NIKKI SAPP: “Giving Advice and Being the Light for Others”

“I find the best way to love someone is not to change them but instead, help them reveal the greatest version of themselves”

~Dr. Steve Maraboli

 

At a certain point in our spiritual journey we begin to unlock our own inner truth. We no longer are looking to outside sources such as religions, gurus, self-help books, etc. to tell us what to do and how to be, but instead we begin to realize that the answers were inside of us all along.

Not to say that we still don’t read books or open ourselves up to learning from others, but rather we have a more clear connection with our own intuition, which allows us to FEEL the “truth” rather than intellectualize it only.

When we were at the point that we needed outside sources to show us the way, they were coincidentally brought into our lives, either in the forms of other people, reading material, or any modality of spirituality that best fit our own personal needs.

Once, we have graduated from needing the constant affirmation and validation from these outside entities, we most likely will find that we have become the “teacher” that has manifested in someone else’s life in the form of a way-shower.

Then it becomes our turn to be the light on someone else’s path. If you have found yourself in this position, consider your responsibility very carefully. Life is a constant journey of learning and growing, and just like there will be countless teachers on our path of growth, we will also find ourselves in situations that we must be the teacher.

So what is the most effective way of being the light and giving someone advice? How do we go about showing someone the way to their own inner truth while still allowing them to learn their own lessons without our interference?

“A teacher is never a giver of truth; he is a guide, a pointer to the truth that each student must find for himself.”

~Bruce Lee

 

The only person we will have the power to change is ourselves. No matter how much we want the best for someone, want them to be happy, want them to realize their inner light, or want them to be their best self, we cannot force them to do any of these things.

And just like we had to walk our own journey, complete with struggle, adversity, heartache, sadness, anger, etc.. we must realize that all these things are a part of the human experience, so they too will most likely have to go through all of them.

When we give advice to others we must always realize we are only speaking from our own inner truth, the truth as we know it given the situations and circumstances that we’ve experienced.

However, their life is not ours. Their truth will never be exactly the same as our truth because their mind is not our mind and their life has not been exactly as ours has. What we can do however is be in our own awareness and light so strongly that we become an inspiration for them to find their own awareness and light.

If a person comes to us for advice and questions we can’t come up with a million “You need to…” or “You should do this…”, directives, but instead, only point them in the direction of their own inner light and unconditional love. The only advice there ever is to really give is to accept the “what is” and love yourself anyway.

All arrows should point back to unconditional love of the self… no matter if the person is sad, depressed, frustrated, insecure, it doesn’t matter. As long as they have identified the feeling, felt it without resisting it, accepted themselves for having it and loved it, there can be nothing else to do. Without attaching ourselves to the outcome of whether they follow our advice or not, we actually free ourselves and them.

We don’t fear for them, because we trust that their journey is bringing them to the right people and situations that are perfect for them. And they don’t abandon their own inner self by blindly attaching to whatever we are saying as their ultimate truth, which may not always be what’s best for them.

However, if we find that we have been put in another person’s life to help them, guide them or show them something, we must trust that the Universe is speaking through us in the best and most effective way possible. Without doubting ourselves, we find that our inner light shines automatically and manifests in the best way possible for all parties involved, as long as we trust that it always will.

“As we let our light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence actually liberates others.”

~Marianne Williamson

 

We will sometimes be students and we will sometimes be teachers in life. Since we cannot ever know everything about everything, we will find that this role reversal happens over and over throughout our lives.

The most amazing thing about all of this is that as soon as we think we are giving someone else advice and showing them the way, as most teachers know, we realize that we were also giving ourselves the same advice.

Sometimes the Universe brings another person to us in the form of a student, but in actuality in our helping of them, we are actually helping ourselves with the same issue. By being in the form of another person, we were able to look at the situation in a different way, from a 3rd party perspective, that we weren’t able to do when dealing with ourselves and our own life.

As always, we must be the change we wish to see in the world. In doing this, we find that we always attract the right people into our lives, either to teach us something about ourselves or to be the teacher for them.

But if we really pay attention and become super aware of how things happen in this ironic Universe, we realize…. it is always both.

 

~via FractalEnlightenment.com

NIKKI SAPP: “How To Be Confident While Remaining Humble”

“There’s a thin line between confidence and arrogance… it’s called humility. Confidence smiles, arrogance smirks.”

~Unknown

 

Somewhere along the line what we recognized as confidence may have been misconstrued a little. We started associating traits like aggressive, loud, opinionated and arrogant with being a confident person. You’ve probably seen the type, or maybe you are the type.

They know FOR SURE that what they believe is the unequivocal truth. Therefore they need to tell everyone about it… constantly.

When they aren’t able to convince someone to believe exactly as they believe they may be caught calling others, “asleep” or a “sheep” or any other plethora of derogatory names that I probably can’t mention here. We also may have misconstrued what it means to be humble a little bit too. Being Humble is associated with weak, shy, meek, and someone who cowers to others.

Someone who is so unsure of themselves or their beliefs that they keep them to themselves and are too insecure to tell everyone they meet their opinion on everything. Is there a way to be both? Can a confident person also be a humble person? In order to answer that question we must dissect what it means to be truly confident, and how does “artificial confidence” come about.

“Because one believes in oneself, one doesn’t try to convince others. Because one is content with oneself, doesn’t need others’ approval. Because one accepts oneself the whole world accepts him or her”

~Lao Tzu

 

There are many reasons a person may develop artificial/arrogant confidence. One may be cognitive dissonance, which means they may be holding on to a belief so tightly that when evidence is presented that contradicts this belief they may be completely unwilling to look at the new evidence. They may have become so attached to this belief that it has become a part of their sense of self.

Since they are completely attached to who they think they are it may be a painful experience for them to open their mind up and see things from a different perspective. The actual energy behind holding on to a belief so tightly that you are unwilling to let it go is fear.

The human ego is always afraid to be found out, so to speak, therefore, any threat of someone or something coming along and debunking one of its belief attachments may bring about a negative emotional reaction such as anger. Anytime anger is involved we can be assured that fear is the culprit behind it.

Genuine confidence doesn’t need to get angry because there is no part that fears being wrong or that others aren’t believing them. Another reason a person may develop artificial confidence is because they are insecure.

An insecure person may not truly believe in their theory or themselves so they feel if they can convince others that they are absolutely the right one they can at the same time convince themselves.

This is often done in an aggressive manner, because they are attached to the outcome of people believing them. Again, the fear behind not achieving the outcome they desire is causing them to act in a rude or aggressive manner. Genuine confidence can remain quiet, kind and humble because there is no underlying fear that needs other people to believe exactly what they are saying.

Genuine confidence is humble. It kind of realizes that most people are operating from their own level of understanding and trying to convince them that they are “stupid” or “wrong” usually won’t work anyway. The humble part of them realizes that LIVING and BEING their truth is always more effective than incessant talking or convincing ever will be.

Also, humble confidence isn’t attached to being right. In fact, it happily welcomes new ideas and beliefs because it knows that only when it opens itself up to seeing things from all perspectives is it able to perhaps learn something new.

“The time which people spend in convincing others, even half of this time if they spend on themselves, they can achieve a lot in life.”

~Arvind Katoch

 

In order to maintain humble confidence about our beliefs we must do two things. One is question ourselves….constantly. You may ask yourself, “Do I know absolutely without a doubt that this belief is true?” Meaning, “Did I see it with my own eyes”- normally the answer to this will be no.

So not to say that you won’t have some beliefs about things that involve situations that you weren’t physically there, but it just means that you always maintain a healthy sense of doubt about your beliefs.

This doesn’t mean that you’re unsure of yourself, it means you are wise, because it means you are open to hearing new evidence. Or you can ask yourself, “Is it possible that I am so attached to this belief that it has become a part of who I think I am?” Or even, “Does it matter if the person I am telling about my belief believes me or not? In this present moment does the fact that they are convinced or not convinced change anything in this exact moment in time?”

“Confidence is silent.

Insecurity is loud.”

~Unknown

 

You may find that most of the time, the answer to that is “no.” The other thing a person can do in order to remain humbly confident in their beliefs is to realize that every person they come in contact with can only understand things from their own level of understanding. Which means they are only operating from their own personal programming which may or may not be completely different than yours.

So yes, there may be times when you tell someone something and you enlighten them to something that they hadn’t thought of before but there will also be times where any effort to convince will fall on deaf ears.

When you are unattached to the outcome, you will be fine with either without getting frustrated or angered. Once we realize that our “truth” may not be someone else’s “truth” we can completely relax into interpersonal relationships and take every interaction with a human being as a potential learning experience, which will allow us to always be learning and growing as a person.

 

~via FractalEnlightenment.com

VERNON HOWARD: “20 Powerful Secrets To Meaningful Relationships”

The following twenty powerful relationship secrets is an excerpt from Mystic Path to Cosmic Power, by Vernon Howard

20 Powerful Secrets To Meaningful Relationships

1. When two people meet, the prize always goes to the one with the most self-insight. He will be calmer, more confident, more at ease with the other.

2. Never permit the behavior of other people to tell you how you feel.

3. Pay little attention to what people say or do. Instead, try to see their innermost motive for speaking and acting.

4. Any friendship requiring the submission of your original nature and dignity to another person is all wrong.

5. Mystically speaking, there is no difference between you and another person. This is why we cannot hurt another without hurting ourselves, nor help another without helping ourselves.

6. When we are free of all unnecessary desires toward other people, we can never be deceived or hurt.

7. You take a giant step toward psychological maturity when you refuse to angrily defend yourself against unjust slander. For one thing, resistance disturbs your own peace of mind.

8. You understand others to the exact degree that you really understand yourself. Work for more self-knowledge.

9. Do not be afraid to fully experience everything that happens to you in your human relations, especially the pains and disappointments. Do this and everything becomes clear at last.

10. The individual who really knows what it means to love has no anxiety when his love is unseen or rejected.

11. If you painfully lose a valuable friend, do not rush out at once for a replacement. Such action prevents you from examining your heartache and breaking free of it.

12. Do not be afraid to be a nobody in a social world. This is a deeper and richer truth than appears on the surface.

13. Every unpleasant experience with another person is an opportunity to see people as they are, not as we mistakenly idealize them. The more unpleasant the other person is, the more he can teach you.

14. You can be so wonderfully free from a sense of injury and injustice that you are surprised when you hear others complain of them.

15. We cannot recognize a virtue in another person that we do not possess in ourselves. It takes a truly loving and patient person to recognize those virtues in another.

16. Do not mistake desire for love. Desire leaves home in a frantic search for one gratification after another. Love is at home with itself.

17. There are parts of you that want the loving life and parts that do not. Place yourself on the side of the positive forces: do all you can to aid and encourage them.

18. You must stop living timidly from fixed fears of what others will think of you and of what you will think of yourself.

19. Do not contrive to be a loving person: work to be a real person. Being real is being loving.

20. The greatest love you could ever offer to another is to so transform your inner life that others are attracted to your genuine example of goodness.

 

~via BodyMindSoulSpirit.com

PAUL LENDA: “20 Transformational Truths From Sages Throughout the Ages”

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Throughout the ages, there have been many who have had gotten a taste of incredibly mesmerizing higher states of consciousness. Rather than keep their experiential knowledge and wisdom about the higher and deeper elements of existence to themselves they spread the word to others, be it through spoken word, written works, or other methods. Thanks to the sages, luminaries, spiritual teachers, thinkers, and every-day people who had an enlightening experience we can ignite the light of expanded awareness about the higher and deeper aspects of the human experience and of existence itself from such people. When the future looks bleak and the motivation to excel and advance seems pointless we can look up to those who have lived and are still alive who possess that inner wisdom which they had realized through their own personal experiences of an enlightened state of awareness.

The transformational truths that such guiding lights to humanity express to us can raise our level of hope once more to the domain of energy that makes us more proactive. Reignited excitement and passion can drive us closer to the successes we imagined and dreamed would come true. We are all capable of incredible feats. Ask yourself if your state of mind is stopping you from realizing that realized life success story that you undoubtedly had played within your head so many times before.

Don’t let it stay a dream, let it become a reality. Living in the 21st century of our archaic timeline we have the amazing opportunity to taste such consciousness-shifting words of wisdom and we will take a look at 20 such enlightening truths from sages throughout the ages. Allow for these timeless words nourish your mind, heart and soul.

Transformational Truth 1

A human being is a part of a whole, called by us a universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest … a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.  

~Albert Einstein

Transformational Truth 2

You should be an island to yourself, a refuge to yourself, not dependent on any other but taking refuge in the truth and none other than the truth. And how do you become an island and a refuge to yourself? In this way. You see and contemplate your body as composed of all the forces of the universe. Ardently and mindfully you steer your body-self by restraining your discontent with the world about you. In the same way, observe and contemplate your feelings and use that same ardent restraint and self-possession against enslavement by greed or desire. By seeing attachment to your body and feelings as blocking the truth, you dwell in self-possession and ardent liberation from those ties. This is how you live as an island to yourself and a refuge to yourself. Whoever dwells in this contemplation, islanded by the truth and taking refuge in the truth–that one will come out of the darkness and into the light.  

~The Digha Nikaya

Transformational Truth 3

“Life is what you make it,” this is very true.
Find beauty and magic in all things,
and the Love that sees you through.
When you look at the world where you live,
seek not your gain, but what you can give.
When a man is poor, and hungers, and thirsts,
serve not yourself ’til you serve this man first.
When a man is down and seeks shelter from cold, give him shelter.
You’ll receive blessings untold.
Live by the Golden Rule:
Do unto others as you’d have done unto you.
And always remember:
When you destroy, you destroy a part of you, too.
Life is what you make of it.  

~Unknown

Transformational Truth 4

Loving this world, seeing the beauty in everything.
Appreciating every moment as a beautiful, wholly contained,
pearl of eternal nature, this is the world to me.

A never ending string of pearls…. every moment is in and of it’s self a life time,
and when we have affection and let ourselves experience life without expectation…
that is when the majesty of the world opens her petals to us…
And welcomes us home.  

~Carlos Castaneda

Transformational Truth 5

We may liken truth to a mountain, and the various interpretations of that truth to different paths leading up to the summit. Many people are traveling along all of these paths and every one, while he is at the bottom, thinks his path is the only one; he sees only a small part of the mountain, and may therefore be justified in crying to his brothers, “You are wrong! Come over to my path; this is the only one that leads to the top.” But as all these people progress upward, they will see that the paths converge at the top and that they are all one in the ultimate.  

~Max Heindel

Transformational Truth 6

Stop attributing names and shapes to the essentially nameless and formless, realize that every mode of perception is subjective, that what is seen or heard, touched or smelled, felt or thought, expected or imagined, is in the mind and not in reality, and you will experience peace and freedom from fear.  

~Nisargadatta Maharaj

Transformational Truth 7

Do not believe anything
because it is said by an authority,
or if it is said to come from angels,
or from gods,
or from an inspired source.

Believe it only if you have explored it
in your own heart
and mind and body
and found it to be true.

Work out your own path,
through diligence.

~Gautama Buddha

Transformational Truth 8

Every man has his woman within him and every woman has her man within her. Only the meditator comes to know his whole being. Suddenly his inner woman and the inner man melt and merge into each other. That creates an orgasmic state in him. Now it is no more a momentary experience that comes and goes; it is something that continues, day in and day out, like the heart beating or breathing.

~Osho

Transformational Truth 9

When you find the way
Others will find you
Passing by on the road
They will be drawn to your door
The way that cannot be heard
will be reflected in your voice
The way that cannot be seen
Will be reflected in your eyes

~Lao Tzu

Transformational Truth 10

When we experience the pain of another person, we instinctively want to take away that pain. But by taking away the other person’s pain, we also take away his or her opportunity to grow. To be truly compassionate, we must be able to share another person’s suffering and pain — knowing there is nothing we can do to relieve it and that we are not responsible for it, and yet knowing and understanding what that pain feels like.

~John Gray

Transformational Truth 11

How people see the world is often a reflection of how they see themselves. If they think that the world is just a cesspool of lies and deceit, then they themselves may be full of lies and deceit. Watch out for those people who are always telling you just how corrupt the rest of the world is. As the saying goes, ‘It takes one to know one’.  
~David J. Lieberman
Transformational Truth 12

Throw away holiness and wisdom,
and people will be a hundred times happier.
Throw away morality and justice,
and people will do the right thing.
Throw away industry and profit,
and there won’t be any thieves.

If these three aren’t enough,
just stay at the center of the circle
and let all things take their course

~Lao Tzu

Transformational Truth 13

Ego is a structure that is erected by a neurotic individual who is a member of a neurotic culture against the facts of the matter. And culture, which we put on like an overcoat, is the collectivized consensus about what sort of neurotic behaviors are acceptable.
 
~Terence McKenna

Transformational Truth 14

Keep your thoughts positive, because your thoughts become your words.
Keep your words positive, because your words become your behaviors.
Keep your behaviors positive, because your behaviors become your habits.
Keep your habits positive, because your habits become your values.
Keep your values positive, because your values become your destiny.

~Ghandi

Transformational Truth 15

All the forms of Life in the Universe may be looked upon as being manifestations of the One and Universal Principle of Life in various forms; the whole of the Cosmos, being a product of the Universal Mind, may be regarded as universal, absolute consciousness becoming relative in separate forms. The universal consciousness of the Universal Mind forms spiritual centres of consciousness in living beings, whereby each being may feel and know its surroundings; and as the kind of living beings expands, their consciousness and power of sensation and perception expand with it; for all their powers belong to the mind. and not to the body: the latter without the mind is merely a form without life.
   ~Franz Hartmann

Transformational Truth 16
 
If we understood the power of our thoughts, we would guard them more closely.
If we understood the awesome power of our words, we would prefer silence to almost anything negative.
In our thoughts and words we create our own weaknesses and our own strengths.
Our limitations and joys begin in our hearts.
We can always replace negative with positive.
   ~Bettie Eadie

Transformational Truth 17

Since time without beginning, the nature of Awakened Mind and Emptiness has consisted of the same, absolute non-duality of no birth or death, no existence or non-existence, no purity or impurity, no movement or stillness, no young or old, no inside or outside, no shape and form, no sound and color. Neither striving nor searching, one should not use intellect to understand nor words to express Awakened Mind. One should not think that it is a place or things, name or form. One should not think that it is a place or things, name or form. Only then is it realized that all Buddhas, Bodhisattvas and sentient beings possess the same natural state of great Nirvana.

~Huang Po


Transformational Truth 18

As human beings we all want to be happy and free from misery. We have learned that the key to happiness is inner peace. The greatest obstacles to inner peace are disturbing emotions such as anger and attachment, fear and suspicion, while love and compassion, a sense of universal responsibility are the sources of peace and happiness.

~Dalai Lama

Transformational Truth 19

There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life.

    ~John Lennon

Transformational Truth 20

Greet everyone you meet with a warm smile, no matter how busy you are.
Don’t rush encounters with coworkers, family and friends.
Speak softly. Listen attentively.
Act as if every conversation you have is the most important thing on your mind today.
Look your children and your partner in the eyes when they talk to you.
Stroke the cat, caress the dog.
Lavish love on every living being you meet.
See how different you feel at the end of the day.

~Sarah Ban Breathnach

~via Shift.is