Archive for February, 2023

5 Steps to Greater and Spiritual Self-Confidence

Wednesday, February 15th, 2023

The confidence you have is vital to the four big areas of your life: Mind, body, relationships and prosperity.

In this article I’m going to explain what confidence is, why it’s your birthright ­and therefore why it’s possible for everyone to claim it in full. I’ll then identify the one very simple, key action you can take to claim your confidence in any moment.

Having worked through this process for myself, and for other people, I’ve seen how certain cultural obstacles can prevent people from reclaiming their lost confidence. So I’m also going to share two key insights which help make the foundations upon which you can build your confidence.

So in this article we’ll sort of ‘reverse engineer’ back from what confidence is, to discover what the foundational bases for confidence are, and therefore what the blocks are, and how we might remove those blocks from our path.

It is for this reason that I’m going to present these five steps in the order 3, 2, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. (If unusual counting is good enough for George Lucas and the Star Wars franchise, it’s good enough for me).

So, Step 3…

Step 3: Know The Target – and Hit it!

The first thing is to understand exactly what confidence is. And it’s very simple; confidence is the act of confiding in ourselves. It’s a simple moment of self-honesty.

If we really want to get clinical about the anatomy of confidence and lack of confidence, we can consider the conscious mind and the subconscious mind.

The subconscious mind holds all the information from all experience we’ve ever had – save that which may have been permanently destroyed by alcohol, etc. Yet the conscious mind doesn’t want all that information at one time, and can’t handle it anyway, and so the subconscious feeds the conscious mind what is required for the current moment.

Except there’s an exception.

The ‘unconscious’ – called ‘The Shadow’ by psychologist, Carl Jung – is that total of your own inner information which has been a threat to you.

This ‘Shadow’, the unconscious, is the gap down the back of the sofa! It is where some of your own truth and personality is lost, and thus it is pretty much the same thing as your lack of confidence.

But why would your own information and truth be a threat to you? Simply because someone at one time who had some power over you (physical, social, cultural, emotional, economic, religious, domestic) disapproved of it. It threatened their sense of self, or their sense of okayness, and so you had to disown it so as to not incur their displeasure, or worse, their rage.

If people hadn’t repressed you, or controlled, judged and conditioned you, why would you lack confidence?! Answer: You wouldn’t!

But if those people are no longer around, or no longer a threat, an obvious question occurs: Is it safe to reclaim that lost confidence?

We bury those parts of us that are dangerous for us to acknowledge about ourselves. This unconscious Shadow equates to your lack of confidence because it represents those aspects and truths about yourself that it hasn’t been safe for you to be honest with yourself about.

An example may be a gay young man growing up in a homophobic household in a partly homophobic society. It may literally be dangerous for him to be honest with himself about that.

So there, you see, we know our target (self-confiding) but we have a problem in hitting our target because someone has put a board in front of it.

This is actually the original meaning of ‘sin’, whose Pagan meaning is “to pick up your bow and miss your target” (page 95 of the Kissing Consciousness book).

That simple act of gaining confidence I promised above is to be honest with yourself. In fact, if we’re talking about you wanting to gain more confidence than you currently have then you are required to be more honest with yourself than you previously have been.

An increase in self-honesty is an increase in self-confidence.

But an increase in self-honesty is dependent upon an increase in self-acceptance, i.e. self-love.

Building confidence requires us to get any self-judgement there is out of the way first.

Confidence vs Competence

This may mean being honest with yourself about something you cannot do, either temporarily or permanently. Confidence is not competence. Therefore, confidence is not about telling yourself you can do something regardless of whether you can, as if that is some kind of self-deluding ‘positive thinking’. Confidence is about being honest with yourself if you can and honest with yourself if you can’t.

Here’s my 60 second guide to confidence;

Step 2: Emotional Freedom

So it’s simple, right, we just face everything?

Well simple does not mean easy, and many people – perhaps most people – aren’t always comfortable facing up to emotions and feelings.

In fact, as a life coach I know that lack of emotional capacity is the most common denominator for many of my clients. If I ask people to assess how comfortable they are with their emotions on a scale of one to ten, the answer is typically less than five, and often around two.

This is why I created the Kissing Consciousness concept of ‘Emotional Infinity’, to help people see how to create infinite emotional freedom.

Whether we consider emotions to be in the body and feelings to be in the mind, or the other way round, doesn’t matter. Forget the labels, ‘feelings’ and ’emotions’, we don’t need them. We can deal directly with the reality.

There are only two places where feelings and emotions can arise – in the mind and in the body. So we need only concern ourselves with ‘events of the mind’ and ‘events of the body’.

If we allow whatever arises in these two vessels to arise, we have infinite emotional freedom.

But as we grow up we ‘learn’ how to be unable to cope with such things. We’re told we shouldn’t cry – one of the stupidest instructions in the world. People who are themselves uncomfortable with their own feelings tell us; “Don’t cry!”

Don’t cry, don’t shout, don’t scream, don’t vomit, don’t go for a run. What else have you been told you aren’t allowed to do as a natural way for your body to process the feelings and emotions which arise in it?

Your awareness is the sky and the feelings and emotions that arise in your body are like the weather. The sky doesn’t resist when it is filled with sunshine, or rain clouds, or thunder, and it is not natural for us to resist. It is learned conditioning. So the first thing to do is to liberate your body from all the ways it isn’t allowed to cope.

Then we come to the mind. Our responses to both ‘events of the body’ and ‘events of the mind’ are informed by the beliefs, attitudes and values we hold in our minds.

If a thought or feeling or emotion arises in the mind do we allow it to be there? Or do we judge it for arising, immediately creating a problem for ourselves?

Step 1: Wisdom

Just holding an intention of allowing ourselves and our bodily reactions isn’t always enough; we may need to get deeper.

We can only face what arises if it is acceptable enough to us that we’re not too scared to face it, and that is often based on the culture that defines us. Where we have judgements about how things and how people “should be” then we have the potential to resist and fear our own thoughts if they are – or might be – in direct conflict with how we think we should be.

We have all kinds of different cultural programs and conditioning running in our modern world. You may get someone’s approval by serving the collective. You may get someone else’s approval by demonstrating your ability to excel beyond the collective, sacrificing it as you go (“look after number one”). You may get someone’s approval by agreeing with their values of equality – only to anger them by solving an equality issue without forming a committee first.

So who are you to be? Who are you allowed to be? Whoever it is, society wants to define it very tightly. No room for your true nature here; social constructs insist on shoe-horning you into small boxes – and boxes that contradict each other at that.

“Be a sensitive man!” “Be a ‘real man’ and forget all that sensitivity crap!” “Be a modern career woman – but spend 100% of your time at home as a housewife!”

Wisdom dissolves this prison by accepting, valuing and honouring your true nature.

To understand wisdom we can use the logical principle of ‘Subject vs Object’. In logic, a subject is defined as “that which is aware of an object”. Look at (or pick up) any of the objects around you. They are the objects and you are the ‘subject’ that is aware of them.

Wisdom answers the age-old question, “Who am I?”

Ask anyone who they are and they will start with such things as “My name is… I’m [insert age], I’m a [insert trade], this is my body, these are my thoughts and beliefs, I’m this person’s husband/wife, brother/sister…”

…but these are all objects. They’re miraculous, wondrous objects but they’re objects nonetheless. Who is the ‘real you’; the subject that is aware of all these objects?

Do you see? People define their subjective self by objects. And as Integral Philosopher, Ken Wilber, points out, that is a colossal case of mistaken identity on the part of almost the entire human race.

It’s also why he suggests we kind of have two selves; an empirical (or finite) self based on the mind and body, and a transcendental (or infinite) self which is not bound by these objects.

This can be further understood by the spiritual mantra; “I have a body but I am not my body. I have a mind but I am not my mind.”

It’s a big and deep topic that I can only touch on here, although if you’d like to delve deeper then see my free wisdom resource below. But the main takeaway I want this to leave you with is that this insight creates a little separation between your deeper self and all these objects.

That should loosen your identity such that you may have less – and at some point hopefully no – resistance to the contents of thoughts that arise in your mind.

Wisdom, therefore, allows you to shun the conflicting cultural concepts and deal with the reality of you instead.

In short, there is almost certainly an amazing you waiting to be reclaimed.

Facing the Unfaceable

If you’re going to clear out the crud from the deep recesses of your mind then it’s possible you’re going to come ‘face to face’ with some pretty disturbing thoughts.

This wisdom will allow you to remain sturdy and composed while you observe and consider them.

“What is wrong with me that such a thought is in my head?” Well, you can be reassured by that reaction, because it proves that such a thought doesn’t reflect the truth of your character. If it did you wouldn’t be disgusted by it (see pages 263 and 306 of my book, ‘Kissing Consciousness’ and the section on ‘The Self-Disgust Principle’).

Spiritual wisdom allows rare individuals the freedom to process anything that arises in the mind without fear.

Other people may judge me, but in the privacy of my own mind anything is allowed. In other words, I have made my own mind a ‘Safe Space’.

And what makes that possible is the wisdom to see that I am what I am, and whatever I am is fine, and I don’t need to buy into any social constructs that may constrict that.

That’s confidence!

Step 2 Revisited

So with this new-found spiritual wisdom you have the basis to allow yourself to be open to all thoughts, feelings and emotions, and with that to ‘face everything, avoid nothing’.

That doesn’t mean you won’t feel pain, or unhappiness, or whatever. It just means you can develop the capacity to not feel the need to resist or avoid facing such things – and can therefore always live with confidence.

And this also lessens the suffering. As they say, Suffering = Pain + Avoidance.

Step 3 Revisited

This isn’t just greater confidence, this is what’s known as ‘Spiritual Self-Confidence’; an infinite capacity to confide in yourself.

And note the association between ‘spiritual’ wisdom (enlightenment) and ‘Emotional Infinity’. The quality of the infinite runs through both. The purpose of virtually all wisdom traditions has been to help people move from an understanding of their small self to an understanding of their big Self (capital ‘S’), their Universal Self.

Understanding your individual nature as an expression of the infinite loosens the shackles of your identity which may otherwise limit you.

As Tony Robbins observed thirty years ago, people feel the need to remain consistent with their identity, their sense of self. Well if that identity is infinite, isn’t, too, that person’s relationship with their own personality and potential? …and thus with their confidence?

Step 4: Hold Presence to Your ‘No’ Permissions

We now have a basis for confiding in ourselves around any topic or feeling. But that doesn’t mean our unconscious Shadow baggage has magically just healed itself and disappeared.

All it means is we are in a really good place (mindset) to do that work.

The Simplicity of Kissing Consciousness

If you aren’t familiar with Kissing Consciousness, we make things very simple by seeing each moment of life as experienced through a state of either self-acceptance or self-constriction.

We call these states ‘Love Consciousness’ and ‘Fear Consciousness’ respectively, and then notice how all other pairs of qualities such as confidence, fulfillment, living in the flow, choice, and their opposites – lack of confidence, frustration, stuckness, the illusion of choice, fill in under one or the other columns, thus;

Another way in which we bring this to life is with a concept I created called ‘Human File Permissions’. We were all born with only self-acceptance (‘Yes’ Permissions), yet the unconscious, the Shadow I mentioned above, essentially became the sum total of our ‘No’ Permissions.

Whenever we are about to do something, if we have a ‘No’ Permission around it, our subconscious remembers this, and – to keep us safe – finds a way for us to fail to do so. We experience this as self-sabotage, or something like that; lack of confidence.

The purpose of Kissing Consciousness is to help you turn your ‘No’ Permissions into ‘Yes’ Permissions… turn Fear Consciousness into Love Consciousness… so you can live your fullest and truest life.

You can read more about ‘Human File Permissions’ starting from page 60 of the Kissing Consciousness Handbook (and see the index for more page references).

There are two ways to illuminate and heal our Shadow and turn lack of confidence into confidence;

1. ‘Hold Presence’ to it as it arises day to day
2. Go after it proactively – hunt it down, so to speak

So how do we ‘hold presence’? I’ll embarrass myself; I’ll give you an example of my own.

There I am in the past, fully confident; relaxed, natural, in total control of what I am doing, and then an attractive woman enters the room and all that goes to hell in a handcart.

I was brought up with a ‘No’ Permission around being allowed to connect with women. So for me that was a trigger that changed my state from Love Consciousness to Fear Consciousness.

For other people, their ‘No’ Permission triggers may be different; maybe around money, so they get triggered when the bills come in, or around their body, so they get triggered if someone mentions the beach.

So anyway, in that moment I could either be a victim of my conditioning (if I didn’t understand what was happening), or I could choose to have a conscious response – ‘hold presence’ to the state of Fear Consciousness that arose in me.

And so, in the latter, what we’re talking about here is noticing that the mind has doubts, the body has a reaction, the heart rate quickens, maybe the palms get sweaty, etc. And instead of identifying with this reaction, we observe it as an object. We see it for what it is; a False Self conditioning, nothing to do with who we truly are.

And so maybe as our breathing becomes shallower we notice it and allow ourselves to breathe more deeply again – but without forcing anything, instead inviting the body’s nervous system to process and recover.

In our mind, we realise that we don’t have to identify with the nervous thoughts, we can just observe them as objects, and choose not to react unconsciously to them anymore.

That’ll do for now, I could write a million words here – come to one of my seminars if you want to go into this further.

Step 5: Proactively Challenge Your ‘No’ Permissions

You don’t have to wait for day to day experiences to trigger your ‘No’ Permissions.

People across the world have proactively engaged in Shadow work to help them reclaim their lost personality aspects and capacities. This is what I do with my clients and at workshops I run.

I even set up Kissing Consciousness so you can do this without me.

By using the following two-part question tool, whenever an energy of self-constriction arises in you, even if you can’t name it or define it, you may ask yourself;

1. Would you like to let it go?

And if so,

2. Ask your body if it would like to let it go?

You don’t even have to be in a ‘real’ situation. The brain – and the bodily nervous system that responds to it – can react all the same to imagination. (Imagine pouring vinegar on your tongue and see if you have a physical reaction). So I could have imagined asking a woman out, felt the nervous system reaction of my ‘No’ Permission, and processed it so I had tamed it, before asking out an actual woman.

You can make yourself and your awareness bigger than the ‘No’ Permission.

We can do this with anything. Right now, you can ask yourself to let go of any conditioning that wouldn’t allow you to earn x amounts of money.

What’s the trigger point for you? A thousand a month? A thousand a week? Ten thousand a month?

I’d better stop there or I’ll be writing for the next month, as I could go off on so many tangents, continue or expand this piece in so many directions.

I hope that helped you.

If you’d like to get more from Kissing Consciousness you can get the first two chapters of the Kissing Consciousness book for free here;

https://www.kissingconsciousness.com/chapters

You can buy the book here in both paperback and Kindle formats;

Paperback | Kindle

And if you’d like my one to one support with anything at all you can schedule a free coaching discovery call with me via this link;

https://www.kissingconsciousness.com/coaching

Thanks for reading.

Kindest,

James