„You can either be a host to God, or a hostage to your ego. It‘s your call.“ — Wayne Dyer
Today‘s episode was meant to be about the holotropic breath workshop I attended this past weekend but something more pressing came up: I got threatened and physically attacked by a friend. There‘s a lot to unpack here.
No time to read? Look for Insight #1, #2, #3 and #4 in bold. Also, the text version is extended to the audio recording as I made some last minute additions around the false guru concept, added Insight #2 and #4 and numerous smaller edits.
I’m using the word “spiritual” frequently throughout this episode. It can be freely exchanged with personal/human development or growth. Use whichever speaks to you. It’s all the same.
Today’s event made me think about when I last had a physical fight with someone and it brought me back to the tender age of 16 when I physically wrangled on the floor with a guy in my then-dancing class. Nearly three decades ago. That is the only proper physical fight I remember. Maybe there were others, quarrels, but nothing major.
What happened today (the content) is less interesting and relevant than how it happened and why (the context). At least from the perspective I have and I can share. I will also get to why this is worth sharing and writing about. There‘s a profound lesson for myself and I think for every human being. Being human is not easy in ways we don‘t often fully appreciate.
The two of us had several disagreements, small by nature, but significant enough that it would have been worth addressing and resolving them by way of a conversation. However, this conversation never happened because the other party did not deem that conversation relevant and/or did not want to have it. What we both did, as a result, was to eat up the related frustration inside of us until it boiled over.
It had boiled over before but they had just been verbal exchanges, angry glances and a lot of bad energy, you know, the stuff you can feel when you enter a room or look at a person without a single word needing to be uttered. We are hyper-sensitive beings and can sense anything that is off. Often this perception gets drowned out by an overactive aka overthinking head or by us dismissing our intuition as: Ahh, it‘s nothing…
This morning was different. We had had a few text exchanges that had ended with a message from him that was, in my opinion, so out of reality and distorted in its perception, worse, it turned the situation upside down, arguing that I was playing the victim and attacking him at the same time. And that he is CLOSING THIS CONVERSATION HERE.
As I woke up and was reading this message, I took a deep breath. I could feel how my body tensed and wanted to react straight away rather than me composing a reflected and constructive response. I took another breath. When our nervous system perceives a threat, it runs automatic programs that put us into fight, flight or freeze and the outcome is always worse, most often much worse, then to skip a beat, breathe and reflect before responding. Except, you really are in a life-threatening situation but in 2023 that happens once every blue moon. Not when texting with a friend, boss, spouse or whoever.
I feel my heart rate slowing down again. I get up and sit down for meditation, hoping to find more peace, calm and clarity on how to deal with this conflict. An hour later, I arise with the clarity that I will confront him about his message and set a clear boundary. Healthy boundary setting and communication are something that I had not learnt until recently. It‘s always been so much easier to please the other person and be nice but the result is that we eat the frustrations into ourselves until we explode (as we both have been doing) rather than communicating our needs and wants proactively and addressing and resolving them in the process.
I get up and walk into the kitchen. I look into his eyes and say calmly but with certainty: “Don‘t ever send me such a message again.” What happens over the next few moments is an increasingly loud and aggressive exchange leading to ordering me out of my own home, threatening me and ultimately physically attacking me. All from a seemingly innocuous comment about some house preferences I had. However, he, for whatever reason, saw them as a repeated attack on him personally.
Insight #1: Whatever we say might be perceived very differently by someone else based on their internal, unconscious life story. The reverse is of course also true: Whatever we perceive might have been intended with a very different meaning by the communicator. That‘s why context is key (even more so over text) but even context can often not overcome differences in perception.
It cannot be overstated that our minds create our reality based on sensory inputs and memories rather than actual physical reality. What we perceive is never absolute reality but a mix of emotions, stories, visual and other senses interpretations of our brain. Even the physical reality we see is not real but a construct of the mind optimised for survival.
As I am leaving the house, I am pinching myself for what just happened. Did it really happen? There was no real issue to start with and yet it had completely blown out of proportion. Over the next two hours, I got in touch with my coaches and guides or whatever you want to call them to help me see what I am missing - as I am one of the two people in the conflict, my perception must be biased. Our egoic minds play these games on us just as they did on my friend. Going into meditation and, more importantly, speaking with people who are well-versed in the understanding of the human condition and can provide a dispassionate and objective perspective is the surest way to make sure one is not lost, does or says stupid things and thereby escalates the situation.
Insight #2: Our minds play all kinds of twisted games to preserve our egoic sense of self. They can’t be trusted to present truth so we need to insert checkpoints, a warning system, to alert us when we start acting out of place. This is especially important for extreme situations. The only real checkpoint is another, professional person, a coach, a therapist, a shaman, whatever. And you need to be confident about their skill not on paper but that what they’re teaching they are being/doing themselves, in their personal and professional lives. Otherwise, it’s knowledge rather than embodied wisdom and their judgment can’t be trusted (more on that below). As my coach taught me: There’s only one of us inside.
The conversation with her lead me to the conclusion that, at least in this instance, I seem not to be crazy, what I communicated was reasonable and he seems to be putting himself into victimhood, making me the perpetrator when he was the one attacking me and then blaming me for making him attack me. Not only was he gaslighting me but he was also playing reverse psychology by making himself the victim while claiming I am in victimhood. The mind can be a twisted place. I have plenty of experience of that myself, just read:
Situations like this one happen all the time. What makes this crazier though is that this is a person who meditates a lot, like me, every day in the hour or hours range, has done a lot of work on himself, worked with many people and has gone down deep the spiritual rabbit hole. So this is not just a random person that doesn’t know what he’s doing. This is a person that is highly evolved and self-aware. So how come he had such a primal and uncontrolled reaction to something seemingly innocuous?
Insight #3: I can be spiritually extremely knowledgable, seemingly aware of the human condition and have done a lot of work on myself yet it’s all useless if I can’t embody it. I take this as a very visceral warning shot for my own journey. It is so easy to get caught up on the spiritual or personal growth high horse and the moment I get unvigilant, the ego and/or the reptilian mind takes over. We are both the redeemer and the destroyer - as my coach always reminds me.
My friend’s behaviour and actions were for me to see what can happen when you do a lot of inner work and therefore think you can’t possibly be doing anything wrong even to the point of hitting another person and blaming them for doing so (how about killing then?!).
The spiritual journey is fraught with obstacles, especially the spiritual ego which is just another form of ego but much more dangerous because one thinks of oneself as so much more evolved, beyond ego so to speak, and hence could not possibly have an egoic defence mechanism anymore. And when it does get triggered, then yes, it must be the other person aka you made me hit you. Call it the delusions of “waking up”. This is obviously not just a spiritual issue but applies to any human development: Becoming good at something and arrogant and with blindspots as a result. What makes it, however, especially tricky in the spiritual context is that that is the very domain of evolving in one's human capacity, awareness and behaviour.
After my coach and I had reviewed the situation, her next question was: What do you want to create from here? Besides me wanting to resolve this dispute - whether we will or not is outside of my purview though - I responded that I never want to become that person: The false guru. The one who claims to be enlightened yet abuses at the same time. The world is full of those because as you evolve spiritually and without continuous work on humility and keeping the ego in tow, it just pops up in another place, often bigger than before having started the personal growth journey.
My pledge: If I ever do - not have done because my younger version has done all kinds of “young” as in less developed things, I am on a journey in the end just like all of us - then please call me out on it! Now that I have become fully aware of the extent and nature of it, there are no more excuses. I’ve graduated. There’s only the high road from here on. If I act with spiritual ego, please kindly point it out to me so I can correct it before it could ever escalate. Thank you.
And let me add an important distinction to “the false guru”: The very idea of the guru is false in the sense that there is someone that has the answer for you. There is no-one that has an answer for you, we are each our own guru. It’s your inner teacher, the feeling or voice that is not thought but knowing, the intuition that you feel when you know what needs to be done or who you need to be that is here to guide us. That is also the path from being a victim of life to being the creator of everything in it. Read:
Back to the actual topic: Humility is the name of the game. The further you evolve, the more humility is required to operate in those higher echelons. The grail scene in Indiana Jones illustrates this powerfully:
Insight #4: Humility is the fuel for spiritual or for that matter any human development. Without it you’re not going anywhere. I like to think of it as a gate for the worthy: You can’t move forward without increased humility. Human evolution is embodiment-based. It doesn't matter what you know or who you are but how you are, your day-to-day beingness, how you treat other people including, especially, the waitress and the cleaning help.
It reminds me of my recent Ayahuasca journey where I got humbled by the need of letting go of everything: Money, power, fame. You can’t hide from yourself. Read:
It was a lesson in humility that then helped me to ascend into higher realms in subsequent ceremony nights as I shared in episodes #38-40. Humility is not only the door opener in Ayahuasca but Ayahuasca is simply an amplified and accelerated learning experience for real life. That is the very purpose of Ayahuasca, to experience something powerfully, viscerally and in condensed form so that we can accelerate our learning rather than taking years or a lifetime of trial and error in “real life”. Whether or not we bring the learning from the ceremony back into real life is of course a choice. The power of the human journey is that we know what is true and real deep inside - and then we have free choice and we can thereby explore and learn the consequences of our choosing.
And today, I was put in place again by the universe through the display of my friend’s behaviour. And I thank him for showing me what I needed to see. No book can teach this. I had to experience it viscerally. It’s a reminder that the journey I am on here is to serve others not my ego. No matter how far I make it or how wise I ever might become, there’s no room for ego, for the indulgence of myself. Instead, I am to live from a place of gratitude and grace, thankful for the journey I am on and the many powerful teachers that have seemingly miraculously found their way to me.
I want to add that I am eternally grateful to my friend for so many things. He has been instrumental in my journey and I would not be where I am without him. So if you are reading this: Thank you from the bottom of my heart for everything you have done including the lesson today in what not to do. Words cannot express my gratitude for the path we have walked together and no matter how difficult it was at times I know there was not a single moment wasted. Everything was and always is a gift.
And this is also the end of our shared journey. At least for now. This is no longer a constructive relationship that is serving us and I believe everything we needed to learn has been shown to us. Now it is our individual turns to put the learnings into practice, to embody it. It’s time to move on to our next chapters.
If I don’t speak to you before the holidays: Happy Holidays and if you celebrate Christmas: Merry Christmas. That you may have a wonderful and connecting time with your loved ones laying the foundation for the most beautiful start into the New Year.
With much love, Vincent
45/ getting punched by ego