BY IRENE LYON

I sat in front of my computer a few weeks ago writing an article on the ten lesser known habits to optimize your business success this year and I was hit with another thought that deserved some exploration.

It was a thought about false prophets and the people who follow them.

Being a conscious, and sometimes overly ambitious, entrepreneur means that I’m always checking out what other people are doing in the self-development and internet marketing space. While entrepreneurs are always on the look out for how to better improve and move their businesses forward, they are also becoming more attuned to the importance of protecting their most important asset: themselves.

The Bounty Abounds

The Internet is flooded with wellness coaches, holistic gurus and other mind-body “specialists” who share their recipes for green juices, offer up long lists of positive affirmations and a variety of methods for reaching greater health and dare I say, enlightenment?

It seems that everyone is hungry to fix the issues that are present in their life and the often-trendy wellness/holistic/zen etc. community offers a shiny way to do that.

The challenge, however, is that many of these gurus haven’t invested the time into studying and understanding the deeper aspects of the human condition, yet these same people are making promises to their community that are a very big stretch.

Slaying Old Gremlins Should Be Done With Care

Helping people investigate their internal worlds, not to mention diving into the slaying of old gremlins from childhood past, is not something to dive into carelessly. Ever.

Nor should anybody casually promise the conquering of deep-seated fears, which are pretty much always a result of some form of:

  • Early childhood trauma and/or developmental trauma

  • Bullying and ostracization from a peer group

  • A major accident wherein a person’s sense of safety was compromised and threatened

  • The loss of community, loved one, and/or

  • Little to zero emotional connection from our primary caregivers (i.e. faulty infant attachment.)

….to name a few.

Affir-mantras Are Not Enough

positiveThis list that I just wrote, which is by no means complete, reflects some of the reasons for the fear that my clients are healing. This list CANNOT be quelled with a top ten list filled entirely with feel good positive thoughts, affirmations and mantras. They just can’t.

Those lists might help soothe a person in the moment but typically, from what I’ve seen, this happens because mantras and affirmations do a great job at micromanaging a person’s discomfort by essentially giving them something nice and shiny to distract themselves with.

The trouble is this: when the person isn’t saying the affirmations, or consciously practicing them, the gremlins come back to fight another fight and the person is left defeated and wondering why they aren’t getting any better. Or, they simply repeat that top ten list and cleverly micromanage that gremlin back into another part of the body and psyche, which will then typically pop up as a physical sign (say a skin rash), symptom (pain of all sorts) or what is diagnosed these days as depression, panic, anxiety, irritable bowel, etc. The list is a long one.

(By the way, when we don’t have the skills and body knowledge necessary to befriend the emotional, mental and physical discomforts that pop up, then WE MUST be clever and find some way to push them back in or else we risk disconnecting from ourselves, shutting down, or going into panic/anxiety.)

Deep inner work, protecting and healing your most prized asset — you — must open up the unique nature of you and be done with care, skill and finesse. Something that I have found is very hard to come by these days.

This deep inner work must be cultivated so that lifelong practices of self-care, healing and creativity bloom via curiosity and personal biological uniqueness, along with safety and respect for not only your own unique past, but for the level of capacity of your individual nervous system.

This endeavour should never be approached carelessly.

Protect Your Most Important Asset

Seek out a teacher or a professional whose knowledge has been grounded by science and real study of the human system and who understands how trauma physiology functions. Someone who started out in this field not just because they were healing an addiction and found Spirit, or God, and then wanted to teach others what worked for them, but because they actually went into the work consciously.

Whether they entered that space as a profession, or through their own self-transformation, they are still on their own healing path so you want someone who will admit that – avoid at all costs ANYBODY who claims to be “enlightened.” Look for someone who is now applying their learning and experience to some form of practice that is in service of others.