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4 min read Sunday Spiritual

‘Look within’ is rubbish advice

Stripping away some of the psychobabble and seeing what ‘being enlightened’ could actually mean 🧘🏻

‘Look within’ is rubbish advice
Photo by Jared Rice / Unsplash

Here are a couple of spirituo-babble phrases that might twist your melons:

🧘🏽‍♂️ “Look within”

Ok, right. So… what exactly does that mean? And how do I do it? With X-rays, or something?! Think really hard about stuff?

🧘🏽‍♂️ “You are already enlightened”

What?! Oh, come on, give me a break!

😩

For years I’ve heard these sayings and I’ve never really liked them—they make no sense to the Giles Ego Construct 📦, if I’m being honest—but a while back, one of my clients taught me what they mean.

For which I am profoundly grateful.

Thank you. I had a real block on these statements, and now I see.

💖


They came to the session in a bit of a funk, and when I asked them how things were going, after a big old splurge of existential discontent, they sighed and said, resignedly,

“I give up. I think I’m just going to have to accept that this is how I am. I will be worrying for the rest of my life.”

And they visibly slumped. It was rubbish. They weren’t getting what they wanted out of this. 

I, meanwhile, had a look on my face akin to having been slapped round the head with a halibut. Because if I’d been reading a transcript of our session (rather than sharing my client’s pain, as they sat in front of me), I’d have seen the answer, plain as day.

😮

“Wait… what?! What did you just say?! Did I hear you correctly? That’s it! You got it!”

Yes. We will be worrying, the rest of our lives! This is our humanity. This is the computer in our heads, spitting out its meaningless programming. This is what it does, in its misguided attempt to keep us safe.

And the solution…?

It’s to give up. 

Give up fighting it.

Give up rewarding it with attention.

Give up making meaning of it.

Give up imbuing it with a power it simply doesn’t have.

☺️
The solution is acceptance of the human condition.

Resistance is what is hurting us.

It's futile.


We explored this together and as the session wore on, we got to a much quieter, more understanding place.

My client’s mind mostly stopped its protesting, although at one point, the wisdom within spilled out again, when it complained, mildly:

“Well I can’t argue with that. No matter how hard I try.”

😮

I couldn’t help myself:

“Well stop trying then!!!” 

Here’s what I saw:

🧘🏻‍♂️
We are all already enlightened, we just don’t know it. Everything we need—all the answers—are already within us.

My client showed it to me in their own wisdom, there and then. It was tumbling out of them, every time they opened their mouth.

They just couldn’t see it themselves, there in that moment.

We ended, and “listen to yourself” was the advice I gave, from a place of love and caring. 

(Which is no different from ‘look within’ really, is it?)

My client’s reading this (I shared it with them, beforehand) and I want them to know how grateful I am to them for helping me to see something that in all the years I’ve been doing this work, I’d kind of got intellectually (reluctantly), but had never really seen; never really felt … until that moment.

That day—precisely because you are ‘already enlightened’—you were the teacher.

Thank you!

🙏🏻

Giles

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