If you aren’t content with where you currently are, taking a look in the mirror might be your first step toward finding your happy ending. The only thing that may need fixing is your connection with yourself.
In his newest book, Connect: How to Find Clarity and Expand Your Consciousness with Pineal Gland Meditation, best-selling author Ilchi Lee says your troubles can teach you something.
“Crisis, it has been said, is an opportunity. You may have the best opportunity to meet yourself,” he wrote.
If you know your connection with yourself has been severed, you can reestablish it. Here are three ways for you to jumpstart your journey.
1. Pinpoint Why You Aren’t Connected
Figuring out why that connection isn’t there is the first step toward healing it. There could be several reasons for your disconnection. Maybe you are scared of failure or being rejected, so you build up walls to protect yourself from disappointment. Or, you may have another reason for your disconnection—a lack of focus. “We don’t have a good connection with ourselves because our consciousness is mostly directed outward,” Lee wrote. We have so many distractions—like cell phones, emails, texting—that it can be hard to think about anything else but our next task or message. But once you’ve figured out why your connection is suffering, that’s a big step toward correcting it.
2. Shift Your Focus
You have to retrain your brain to look internally rather than externally if you hope to reestablish your connection. “To connect with ourselves, we have to turn our focus inward,” Lee wrote.
The danger with looking outward is that we become convinced we don’t have what we need, that we need to be “better” than other people to receive validation we’re living successfully. “A good school, a good job, a good record, a large salary, a wonderful spouse, a good house, a luxurious car, and other aspects of this visible world that establish our status in society become people’s romantic fantasy,” Lee wrote. Even if we hate our jobs, we fear to quit them because we might lose the big paychecks we’ve tricked ourselves into believing we need or we think we will lose prestige in other people’s eyes. “Without our realizing it, the visible world—a life based on comparison to others—has taken its place as the central value of our lives,” he wrote.
But once we stop looking to other people for what they consider important and teach ourselves to care more about what our inner selves think about our lives, the clutter that has been clouding our judgment is suddenly cleared. All you have to do is listen to yourself, not others. Make quiet time, even a few minutes, a daily priority.
3. Detach From Emotions
When we’re able to look at ourselves objectively, we live less reactive lives. We’ve all seen people who aren’t proactive about what they want and seem to be operating reactively. For example, people who overspend to impress others and are in a perpetual state of panic when their car breaks down and they have no money set aside to repair it.
Six emotions in particular—joy, sadness, fear, greed, anger, and dislike—can cause you to stop listening to yourself.
“It’s easy to lose a sense of our true selves when we’re swept away in a whirlpool of feelings. . . . You speak and act emotionally because in that moment you have lost your real self,” Lee wrote.
Finding a way to control those emotions can quiet your mind to give you the inner peace you need to reconnect. That’s why when you meditate, you are told to clear your mind—because those emotions interfere with your ability to see things in a detached fashion and connect with yourself and the world around you.
In his book, Lee explains the merits of Jigam training to open yourself to the energy you have that’s full of love and compassion. It can be healing to your sense of connection. To release the negativity to get to this state, one method Lee explores is saying a healing words meditation.
Let Yourself Off the Hook
Permitting yourself to let go of what others expect of you is a form of powerful magic. It can transform your life for the better, and open the pathway for a connection with the greatest friend and ally you will ever have—yourself.
Editor’s Note: Author Ilchi Lee sends inspirational messages to help you connect to yourself every Thursday. Sign up here if you’d like to receive them.
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