So what is so wrong with the school system? I’ve believed that the school system is very flawed for a long time. I can be a bit intense about it now, but for the most part controllably so; years ago, though, I was so intense about it that I could hardly speak a comprehensible word on the topic. I would choke on my own words. I was consumed by rage.

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Why? I guess I didn’t know how to deal with anger very well. But what didn’t help was the fact that I found these things so obvious, and yet no-one who I talked to would really understand me or even listen to me on the topic. I felt like everyone around me was complicit in a major crime. And yet I was the one who they thought was crazy.

My views are still essentially the same as they have always been, since I became aware of my instincts on the topic. It’s only my rage that has gone down. I still feel that this truth is as plainly obvious as I always have. I still think that the school system is a soul-and-life destroying horror on par with the genocides. (Seriously). But I can talk more calmly about it, and avoid feeling the need to throw around blame.

The School System Is Not About Learning

So what is so wrong with the school system?

First: The school system is not what it says it is.

You go to school to learn, right? That is the school system’s explicit purpose. So that children can learn.

But what do you learn in school? I mean really? What really stays with you?

Well, you learn to read and write and to do basic math. That’s good. If you’re lucky you might end up with survival level in a second language too. Okay.

But as you know – as everyone knows – almost all of the rest of it, you forget. Sometimes only two days after you crammed for the exam.

History? You forget all of the dates of events that only dead people ever cared much about.

Science? You forget the organs of plants and the formulas for working out the velocity of a falling object.

Literature? You forget those books you were forced to read and only remember how much you hated them.

You can learn everything that you actually remembered from school in about two years. I’m not exaggerating here! How long did it take to learn to read and write and do basic math? Not long. Four years at most. And if you hadn’t been distracted by the useless stuff combined with that… yeah, two years sounds reasonable.

So school is not about learning. If it was, people would have realised how much more efficiently it could be done. About 10 years of school time, then, are wasted from the perspective of learning.

It’s my contention that those who created the school system knew what they were doing, though, and from their perspective – not ours – the time wasn’t wasted.

School Is Genocide

My old self – who I can hear as an echo in my psyche – would have said: TEN YEARS!! TEN YEARS!! TEN WASTED YEARS. TEN YEARS REMOVED FROM MY LIFE. ONE EIGHTH OF MY LIFE WAS MURDERED!

I don’t want to make this article about venting, but you can see her point, maybe.

Imagine if school was your whole life. That would not be a life at all! I know I would kill myself rather than face such a life. And I think most people would too. If everyone saw school as a form of prison like I do, of course they would.

School, though, is only one eighth of your life… right? But, that still means that for every eight people who go to school, one life is “lost” overall. And it’s also true that billions of people experience the modern school system these days. So I don’t think it’s so far from truth to call it a genocide. Or at the very least, the scale of damage is that of a genocide.

I say this calmly. Nowadays I won’t use the word “murder” because it contains a judgement. I no longer want to judge the action, to condemn. I know now that that doesn’t help – all it does is poison me. But I still believe all that I’ve ever believed. School is not what it says it is.

School Is About Obedience

So what is it? In essence, school as we know it is a tool to teach people to be obedient.

It is made to shape them in a lot of ways, in fact, and very little of that shaping is to do with maths and science or any of that. But obedience training is the biggest thing that school is made to do.

I believe that school should not be obligatory. It should not be obligatory to go; and when you’re there, it should not be obligatory to stay or to do things in the way they tell you to.

My old self would have raged against this so hard. She just couldn’t accept being told what to do. Nowadays, I don’t have anyone telling me what to do, so I’m okay. But I still feel that authoritarianism is wrong.

Wrong because we have free will and dignity. Wrong because it just doesn’t work very well to control others through authoritarianism; people access their creativity best when they work together on a common goal with people who consider them equals. Wrong because authoritarianism inevitably involves discipline, humiliation, and punishment.

But all of those reasons are a little unimportant to my argument. My argument is devastatingly clear if I only point out this fact: obligation is unnecessary because most of the time we spend in school is unnecessary.

You could say that we should force all children to learn to read, write and do basic math. I disagree, but I can see where you are coming from. But basically all of the rest of what we do in school – for ten whole years – is demonstrably useless.

So, at the very least, the ten years in which we are learning useless things should be optional. There’s no justification for those years; not for existing at all, and much less for them being obligatory.

Take a little time to let that sink in.

Why are these 10 wasted years obligatory? Simply because it is not facts we are teaching; we are teaching children to respond to obligation itself.

Obedience Training

The message of obligatory schooling is this: you are not your own person. You have to do things according to the school timetable. Come when school starts; go to every lesson, whether you like it or not, at the set time. You have to do what your teacher says, even if it’s wrong. You have to ask permission to go to the frikkin’ toilet for god’s sake. The toilet. Do I even need to point out how ridiculous this is?

All of these things teach you to require authority. It teaches you to expect that other people will tell you what to do all day. It breaks down your resistance.

In the end, in fact, it makes you need it. Your independent will is so thoroughly broken down that you don’t even know what you want anymore. You just wait passively until an authority tells you what to do. In your “free time”, you don’t pursue your own passions any more: your attention is funneled into safe outlets such as television and Facebook. You are rendered effectively clawless.

Jobs pick up where school left off. They continue to fill up your time and stop you from ever finding your independent will. They keep on encouraging, requiring obedience.

Forever clawless. Unless you wake up and break out of the system, of course.

Free Schools And Unschooling

…So what about better schools, like Waldorf and so on? Well, for me Waldorf schools are a bit better but they miss the point. So long as school is obligatory, you are impinging on a child’s basic human dignity. You are teaching them to need authority rather than have their own ideas and initiative.

Some schools, however, are obligation free. These have various names: free schools, anarchist schools, or democratic schools. (Don’t be put off by “anarchist” by the way; the word actually just means no leader, which is exactly what this is. The other two terms are more common anyway).

Summerhill is my personal favourite, a long running project created by a visionary leader. There are many others, though, including a chain of schools by the name of Sudbury Valley or just “Sudbury schools”.

There is also the possibility of homeschooling. Non obligatory homeschooling is called “Unschooling” — or “Radical Unschooling” to differentiate it from diluted versions of the philosophy. The word is also used to mean the parenting philosophy of non-obligation — independent of which school your children go to. I find that part very important too, as school is only going to be part of your child’s early life.

Either way, the important thing is that free schools and Unschooling work. Children who go through these systems come out incredibly well balanced. Don’t believe me? Just check those websites for some testimonials. You can also read some experiences in this article.

And they do learn. Actually, the normal school system is what teaches children to hate learning. People are natural learners by nature, and those who go through Unschooling or free schools never have that instinct squashed. They become lifetime learners. But they do it on their own schedule.

Some children who go through these systems learn to read at age 3. Some, who enjoy more physical activities or for whatever other reason have their own plans, leave off reading till up to age 14. Generally these children learn to read around the same time as normal children, or just a little later. But here’s the thing: they all learn to read.

The apocalypse scenario envisioned by proponents of obligatory learning never comes to pass. No one becomes an uneducated, defenseless hick. On the contrary, people who avoid their obedience training grow up psychologically MUCH stronger and more independent. I would argue that the mere lack of obligation culture makes them less stupid on its own. And yes, they learn. They learn without anyone telling them to.

This, in itself, is enough to blow the concept of obligatory education out of the water. If children do not need obligation to learn, why does obligatory schooling exist?

Just let that question hang in the air for a while. Stare it down. Let it seep in. In itself, it is enough to change everything. It is a truth that can knock down towers.

If you believe in facing up to truth, all you need to do is to sit back and let it do so.

John Taylor Gatto

Now, perhaps some of you have read this far and still have doubts. Naturally, I haven’t been able to tackle this from every angle, because that would need a book. I haven’t written one yet. But John Taylor Gatto has. And they are devastating.

John Taylor Gatto delved into the history of the school system and found out what its original purpose was. The information wasn’t even hidden; just ignored, buried under all of the lies about what school’s purpose is.

Read his account of the history of modern schooling, check his sources, and I promise you, you will see what I see. The history is real and verifiable — and its meaning is unmistakable.

But see for yourself.

You can read some free articles on his website. They should be enough, really. But if you want to really blow your mind, read any of his books:

Dumbing Us Down

Weapons Of Mass Instruction

A Different Kind Of Teacher

I think I’m justified in saying: I rest my case.

Did this just blow your mind? Support Sophia’s activism with a donation. Each one directly gives her more time to focus on this blog and related projects.

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Obligation Is The Death Of Responsibility

Suppose there is a vote for a cause you believe in. 50,000 votes or so should be enough to swing the decision in your favour. You have just one vote to cast. Can you really make a difference?

Or, think of recycling. If you start making a little extra effort to recycle, you will improve your tiny impact on the world. But if the rest of humanity doesn’t change, the pollution and destruction of the Earth will continue unabated. Can your actions really mean anything?

Consider this, too. I’m vegan: I do it for the sake of animal welfare. People have told me, though, that that won’t change anything. The animal foods industries are so big; and I’m just one person. How can just one person expect to make a difference?

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You Are Not Just One Person

These kinds of thoughts have come into my head many times. It did take me some time to resolve them, but I think I finally have an answer that satisfies me.

My answer is this: I can expect to make a difference because I am not one person.

When I go to vote, I do not go to vote as Sophia Gubb. I go to vote as a part of the whole group of people who see things the way I do.

When I recycle, I don’t recycle as Sophia Gubb. I recycle as a part of the increasing section of humanity who is aware of their impact.

When I eat vegan, I don’t do so as Sophia Gubb. I eat vegan as a part of the very large worldwide vegan movement.

And those who see things the way I do, together are enough to make a difference.

A Shift In Identity

Looked at from a certain perspective, this may seem self-evident, even a kind of platitude. And, you might say, it still doesn’t change the fact that my contribution alone doesn’t add up to much.

But there’s the thing: my contribution is not alone.

And I think seeing things in this way is anything but a mere platitude. It’s a shift in identity.

From the first point of view, I am just one person. I am small, disconnected, powerless.

From the second point of view, I am more than just Sophia Gubb; I am part of a whole group of people, a movement.

We Are More Than Just Ourselves

I believe the second is more accurate, actually. We are never just ourselves; we are always a part of something larger. We each probably could not survive alone, and certainly not do anything more than survive. So I think it’s vanity to have an identity which doesn’t include that which we are part of.

And by shifting your identity in this way, you can feel stronger. You don’t just have your strength as an individual, but also the strength of that which you are a part of.

If you ever really managed to feel like you were completely separate from the world around you, you would feel as powerless as a lone human trying to survive in the jungle. The fact that you can ask for help and depend on others means you know you are not alone. And the more you can do this – the more you can identify as part of the whole – the stronger you can feel.

And that’s how you can know your efforts are not futile when you recycle, or vote, or refuse animal foods. You are not just one person trying to make a difference. You are one of many. Your action is not just one action. It is one of many. And together it all means something.

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I’ve made a new video about my gender transition. Here I’m talking about becoming less insecure and less worried about how people see me, and developing a sense of unshakable self respect.

If you liked this post, please think about making a donation.

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Transsexual Perspective

In this world most people aren’t born into making a conscious effort towards personal growth. Society encourages them to stay asleep and to accept the path that is given to them. If they have mental/emotional problems, they may be encouraged to go to “therapy”, but it’s remarkable how stupid and ineffective this therapy often is. Its fundamental issue is that it doesn’t challenge the norm. Just like most of society doesn’t. Challenging the norm is the invisible taboo.

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So getting into personal growth or personal development isn’t so easy. The whole of society tells you to just go back to sleep and accept things as they are. Accept yourself, your way of life, as they are. It’s okay, you don’t need to change. Your cultural conditioning is just fine. If anything is wrong with you, it’s blind fate; but don’t worry, there may be a pill for that.

And even the idea of personal development isn’t so easy to find if you’re not looking for it. In “normal” society it’s kind of ridiculed when it is mentioned at all. Those silly meditators. Those health freaks. You don’t get an accurate perception of what personal development is really like this way, and nothing to tell you that it might actually be for you.

The fact is, however, that practically every aspect of your life that matters – health, dating, vitality, education, work, occupation, impact, power, awareness, philosophy – can be improved by going against the herd and finding your own way. The fact is that the deepest questions to life: “Why are we here?”, “What’s the meaning to this life?”, “How can we be happy?” do have answers. But those answers aren’t in any school textbook, so you’ll have to find them yourself, and trust your own judgement rather than that of the socially-approved authorities.

Finding the strength to go against the herd is hard. It can take a long time to finally break free and discover your own path.

Discovering Personal Growth

In my case, finding personal growth certainly was a very slow process. I started out with a burning, but undefined desire, and engaged mostly just with stuff which I was brought up to consider safe. Bit by bit, I found the strength to move towards the edgier, and more effective, stuff.

So I started with “therapy”, the closest thing to personal development which society encourages you to do.

That said, I threw out the window the whole thing about depending on someone else to do therapy on you. It seemed so disempowering, not to mention expensive. I decided I could do therapy on myself.

So I bought books on different pyschotherapy modalities and tried to do just that, mostly through introspection.

This was still pretty far from what I was actually looking for. It didn’t work very well, and in some ways made my problems worse. It encouraged my tendency to overthinking and being disconnected from reality.

But, my self-therapy was close enough to to what I was looking for to keep me going. I discovered through trial and error – by which I mean mostly error, at least at the beginning – some ways in which I actually could change myself.

And from those crude beginnings, I successively discovered new disciplines which were ever closer to what I was actually looking for. I got into seduction, even though I wholeheartedly disagree with the movement now, mostly because I found the growth element of it attractive. I dabbled in Buddhism, anarchism, hypnosis, trying to become ambidextrous, constructed languages, quantum mechanics, conspiracies/whistleblowing, and other topics.

I also started just looking for “wisdom”, even if that meant just wise quotes from books or movies. I also stumbled across some people, quirky loners who were commenting on life but who, like me, didn’t seem to know about the concept of personal growth per se or to have come into contact with the personal growth community.  Fitting this description were traevoli.com and George Mikes’ book “How To Be A Guru“.

Finally, after some years of this, I found Steve Pavlina’s blog. I found it by accident – well, it was linked to from a “success” forum, which was in turn an offshoot of a seduction forum.

And it turned out that everything on the entire frikkin website resonated so deeply with me. I was kind of in awe. I didn’t think this level of lucidity existed on planet Earth. It was what I had been looking for for so many years.

I read practically every single article, and acted on most of the ideas which I found applicable to my life.

And I finally had a name for what I was looking for. “Personal Development”. It was like a coming home.

Seek And You Will Find

This story shows just how hard it can be to break out of socially-conditioned complacence and engage in empowered personal growth. In our society, the cards are stacked against you.

But Jesus was supposed to have said: Ask, and you will be given. Seek, and you will find. Knock, and the door will be opened to you.*

That remains one of my favourite quotes because it is so profoundly true.

I sought, and sought. I didn’t even know what I was looking for, I just believed deep down that I’d know it when I found it. And so it was.

I don’t think any force in the Universe can stop you if you Seek for so long and with such drive.

*I found just now that the New Living Translation puts it as, “Keep on asking, and you will receive what you ask for. Keep on seeking, and you will find. Keep on knocking, and the door will be opened to you.”

I like this even better as it’s even closer to my experience of it. If you seek just a little, then give up, you may experience failure. But if you  keep at it, I believe it is almost inevitable that you will find.

Resistance Is Normal

I know I’m probably preaching to the choir with this article. This is a Personal Growth website and anyone who is here is almost certainly interested in Personal Growth. But then again, maybe there are some who are on the fence, or who are still getting through their initial resistance to the topic.

To them I say: this resistance is normal. It’s normal to be weirded out by all this and wonder, if it’s possible to radically improve your life from the inside out, why do so few people do it? 

But if you’re like me, then you have a strong pull underneath all that resistance. Some part of you wants to look away, and some part of you, a stronger part, wants to dive on.

Listen to that part. Seriously. Nothing can go wrong.

It Will Be Worth It

OK, not nothing. Things do go wrong sometimes. For sure. A couple of rather brash experiments come to mind. Try not to be brash, okay? Talking from experience here.

…But! It will be worth it. That‘s the point.

It will be so worth it.

Look at me. I am different in a billion ways than I was before I started Personal Growth, and every single way makes me happier, stronger or a better person somehow. Every single way.

I might have died from depression or my long term illness if I hadn’t found Personal Growth, in fact. For me, my pit was deep, and the only way out was to build my way out. No one could help me but myself.

Not everyone has to have been in such dire straits as me. You can just want to break free of your limitations. Discover new ways of being, better ways of doing what everyone does. You can turn life into what your heart knows life can be.

Step Into The Unknown

The bottom line? You can be happy. And if you’re already happy, you can be happier.

You can be successful in whatever you want to do. You can be wealthy. You can be healthy, if you’re sick, or healthier if you’re not.

All of these things are within your control. Society will largely tell you that you can’t control these things, or that you have to accept the results of the standard, approved way of controlling these things. But it’s not true. You can control them, and there are almost always better ways to do so than what society approves of.

You just have to take a step into the unknown. To accept, for a moment, that everything you thought you knew might have been wrong. To accept, also, the disquieting and somewhat arrogant-feeling truth that what almost everyone does isn’t the best way of doing things.

But that’s okay*. Billions of people smoke, and pretty much everyone can admit that this is a silly thing to do. I think they can deal with the fact that they are being silly with a few hundred more lifestyle choices, too. Actually, they’ll just do what they always do: ignore the uncomfortable truth. So don’t worry about them. They are fine.

*My first blog post was called, “Everyone Else Is Doing It Wrong”. It’s almost a pity I had to delete it (it didn’t come up to my standards for quality), and I’ve occasionally thought of making a new post with that title. I don’t like being quite so provocative nowadays, but maybe this post can stand in for it as its spiritual successor.

Just Get Started

Think about yourself now. Are you willing to do what you’ve always done, to do what everyone else does, knowing you’ll likely get the same results? Or are you going to try something new?

If you want to take this step into the unknown, I’m here for you. Just start browsing the site. Do some Googling around too, and check out Steve Pavlina if you haven’t already.

As I said before, practically every aspect of your life that matters can be improved by going against the herd.

For sure, others will be there to tell you that it’s wrong or stupid. But that’s why they are the herd. It’s their job to try and make sure everyone copies each other and does nothing original or groundbreaking.

If you look beyond those people, you will find a small but significant community of people who are challenging the norm regularly in their lives. They will show you the sorts of possibilities there are out there. Let yourself get inspired, and when you are ready, go and do something daring.

“Yo! Just wanted to mention that this blog is largely supported by donations, so if you think this is awesome and would normally pay to keep reading this stuff, please consider taking a couple of euros out of your monthly allowance to support the site. Click here to read more… ”

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You might have noticed that I’ve changed my tagline.

It was previously “Indigo Children And Adults, Conscious Living And Saving The World.”

Now it is: “Indigo Children & Adults, Spirituality, Personal Growth And Activism.”

Why the change?

(Image Source)

Saving The World

Starting with the least important issue first: I was beginning to get tired of the tongue-in-cheek “Saving The World.” Partly because it came off as kind of boistrous, and I don’t identify with that so much now. Since I became Sophia (I’m transsexual) I’ve found I have a more gentle outward persona.

Besides that, I should have known that a joke was never going to stand the test of time. How many humourous T-shirts do you still wear a year after buying them? Not many.

Spirituality

Then, there’s the new element of “Spirituality”.

Spirituality is one of the things I think most about, and I recently realised that it was also very important for me to write about.

The trouble is, I’d felt scared to write about it for a long time, probably because I had this strange complex where I thought I wasn’t “enlightened” enough to give others spiritual advice. I’m glad I got over that, because recently I’ve written several spirituality-oriented posts which I think are genuinely excellent.

Actually, the floodgates opened when I decided on my tagline change a couple of weeks ago. With that, I was symbolically accepting that I really was good enough to write about spirituality — and I finally started really letting myself do so.

I still have a lot of ideas for more posts on this topic. I’m going to try and get them all out in the coming weeks and months.

Personal Growth

Finally, there’s “Personal Growth”.

This was a big one for me.

OK.

Basically,… I’ve spent about four years in denial that my website is a Steve Pavlina clone.

There. I said it.

I was inspired to make a blog by Steve Pavlina, who showed me that you could live free while doing something that was true to who you are.

The trouble was, many other people were inspired to do exactly the same thing by him. And I saw how most of those blogs were absolutely transparent attempts to earn money and win themselves some freedom.

Not at all like what I was doing, then…

I saw how those blogs would almost invariably start out with great ambitions and almost invariably crash and burn. People just wanted quick solutions, and would quit as soon as they realised it wouldn’t be that easy.

Clones

…And, I also just couldn’t stand just how much they were clones of Steve Pavlina.

Saying the same sort of stuff, in the same way.

Not at all like me, then…

So I wanted to differentiate myself. I wanted to be more than “just another personal development blog”.

And so I went through so many different brandings it’s not even funny.

To be fair, I was finding my voice, and my aversion to being associated with Steve Pavlina probably wasn’t the only reason I didn’t realise I was making a personal development blog. But, yeah, it was a big reason.

And so I was basically writing a whole load of personal growth advice for years without quite realising I had a personal growth blog.

Weird…

Ending Self Sabotage

So now that I’m not in denial anymore, perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that I feel like I can write better articles now. I don’t have to do some sort of doublethink to write anymore. And I don’t need to sabotage myself in order to avoid, you know, people seeing me as a personal development author.

This all seems rather stupid. But then again, from what I can see, internal blocks like this are what stand in pretty much everyone’s way to getting what they want. …Unless they don’t want anything at all, of course.

I knew myself that internal blocks were what were holding me back with my website for some time. Why? Because I knew the best way of getting traffic for my website was guest posting on other sites, and I just wasn’t doing that.

I didn’t beat myself up though. I didn’t try and plow through my internal blocks like the Terminator. I know some people say you should do that. I don’t like that approach myself though.

You see, I felt somehow that I needed to get comfortable with my blog and my writing before I shared it more fully with the world. And that’s what I was doing.

The block might have seemed like an enemy, but I think really it was an ally in disguise. I think blocks usually go away best when you listen to their subtle message, rather than when you try to headbutt them out of existence.

You can try the latter approach too of course. But I think it’s nicer and more “organic” somehow to do it the way I did.

Dealing With Self Sabotage

If I were to give some advice on dealing with self sabotage I would say this:

I think the important thing is to know that it’s possible to get what you want to get in life. When you know that, then the question becomes, why don’t I have what I want in life?  – and self sabotage can become more evident.

Resolving self sabotage isn’t absolutely immediate from that point, of course. I think it’s a case of gently but persistently pushing forward with your desires, and working through your issues as they come up.

Stay honest with yourself. It can be more comfortable to think that you don’t want something or that it is impossible to have it, than to think that you still have work to do and that you’re scared. I think if you stay aware of what you want and make continuous, gentle pressure towards that end, it’s pretty inevitable that you’ll get there in time.

That’s my faith, and I think it’s fair to say it’s my experience so far.

What Is Your Blog About?

One more experience I’d like to share.

Since changing my tagline, something I’ve noticed is that I can answer the question, “What is your blog about?” much more comfortably now.

It used to be an inevitable bind I got into. First someone would ask, “What do you do?” as a way of making small talk. I would say I was a blogger. Then, of course, it’d be: ”What is your blog about?”. The answer was always a struggle.

I would start with something like, “Well, I write about what I think about,” and generally lean towards describing it as a personal development blog without actually using those words. The description wasn’t so different to what I would make nowadays, but my nervousness about it was palpable.

Now I can say cleanly, “I write about personal growth, spirituality and activism.” It comes off nice and professional, like.

And so, well, I feel more comfortable with my own mission statement now. And, by extension, I feel more comfortable with seeing a future in which I’m being successful with my mission. It’s a good feeling.

Conclusion

So that was me on my website’s tagline and self sabotage in general. What about you? Are you holding back on something which you want to make happen? Can you identify self sabotage there somewhere? And, if you can, what do you think the hidden message of that block is?

By the way, this website is largely maintained by donations. If you’re getting value out of this website please consider making an occasional donation to express solidarity. Think of it as a magazine subscription or similar.

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It’s my birthday! My first birthday to be exact.

I know, everyone says I seem wiser than my years…

OK, so today is my first birthday in my identity as Sophia. Before I was Sophia, I had a boy’s name.

In some respects I was so different to how I am today that it’s rather hard to identify with my old self. “He” feels like a different person.

In the spirit of this event, I’m going to make a quick retrospective of the year.

Preparation

I actually started transitioning a month or so before “officially” living as Sophia.

This began with little additions of feminine attire to my presentation, in order to build comfort and prepare the people who knew me for what was to come.

I had also changed my name and sex to female on Facebook some months before that, but I generally allowed or encouraged people to assume I was doing it ironically. I might have even fooled myself I was doing it ironically in the beginning.

For a while my little feminine flourish was just wearing a flower in my hair. I got some surprised and mildly disparaging comments at that, but I just smiled and said little in the way of explanation. A while later, I started adding progressively less and less ambiguous female clothing to my look. Finally I was wearing blouses every day combined with gender-ambiguous trousers.

This gradual change ended when I at once I began wearing skirts, putting on makeup and beginning to change my voice. I lived like that for just a couple of days, before the feeling arrived: now. With trepidation and determination, I changed my name on Facebook from “Andrea” to “Sophia”, and wrote up an announcement:

So I’m Sophia now.

I’m no longer being ironic about it or pretending it’s a game: I’m actually, really, changing my sex.

I feel I need to make a disclaimer that this might not be forever, because otherwise I feel like otherwise I’d be held to that expectation. That said, it does feel very right for me now and is more than just an experiment or a game. It’s possible after trying this out I’ll eventually end up in a more moderate form of self expression, but I’m less and less certain of that. Still, we will see. I do reserve the right to go back on this if I want to. 

I also might not stay Sophia as it’s still a provisional name. If, as I think is possible, I’ll be this way for a long time, I need to have the right name, so I’m still thinking this over. It could well be Sophia though.

By the way, please do not worry, if you’d be inclined to, as impulsive as I often am I’m not going to throw myself into surgery or anything at all that I can’t go back on. If I do anything like that it’d be after years of deliberating and second, third, fourth guessing myself way after I would have normally considered myself certain.

This announcement is in fact 2 and a half years in the making. It’s been a very slow process of deliberation to get to the point where it feels good to get out there and tell people what I want to do and be in such a clear and public way.

I’m okay with you taking your time to readjust to this change and I won’t push you too hard to call me by my new name or the female pronoun, at least not for the moment. Please do take me seriously and try to get your head around this in your own time, though.

I could do with clothes and advice, if anyone has any they can give me. Or buy me a gift voucher for H&M. You know you want to. :p

Love you guys, anyway, and I hope you all take this well. Hugs to all, and if anyone has any question or anything they want to talk about, just get in touch.

This received 56 “likes” and 94 comments. They were all so positive. It was wonderful. (You can read the original and its comments here).

Beginning

So as you can see, at the beginning I was really not so sure that I was going to remain Sophia. I started out with the idea that it was an experiment, just to see how I would feel doing it and what I would learn.

Obviously, it turned out to be much more than that, but I guess this helped me get over my initial resistance, which was frankly immense.

The first week of living as Sophia I was basically wandering about in a daze. I kept missing appointments, I left my keys in my house, forgot what day it was. Emotionally it was like a train had hit me.

I started out very, very intense, and very radical. I tried to do everything at once (except take hormones — and I made unrealistic schedules for that, too). I was juggling learning makeup, with practising a female voice, with finding female clothes however I could on a limited budget. In fact, from the very first day I refused to touch a single item of my previous wardrobe.

The timescale I had in mind was incredibly unrealistic. I was hoping to pass as a woman as much as possible without doing anything irreversible in the space of just a couple of months.

I was impatient, partly, I think, because I was so very self conscious and uncomfortable with what people thought of me.

Opencon

One month after starting my transition, I went to Opencon Catalonia, a polyamory convention in the Catalonian Spanish countryside.

It was trans friendly, for sure. The polyamory community usually is. However, I was soo insecure about my identity, so very constantly aware of it. I introduced myself as trans in the welcome circle (to applause) and warned people that I couldn’t keep my feminine voice going all the time and for them to be understanding.

My whole life was like this. So very aware all the time of my trans-ness. Always uncomfortable in case I wasn’t passing perfectly or wasn’t acting like a woman should in one way or another.

Putting On The Brakes

The probability of emotional burnout loomed and I began to scramble to find ways of slowing down my process. And I managed to after quite a few months, though it really was intense going.

I started to deliberately not do everything I could to pass as a woman. This was about six months into the process.

Particularly, I stopped covering up my beard shadow with makeup. This changed how people percieved me a lot. And I didn’t mind, I wanted to get comfortable with that.

One year into my process now, I’m quite a lot more comfortable than I was, though I still feel a bit insecure about it sometimes. I’ve started putting more effort into doing what I need to do to pass as a woman again, though this time more for me than for other people.

Trying To Be A Woman

In this time I also began to learn not to “try” to be a woman, but to just be myself, which was womanly enough.

In general, the whole thing isn’t as complex as I thought. In terms of posture, it helps to not sit with my legs splayed out and to stand a bit straighter (but the latter is not really necessary). In terms of language, the only thing I’ve really changed is to stop saying “man” at the end of my sentences (e.g. “that’s so cool, man!”) and using someone’s name instead. As for gestures, I just needed to let my natural femininity flow, which was rather a relief. The tone and timbre of my voice are things I’m still working on.

So all of these things are really rather simple. I also wear women’s clothes and try to cover my beard shadow with makeup. Besides that, there really isn’t much else I can do until I take hormones.

The thing is, in the beginning I didn’t see things this way. Being a woman was such a big task. I was constantly analysing or second guessing whether something I did or said was female enough. It was incredibly taxing and draining.

All this, I think, came from insecurity, a fear of not passing as a woman — and a fear, too, that I was somehow “not trans enough” or not really a woman.

I was often asking people if they thought I was actually a woman. I wanted external confirmation. Not such a good idea. I eventually came to realise that unbiased people were few, and the only one I could trust to know my feelings in the first place was me.

Obsessing About Being Trans

And yes, I was thinking constantly about whether I was really trans. It was an obsession. I wanted to know so I could take hormones, and I wanted to take hormones soon. So there was a lot of emotional pressure on me to find out.

I thought about it every single day. Literally. Probably every single day in a row for about 9 months. Only then did I start to cool down a bit.

My questioning process culminated at the 9-month mark with three sessions with a great therapist, a psychic reading and an intense journalling session which left me certain I had no logical basis for denying my feelings anymore. Afterwards, I kept the results to myself for a whole month before feeling comfortable about sharing them with the world.

I did so in my last post about my transition.

Before And After

In the beginning I was uncertain that I was trans. Now I am certain. I thought it might be an experiment. Now I know it’s much more than that.

I was incredibly insecure about how people saw me. Now I’m quite a lot more comfortable with it. I was constantly trying to pass. Now I’m okay with showing imperfections in my presentation, though I’m growingly spending more energy on it again for my own sake.

I was doing my process incredibly fast and was hurtling towards burnout. Now my pace is much slower, though I think I still could work on taking things a bit more easy.

It’s been quite a year.

Transgender People Always Knowing That They Are Trans

One thing I’ve noticed that screwed with me a lot was the idea that trans people always know they are transgender since the moment they can first speak. It’s a pretty common misconception of trans people, one I started with and found hard to shake for quite a while. It was also probably one of the most common criticisms thrown my way.

I guess that if I didn’t have this misconception, I could have known I was trans much earlier, or not have had such a problem accepting it. The truth is a large percentage (I think around 50%) of trans people don’t know they are trans for quite some years of their life. We are doing people a disservice by hiding this fact.

The media prefers to focus on the other sort of trans people, the ones who knew it ever since they were born. I guess because it seems more dramatic, and also perhaps because it could seem more legitimate to some, less like they are “choosing” it and more like they were saddled with it since an early age.

What I want to know is why should it matter if I’ve chosen it or not? If I affirm myself as female, I want people to respect that, whether or not I think I’ve always been female. It shouldn’t be that hard, people.

Lesbian Trans Women

Another hang-up I’ve had was about sexuality. I thought in the beginning that trans people would have a similar proportion of straight, bi, and gay people as compared to the society at large. I worried, in fact, that many lesbian trans women might not be “really trans” (whatever that means).

Now, I know that trans women are more often gay and bi than normal women: the ratio is about 1:1:1, in other words, 1/3 straight, 1/3 bi, 1/3 gay.

So me liking women is no longer a threat to my self image as trans (…and it should never have been, come to think of it). I feel rather normal as a trans person now, rather than fearing I might be a freak or secretly somehow a fraud.

I still think I am bisexual, though I no longer clutch to that out of insecurity in my trans identity. And I’m now open to eventually finding out that I’m not. I don’t care either way. I’m trans, and that’s who I am, whoever I want to sleep with.

Hanging Out With Trans People

It’s helped me a lot, too, to hang out with other trans people. I wish I could have done it more from the beginning. It dispels so many fears, so many insecurities to see others like you. And the trans social network is also still currently the best way of getting information.

Overall

Overall, I’m really happy with how this year went.

My personality changed a lot; I lost a lot of aggressiveness and anger which seemed to stem from defending against people who thought I wasn’t manly enough. I discovered new joys in life, happier sexuality and friendships, and lots of answers about myself.

I’ve also learnt an incredible amount about what it means to be a man or a woman, and about the social conditioning of both. I’ve embraced feminism like never before, finally “getting” things I never got, now that I could see them from this new perspective. 

People seem to respect me more now. I’m more authentic and seem less like I’m struggling to cover up my inadequate masculinity. I think they perceive that on some level and appreciate it.

It was hard but very rewarding. I think I’ve become stronger as a person and, of course, a much better expression of who I really am.

For the future, I’m hoping to chill out even more if possible and just take things one day at a time. I always want to do things fast (an indigo trait) but I have to accept that this dimension of reality just doesn’t bend to my will as fast as I’d like it to. Well,  with time, perhaps, I can learn to flow with that and even enjoy it.

I’m nervous and excited and impatient to see who I’m going to be in one, two, five years time!

Sophia

By the way, this website is largely maintained by donations. If you’re getting value out of this website please consider making an occasional donation to express solidarity. Think of it as a magazine subscription or similar.

Related

Gender Transition Updates For March 2013 (And My “Big Announcement” )

LGBT Related Updates For February 2013

Transgenderism Is Not An Illness

Gender Transition Updates For 2013

A Gentler Gender Transition

Sex Change

Some years ago, I got a reading from the psychic Erin Pavlina which changed my life. In the aftermath of that, I became understandably very interested in developing my own psychic abilities. I wanted to be able to connect with my spirit guides like she could, and get the information I most needed for my life’s path.

(Image Source)

Well, right now I’m in a funny situation. I think I succeeded in getting what I wanted. But not quite in getting what I thought I wanted.

Because in my head I assumed that all forms of being psychic were the same. That being able to connect with my spirit guides was the same power that would let me guess lottery numbers or read someone’s mind.

I have gotten no better at those latter things. And, I guess, because of that, I thought I was still not connected to my spirit guides. But suddenly, a little by surprise, I realised that I really was connected to them.

In retrospect, the change I’ve made in this regard is breathtaking. I went from feeling disconnected and intensely lost, to what I feel now: an almost unshakable sense that I am protected, accompanied and guided. And this, more than anything else, was just what I was longing for.

Information The Soul Needs

But I thought I was also looking for awesome psychic abilities that would make me seem superhuman. For the most part, I haven’t found those.

Really, I’ve found that I get the information my soul needs. But if my soul doesn’t need me to know something — if I want to know in order to show off or for other relatively shallow reasons — trying to channel fails.

I don’t know if this is the same for everyone. But I think, at least, it’s the case for a lot of people.

So, if you’re trying to connect with your spirit guides, my advice would not be to start with those psychic symbol cards or trying to predict the outcome of a horse race. If you’re like me, you’ll get the same results I got.

Connecting With Your Intuition

Instead, I suggest learning to connect with your instinct, gut feeling, intuition, or inner sense of “knowing”. Use it whenever you make a decision which, big or small, your soul might care about. So you can do that when trying to work out whether to go to university or to start your own business. Or when you’re trying to work out which blender to buy in the shop. So long as you have an honest, harmonious, grounded reason to know something, your connection to your guidance should be working fine.

It will take some time to learn this skill, of course. You won’t always be right in the beginning. What worked for me was to just go ahead and use my intuition even though I didn’t know if it would work or not.

So just check in on your feelings and make a note of what you think your intuition is saying. Then make a decision about whether or not to follow your intuition. Whether you follow it or not, in retrospect you should be able to tell if the intuition was right.

Your Spiritual Guidence Is Your Intuition

It helped me a lot to realise that my spiritual guidance was this, my intuition. I had been learning to identify and trust my intuition in all this time I was trying to build my psychic abilities. But somehow I thought that psychic abilities were also something different from that, something flashier. Because of this, I often missed or downplayed the subtle knowing that I already had access to.

I had what felt like a breakthrough by just sitting down one day and consulting my intuition. I basically went to that “place” in myself where I go to make some sort of life decision, a sort of centred groundedness in my gut area. Then, I just stayed there for longer than I usually did, asking questions. This was one of the first times that I managed to have an actual full-blown conversation with my spirit guides and the first time I so clearly felt them as a presence beyond just the information they sent me.

I realised that every time I had tried to go “outside” myself to get information, I had lost my connection and tended to only get answers from my imagination. But when I stayed “inside” myself and kept to what I felt were my natural abilities, I had full access to my intuition.

Being Connected With Your Spirit Guides Is Natural

Being connected with your spirit guides IS natural. Everyone is to some extent.

The trouble is that spirit guides communicate in thoughts and feelings, and aren’t very substantial themselves, making it relatively hard to perceive them and easy to mistake their thoughts for yours.

This why I didn’t think I was making progress with my psychic abilities for a long time. I expected to have a conversation with an entity, but didn’t understand that I was already having those conversations without realising it. So I was looking outwards for a connection with a new entity, rather than inwards for a connection I’d always had.

And ironically, that day was the first time where plain intuition turned into a spirit guide conversation. When I realised that I was already having conversations with my guides, I was better equipped to perceive the subtle originators of those thoughts.

When Fear Blocks Spirit Guide Connection

Another thing I’d like to mention: when I have unconscious “issues” around a topic, getting my intuition on the matter is usually a bit harder. Fear or other distortions can be “noisy” and make it hard to hear the subtler voice of guidance.

In these cases, I find giving the question time helps. Just leave the question hanging there. Hold yourself in that dissonance of not knowing and wanting to know, without trying to find refuge in pretending to know or pretending not to care.

Then, going for a walk can help. Seeing as you are trying to get an intuitive feeling, don’t think too much – try to just feel and remain grounded. Walking and just experiencing the environment around you can help with that.

Or, leave the question on the backburner and do other things. Await its answer to appear in your life, whether through gradual dawning, sudden inspiration, or the synchronistic appearance of guidance in the form of a book, website, or conversation.

In this time the fear which stops you reaching your guidance can gradually dissolve, and the knowing which you already held inside becomes slowly more and more obvious.

In general, I find that thoughts and fears are relatively volatile, but true intuitive knowing is very constant. I liken it to sight. If you want to see, do you strain to channel something into your field of vision? No, you just move your eyes and the sight is already there.

In the same way, you just need to move your inner perception to the right place and what you need to know is already there. And while fears and thoughts may come and go, your knowing remains. Because of this, the more time passes, the easier it can become to identify your intuitive knowing.

Vibration Helps Connection

Apart from that, I’ve found I get clearer, more obvious communications from my guides when I’m in a high vibration, i.e. feeling good and at peace or having just meditated.

Note that you can feel good but not at peace, e.g. euphoric and disconnected. Because of this I like to focus on both feeling good and at peace. I am currently rather enjoying the gentle reminder to myself: “Everything is okay.” Feeling the truth of these words, I can guide myself into a deep acceptance of reality. I guess it’s not a coincidence that my recent clear conversation with my guides came after a couple of days of this practice.

Spirit Guide Connection As A Way Of Being

In general, becoming connected with my spirit guides has been a change in my way of being. It’s how I feel; connected rather than disconnected, accompanied rather than alone. It’s trust; trust in the Universe to do its part, trust in the flow of life.

It’s rather subtle. You’d think that psychic abilities would be something like: you get a vision one day and know that you must go to a city in Germany where someone is going to give you a marvellous opportunity. Instead, synchronicities seem to push you there, your feelings all agree, and you just follow the flow of life, not really knowing what will happen, but knowing for sure that you’re where you need to be and you’re going to get what you need.

Then, when you get your chance, you seize it, not thinking too much, just trusting. And it works out.

It always seems to work out. The more connected you are with your spiritual guidance, the more things just seem to go your way. That’s how it feels for me.

Related

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How To Deal With Anger And Other Negative Emotions

Alchemy As A Path For Inner Transformation

Spiritual Experience With MDMA

I was just talking to someone about the phenomenon of transgender indigo children and adults. From my experience, very roughly 5% of indigo people are transgendered, e.g. born male but are female inside, or the other way around. This is a much larger proportion than compared to society at large.

Why is this the case?

There are four reasons that I can think of.

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Evolving Towards Gender Integration

Reason one has to do with how spirits evolve.

Indigos are “old souls”, usually having lived through many incarnations.

Over many lifetimes we tend to live as both male and female to evolve our soul, and become more and more able to integrate these aspects in a single lifetime.

I think being transgender helps an advanced soul learn to further integrate and express its male and female sides. In my case, being born as male helped me learn a lot about traits which men are more encouraged to have, such as confidence, initiative, bravery, the occasional crudeness, and unabashed strength and competence.  All of these things I maintain in my female persona nowdays, which I think makes me very balanced as a woman. I wish all people could have this unique experience of living as two genders in one lifetime; you grow and learn an unbelievable amount.

So I think being transgender helps your incarnation to reach a better level of integration of male and female. It also helps a soul advance in integration beyond just this lifetime. 

Waking Up Through Transgenderism

Reason two has to do with waking up.

As I mentioned in How To Tell If You Are Indigo, indigos very often go through very harsh experiences, usually when they are young. These can be anything from sickness to accidents to disabilities to near death experiences.

I’ve thought that some of the pain we go through can just be ascribed to our sensitivity and our difficulty adapting to a world that isn’t nearly as loving as us. But then again, I don’t think this is enough to explain such a frequency of such powerful and diverse traumatic experiences among indigo children and adults.

I think the main reason we go through such experiences is that they catalyze us to wake up spiritually. In many cases the choice really is: wake up or die. In other cases, the suffering forces us to re-examine our priorities, to learn more perspective, to learn compassion and a greater understanding for those who suffer, and to grow closer to God/Infinity.

Transgenderism is one such awakening experience. I’ve seen how it awakens non-indigos as well as indigos.

It forces us to break down the scripts we’ve learnt from society. To examine ourselves, to learn to be our own therapist. To confront intolerance. To redesign our concepts of gender. And through it all, transgenderism leaves us incredibly strong people.

I know I’m thankful for being trans. It helped create me as the person I am today. I am sure my Higher Self chose this for my life path in this incarnation, and that it was for a reason.

I think the case of other indigos is similar. We’re here to do big things, and that means we need to wake up fast and thoroughly.

Self Awareness

Reason three has to do with the simple fact that indigos tend to be self-aware.

I’m not the first person to notice the overlap between groups: polyamory, veganism, BDSM, Esperanto, indigo children and adults, and transgender people.

These seemingly completely different subjects have one thing in common: self awareness. Members of each of these groups tend to be self aware to a more than average extent. Transgenderism, in particular, can wake people up to being more self aware, but often when the impulse is weaker it also needs self awareness to be identified and expressed.

In this latter case, only those who are truly dedicated to being who they are will end up letting the world know that they are trans. Indigo people, with their non-conformity and inclination towards personal development, are prime candidates for this.

Past Lives And Transgenderism

Those were the three main reasons indigo children and adults are often transgender. Almost as an afterthought, I’d like to mention another reason that occurred to me as I was writing this article.

It’s often theorised that transgenderism has to do with past lives. Perhaps, some say, a trans woman was also woman in a past life and “remembers” that in her present life.

The trouble with this theory is that most of the time we ALL switch between genders as we go through different incarnations. So why aren’t we all trans?

Well, I think perhaps in the case of trans people the “boundary” between lives might have become a bit weaker than with normal people, and more of the previous life has crossed over. This would seem to fit with how many indigo children and adults have past life memories.

In my case, however – if my intuition is correct – my last life was not female. I think at least the last three of my most recent past lives were male. On the other hand, I do think that my soul in general is closer to female than male, and that in total I may have had more female past lives. Perhaps, at this stage in my soul evolution, my incarnation is getting closer to what my soul is. My deeper self shines through, including my femininity.

Conclusion

So that’s my speculation as to why indigo children and adults are more likely to be transgender. If you have any of your own ideas or experiences, feel free to add them in the comments.

Related

How To Tell If You Are Indigo

How Do I Know If I’m Really Indigo?

Indigo Children Resources

Indigos Who Don’t Want To Be Labelled Indigo

A few months back I had the roommate from hell. She had an intense indigo personality and was both very enjoyable company when in a good vibration and very painful to be around when in a bad one. After I while I started experiencing her negative side more and more and we had to ask her to leave.

(Image Source)

I think a large part of what made our relationship go into a downward spiral was her philosophy on negative emotions. She firmly believed that if she had a negative emotion, she had an entitlement to express it, even if it hurt someone. She would say “I hate you” as easily as she would say something kind, and for relatively trivial things, so long as she happened to feel it in the moment.

In her mind, if she felt it, she almost had to express it, otherwise she’d be oppressing herself. Or I’d be oppressing her, if I told her not to.

The Shortcomings Of A System

Indigos are often great measures of how well a system is working. When they believe in something they tend to really take it all the way, and the shortcomings of a system can become obvious.

In this case, I think she was using a pretty standard philosophy on how to deal with negative emotions. She simply took it so far that its problems became obvious, at least to me.

What many people tell you is that you should express your emotions. If you hold them inside of you, they will build up, and eventually come out in uncontrolled ways.

Why It’s Not Always Best To Express Your Emotions

I don’t think that is necessarily the best thing. For instance, it’s not rare for a person to want to punch someone. I think most will agree that actually “expressing” that and punching someone is not a positive thing to do. They would then punch you back, and the situation would escalate. From what I’ve seen, violence pretty much always leads to more violence.

Of course, punching someone and saying something hurtful isn’t the same thing, right? Well, I’d actually argue that the two things have more in common than most would think. A hurtful word triggers the same sort of response in people as a physical attack, if on a lesser scale. They usually say a hurtful word back, and, of course, it usually doesn’t stop there. So “expressing” anger like this is really not helpful.

But what if there is a better way of expressing anger, one which isn’t actually some sort of attack on a person? Well, I think there may be. But I don’t think it’d be the sort of therapeutic expression of anger which most people are thinking of.

Anger Invades The Aura

You see, anger is always directional. You’re always angry at something. And on an energetic level, if you’re angry at a person, you are sending those negative vibes their way. So it’s pretty much impossible to express the energy of anger to someone without that invading someone’s aura somehow.

It won’t kill them, but it will require some energetic defenses, smart responses, or energetic cleansing afterwards. These are things that most people can do to some extent, even if they are not aware of energy as a concept, though few people are good enough to remain completely unaffected.

So if the recipient of your energy is unable to defend themselves properly, they will carry your anger in them forever after, getting angry at others and transferring that energy to more people in a never-ending cycle of negativity and pain.

Basically it’s the same as the never-ending cycle of physical violence which we’ve all heard about, except the violence is… non-physical. I strongly believe there is no difference apart from degree.

So with this in mind, I think it’s possible to express anger by saying, in a neutral energy/tone of voice: “I am angry”. If I had to do this, I’d usually say something like, “Hey, I’m sorry cause I know that this is my own stuff to deal with, but I’m feeling angry right now in response to something you said/did.” I’d make that preface so that people would know I’m not trying to direct my anger at them, even if the anger in question did have them as the target.

Preventing Anger From Building Up

But – I’m sure some of you are saying – if I can’t express anger at someone, how do I prevent it from building up and exploding?

Well. Let me begin by saying that this article would be absolutely incomplete if I didn’t supply an alternative method of dealing with anger. I don’t think holding anger inside and letting it build up is healthy – at all. And if this is the only option, I guess letting it out on people in small, controlled doses is probably better than letting it grow and grow.

But that’s not much of a choice, is it? Lashing out often in small doses vs. lashing out rarely in big doses? And if this weird algebra of rage is correct, then wouldn’t it be the same overall amount of lashing out in total anyway?

Conscious Anger

I think the philosophy of expressing your negative emotions can be good because it prevents them going subconscious. You bring them to the surface, and at least to some extent you expose them to the light of consciousness, which tends to expose their dysfunctionality and encourages them to heal.

Eckhart Tolle recommends observing your emotions as they come up, as well as your words and actions. Maintain some awareness of yourself as the observer of all that is going on.

If you do this, anger cannot completely control you. You’ll be able to realise more easily how damaging it is to act on anger, and it’ll also make it easier to choose not to act on anger if you so desire.

That said, expressing your negative emotions at someone is usually just going to perpetuate negativity and create a feedback loop. I don’t think it’s a good idea.

If you really can’t stop yourself, though, then go ahead and express your anger at someone. As you do it, remain watchful. Observe everything that unfolds. Really, really feel it, experience it, take it all in. And if you don’t like what happens, perhaps you’ll be more motivated to avoid this next time.

If at all possible, though, don’t express the anger you have towards someone to them themselves. If you have to express it to someone, it’s probably better to express it to a sympathetic friend. If you do this, try to find someone who is likely to help you process your anger by holding an energy of forgiveness — and not just feed the flames by contributing extra anger on your behalf.

Otherwise you can write your anger into a journal. Best practice afterwards would be to burn the pages, a symbol for the transmutation and cleansing of that energy from the ether.

If doing any of these methods, observe the anger as it comes out. If you have a written product afterwards, observe that, too, trying to come from a detached standpoint. You might notice that, energetically speaking, you have basically just vomited over the page. It isn’t pretty, and it doesn’t hold any special value apart from then being burnt.

Anger Has A Meaning

So this is how I think the philosophy of expressing your anger can have some validity. I think particularly the technique of journalling and then burning the pages has a lot to be said for it. I don’t think these things are the whole story, however.

Anger has a meaning. People who are chronically angry are often those who don’t stick up for themselves, or those who experience repeated violations of their boundaries. I think most of us have at least some work to be done regarding the integrity of our boundaries.

Separating From Your Anger

However, sticking up for yourself, or protecting your boundaries, doesn’t mean being aggressive. It can mean being assertive, or – as that word often seems to sound like a milder form of aggressive – you can just communicate better.

You can often feel like you’re being walked all over, and feel angry because of it, because you’re in a pattern of not clearly and confidently communicating your needs. And perhaps when you do you communicate them, you do so from a place of anger, and that triggers people to act negatively towards you in return.

In this case, you need to separate anger from the communication. Don’t withhold your communication because you’re scared you can only say what you have to say in an angry way. And don’t be angry at someone just because you need to communicate with them.

Learn to separate. Obviously, saying certain things will tend to trigger you into anger. In this case, you should attempt to be in a meditative state while communicating. Feel your centre, focus on your breathing. Be able to observe the moment when anger comes up, and when it does, return your focus to your breathing, your centre, until you are able to act and speak separately from it.

This separation is my core technique for dealing with anger when it arises in an interaction with somebody.

With this, you can learn to start communicating things which you previously didn’t because of the anger you attached to the communication. Challenge yourself to communicate those things more and more. This will give you the opportunity to practise separation and will hopefully heal any associated residual anger.

Additionally, sometimes other people will get angry or defensive when you say certain things which are normally said in an angry or judging way (criticism, for example). I believe that if you truly remove your own anger from the equation, the anger of other people will tend to slowly disappear, having nothing to reinforce itself with. But in the beginning, they may be expecting you to say something with anger or judgement, and they will respond as if you had been angry or judging.

In this case, first, practise self honesty – was your communication really free of negativity?

And then, supposing it was, just keep communicating in a negativity-free way, making sure not to get triggered into anger by their response. You can reassure them that you really didn’t mean to be hostile towards them, but that you really felt that it was necessary to communicate this thing. If they are reasonable, they will usually get it.

Location

Sticking up for yourself can also simply mean refusing to enter into a particular energetic “game”.

When we’re in a situation which makes us feel angry and disempowered, I think a lot of the time, if we investigate, we can identify ways in which we are contributing to making it happen.

Location is one major factor. For example, a huge amount of people feel rage at how they are treated in their jobs. But, they keep showing up to their job every day. I think that if they became aware of their anger and processed it rather than pushing it under the surface, they’d gain the clarity to simply quit.

This happened to me when I was in the system, back in school. Rage was building and building inside me, but I felt powerless to leave the system. Finally my rage was bursting out everywhere. At this point, when it became impossible for me to deny my own feelings anymore, I was able to remove myself from the source of them by quitting school. From there, I could begin healing.

This principle can also extend to the people you hang out with. If you don’t like someone, go somewhere else. Or if they are in your space, throw them out. If they are your “friend”, consider whether your relationship is really worth holding onto. The same goes for relatives; hold nothing sacred. If someone’s attitude gives you a cause for chronic anger, and you’re not absolutely bound to them for survival, then delete them from your life.

Activist Anger

There are other ways in which we can draw anger-inciting situations to ourselves. One way is actually to express anger towards a recipient. If you find something or someone unacceptable, you can rage at them. If they are negative themselves, they may choose to engage with your anger by singling you out for nasty treatment. Then you’ll really have something to be angry about, and from then on you’ll feel incredibly justified in your feelings.

I see this with some activists. A lot of them are so angry at police and the system that they seem to repeatedly expose themselves to the mistreatment of police and the system. In particular, a lot of squatters I met in Barcelona exemplified this. They just couldn’t let go of the injustice of capitalism. So they squatted buildings, got thrown out, and then raged at the police and the system for throwing them out. And then they squatted more buildings, feeling ever more hurt and victimised as this cycle continued.

I don’t like the injustice of capitalism either, but, having tried chronic anger on for size, I’ve since decided that I will accept living to some extent within the money system in order to have the stability I need. From there, I’m empowered to work on the flourishing of a peaceful revolution.

What You Focus On

Finally, I want to explain that anger can come simply from what you focus on. If you focus on injustice, as I mentioned above, you can have the fuel to keep you angry for basically as long as you want. But if you make a conscious effort to forgive injustice, you can slowly transmute the harsh energy of anger into gentleness and kindness.

And from there, you can still work to create change, if you desire. But it will be a different kind of work, and a different kind of change.

The Meanings Of Anger

So anger can mean many things:

It can mean you need to communicate better, and to separate your anger from your communication;

It can mean you need to stop putting yourself into positions where your boundaries are crossed, including having the self respect to leave a job or social environment or to cut off ties with an acquaintance;

It can mean you need to change what you focus on, and possibly to forgive, to simply accept, any forms of injustice which you find yourself still having to live with after having tried to get away from them.

Anger Causes Anger

In general I think it’s important to always act separately from your anger. I believe any act or word that is inspired directly by anger will tend to cause the perpetuation and proliferation of anger and negativity in the world. Even if there doesn’t seem to be any direct consequences to a particular expression of anger, I think that energy will be sent out there and contribute to the general energetic pollution of the world. Besides that, I think that it’s likely there will be consequences for you based on the more esoteric laws of the Universe, even if not due to more standard conceptions of causality.

I think that it can be positive for anger to inspire changes in your words or actions indirectly however. If you follow anger to its root it can show you where you are failing in self-respect, communication, or other issues.

Don’t Repress Yourself

Don’t mistake these words for a suggestion that you should repress yourself. I think I’ve made it pretty clear that I’m not suggesting that, but perhaps it bears mentioning.

A lot of people are brought up to suppress their anger (or rather, to have no self respect and then to suppress the results of that). It can be tempting for these people to express no anger and act as if they have reached great spiritual heights because they never seem to show signs of it.

Actually, if you look closer these people do express their anger. They make snide remarks, backhanded compliments, and petty actions designed to take out their frustrations on others. And sometimes they will actually explode, or perhaps find some “legitimate” reason for expressing anger, all the while maintaining their facade of spiritual superiority.

Don’t be that person. Be honest with yourself about how well you have understood the messages of your anger and transmuted it. And also with how well you are separating from your current episodes of anger and avoiding sending that energy towards anyone.

Anger Is About You

Most of all be aware that anger is about you, not about other people. Your anger always has an object, but you are the origin of the anger, not the object. Some things may be more likely to incite anger than others, but in all situations there is the possibility of acting and speaking without anger, and even of not feeling anger at all.

Don’t be hard on yourself if you act or speak with anger or feel anger. Very few people are entirely clear of anger. I’m certainly not.

The first step is to learn to separate yourself from your anger. Personally, I believe I have got to the point where I can do that in more or less any situation. So that, I think, is definitely quite an achievable goal; if I’ve done it, you can do it. (I still might not separate in some situations when I forget to, which can happen if the anger is weak enough to slip under the radar, e.g. what you’d call irritation or frustration. Otherwise I invariably do separate).

Once we’ve got to this point, hopefully, the anger will start to clear itself from our energy bodies on its own just as a result of our skill at this, and we can speed the cleansing along by finding the meanings/messages of our anger, as well as transmuting in other ways.

Eventually, we’d reach the state where our energy bodies are totally free of anger. I’m not there yet, and I don’t know personally anyone who is, though I believe masters like Eckhart Tolle may be.

Eckhart Tolle

This provides me with a great opportunity to segue into the last topic I wanted to mention in this article: Eckhart Tolle.

Eckhart Tolle is without a doubt one of the biggest influences I’ve had in my life; perhaps the biggest. His books about spirituality have such clarity and power. I found them to be absolutely transformative, as have millions of people. They provide an excellent blueprint on how to raise your vibration, how to achieve meditative states, and how to deal with negative emotions, which is why I wanted to mention them here.

In the process of separation I mentioned above, I suggested attempting to find a meditative state when anger threatens to come up and control your words and actions. Obviously, that’s not always easy. What allowed me to get to the point where I could do that was the work I did on myself following the blueprint in Eckhart Tolle’s books. This whole article would look very different, would probably not exist, without that inspiration.

So, if you really want to empower yourself with what I’ve been saying here, as well as in all areas of your life, I strongly recommend checking out his books.

If you use Amazon for buying books, here are a couple of links you can buy from. I earn a small (4%) commission if you buy – I just thought I’d mention that, but it isn’t the reason for me recommending them.

So “The Power of Now” is Tolle’s definitive work. I would recommend anyone who is interested in Tolle to read this first. It’s concise, charged with spiritual energy, and brilliant.

If you are certain you want to commit seriously to evolving yourself through Tolle’s work, I would also recommend you check out his other two books, “A New Earth” (which focuses more on how to deal with negative energy in relationships) and “Stillness Speaks“.

Conclusions

So that’s it for the article. I think I’ve explained my whole working philosophy about how to deal with anger in a pretty complete way. Try it out, test it, and tell me how it works for you. Feel free to leave any questions or thoughts in the comments.

By the way, as I usually do at the end of every article, I just want to take a moment to suggest that if you’re getting value out of this blog, you can support it with a donation. A few donations here and there add up, and together they can go a long way to making my work sustainable.

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Setting The Pace For Your Spiritual Growth Through Intention

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As part of the run of spiritually-themed articles I have running through my head right now, I wanted to write something about setting the pace of your spiritual growth through intention.

It Is Possible

My message for this article is simple and needs little embellishment: It is possible to communicate with the Universe in order to speed up or slow down the rate at which you go through learning experiences.

This is very easy to do. The only obstacle people ever usually have, as far as I can tell, is simply not knowing that it is possible.

You need only address the Universe, your Guides, your Higher Self, God, or whichever other force you think would be appropriate, and make the intention to that effect.

Read on, though, because there are some, shall we say, safety issues it would be good to be aware of.

My Friend’s Experiences

A friend of mine explained to me, once, his experiences with setting the pace for his spiritual growth.

At one point he had become very frustrated with his progress and, regarding that topic, addressed himself to the Universe. “I want to grow faster, faster! Hit me with everything you’ve got, do everything possible to wake me up, I don’t care what I have to go through or what I have to suffer, just make me grow!”

What followed was 2 years in which he experienced every possible sort of negative experience imaginable. Financial troubles, breakups, sickness. It was unbelievably intense and by the end of that period he was at his wits’ end.

This was when he remembered the intention he had made and made the connection to what had been happening. Hurriedly, he retracted his intention. At that, the string of mishaps abruptly ended.

The Aftermath

After this period, my friend felt understandably quite a bit traumatised and reported going through some years in a kind of exhausted indifference to what happened in his life. On the other hand, he also learnt a lot of inner peace, a sort of Zen-ness, and an increased ability to maintain his centre through life’s ups and downs.

The interesting thing is that in a subsequent consultation with an astrologer, my friend learnt that he had completed the spiritual lessons for his current lifetime and was beginning to work on lessons which were intended for future lifetimes. I thought that was a very unusual and poignant thing to hear in such a consultation.

So, it definitely seems like he made some real headway and moved faster in this lifetime than was originally planned.

Learning Through Positive Experiences

I have a slight issue with the intention which my friend set, though, because it seemed to contain the assumption that growth has to happen through misfortune. While I’m sure it can, I believe that there are other methods too, ones which are less painful.

Of course the trouble with phrasing the intention in the way my friend did is that the Universe will bring you exactly what you ask for. If you ask for growth through suffering, the Universe will bring you growth through suffering.

Well, I heard my friend’s story some years back. Inspired by it, I decided to set an intention of my own for fast growth. However, trying to learn from his experience, I specified that my growth would come through positive experiences whenever possible.

Here are the exact stipulations of my intention, slightly modified since the first time I made it but still the same in essence:

I intend to heal and grow spiritually as fast as I can within what is good for the Highest Good Of All and within the larger context of my life purpose as a whole, being ready to experience whatever this process requires, intending always pleasant learning experiences but being ready to go into unpleasant ones if that is what it takes.

My Pleasant Growth Experiences

Since I made this intention, I have gone through some very powerful growth experiences, and, indeed, most of them have been relatively pleasant. For instance, a year ago I began living as a woman despite having been born into a male body. That was an intense but largely positive experience. It shook me to the core just like a powerful personal trauma might, but unlike a trauma, the experience was both chosen (I decided to explore my feelings in this regard, nothing forced me to) and not particularly uncomfortable on the whole.

I have had unpleasant experiences with being transgendered as well as with other learning experiences I’ve gone through since setting the pace for my spiritual growth. But, actually, I have had a remarkably positive time of it on the whole. In fact, a transgender counsellor I worked with expressed genuine surprise at how well I was doing emotionally.

I guess I just kind of willfully decided that no matter what other people experience, transitioning from male to female wasn’t going to be something that made me feel embittered or victimised. I had had enough of that for one lifetime.

And so, it didn’t. Being transgender has been challenging but also enriching and exciting. I am only appreciative of what I’ve gone through and the perspectives that has furnished me with.

And on the whole, my life has steadily improved in comfort and pleasure these last years, while my personal growth has remained strong and steady throughout. If anything, my growth has only increased in intensity in this time, rather than slowing. The comfort has not seemed to affect the pace at all.

Making Your Own Intention

So, now that you’ve learnt that you can set the pace of your spiritual growth, you can, if you like, make an intention like the one I made. You can even copy the exact wording if you feel inspired to.

Whatever wording you come up with, I do recommend you add something like my “within what is good for the Highest Good of All” to make sure that what you are intending will really make the world a maximally better place for everyone. This is a good thing to add onto any intention you make.

I also think “within the larger context of my life purpose as a whole” is also important, because after all, we are not always here just to learn or grow. Our souls often come to Earth with the primary intention of helping others, and our plans for spiritual growth in this particular incarnation may be, therefore, relatively limited. I’ve heard some souls even take “holiday” lifetimes where their soul purpose is to rest. So there are things which our soul might want to do other than just growing spiritually, and for that reason I think it’s a good idea to acknowledge that and leave space for that in our pacing intention.

The Slider

You can speed up your growth then. I should mention, too, that sometimes, things have happened too fast in my life. Once or twice, I asked the Universe to slow down a little bit so that I could have time to rest and/or process. In one case I remember I had to repeat myself a couple of times, but in a fairly short space of time it obliged. (I guess it wasn’t so easy for the events which I was experiencing to stop just like that).

Perhaps, for making little adjustments like this, it could be valuable to imagine a slider. You can push the slider towards one end to speed things up, or towards another end to slow things down. If you make this visualisation while addressing yourself to the Universe, I think She should get the message.

Actually, I mentioned a slider because that seemed an easier way to explain it, but what I have used sometimes was something that was more connected to my feelings – some sort of internal body clock that I could shift somehow using my kinaesthetic sense. When I needed things to slow down, it was like trying to put on some kind of brakes, while when I wanted to speed up, I could kind of push forward.

Whether you communicate to the Universe through the kinaesthetic sense or through a visualisation is, I’m sure, just a matter of personal preference. What matters, I believe, is that you have conviction and that you are directly addressing your chosen power.

In Conclusion

So, in conclusion, I think it’s cool to know that evolution can happen to a great extent as a function of how much you open yourself to it and invite it. I also hope that what I’ve written here will encourage people to invite more pleasurable learning experiences into their life, as well.

And so, give everything you’ve read here some thought. When you’re ready, you can give the techniques above a try.

Be responsible with it and don’t push yourself into anything you can’t handle. And remember, of course, that you can cancel your intention or set your slider back to the “factory setting” at any time. Just address your chosen power and ask that it be so.

Thanks for reading! If you have any experiences regarding this, I’d be very interested to hear them in the comments.

If you got value out of this article, please consider making a donation.

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