To be truly yourself takes work. It takes honesty and courage. It requires you to turn your ears not outward but inward to your own heart and soul. When you do, though, you offer something original, something beautiful, something more, to the world – you offer the one and only you.

15min.

In course 1, Love & Understanding, we explored how you are not separate from the whole – how there are no divisions in existence. In this course, however, we are going to look more closely at what makes you you? So, go ahead and tell me: What makes you you? Not me, you?

Reflection & Journal

When you understand yourself and your motivations and work hard to develop yourself, you will have more to give your friends, family, and the world. Don’t neglect your own development, then. Know your impulses and motivations. Know yourself. Only then can you give yourself freely.

15min.

What are your soul’s inner forces? What does your soul seek? Does it require safety, esteem, and affection? Does it want freedom, agency, and control? What about justice, fairness, and equality? Does your heart ache for goodness and beauty? What inner forces speak to you? Move You?

Reflection & Journal

What physical, sensual, and spiritual faculties has Life equipped you with? How can you harmonize these with your spiritual impulses and interests?

15min.

What physical, sensual, and spiritual faculties has Life equipped you with? How can you harmonize these with your spiritual impulses?

Reflection and Journal

Where do you find yourself falling into self-concern, becoming torn apart from the whole? What conditions bring it about? In this course, learn to look out for and overcome the hindrances – greed, sensory desire, anger, sloth, torpor, restlessness, worry, doubt, cowardice.

15min.

Let’s get ahead of the hindrances that most often catch you. Here, we’ll learn how to play in their shadows. With your imagination, spark situations that send you falling into self-concern and, once here, condition these moments to act as a bell of mindfulness.

Meditation Exercise

Life has woven the human ego together with a desire for safety, security, affection, admiration, power, and control as a means to survive and propagate. And depending on our upbringings, we may have deficiencies around one or more of these human needs, which have hardened the walls of our ego.

15min.

What are your soft spots? What human vulnerabilities have been carried through your family throughout the generations? Were you starved of any basic human needs growing up? Do you have any strong defenses set up around safety, affection, admiration, or control – a feeling of scarcity?

Reflection & Journal