Your vibe attracts your tribe. Is that true?

"Your vibe attracts your tribe." Sounds good, right? But its not alwayss true, because sometimes your vibe also attracts sociopaths, lite- dimmers and border-crossers that come to steal your light. If you needed that lesson, then I suppose its okay to call them part of your tribe, but if you didn't, then its fair to say that your vibe also attracted an abuser. I have known many who bought into this bouncy ' new cat' quote and let the wrong people through the door. Perhaps a grounded re-frame would serve us... "Sometimes, your vibe attracts your tribe. Sometimes, your vibe attracts that which doesn't serve you. And sometimes your vibe has nothing to do with any of it. Sometimes, a predator walked in your direction just because 9s)he wanted to. - Jeff Brown, Grounded Spirituality

Healthy boundaries aren’t walls or barbed wire fences...

Healthy boundaries aren't walls or barbed wire fences. They are gates, portals that we selectively open when it is safe and life-enhancing to do so. Sometimes we do have to wall others off, to heal, to get a taste of what it feel slike to be protected after an abundance of suffereing, but eventually we come into a scared balance. Here, we make conscious decisions as to when to open, when to clsoe. I think of it as the art of selective attachement. Rather than responding from a patternerd palce, that is too open or too clsoed, we assess each situation on its own merits. We keep gate closed, when it is unsafe to open it. We unlatch the gate, if tehre is a healthy basis for connection. Healthy boundaries are situation specific, evolving and clarifying as we grow. We sift connections through an intelligently discerning filter, only opening the gate to thsoe experiences and individuals that enhance our sacred true- path. - Jeff Brown, Grounded Spirituality

One of the most underrated ingredients for having a good life is a clear conscience. To know you aren't out there doing peopel dirty, hiding who you are, or screwing people over, it lets you sleep peacefully at night. Karma is real, energy is contagious. Live accordingly. - unknown

It is truly exhausting to carry a bag of lies up the hill. Sometimes we have to, in order to survive, but then it just becomes impossible. Because we aren't built for the inauthentic. It pits us against our very nature, and turns us against life, itself. One way or the other, our truth wants to break through the dams of artifice and adaptation, to be lived... - Jeff Brown

The 'everything happens for a reason' mantra emerged as a necessary counter-balance to the idea that we are ALWAYS victims in situations, because, surely, we are not. Sometimes we do play a role in what has been manifest. But, like all polarized mantras, it goes too far in one direction and ignores situations where suffering is needless. Yes, everything happens for a reason, but it’s not always a good one. There is always some degree of misguided action on this planet.

Since we can't determined why something happened to someone else, it’s always better to come from a place of compassion when confronted with someone’s hardship. Let them decide if the reason was a good one. Let them decide if it was a gift.

Blanket statements like: “You are exactly where you are supposed to be” —no matter what someone’s life circumstances and challenges—have become hollow, empty platitudes. Yes, there is no question that we can often learn something of value wherever we are on the path, and yes, we may have, in some situations, attracted the exact challenge that we need to grow, BUT that does not mean that we are ALWAYS where we are supposed to be or that we chose our reality. Sometimes we need a kick in the ass, and sometimes we are just a victim of terrible circumstances. Sometimes our suffering is needless and the result of other people’s wrongdoing. Compassion demands that we hold the space for other’s challenges with a wide open heart. Let them decide if they are exactly where they are supposed to be. - Jeff Brown, Grounded spirituality

“The primary cause of our unhappiness is not our thoughts. The monkey mind is not the source of our anxiety. It’s a symptom of it. Forget the monkey mind. The mind is not the enemy—unhealed pain is. Men have been blaming the mind for their neuroses for centuries, while deftly avoiding that which sources its maladies—somatic constrictions, and unprocessed emotions stored in the body itself. It’s like losing your keys somewhere in the house, and looking for them in the car. Useless, useless, useless. Until they stop blaming the mind—and recognize that its neuroses stem from the unresolved emotional body—there will be no liberation. Shifting out of unhappiness is not a cerebral process—that’s just another ineffective band-aid. It is a visceral full-body experience. It’s the "monkey heart" that’s the issue: the state of inner turbulence and agitation that emanates from an unclear heart. The more repressed your emotional body, the more repetitive your thoughts. Flooded with unhealed emotions and unexpressed truths, the monkey heart jumps from tree-top to tree-top, emoting without grounding, dancing in its confusion. Often misinterpreted as a monkey mind, the monkey heart is reflected in repetitive thinking, perpetual anxiety, and negative imaginings. All of which are emanating from the emotional body.” - Jeff Brown, Grounded Spirituality

Unconditional love begins at home...

Uncoditional love is a beautiful thing, as long as we don't use it against ourselves. I can love all of humanity, but that doesn't mean that i will put up with all of humanity. The boundary, for me, is a set of healthy self-regard. When my unconditional love for another undermines my self-respect, the fence goes up. Not because I don't believe in their possibilities, but because I have come to realize that there is no value in sacrificing my actuality for their potentiality. I make a distinction between human potential, which may well be finite, particularly in those who choose, over decases, to remain asleep. Yes, they may well awaken, but we should never postpone any part of our own life waiting for that to happen. We should never hold back our own potential. Unconditional love begins at home, with the protecting and honoring of our own unique journey. - Jeff Brown, Grounded Spirituality

A spirituality without story is like a body without breath...

At a time when our stories have been shamed and shunned in the spiritual community, it is all the more imperative to revive them and make luminous their sacred, transformative properties. The past is not an illusion, as many would suggest. It is the ground of our being, the karmic field for our soul's transformation, a living vibration that echoes on, the mysteery that threads right through our history. Story is where we come from, Story is what roots us in the present. Story is how we arriiritve at the next place intact. A spirituality without story is like a body without breath. Dead to the world. - Jeff Brown, Grounded Spirituality

You have every right to preserve your emotional integrity...

Many who have made the brave, necessary decision to disengage from family are met with a shaming, shunning response from others. It is one of the most destructive and imprisoning guilt trips of all time, " But she's your mother," " but he's family," " They did their best," " Yoe owe them your life." Pay no mind to this. It's been my experience that if someone is considering disconnecting from members of their family of origin, there are usually very legimate reasons for doing so. Even if they did their best, that doesn't mean we have to stay in contact with them. Some wounds cut too deep. Some bridges have been permanently burnt. some people do not change. You are not a bad person if you choose to say good bye to abusive family members. You have every right to preserve your emotional integrity. - Jeff Brown, Grounded Spirituality

We are powerful beyond measure....

We are powerful beyond measure, and so deeply vulnerable at the same time. This may seem like a dichotomy, but it' isn't. We have misunderstood real power. It has been seen as a force that is assertive, non- surrenderng, pushing in through. This is not real power. This is simply willfulness. Real power is something else: receptivity, vulunerability, the courage to keep your heart open on the darkeset of days, the strength to feel it all even when the odds are stacked against you. Real power is showing up with your heart on your sleeve and absolutely refusing to waste one moment of your life hidden behind edginess and armor. The art of enheartenered presence. Now that's power. - Jeff Brown, Grounded Spirituality

Depression is frozen feeling. It’s seldom a disease of the ‘mind’. It’s a disease of the heart. It is sourced in unexpressed, unreleased, and unhealed pain that is held deep within the physical and emotional body. You can talk about it in therapy to soften its edges, you can medicate it in the hopes that it becomes more manageable, but the real work has to happen somatically, deep within the body itself. The frozen material has to be thawed out, worked through, released. Our shadow is not our enemy. Repression is. Unfortunately, we still live in a world that is afraid of the source material. So we shun it, bury it, ‘manage’ it with dissociative spiritualities, medications and analysis (‘excessive analysis perpetuates emotional paralysis’). All of this merely perpetuates and concretizes the problem.
The only way to heal depression is to get to its roots. To get right inside those frozen feelings, and to thaw them out somatically. We felt the initial pain in our hearts. We must go right back inside of our hearts to feel and resolve it. No more damming up of our emotions. No more defenses and denials. Instead, a society-wide acceptance of the fact that we are all carrying pain. There’s nothing to be ashamed of. It's part of our collective experience. And a culturally embraced invitation to do the real work to heal its deep roots with body-centered psychotherapies. And with love. The more we can love those who are struggling with depression, the more strength they will have to reclaim their past and heal their hearts. They didn’t have support back then. Let’s give it to them, now. Let’s create a safe societal container to bring those feelings back to the surface. THE FEEL IS FOR REAL. Let's feel our way back to life... - Jeff Brown, the message at the heart of 'Grounded Spirituality'

It's up to you- it's always up to you. You can deny, repress, distort, and bury your unresolved wounds all you want. You can re-frame them, pseudo-positivity them, detach from them, bypass them. You can re-name yourself, hide away in a monastery, turn your story around. And you can spend all your money on superficial healing practies and hocus-pocus practitioners. But it won't mean a damn thing, if you don't do the deeper work to excavate and heal your primary wounds. The material is still there, right where you left it, subconsciously ruling your life and controlling your choices. This is the nature of unhealed material, it is alive, and one way or the other, it will manifest itself in your lived experience. It will language your inner narrative. It will obstruct your path and limit your possibilies. It lives everywhere that you live. And so you have to decide, excavate it and bring it into consciousness where it can be worked through and integrated; or repress it and watch it rule your life. It's one of the hardest truths we have to face; If we don't deal with our stuff, it deals with us. There is no way around this. Choose. - Jeff Brown, Grounded Spirituality

“The anti-judgment mantra is yet another way that Patriarchal Spirituality and the New Cage movement sidestep personal responsibility for their actions. Don’t judge! Yet in truth, we are judging all the time. We were granted the gift of discernment and critical thinking. Thank God for that—it keeps us from walking down the wrong paths, making unhealthy decisions, destroying our lives. Even those who criticize judgment are judging. It’s fundamental to the human experience. Perhaps the real question is not IF we are judging (or discerning, if you prefer), but WHY we are judging? Is it benevolently or malevolently intended? Are we judging in a forward-moving effort to distinguish unhealthy from healthy, or are we judging as a reflection of an unresolved superiority complex? Are we judging because we have a need to call out the madness of the world, or as a direct reflection of it? Where are we coming FROM? Because not every ‘judgment’ is a conditioned perspective. Often, it is a reflection of hard-earned wisdom and a grounded sensibility.” - Jeff Brown, from ‘Grounded Spirituality’

The humanism bypass. I did it for years. I saw glimpses of someone’s potential, their beautiful soul, their loving heart, and told myself that this was who they truly were, ignoring all the rest. But the rest was what destroyed. The rest is where they lived most of the time. The rest was no illusion- it was them, too. This self-destructive pattern was birthed in two places: (1) my deep desire to see the best in my difficult parents. Not for them, but for me. I needed to believe that there was something kind and caring living inside of them; (2) a misplaced projection from my own self-concept work. I held the belief in my own potential, as a way of overcoming the shame I carried. But I made the mistake of assuming that everyone else was just as eager to find their light. Of course we all have glowing potential. At the core, we are all magnificent beings with profound capacities. But how many of us fully actualize it? At this stage of human development, not so many. The trick is to hold the space for two things at once- a deep belief in everyone’s possibilities, and a deep regard for your own well-being. It’s okay to pray for everyone’s liberation without joining them in prison. Pray from outside the prison walls, while taking exquisite care of yourself. It's okay- you can't do the work for them anyway. Boundaries, boundaries, boundaries… don’t leave home without them. - Jeff Brown, Grounded Spirituality

Grounded Spirituality

"The primary cause of our unhappiness is not our thoughts. The monkey mind is not the source of our anxiety. It’s a symptom of it. Forget the monkey mind. The mind is not the enemy—unhealed pain is. Men have been blaming the mind for their neuroses for centuries, while deftly avoiding that which sources its maladies—somatic constrictions, and unprocessed emotions stored in the body itself. It’s like losing your keys somewhere in the house, and looking for them in the car. Useless, useless, useless.
Until they stop blaming the mind—and recognize that its neuroses stem from the unresolved emotional body—there will be no liberation. Shifting out of unhappiness is not a cerebral process—that’s just another ineffective band-aid. It is a visceral full-body experience. It’s the “monkey heart” that’s the issue: the state of inner turbulence and agitation that emanates from an unclear heart. The more repressed your emotional body, the more repetitive your thoughts.
Flooded with unhealed emotions and unexpressed truths, the monkey heart jumps from tree-top to tree-top, emoting without grounding, dancing in its confusion. Often misinterpreted as a monkey mind, the monkey heart is reflected in repetitive thinking, perpetual anxiety, and negative imaginings. All of which are emanating from the emotional body.
Bottom line is that you cannot heal and resolve your emotional material with your mind. Knowing our issues is not the same as healing our issues. Your emotional material does not evaporate because you watch it. I have known many who could watch and name their patterns and issues—as if they were scientists, researching their own consciousness—but nothing fundamentally changed, because they refused to come back down into their bodies and move their feelings through to transformation. It’s safe up there, above the fray, witnessing the heartache without actually engaging it. Yes, you may be able to get so skilled at a witnessing consciousness that you can overpower your triggers. But that’s not presence. Real presence comes through the open heart.
The key to the transformation of challenging patterns and wounds is to heal them from the inside out. Not to analyse them, not to watch them like an astronomer staring at a faraway planet through a telescope, but to jump right into the heart of them, encouraging their expression and release, stitching them into new possibilities with the thread of love. You want to live a holy life? Heal your heart. That’s the best meditation of all." - Jeff Brown, Grounded Spirituality

The path of the spiritual warrior is not soft and sweet. It is not artificially blissful and feigned forging. It is not fearful of divisiveness. It is not afraid of its own shadow. It is not afraid of losing popularity when it speaks its truth. It will be bear around the bush where directness is required. It has no regard for vested interests that cause suffering. It is benevolent and it is fiery and it is cuttingly honest in its efforts to liberate itself and humanity from the egoic ties that blind. Shunning strong opinions in the name of spirituality is actually anti spiritual. Spirituality that is only folate soft is a recipe for disaster, allowing all manner of manioouation to run amok. Real spirituality is a quest for truth, in all its forms. - Jeff Brown, Grounded Spirituality

One of the hallmarks of the ungrounded spiritual movement is this statement: “There is only THIS moment.” It is often made by spiritual teachers who are dissociating from their unresolved history- self-avoidance masquerading as enlightenment. We can understand the value of this way of thinking- it calls us out of our worry mind, our habitual consciousness- and reminds us to be here, now. But it doesn’t work- at least not for very long. Because “this moment” actually includes and encompasses every moment before. The past is not behind us, as many of us wish it was- it is deep within us, encoded in our cells, somatized as memory and unresolved trauma. It fully informs our lens on reality. In most cases, the “power of now” is just a dissociative construct. Because most of us are still influenced, and ruled by, the power of “then.” The answer is not to pretend we are present, when all we have done is fled or momentarily suspended our past. That’s not true presence. That's not true healing. The answer is to own, embody and resolve the “then”, so that our experience of the moment both honors our history and recognizes the ways our moment is informed by our past. It is to recognize that past and present are intrinsic to each other. The mystery begins with our history. - Jeff Brown, Grounded Spirituality

Empathize with humanity, but...

Empathy is an interesting world, often mistaken for something quite differnet - unhealthy boundaries, not knowing where we end and the other begins. I think of how often I remained connected to hurtful people (and others to me, when I was hurtful), because I imagined myself empathic. And maybe I was - but that didn't mean I had to endure their madness. Our empathic capacity can be as misdirected as any other ability. Just because you can feel where someone is coming from, doesn't mean that you have to put yourself at risk. When we allow 'empathy' to keep us invested in that which brings us suffering, when we confuse it with a boundaryless way of being, it morphs into misplaced faith and self-sabotage. It becomes empathy run amok. It turns a gift freely given, into a gift freely abused. Better to not turn your compassionate nature against yourself. Empathize with humanity, but shield yourself from harm. - Jeff Brown, Grounded Spirituality

We are not just here together to keep each other compnay. We are here together to show each other God. The portal is each other. - Jeff Brown, Ground Spirituality

Bravery is a curious thing..

There are two forms of courage in this world. One demands that we jump into action with our armor on. The other demands that we strip ourselves bare-nakedand surrender. Bravery is a curious thing. - Jeff Brown, Spiritual Graffiti

It has been my experience that the one that families call the “crazy one” is often the sane one. This is particularly true in very dysfunctional families where ideas of healthy functioning are turned upside down. In these families, members often repress their authentic feelings and turn against anyone who reminds them of their unresolved issues and patterns. As a result, the truth-speakers, the ones who refuse to contain their feelings, those who challenge and humanize the toxic status quo, are often scapegoated and vilified, made to feel crazy by those who lack the courage and insight to see beyond the family's madness. If you have been labeled the 'crazy one', take heart. You are truly not alone. Most great creators and paradigm-shifters were met with fiery resistance by those afraid to grow. Whatever you do, do not allow your voice to fade away in the face of their messaging. Your voice, your vision, your ways of being, live at the heart of your unique soul's journey and are the key to collective transformation. No one has the right to bury them under a bushel of shame. No one! And remember- what is crazy to an unconscious person is often brilliantly sane to one who is awakening. Without you, we are lost. Blessed be the 'crazy' ones! - Jeff Brown, Grounded Spirituality