Your natural state is one of joy, peace, and spontaneous fulfillment. When you are not experiencing this state, some contamination is present in body or mind. Contamination can be the result of toxic emotions, habits, and relationships, as well as toxic substances. All of these are rooted first in the mind as the result of conditioning. Therefore, the solution to toxicity in your life lies at the level where the mind has lost its natural state. Such conditioning begins very early in life. The first symptoms are toxic emotions like anger, anxiety, guilt, and shame. As one grows, this is followed by poor self-esteem, toxic relationships, and lifestyle imbalances. In order to detoxify your life, you need to learn how to reverse this entire range of conditioning.
Who shall ascend to the hill of the Lord? Or who shall stand in his holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart.
—Psalm 24
The roots of unhappiness are often invisible. This is especially true of the conditioning that creates toxicity in a person’s life. The most powerful conditioning exists at a subtle level of the mind. It begins in the first year of a child’s life, as the infant brain learns how to think, feel, and behave from influences in the home. Conditioning becomes a dominant feature in all of us by the time we’re toddlers.
This is when we set lifelong patterns into our brains. Even today you are replaying scenarios you learned when you were two or three. Consider a small child out with his mother. He sees a giant lollipop and wants one. What does he do? The most common pattern is the following: First he is nice, asking in a cajoling voice if Mommy will buy him a lollipop. If this tactic doesn’t work, he tries the opposite, acting nasty. He whines and cries and makes a scene. If this doesn’t work, the next step is to become stubborn and indifferent. He refuses to pay attention to his mother, who wants him to stop being unhappy and difficult. This is a subtler approach than nice or nasty. If stubbornness fails, the last scenario is to play the victim—poor me, no one loves me enough to buy me a lollipop. When the mother finally gives in, her child becomes conditioned, thinking he’s discovered something that “works.”
Simple as this emotional cycle might sound, millions of adults continue to act it out, using the same belief that their tactics “work” to get them what they want. The problem with this conditioning is that by manipulating others, you never really get what you want, which is greater love, peace, and joy. Because conditioning trains the brain into a false sense of happiness, you are actually manipulating yourself. You become the kind of person who doesn’t know how to be anything other than nice, nasty, stubborn, or a victim.
Conditioning is the subtlest form of toxicity. You cannot reach true happiness without escaping your mental conditioning. In our society there’s a wave of interest in leading a life that’s more natural, free of toxic substances. Purification of every type can be beneficial. But the secret to detoxifying your body lies more in the mind than anywhere else. There are seven steps to ridding yourself of a toxin at the subtle level:
Step 1. Take responsibility for your present response.
Step 2. Witness what you are feeling.
Step 3. Label your feeling.
Step 4. Express what you feel.
Step 5. Share what you feel.
Step 6. Release the toxic feeling through ritual.
Step 7. Celebrate the release and move on.
These seven steps apply whether you are trying to change a toxic emotion, habit, craving, or relationship, because your past conditioning lies at the heart of all of them.
Take responsibility. First, give up blame and guilt. Escaping your unhappiness today means finding a creative way to alter your own conditioned response, which is rooted in yesterday. When you don’t take responsibility, you are putting your fate into someone else’s hands. If you blame someone else, you are waiting for that person to change so that you can feel better. How long does that take? You could be waiting for the rest of your life. It’s difficult enough to change yourself. Release the need to change anyone else.
Witness your feeling. Conditioning trains you to feel the same way over and over every time you meet the same situation. This is frustrating because as soon as the old response rises, you become tangled in it. What you need is a clear place, the place of witnessing. Witnessing means that you are present with your emotion but not being used by it. The best way to witness is to locate where the feeling is in your body. Toxic emotions are usually located in one of the subtle centers known in Sanskrit as the chakras. Anger is felt in the gut, nervousness in the stomach, fear in the heart, frustration in the throat, sexual tension in the genital area. There’s no need to get complicated here, however. When asked what kind of toxic feeling they have, most people come up with fear and anger. When you have those feelings, don’t get involved in “what” they are saying. Instead, feel “where” in our body they are saying it. Locating a feeling in your body bypasses the inner mental chatter that keeps such feelings alive.
Label your feeling. Whatever sensation you find in your body, give it a name. Use very simple words: fear, anger, hostility, frustration, shame, guilt, jealousy. Don’t use judgmental words like betrayed, disappointed, and hurt—any word that implies blaming someone else. Naming your feeling is a way of recognizing what you are dealing with. Because you are being simple—and truthful—you aren’t falling for the long, complicated story that we are all tempted to rehash when we get upset. Every story is about one thing, the past. Your sensations and emotions are in the present.
Express the feeling. Any emotion becomes more toxic when you bottle it up. Expressing it leads to release, which is purifying to body and mind. This step isn’t about expressing how much you hate or blame someone else, but since you naturally want to tell your side, first express your feeling from your point of view by writing it down. Then express it from the other person’s point of view, which is more difficult. Then write down your position from a third-party perspective, as if you were covering it for the New York Times. When you go through all three perspectives, the conflict, anger, or fear you are feeling begins to lose its energy. You have expanded your awareness. Expansion allows trapped energy to flow; contraction keeps the energy bottled up to fester. This is a useful rule, because everyone’s first reaction is to contract into a single point of view, their own.
Share your feeling. Now expand beyond your private perspective, allowing others to participate. Share your feeling with someone you trust. Share the whole process you have been going through, including all three points of view. Don’t just gripe or make the case for your own point of view. Your aim is to get a true reflection, which the right listener can provide.
Let go through ritual. Devise your own ceremony that symbolically purifies your life of this particular toxin. You are invoking the age-old power of symbols, part of every culture. Having gone through this process, you will find that you no longer need to hold on. You would rather be the person who is free of this toxic feeling. Come up with a ritual that you will remember and that is significant for you personally—throwing a note in the river, giving your burden to the Virgin Mary, tossing your grievance into the sea wrapped around a rock—whatever ritual allows you to say, “From this moment on I’m free.” You can do this privately, but many people want witnesses to validate their release and help them to remember its significance.
Celebrate and move on. Now it’s time to honor your release through shared joy and gratitude. You will be celebrating an ending and a beginning. The occasion doesn’t have to be boisterous or showy. You are giving a gift to yourself. This is symbolic in its importance, because in celebration you validate that you deserve to be free and happy. Then move on.
Not everyone is comfortable with all seven steps. Try them out anyway, because conditioning has a habit of saying, “You don’t need to change. You’re okay the way you are.” But if you are feeling discouraged, depressed, and anxious, that voice is lying. However familiar it sounds, it’s the voice of defeat; it is working against your happiness.
These seven steps allow you to establish new patterns for coping in a new way. Don’t rush through them or be tempted to skip ahead. Let each step have its own integrity. That is the only way to escape the past, which is by filling in the present with new behavior. The time may come when you don’t have to go through all seven steps because you’ve become skilled at recognizing your feelings, witnessing them, and then moving the toxic energy that glues them in place. Eventually you may find that you can automatically see your situation from several points of view. For now, though, be dedicated to every step of inner purification.
Once you start to feel emotionally free because you are no longer holding on, you have opened the space to detoxify your life in general. You will find that you want simplicity in your life, because happiness is simple. Before, it was easy to become entangled in superfluous things at every level—too many activities, possessions, buried feelings, and decisions that never get made. When you’re ready, however, everything superfluous can be released. Here’s a basic checklist.
If you buy something, give something away.
Spend money to help the environment, returning a fraction of Nature’s gifts to you.
Do something that’s not for profit.
Be generous.
Be lavish in your giving, particularly with intangibles.
Nourish your body instead of defiling it.
Life is either complicated and getting more complicated, or it’s simple and getting simpler. The main thing is to move from the first state to the second. Emotional conditioning is where it begins, always. Therefore, every time you escape your old conditioning, even in tiny ways that may not seem that significant, you are forming more efficient neural networks in your brain. In plain language, you are becoming clearheaded. Instead of feeling undecided between A or B, you are teaching your brain to feel the world directly. This new way of feeling has limitless possibilities. That’s the difference between being conditioned and being unconditioned—in the latter state you give yourself so much more of life’s infinite potential. In the end, there is only one toxin. It’s whatever robs you of your true self. Your true self breathes in complete freedom of choice. Every day it grows toward untold possibilities. When you finally become free of all conditioning, you will be true and purified at the same time.
TO ACTIVATE THE Third key
IN EVERYDAY LIFE, I PROMISE MYSELF
TO DO THE FOLLOWING:
1. I will pay attention to the seven-step process whenever a toxic emotion comes up. This begins by taking responsibility for my own responses and not blaming others. Any response that makes me unhappy is mine to change. I will find the power to change by escaping my old conditioning, which keeps me unhappy. This is the most potent way to detoxify.
2. Before I put anything in my body, I will ask if it is nourishing me or not. Nourishment can come in the form of pure food but also pure emotions and all healing influences. I will not force any habit to change. If I am adding anything toxic to my life—whether in the form of substances, emotions, or relationships—I will not fight against my impulses. Instead, I will discover change at the root cause, which is emotional conditioning.
3. I will take a step to simplify my life. Whenever I see that anything has become too complicated, I see that it is leading only to more complications. My aim is to be free of the superfluous things that weigh me down. First comes simplicity of spirit, which has nothing to do with externals and everything to do with the happiness that accompanies my true self.
