we dissect layer upon layer of conditioning, to discover the degree to which we have been hoodwinked. As hard as this inner work is, it also promises the greatest gift to you- the gift of authenticity. 

We treat ourselves as worthy only if certain criteria are met. The “good girl” tries desperately to be validated, seeking a sense of belonging and endorsement from her outer world. She learns early that her goodness comes from two main sources: compliance and service to others. The notion that we are good enough only if x,y,and z are met is dysfunctional and must be abandoned. 

As we know, it’s no simple thing to change the old paradigm of THAT WOMAN into one that’s completely redesigned from within. It takes gumption. We are creatures of homeostasis who, by and large, covet complacency over adventure and constancy over chaos. It’s only when we are infused with a spirit of the wild and are ready to disrupt our lives that we are able to transform the old into something profoundly different. I am talking about a true spiritual renaissance, the kind that takes intense inner valor and is the work of spiritual warriors. The kind of transformation I am referring to requires a radical awakening. 

When we realize that both the problem and the solution lie in ourselves, the process of change begins. This is the missing piece, the key ingredient. 

We don’t live a life, we live a pattern. The process of entering this deeper layer is like removing cobwebs from our eyes. The reason most of us don’t notice our patterns is that we have been hungry for two foods, love and worth. So hungry have we been that we are in a hallucinatory stupor. Attention, acceptance, and validation are the prizes we obsess over, rabidly hunting them at all costs. Because we believe we are looking for can only be found on the outside, this hunt takes us from relationship to relationship and, at other times, from achievement to achievement. We feel like hapless bystanders, with no choice but to react to what life throws at us. We may have acted like passive reactors, yo-yoing to whatever shows up in our lives, but the truth is, we are extremely active participants in, and cocreators of, our experiences. Passivity then, is a choice- a very active one at that, disguised as a non-choice. Instead of discovering how to give these things to ourselves, we sought them from the external world. 

The more we learn to sit quietly with ourselves in self-reflection, the more we become aware of what’s going on within. We begin to depend on our own company and relish our own friendship. We develop a companionship with our inner being and learn to value its opinions, desires, and ideas. In essence, we begin to court our authentic self.

More and more attuned to our acts of self-abnegation, we pay attention when we suppress our inner voice and, instead, begin to speak up. Eventually, we will arrive at a new place where the needle begins to move from the outer to the inner, from self-imposed duty to authenticity, from lack to abundance, from fear to self-empowerment. The natural blossoms of these shifts is a burgeoning sense of inner love and worth.

There are more failed second marriages than first marriages. That is most likely due to the fact that people aren’t aware of their patterns. 

Self-awareness is the ego exterminator. 

This book requires an inner stillness and readiness to reflect deeply. 

There were so many moments when I clenched my jaw in silence in order to keep the peace, so many moments where I swallowed my dignity in order to keep the family intact. When I wanted to say no, I didn’t. Instead I bobbed my head in acquiescence. When I wanted to assert my will, I didn’t. Instead I convinced myself that my desires were unmerited. So afraid was I to rock the boat and be seen as a troublemaker that I did everything humanly possible to keep the ship afloat. I thought to myself, If only I could be nicer, then we would be happier! If only I was skinnier, we would have better sex. If only I earned more money, we would enjoy life more. I railed against myself constantly, berating myself for not being “good enough”. I was so afraid of his disapproval and withdrawal of love that I tried to become his every fantasy. So enmeshed and fused was I with his sense of well-being that I completely lost every last connection to myself. As a result, I kept trying to be better and better. 

Eventually, we are hit with the epiphany that growth depends on us, not the “other”. Instead of focusing on them, we need to focus on our own emotional contribution, such as, How am I reacting to the other’s behavior? How are my conditioned ways of being supporting their behavior? How am I executing my choices? How am I participating in the cyclical dynamics? 

We realize that the power to change our lives ultimately falls on us and we are sometimes resentful of this. We begrudge the other for forcing us to make difficult choices. This is spiritually immature. 

I needed to stop waiting for my ex-husband to stop his patterns and instead end my own. I needed to change what I was doing. If I thought I was giving too much, well, instead of begging him to stop talking, I needed to change myself and simply cease giving. This meant creating boundaries and to start saying no. As I kept growing, I began to create new causes and effects and quite naturally left behind vestiges of the “old Shefali”. Different sentences began to come out of my mouth, and fresh boundaries were made. Subtle but profound shifts were created in my external self as my internal self began to evolve. It is the look of an awakened woman. 

When we change our patterns, we create dramatic upheavals in the status quo of our relationships and, quite naturally, people in the old system begin to protest. Of course they do. They want things to return to the way they used to be and, in turn, resist the changes we are making. Inevitably, there is a huge clash. Either the one changing stops their growth, which is typically what happens, or the one resisting stops resisting and is welcoming of the other’s growth. 

Either I continued the old way and kept denying my authentic self, or I allowed this new part of me to grow and continued to forge a path of awakening. Before I was quiet and timid, I now dared to protest and defy. Where before I compromised and sacrificed myself, I now dared to place myself first. I now created stoic boundaries of power. And you know what two things stopped the most? I stopped overexplaining and I stopped begging for validation. I finally got to the place where the only person I needed validation from was myself. 

The thing that happens when women awaken is that we honor ourselves. This self-honor allows us to create new standards for our lives, some that are often nonnegotiable. If disrespect is on the menu, we leave the table- no exceptions. Big feelings are no longer to be feared, but celebrated. If we wish to speak, we do. If we wish to cry, we do. There is no one to ask permission from and no one to blame. We become our own mothers, lovers, and best friends. We become our own giving tree. 

How is a mother supposed to make the difficult choice between her children’s well-being and her own liberation? It’s virtually impossible. The only way she can ultimately go forward is when she unequivocally believes that her path will be in the best interest for all. Only when she is fully convinced that staying, despite the immediate comfort it brings, will be more toxic than going through the fire of transformation, will she dare put another step forward. I knew I would be a way better mother and role model out of the marriage than in it. 

There is wisdom in doing things when the time is right. There is a lot to be said for spiritual timing. What this means is that we move forward only when there is a clear clarion call. This usually happens when our inner awareness finds its match in the outer world. Both our inner and outer reality line up. We await this alignment. Whenever the choice doesn’t present clearly, we need to own the phrase, “I am not ready just yet”. We allow for the lack of clarity to be our bedfellow, trusting that through this surrender the right path will emerge when it’s time to do so. 

Our sons and daughters cannot afford to make our mistakes. They need to learn that there are ultimately no excuses for toxic behavior, no matter how “nice” the other person is most of the time. Most of all, they need to learn that they don’t have to tolerate living in fear or terror of another human under any circumstances. 

Many times, both partners are able to adapt, evolve, and grow together, entering a new marital consciousness. When this happens, it’s a beautiful thing, indeed. Many partners are excited y each other’s growth and seek to change themselves to stay in sync with the other. Some can do this successfully, while others cannot. There is no judgment on the ones that cannot. For the couples who can, spiritual evolution becomes a family affair. I have seen this happen many times in my practice and it’s a hugely enlightening process for all. 

Awakening is a beast. There is 100 percent truth to the adage that ignorance is bliss. Of course it is. When we are silent, no one gets upset with us. For many, this bubble of ignorance will be the mainstay of their existence. It makes sense that the decade of their 40’s is the decade of metamorphosis for many women who choose to take the road less traveled. Having followed the checklist dutifully- educated, wed, and perhaps mothered- we have completely forgotten ourselves until now. But something happens when our children become teens. Watching them burst into autonomy and be bold, defiant, and confrontative wakes something within us. We are jolted into an awareness of our own passivity and docility. We watch our children be reckless, bold, and unafraid. 

We can write new narratives for ourselves, like how we look, how and if we marry, how we parent. This is scary at first because we find ourselves in uncharted waters, but soon we find freedom in the process. Once we realize that culture doesn’t get to define us, we begin to take our power back. The validation we sought from others no longer means as much to us. We now ground ourselves in a new reality, one based on self-validation. Culture has infused dread into the divorce process as a way of controlling people and keeping them together. 

It was only when I began to reframe the idea of divorce that things truly began to shift for me. This divorce wasn’t a break from anything on the outside, it was a divorce from my own past, my own inauthenticity, my own false self, my own ego. It was really a divorce from fear and control. When I began to approach divorce as a personal declaration in my life’s journey, everything fell into place. I became empowered instead of disempowered. I came into alignment with my inner truth. I entered an expansive heartfelt space of compassion, rather than blame and resentment. I wasn’t angry at all. I was actually in deep reverence for all the lessons I had learned. I didn’t see this as an end as much as a completion, which requires a different energy. This divorce was not from my husband per se. It was about my marriage to my authentic self. Every step forward was not so much away from him as toward my truth. 

To keep fears at bay, we don masks of the ego. We need to ask ourselves, “How do I use masks to obtain validation in my life?” “Givers” are typically codependent, meaning they are highly dependent on another’s validation. In fact, one could go so far as to say that their entire sense of self depends on it- so much so that without this they feel as if they don’t exist.

There are several masks the ‘giver’ wears: The victim, The Martyr, The Savior, The Bleeding Empath.

1. The victim- Do you feel as if you are the “poor” one in your life and work? Do you feel as if people take advantage of you? Do you feel sorry for yourself and wish things were different? Do you feel as if you are right and they are wrong? Do you feel insulted and belittled by others? Do you expect things from others that don’t come to fruition? Do you feel as if you are an innocent target for others’ wrath? Do you share your woes with others, expecting sympathy, and then feel upset when you don’t get it? Do you feel if others were different, then you would be different?

When she answered each of my questions in the affirmative, I shared that this is typically the pattern of those who see themselves as victims. The pattern is put in place in childhood as a way of keeping ourselves small. This victim consciousness is a tricky thing and hard to shatter. It offers the perfect refuge from our fear of not being worthy or loved. Victims stay stuck in this mindset so they don’t have to be accountable for how their lives have worked out. They are afraid to change because of even the slightest possibility that things won’t go well. 

2. The Martyr- martyr’s often complain of body pain and neurological stress. They are literally burdening their nervous system by grossly neglecting their own self-care. The antidote to the martyr complex is attention, compassion, and service. All they give to others, they need to give to themselves. Where is this need to save coming from? I soon came to see how this was a mask for something deeper. My “savior” had a darker side. Yes, it was loving and kind, but its extreme nature showed me that it was also fulfilling an inner longing. I had so much empathy and compassion for the pain of others that I wanted to ease their struggles. On the other hand, I was so uncomfortable with their tears that I was actually trying to save myself from the pain of seeing them suffer.  Those of us who are saviors deflect the loss of our authentic self by focusing on others. This allows us to maintain a persona of goodness, even superiority, which is our way of compensating for feeling inferior. I was able to let go of my savior complex once I understood how I was hurting my clients by taking away their own resourcefulness and the growing pains involved in their own development. 

3. The Bleeding Empath- The empath’s desire to give to an excessive level comes from her own inner lack. Her identity depends on how much another is dependent on her. In this way, she harbors a shallow side of narcissism where she enjoys being needed and in demand. This is why empaths typically enter intimate relationships with predatory narcissists. Both fill their empty holes by depending on and feeding off each other. For an empath to understand herself, she needs to undergo a systematic deconstruction of her patterns. This means turning the spotlight on her cocreation of reality. The first thing she needs to be aware of is how she has been giving of herself as a way of obtaining love and worth. Her inability to say no doesn’t come from a lack of desire to say no, necessarily, but from a fear of conflict and abandonment. Until she is able to get to the source of these core fears, the empath will not be able to construct the boundaries she needs to thrive. 

The antidote to bleeding empathy is a healthy dose of self-worth and self-care. When the empath is in touch with her inner sense of self, she will naturally execute clear and consistent boundaries. Through boundaries, she can elicit her wonderful qualities for love and nurturance while being careful not to enable the other to be inconsiderate of her needs. In order for her to have empowered boundaries, it’s imperative that she surrenders her own attachment to the idea of being “the good one”. Once she can let go of her own unconscious agenda, she will be able to realize the importance of sacred boundaries. 

An empath begins to heal herself when she changes her internal script. Where before she might have valued excessive giving as the only way to function in relationships, she now begins to learn how to receive. As she realizes her worth and that she is deserving of receiving, her ability to create healthy boundaries grows. These boundaries will be viewed as sacred containers within which her beautiful heart can breathe freely and joyously. 

We spend every moment taking care of our children, our house, and our loved ones, saying yes all day long, maintaining our cool. We are unaware of how this impacts us in subtle ways. We don’t realize how exhausted we are by all this giving. We stretch our emotions and bury our fatigue, blur our boundaries and hide our tears-until we break. This is the fate of the passive-aggressive tempest. She is stuck in a cycle of pleasing others at all costs but doesn’t pay attention to when her own boundaries have been overstepped. 

You are the boss of your own life.

This individuation process is key in enmeshed relationships where one is dependent on the other’s approval. As long as we try to receive validation from the outside, we will be in constant inner misalignment. We will seesaw back and forth until we snap from within. The tight rope of inauthenticity will break one day and all hell will break loose. 

Helplessness and stagnation are the hallmark of the princess. Once her enablers stop allowing her to stay in a state of passivity, she will have no choice but to become resourceful. 

The child doesn’t enjoy change, conflict, or upheaval. She would rather keep the status quo and be relatively miserable than create a change that holds the possibility of bliss. Her security is more important than her authenticity. As a result, she enters a docile, conciliatory position of servility that allows her to keep strife and conflict at bay. She holds on to childish fantasies and keeps waiting for them to manifest, all the while not doing much to bring them about. She appears cheerful and positive, but this is because she lives in an unrealistic version of a reality that will never come to be. 

Let’s take a look at how our body is set up for us to be givers. Consider the ways in which our bodies are exquisitely designed to bear children. Consider also how our womb creates space for our burgeoning unborn child-our belly stretches to accommodate and contain the child, and our breasts know to grow and hold the milk on which our infants will suckle. This design is nothing short of miraculous. Although biology designed the woman to be a giver, culture reshaped her to give of herself to the point at which she loses what little sense of herself may have survived childhood. Knowing the difference between the legacies of biology versus culture is the key to our awakening. 

Pair bonding between males and females in a long-term monogamous nuclear units may be one of the fundamental causes for relational dysfunction, domestic violence, and divorce. When you put two highly dimorphic adults who are largely unconscious into a binding legal contract, ask them to stay undyingly loyal to each other no matter how at odds their libidos are, then ask them to raise children together no matter how different their parenting philosophies, you have a prescription for failure. This is why most marriages collapse and why most who remain often reduce themselves to business and social transactions only. 

By moving away from community into nuclear isolation, we live farther from our tribe and put more pressure on our partners to fulfill all the needs that were originally meant to be met by others in the village. 

It’s only when we begin to examine our own mind and realize how much it has been contaminated by beliefs that we let go of our attachment and enter a space of inner liberation, lightness, and empowerment. 

When we understand why this idea of modern love is more enslaving than it is liberating, we will revise what it means to truly love another and thereby free ourselves from the pain relationships often endure. 

There is a definite agenda to all of this “falling in love”. Love in this fashion is extremely goal driven. One doesn’t love for the sake of loving others. One loves for the sake of committing one’s future to the other. One doesn’t love as an expression of the soul, one loves as an expression of the ego’s desire to fulfill an agenda. Have you ever loved just for the sake of loving, or was your love always tainted with a future goal? The market belief is that if the couple truly loves each other, they would marry because it’s through the act of marriage that they declare their ultimate commitment. What begins as a pure feeling from the heart quickly turns into a transaction for the future. 

The “falling in love” feeling is actually a falling into need, possession, control, and familiarity. It’s a desire to fulfill something within ourselves. We believe we love the other but, in truth, are seeking love for our own ego. We fantasize that we are two grown-ups who are going to walk off into the sunset happily ever after without realizing that we are operating like little children instead of adults. We want the other to finish the work we haven’t yet done to complete our own upbringing. We are adults who are emotional toddlers. When we don’t fully grow up, we constantly project our needs onto others and leak our emotions all over them. We want them to be the person we need to complete our fantasy of ourselves. The dynamic is called, “twin beggars”. Each person looking to the other to fill them. 

Because both people are dependent on the other, the desire to control and possess the other is palpable. They create unspoken conditions where expectations run high and the demand on the other is great. This naturally leads to control and possession. If we see the other as responsible for completing us, it’s natural we will want to control the other. On this path, love morphs into its opposite. Instead of being about liberation and empowerment, it majors in possession. When two halves try to become one, they actually become quartered slivers of themselves. 

Before we can love another, we absolutely must first learn to love ourselves irrevocably and meet our own needs. Most of us don’t love-we need, depend, possess, and control. To put this differently, most of us don’t love- we fear. 

When we enter a relationship with the intention of healing ourselves, conflicts or betrayals are no longer perceived as contentious but, instead, as powerful portals for inner integration. The more we heal and love ourselves, the more the reflection of the broken little child fades and gives way to a powerful and whole adult. 

To love someone is to feel for them without our own feelings about ourselves getting in the way. This is extremely hard to do for someone who hasn’t worked on meeting their own needs, and therefore I call it “high” love. This shift from self to other is the mark of the higher nature of authentic love. Love exists beyond the limits and boundaries of the form based world. 

Love is the ultimate energy. It is the self fully actualized. Not everyone is ready to experience this kind of love. It’s reserved for those who have done the work of releasing their ego such that they are able to enter a space where they live unbound and untethered. It’s only when the self has left its own self-absorption behind that this kind of love can enter one’s consciousness. 

As long as we see love as an achievement of our identity, we will forever be enslaved by its presence in our life and never truly be free of its shadow emotions: hate, betrayal, rejection, or abandonment. These shadow emotions stem from a faulty notion of love. 

The only person she needs to fall in love with and marry is herself. Self-love and growth should be the main criteria upon which we base our decision to be intimate with another. If we truly want to test how loving another person will be, we need to measure the time they spend on loving themselves from within and the amount of energy they put into their growth. 

Healing brings freedom from within. This, in turn, manifests as freedom on the external level. When one is free from within, one will become the greatest shepherd of another’s freedom. Only those who violate their own inner truth violate the truth of others. 

Wanting to be perceived as the good one is a craving of the ego. 

You will be forced to shed your roles as well. To go through your own process of growing up and dealing with his own inner emptiness rather than parasitically using the partner for this function. Instead of depending on the other to parent them, they need to begin the process of reparenting is crucial to awaken.

We have have so conditioned to be enmeshed, needy, controlling, and dependent that this level of autonomy feels downright weird. We never learned to know ourselves as whole and divine being in our own right. Instead of developing our own authentic self so that we were validated and loved by ourselves. As we awaken, we realize we have never truly loved our self fully because we haven’t even known ourselves. To know ourselves means to go on a path of self-discovery. This love doesn’t need another in a dependent way. Because it doesn’t need another, it doesn’t seek to control or possess another. Conscious love is intended to be-unconditional, non-transactional, devoid of control and possession, empty of need and dependency. 

When we prescribe marriage as the end goal, we institutionalize it. Marriage is thought of for many as “love in a prescription bottle”. It’s akin to taking the beautiful scent from a flower and bottling it as a perfume. The institution of marriage fossilizes the living and breathing vitality that is the mark of love. By taking the beauty of love and converting it into all the things love isn’t, marriage brings out pride, control, possession, and dominance. So brainwashed are we by the longevity model that we look at it in terms of “putting in the time”, no matter how we feel while doing it. 

Divorce is seen as an insult to the family ancestry and an attack on culture’s morals. Sacrifice and compromise, even when the two individuals are dreadfully unhappy, is often preferred over the cost of social ostracism. The paradigm of marriage needs to shift away from longevity into growth. When we make this shift, we no longer count success in terms of years passed but in terms of self-growth and lessons learned. When the longevity model transforms into the growth model, marriage will soar to the realm in which it needs to exist- that of true kinship, connection, and freedom. 

Marital rape was legal in many US states right up until the 1970’s. 

Think about it: would you get an airplane that had a 60% chance of crashing? You certainly would not. Yet millions keep getting married day in and day out. The reason? Cultural indoctrination. If it takes a legal contract to keep two people together, the question one should ask if whether the two people should be together in the first place. Are we so numb to the idea of autonomy that we think loyalty and longevity should trump individual growth and liberation? This is really a clash between the old paradigm of loving and marrying and a new, bolder paradigm of loving and liberating. What sense does it make for a 24 year old to bear the cost of her decisions for the rest of her life?

The old way is to marry for the sake of companionship over time. Here longevity matters, regardless of the quality. The old way is to see marriage as the only way to raise children securely. The old way is based on fear, possession, and control. It operates out of lack and unworthiness. It’s clearly time for a paradigm shift. If it weren’t, more than 50% of marriages wouldn’t end acrimoniously in divorce. 

We need to shift into a drastically new model of marriage, one that is based on growth, not longevity. One where choice, abundance, and freedom are the foundational elements of the union, instead of fear-based obligatory and contractual bonds. If marriages were predicated on different ideals such as growth, respect, authenticity, and freedom, we would be living in a different world. In this new model, we would allow each other to grow and evolve without any impingement. We would understand if the other needed to move on to another person or to another phase of their life. We would release the other with equanimity. We would work things out amicably. We wouldn’t need divorce courts or lawyers. We would leave behind lack and truly embrace abundance. 

Culture fosters a huge stigma against divorce. People encourage others to stay in the marriage and say things like:

*Your kids will suffer, so it is better to stick it out

*Well, he didn’t break your nose

*At least he isn’t a drug addict

*He provides for you so well, so ignore the other stuff

Such suppression of our truth creates an inner split and we stop trusting ourselves. Abandoning our inner knowing is the real trauma. 

Culture has made us so ashamed of enduring any sort of dysfunction within a marriage that we stay silent. The way we gaslight ourselves is by pretending that bad things are not happening. 

If you are reading this and are realizing that you have been living a life where you aren’t honored, it’s time to pick up the phone and call someone, either a friend or a professional. It’s time to share your experiences for what they are, without embellishment or self-blame. When you do, you begin to take the reins into your own hands. 

When marital vows are conducted under the auspices of conscious awareness-where two people love each other in a transcendent way, fully aware of the present-moment quality of their partnership-they have a difficult quality and energy to them. The vows we make are to keep one’s own authenticity alive above all else. Here, each understands that as long as growth and honesty are the foundation, all else will fall into place. Both parties commit to supporting the other on their path of ascendancy, promising not to stand in the other’s way and celebrating the other’s direction even if it takes them on a different course. 

The consciousness with which we enter our marriage heavily predicates how we exit the marriage.

An expanded consciousness around marriage understands that it is a life partnership based on respect and the sovereignty of each person in the relationship. 

Our primary opportunity as humans is to know ourselves. 

We women first need to feel connected before we have sex, whereas men typically need to have sex to feel connected. For us, connection is the pathway to sex and for them it is the opposite. When both in the couple awaken to what matters to them and are able to communicate this in an honest way, they bridge their differences rather than create more distance. The best sex has little to do with what happens between the bedsheets and all to do with what happens when we are our of the bedroom. Lasting sexual connection and rhapsody emerge from a deep emotional and spiritual bond. 

Lovemaking happens in unexpected ways and places-in the way two people have dinner together, grocery shop, hold hands on a hike, or tend to their children. Intimacy penetrates every aspect of our lives. It’s a reflection of who we are in our most mundane of moments. 

No true intimacy with another can occur without intimacy with the self. It’s only when we first have a deep inner union that we can foster a union with another. 

The deeper aspects of the mothering journey, where we don’t mother from our mind with agendas and expectations but, instead, from our heart, where we are deeply invested in one thing only- the authentic unfolding of ourselves and our children.

Parents actually believe that when we mirror our children’s feelings, we are being loving and caring. This couldn’t be further from the truth. This is not caring- this is enmeshment. 

Awakening means we unsubscribe from culture’s definition of success and create new paths of authentic self-discovery where we set our own markers for achievement and progress. As we do so, we realize we are fully worthy as we are, without craving what culture told us will fill us up. Culture says life is a competition and a struggle. While we understand that life can be tough sometimes, we don’t subscribe to this scarcity model of life. All the lack is coming from within us. Until we can see how we do this to our children as well as our other intimate relationships, we will keep parasitically drawing from the other’s worth, hoping a few droplets will salve our inner wounds. 

Can we ever really take care of another’s feelings? It’s literally only possible if we are willing to completely kill any individuality within us and bend, twist, circle, and spiral into any shape, size, and form in order to make them happy. This is soul suicide at its finest. 

Where is the line between being nice to another and being authentic? How can we take care of another’s feelings without betraying ourselves? How can we be true to our own feelings and boundaries while also taking care of another? These are the pivotal questions we need to ask if we are to awaken to our true self, which longs for the freedom to be authentic. In order for this freedom to be granted, we need to step away from the mandate to “be nice” and move into a new declaration of who we truly are, guided by the imperative to be authentic. 

There isn’t enough emotional space for her to fly free when parents are more concerned about themselves.

Children, especially sensitive girls, sense the emotional fragility of their parents and home. They immediately jump to the rescue and do their part to glue things together as best they can. Instead of using their energy to develop their own mind and beliefs, they expend all their resources on trying to manage an unmanageable situation. 

A girl growing up in such a home detects early on how fragile everyone is and realizes that her voice, her feelings, and her fears will break the proverbial camel’s back. So what does she do? She squelches her feelings. Instead of turning into herself, she becomes a master at reading other people’s energy. Her survival is based on her ability to read others. In this way, her entire focus is on conflict avoidance and allowing others to supersede her will. She all but physically dies. This is what the classic “nice girl” does. So disconnected is she from her authentic inner voice that she simply goes along with whatever others tell her to do. This is much easier to do than the inner work required to become whole. The nicer she is, the more she receives validation and accolades. This, in turn, further validates her silence. 

Masculine energy, especially for “nice” girls, is the element they need to develop in order to stand tall and strong in their feelings center. A healthy masculinity understands the power of no and uses it whenever necessary. 

I learned to turn my awareness inward. I learned to pause before I talked, checking in with how I felt. This became second nature- so much so that now if I am out of alignment with my inner self, I immediately feel alarm bells ringing. I feel myself enter into a panic state that tells me something is wrong. I realize I have fallen into an old pattern by playing a role that isn’t in alignment with my true self. My self-worth doesn’t depend on anyone but me! 

Self-awareness is the key factor in a person’s awakening. If the person isn’t self-aware, they cannot really be expected to be in an intimate relationship with another. This self-awareness doesn’t emerge in a void. It’s something we cultivate on a daily basis. It’s a reflection of how much inner work we have done. 

My desire to never compromise myself overrode my desire for friendship. A relationship either aligned with my truth or I chose to be alone. When we reach this place on non-negotiability, when we decide we will never give up our truth for anything, we align our outer world with our inner world. It’s almost as if we give off a certain scent that others pick up on. Those who cannot handle our truths naturally stay away. Only those who are on a similar path show up. Just making the decision to stand in our worth does the work for us. 

When we don’t create these boundaries against the toxic elements in our life, we communicate consent toward them. Realizing that our silence is indirect complicity is a crucial realization as we become awakened. Is your now palatable? If it is not, don’t worry about the future. First, accept that the present is unbearable. We must work to create health and well-being in the now. It makes no sense to worry about what tomorrow will bring when today is already toxic. It’s like wanting to wait a few days to put out the fire even thought it’s going to burn the house down right here, right now. 

The US feminist magazine BITCH explains it like this on its website: “When it’s being used as an insult, bitch in an epithet hurled at women who speak their minds, who have opinions and do not shy away from expressing them and who do not sit by and smile uncomfortably if they are bothered or offended. If being an outspoken woman means being a bitch, we will take that as a compliment, thanks”. 

The more we honor our voices and claim our power, the more we are going to be called a bitch. Culture doesn’t like empowered women who speak up for themselves. Calling us bitches, sluts, or whores is one of the ways culture controls its powerful women. When we understand this, we stop taking these words personally. We understand that pissing people off comes with the territory. When people are pissed off, they seek to silence the other using shaming terms. 

The moment we start laying out our boundaries and acting in accord with our inner voice, we are going to hear all sorts of backlash. It’s here that another fork in the road presents itself: do we want to be authentic or do we want to be loved? 

What are the mental shifts we need to make in order to arrive at this place? It begins by leaving behind our damsel Princess energy and entering our empowered Queen energy.

Let me explain what “loving ourselves” means to me. It means that the love we get from ourselves is more valuable than the love we receive from another. This is key. The feeling we get when we honor ourselves needs to be more of a bejeweled treasure than the feeling we get when another honors us. When we arrive at the place where our own self-approval and self-invalidation matter more than that of others, we turn to ourselves for wise counsel, like we would have previously turned to a wise leader in the past. Instead of calling a friend on the phone, we call on our inner self. When we are sad, we accompany ourselves on a journey inward to discover the reason. When we are happy, we celebrate ourselves and experience inner pride without the need for outer approval. 

Getting used to being alone is a large part of the awakening process. Preferring to be on one’s own rather than being with those of a differing consciousness emerges naturally. This displacement of others as our top priority allows us to stop caring what they think. When we do, we have arrived in our Queen energy.

The Awakened Queen is never cut off from her heart. In fact, she is fully grounded in it. She sees how others operate from lack and has compassion for them. Instead of being threatened by others’ anxieties or influenced by them, she stands strong in her own wisdom. She builds her queendom of carefully selected women who, like her, are past living in separation or fear. 

The Queen is the archetype of a woman who is no longer apologetic about her inner right to take up space and hold court. She is no longer ambivalent about her capacity to contribute and make a difference. She is no longer afraid to shine. She is fully and irrevocably aware of her worth and no longer cowers in the shadows to display herself as boldly as she desires. The Queen no longer sees herself as lesser-than….ever. She fully sees herself as an equal at the table, be it a table of peasants or presidents. Because she has seen through the illusion of labels and identification, she is no longer intimidated. She doesn’t need to be the most credentialed, most glamourous, or the wealthiest to take her place at the table. She sits at the table because she fully and wholly recognizes that she is worthy just as she is. 

She no longer seeks approval or validation, for to do so would be to stoop below her worth. The Queen values her own voice so much that she places herself in a position of great honor. She now fully realizes that she has her own power to turn to, her own inner compass to guide her, and her own resources to count on. The damsel in distress has woken up and is no longer dependent on her prince. The Prince fantasy is charred, dead, and buried.  

So afraid are we to own our feelings that women constantly seek permission from the outside world. It’s almost as if we need a reason before we follow our own intuition. It’s as if our feelings are never enough. We need to know the other’s reason first. If the other’s reason is big enough or strong enough, then we are willing to squash ours down. Once again we see our fundamental problem as caring and nurturing women. We care for the wounds and feelings of others much more than we do our own. 

She realizes that she will always be a work in progress, but she is fully worthy of being honored and celebrated just as she is. Unlike the Princess, who keeps waiting for a brighter future, the Queen refuses to be in stall mode ever again. She realizes that life is lived in the present moment. No matter how messy or incomplete, it’s who she needs to be at this point in time.

The Queen carefully selects her Co-Queens and Kings. As she holds her time valuable, she just doesn’t waste it on just anyone who desires her attention. She is willing to turn people away if they don’t match with her consciousness. She has lost her hustle, her thirst, her hunger. Whatever she needs lies right here, WITHIN HER. There is no longing or craving to do or be anything other than what shows up in the moment. 

Justifications are the main way we stay stuck in dysfunctional patterns. Creating justifications is the opposite of accountability. Justifications passively generate excuses for why we or another did or didn’t do something. Accountability actively creates actions to change the situation as soon as possible. One is replete with stagnant energy, the other with adaptive resilience. 

One of the other ways we create justifications is through cognitive dissonance reductions. A term coined by psychologist Leon Festinger, it implies a psychological process where we try to reduce the discrepancy between two conflicting beliefs. If a woman is being ill-treated by her partner, she experiences a discomfort between two of her beliefs: her partner loves her, and ill-treatment is unacceptable. What is she to do now? She tries to reduce the discrepancy by changing one of her beliefs. Either she changes the belief that he loves her or she changes the definition of ill-treatment. In this way, she creates a new reality for herself by either leaving him or changing her views on the ill-treatment such that she no longer sees it as unacceptable. 

As long as we rely on our parents’ auspices for comfort, protection, and care in adulthood, we will never activate our own capacity for these abilities within ourselves. Not only will we stagnate, we will overtax our aging parents and obstruct them from entering a new phase of their lives. 

[Author] I grew up with an extremely empathic mother who was undyingly present and loving. However, because of her own conditioning, she didn’t teach me the valuable skill of laying down boundaries. She was afraid of conflict and dealt with her discomfort by pleasing people to the point of utter self-abnegation. I learned to be the same way through osmosis. As a result, I entered many relationships where I departed from my true self in order to keep the peace and harmony. I had to create new neural pathways so that reactions wouldn’t pop out of my mouth without a pause. I had to undo all my instinctual ways of responding and replace them with more conscious ones. Most of all, I had to learn to love and honor myself. I had to become my own parent. 

Reparenting ourselves involves creating and relying on our inner GPS. Instead of looking outward toward others to mother, father, and guide us, we activate these powerful elements within ourselves. There is no one out there who knows me more than I do. I have the answers within me. Look inside and I will find them. 

Awareness allows us to shift from projection to introspection. As we turn inward, we pay attention to the patterns we are playing out. We absolve the other from holding the responsibility of filling us up and validating us. Detachment doesn’t mean we avoid becoming intimate with the other, only that we aren’t dependent on them for our inner nourishment. Do you see the difference? One is about possession and control, where we try to change the other to fit our ideal. The other is about liberation and elevation, where we accept the other by helping them stay true to who they are. 

When we have lots of inner holes akin to Swiss cheese, we will be on the lookout for external elements to fill these holes. These holes persist because we haven’t yet entered unequivocal acceptance of ourselves in our as-is state. 

We are not who we think we are. Who we think we are is a conditioned version of ourselves that we have been acting out since we were born. We basically inherit our parents’ consciousness or lack thereof. There is no escaping this transfer of conditioning. It happens involuntarily most of the time. None of this is who we truly are. When we are unconscious and unawakened, we allow our mind to be left unexplored and unexamined. We remain captive to the past and all the cultural identifications that go with it.  

 
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