What does full-spectrum mean? And what is the difference between linear and non-linear methods of personal growth? In this post I will answer these questions and share my approach both from a subtle and a methodical perspective.
The Subtle Way
We are increasingly living in a society that pushes us to lead from the compulsive mind — discipline and habits are considered the gold standard for success, which only lead to boredom and burnout. What could we do instead? Is discipline necessary or is it just a filler when something deeper is missing? Are habits fulfilling or just draining your soul?
Leading from the heart
The intellectual mind is great for many things, but when it is the only thing we use, life gets sucked out of life. We slowly descend into living in death. Life is lived from the heart, not the mind. Life is lived when we feel — inspired, passionate, creative, empowered, spontaneous. When you are deeply inspired, the need for discipline drops away. When passion arises, compulsion fades. Habits give way to spontaneity. We naturally use our creativity and power because we finally have space to feel, breathe, express.
When we force ourselves through discipline, we cut off the deeper parts that arise naturally in their own rhythm. These parts need space, time, compassion, acceptance, and care to come to the surface. Forceful, compulsive, habitual behavior suppresses these parts and slowly drives us towards normalized insanity. When we use force to drive results in our time, we shut out the parts that can deliver greatness if we allow them to operate in their time.
Speed and efficiency are great for robots. And most humans have been turned into robots and consequently are expected to perform by those metrics. If you want to become human once again, realize that living and leading from the heart is the way that happens. Slow down, connect with your authentic, essential self — not that most of us have any idea what or who that is, and that is where it helps to work with someone who can help you break through the facade that culture has imprisoned you within.
Results, results, results…
I was born and grew up in one of the busiest, fastest cities in the world — Bombay, India (now known as Mumbai). I also lived in a few other cities until moving to the middle of nowhere known as the Atlantic rainforest on the coast of Bahia, Brasil. I instantly loved the snails pace life people lived here, I finally felt home energetically. You could make an appointment with a professional such as an accountant or a doctor, and have them show up anywhere from 15 minutes to 2 hours late, or just forget about it completely. This may sound like a frustrating nightmare to most people who think punctuality is a virtue, but I couldn’t have been happier that people don’t take such things too seriously. And shit still gets done. Not in the way you may expect it to get done, but somehow it does. And that is the beauty of it. Letting go the mental control to make life go in the way we think it is meant to go, and allowing life to unfold in the most beautiful and unexpected ways.
Finally, after all that, a part of you still wants to know what are the tangible results from all this “work”. What do people get by paying to work with me and other coaches, therapists, and teachers? I can’t tell what people get from others, though I can tell why people continue to work with me not just for weeks, more often it is for months and years.
Each person has unique needs. While some can’t slow down, some are stuck and can’t move if their life depends on it. My approach is personalized to each individual I work with. Working together also looks different for at each stage of your development. We could be working on different challenges and opportunities for growth.
Some people tell me they are living joyful and content lives — great. Are you challenging yourself to go to the next level or do you believe you will stay content at the same level for the rest of your life? Working with someone at the peak of your life can help you get to the next peak. Contentment is not about staying stuck. It is easy to stagnate and slide into boredom eventually with this false belief about contentment.
There are only local maximas, there is no global bound on growth, there is always more to uncover. This desire to grow doesn’t come from a place of emptiness where you need to fill the void by constantly chasing more. You can be fully content and still keep growing. If you believe the idea that contentment is the end of growth, you have missed the point — the journey is endless.
Here are some aspects we could be working on based on the current stage of your journey and how far you wish to catapult:
???? Shifting from discipline to deep inspiration, from compulsion to raw passion
???? Replacing boredom, avoidance, and procrastination, with genuine enthusiasm
???? Healing the addiction to suffering, shame, and guilt
???? Developing your full breadth of intelligences: mental, emotional, physical, mystical
???? Integrating into a state of balance through the union of complementary forces such as:
???? Power + Trust : Amplify and Deepen Your Faith in Your Self
???? Compassion + Gratitude : Amplify and Deepen Your Fulfillment and Joy
???? Power + Compassion : Amplify and Deepen Your Impact and Self-Love
The Method
Some people call me a coach and others call me a teacher.
Some people call me a therapist and others call me a healer.I don’t care what you call me.
People work with me because deep down they know I will help them heal and evolve into the next level of their being.You don’t call me because of my degrees and labels.
You call me because you are ready and committed to evolving your self and your life.
What is a full-spectrum approach to personal growth?
Therapy, Coaching, Healing, Teaching / Learning, are each a unique facet of the personal growth journey. Most people tend to focus and get help on one facet, either at a time or their entire lives. A full-spectrum approach incorporates all these facets at once. In this section I will share why each facet is important, and also the importance of working on them simultaneously.
What is the difference between the linear and non-linear approach?
The linear approach to personal growth is to work with a coach OR a therapist OR a teacher OR a healer. The non-linear approach is to work on all those aspects at once, because they are all important. You can choose to work with a coach AND a therapist AND more, or work with someone who is a full-spectrum facilitator.
The linear approach may lead to shifting one aspect and remaining blocked in others, which will keep us eventually stuck and looping, leading to frustration, disappointment, and despair. When we make a movement in one facet and complement that with movement in other facets as well, we make exponential shifts in our selves and our lives, and break out of loops that have drained us all our lives.
What does full-spectrum personal growth look like?
I have worked with a broad range of 1000+ people, from high-flying CEOs and entrepreneurs to moms and housewives, from lawyers to actors to comedians and artists, and all kinds of normal and weird people. I have also trained high-level coaches, therapists, and teachers. This range has given me perspective on what it means to be human, and that has helped me immensely on my own journey of becoming human (yes, I am on a journey of becoming human, because I believe, like me, people are disconnected from their humanity and everyone is something “not-human”, and it is our imperative responsibility to become human. Another post on that coming some time, sooner or later).
Therapy and Healing | The Past
If you desire to escape, you will only find what you are escaping. Desire is not where you go to, it is where you come from. If your desire comes from a place of suffering, you will keep finding suffering. If instead, you confront your suffering, you will find peace and fulfillment, and then whatever you desire from that place will keep bringing you more peace and fulfillment.
The original intent of therapy is to confront the past so we can heal the patterns and beliefs that keep us stuck in recreating the past. We recreate toxic relationships and situations because of traumas and conditioning from our past. We keep trying to escape these uncomfortable feelings, and in that we keep unconsciously creating a life where those feelings repeat. And we feel doomed and trapped in this prison, believing there is no escape and “this is life”.
Therapy has failed miserably for many people because most therapists are inept at helping to root out the causes of suffering. They provide coping and management techniques so you can fit into society and be a “good person”, and continue playing your role as a cog in the machine. But real therapy, when you have an excellent therapist, helps you to heal the traumas and rescue yourself to feel whole.
Coaching | The Future
Therapy in itself is incomplete, it only looks at mending what is broken. It tells you why you are stuck and repeating patterns. But it doesn’t really help you in moving forward and creating your life. As I mentioned before, most therapy just helps you fit into the machine, be a slave of the matrix.
That is where coaching is helpful. It focuses on creating the future. You go from fitting into the plan life had for you, to creating the life you want. You could still be working in a job, but it would be a job that fits you, not a job that you fit into. Or you could be doing something radically different, something your heart has desired all your life, but you have been to afraid to answer the call.
The best things in my life have come from being told no for what I wanted. What I thought I wanted was only blocking me from getting what I really desired. Want is not desire. Want is craving. From the mind. Desire is deep. To root out your deepest desire you have to go beyond wanting. You have to deny your cravings. Only then you will discover that which will fulfill your soul. And it is your commitment that will see you through to finding contentment.
Coaching helps to discover those deep desires and teaches you to fulfill them.
Teaching & Mentoring | The Present & The Beyond
I distinguish between coaching and teaching because not all coaches teach about the mindset, the heartset, and the approach to creating life. There are some coaches that will teach this too, but I consider teaching to be a significantly different facet from coaching. While coaching teaches you tools to create your future, and therapy teaches you tools to heal your past, we also need to learn about life in the present and beyond.
My teaching specifically focuses on living in the liminal space. Our culture and world is polarizing, forcing us to take sides and belong to specific camps of thought and belief. People forget that there is a whole reality between the polarities, between the sides.
Living liminally, or in between, requires learning an entirely different way of life. It requires subtlety and nuance, it requires slowing down and staying connected. This can be learned in many ways, having a teacher who has lived in the extremes and found the center can be very powerful catalyst to finding the center yourself.
Buddha called it The Middle Way
Gurdjieff called it The Fourth Way
It doesn’t matter what you call it
Are you ready to live it?
Going Full Spectrum
All this may sound either exciting or intimidating, or a mix of both, or completely uninteresting. This approach is not for everyone, and there’s a lot more on that in the next section. When you do go full spectrum, life looks entirely different from anything you have lived before.
As mentioned before, if you create the future from a place of escaping the past, you will keep heading to the place you are escaping, the place you want to avoid at all costs, yet you can never escape it. If instead you confront it intentionally, you free yourself and you can create from a place of what you desire, not from a place of escape. This is where therapy, healing, coaching, and teaching all come together.
Learning to see and work in all directions opens up many new dimensions to the way we live life. This applies beyond personal growth, it becomes our way of approaching everything. When earlier you may have been linear-oriented at work, relationships, and other aspects of life, new dimensions start unfolding in every area of your life. The non-linear approach enriches every aspect of your life.
All of this comes at a price, not the one you imagine, it is something you may never even conceive…
The Price
To stay stuck in seeking is what most people do in the space of spirituality and personal growth, they will never “get it”, they will keep shitting money on those who get it, they will keep reading self-help books and listening to YouTube videos from the great spiritual teachers, and still they will keep suffering through life.
Why don’t people get it? Because getting it means you move into creator mode. There is no more feeling lost and purposeless. There is no more misery and complaining. There is no more looping around the issue. There is no more avoiding feelings and confrontation. There is no more playing coy and small. To sum it up, it’s the end of your addiction to suffering.
But that is the last thing anyone wants to give up. Suffering is the most valuable possession of every human. You may give up one way of suffering consciously and pick up another unconsciously. This is famously known as addiction substitution. But to give up suffering altogether is too much to ask of most humans.
People need the world to suck. You need the world to be unfair so you can complain about it. The world will not stop sucking and it will always be unfair. But you don’t need to hate that neither do you have to complain about it. That is what most people don’t get. The world is perfect in its imperfection. What makes the world suck unnecessarily is the human addiction to suffering – well, that’s not actually true, that is part of the perfection of the world sucking. You don’t even have to convince other humans to stop suffering. That is not my intention in this post. That is what most spiritual teachers keep preaching, but I think human suffering is by design and most humans are meant to keep suffering — not just decades of suffering, but lifetimes of suffering.
This path is not for the many, it’s for the few, and it’s ok if you are a Jew (that was an excellent rhyme, right?). Saying it is for the few is not discriminating against a particular color, race, religion, or gender. It’s for the few only because most prefer to keep suffering. And Suffering doesn’t discriminate, it is the most politically correct phenomenon. It embraces every human equally. You can be rich and suffer as much as the poorest person. Because suffering is not about circumstances. That’s the biggest fallacy humans have about suffering.
This is why suffering is the most politically correct phenomenon. It will embrace anyone and everyone who will accept it in their lives. It’s even better than god. God has too many conditions to accept you. Suffering on the other hand will accept you as you are. This is the reason most people don’t give up on suffering. It is the only place they truly receive unconditional acceptance.
Only when you begin to receive unconditional love and acceptance from another source will you ever feel ready to start letting go of your suffering. This is my real secret. This is why people call me and work with me. They can be and do anything, and I will accept them. But I am not as perfectly accepting as suffering. My condition is that you have to be ready to give up your suffering. That’s it, just that.
I have worked with people for free, given them discounts, they have been angry and hated me, screamed, left, accused me of all kinds of things, wanted me to hate them and fire them, wanted me to reject and abandon them. But I don’t and I won’t. I have taken away all their excuses to keep suffering, and only few are ready to pay the real price – to give up their suffering.
Most will keep finding an excuse, and I respect that. I have no intention to rob someone of that which is dearest to them. That’s why I don’t try to convince anyone of anything. This is something you have to want and you have to do. I can only guide you, I cannot do it for you.
Are You Ready to Pay?
Now that you know the price of living a full life, of being the creator, are you ready to pay? Not just the monetary investment of having a guide in your life. Are you ready to pay the ultimate price: letting go of your suffering? You may think you have already done that. Let’s have a call. If you are truly at that level, it will be great to meet. If you are not, it will be great to meet. Discovering facets of your addiction to suffering is vital to keep growing. Having an external perspective on your life from someone who is trained to see blind spots can be a powerful way to identify the areas for growth.
I have met people who believe they are living content lives. Belief is not being. Belief is not knowing. Belief is a filler. It is a way to cope with the grief of having the void, of missing the parts of your soul that have wandered off into the ether. Are you ready to bring them back?