Shakti Gawain on Awakening to Self-Acceptance

Renowned author and speaker Shakti Gawain visited Bodhi Tree in 1993 to discuss her book, The Path to Transformation: How Healing Ourselves Can Change the World. Understanding that the world is malleable and at times unreliable, Gawain opens a channel to awakening anchored in the one thing that does not waiver: deep, abiding, wholesome self-acceptance. Here, she charges us with clearing our own earthly path, embracing our inner work not only in service to ourselves, but also in support of an ever-loving planet.

Shakti Gawain’s Story

For more than 25 years, best-selling author Shakti Gawain has been a pioneer in the field of personal development and an internationally renowned teacher of consciousness, facilitating thousands of individuals in developing greater awareness, balance and wholeness in their lives. Her books, which include Creative Visualization (said to be the inspiration for Des’ree’s 1994 hit song “You Gotta Be”), Living in the Light, The Path of Transformation, Four Levels of Healing, Creating True Prosperity, Developing Intuition, and The Relationship Handbook, have sold over 10 million copies and have been translated into more than 30 languages.

She is also the co-founder, with Marc Allen, of New World Library Publishing Company and founder of Nataraj Publishing, a division of New World Library. Through her one-on-one coaching sessions, seminars and books, Gawain has helped people heal and develop all levels of their being—spiritual, mental, emotional, physical—and access their intuitive inner wisdom. Sharing the ideas and practices that have helped her the most in her own life, she guides others on their path to living more consciously. A passionate environmentalist, Gawain believes that as we bring more awareness to our daily lives, we can learn to live in balance on our planet. She and her husband, Jim Burns, live in Mill Valley, California. —Justine Amodeo

“We will discover the nature of our particular genius when we stop trying to conform to our own or other people’s models, learn to be ourselves, and allow our natural channel to open.” —Shakti Gawain

The following is an edited version of Shakti Gawain’s 1993 Bodhi Tree Bookstore presentation.

Well, thank you for showing up tonight and squeezing in here, sorry it’s so jammed but it’s nice to see all of you here.

I appreciate you coming, given that we’re not real comfortable, I’ll probably keep it fairly short tonight and then be able to just sign books and make contact with you personally. So I’d like to start by asking you to close your eyes for me. We’re not gonna do a meditation because it’s obviously a little bit too uncomfortable for most of you, but I’m just gonna have you just go inside for a minute and just think about something, just a little exercise.

Meditating on the Future

This is the way I start the book. In this new book, The Path of Transformation, I begin by having people do this little exercise. So I’d like you to close your eyes and take a moment to think about the future. And start by thinking about your future. And what I’d like you to do as you think about your future is just see whatever thoughts, whatever feelings, whatever images come up.

Don’t sensor it and don’t control it; just sort of allow whatever comes to you. And then I’d like you to let your imagination expand and think a little bit about the future of all of us. And again, not censoring, not controlling it, just sort of allowing whatever thoughts or feelings or images come up to you when you think about our future.

OK, good. And whenever you feel ready you can just then open your eyes and come back. Now, I don’t know what happened for you and probably something different happened for each of you. When I do this exercise with groups of people and I ask them to share a little bit about their experience, which we definitely will not do tonight since it would be a little difficult.

What I find is that there’s a really wide variety of experiences people have when they start thinking about their own future and about the future of the world. On the one hand, we feel a lot of excitement and maybe some vision about what we’re hoping will happen in our lives, in the world, and some feelings of how much potential there is for what’s possible.

And on the other hand, a lot of times we feel a lot of fear and concern and doubt. It’s pretty hard to face the kinds of challenges most of us have in our lives today—not to mention what’s going on in the world—without feeling some anxiety about it. So in general I find that people have sort of a mixture of feelings.

Maybe if you are having a really good day then you have a really wonderful vision, or if having bad day maybe you don’t today. But, overall, I feel that most of us have a real mixture of feelings about the future. And that really is as it should be. It’s appropriate that you feel that way.

Because we are living in probably the scariest time that’s ever existed on this planet. There’s a lot of problems, and there are a lot of challenges to me. So it’s appropriate that we feel some anxiety about that. And at the same time we are also living in the most exciting time that’s ever existed on this planet as far as I can tell.

Committing to Living a Conscious Life

Because we are living in a time where there is really an incredible potential for change, for growth, for transformation and for really creating this world as a better place. And I think that the first step in dealing with problems, dealing with challenges, is always to really confront them, to look at them honestly, to deal honestly with the feelings that we have, whether it’s fear or worry or hope or joy or any of that, to be able to really look deep within ourselves and see what we are experiencing.

So I wrote this book for several reasons, the first being that I do believe, looking at my own life and looking at everyone I know personally, that we are all facing major challenges in our life all the time—challenges in our relationships, challenges in our work situation, our financial situation, our health.

We’ve all got something if not one thing—maybe several things—that we are dealing with that we oftentimes feel kind of stuck and feel frustrated. And I wanted to do the best I could to pass on to other people the kinds of techniques and tools and perspectives and attitudes that have helped me and are helping me on a daily basis in being my own challenges in my life.

I wanted to talk about what is the consciousness journey, the consciousness process that we’re all along whether we know it or not. And how can we become more clearly committed to that process? What does that really involve? What does it mean to become conscious? What can we expect from that process? Secondly, and perhaps even more importantly, I wanted to address the concern that I feel like we do feel when we look at the world, and it’s enough to look at our own personal problems. That’s challenging and hard enough for all of us, but when we look at the world and the problems we see in the world, I think most of us do feel kind of overwhelmed and think, first of all, what does any of this has to do with me? Is there anything that I can in any way do about this? Is there a way that I can make a difference in the world? Or do I make a difference in the world? And for those of us in particular who’ve been on some type of personal-growth journey or consciousness path for a while, doing a lot of inner work spiritually, emotionally, however we’ve been doing it, I think there’s a lot of confusion sometimes about what does the inner work that I’m doing have to do with what’s going on outside? What does it have to do with what’s going on out there in my life? And what’s more, what does it have to do with what’s going on out there in the world? Does it have anything to do with it? Is what I’m doing in terms of this inner process valuable in terms of the world process? My answer to these questions, surprise, surprise, surprise [Laughter], is that I believe we do really make a difference in the world. I think all of us already do, whether we know it or not, and I think that we can make even a greater difference by owning that, by acknowledging that, by consciously taking responsibility and making commitment to our own consciousness process.

The World’s Healing Crisis

In my view, the world today is going through a major healing crisis that’s very similar to what we have all gone through, or are going through, or will go through in terms of our own personal lives. A healing crisis is something that happens to us. It usually feels real bad at the time it happens.

It feels negative, it’s upsetting, it’s traumatic, it usually involves some kind of loss. You lose a relationship, you lose a loved one, you lose money, or you have a health crisis, something comes up and at the time it happens, we go, “Oh, my God, why is this happening to me? What have I done to deserve this? Why does God hate me? Just why is this happening?” We don’t see anything positive in it at all and it’s just very troubling.

In retrospect, when we look back on our life, we can often see that those very times that were so upsetting and traumatic at the time they happened and it seemed so negative, in fact, were a major turning point of some kind for us. They brought up something that we really needed to look at, or really needed to become aware of, or they in some way brought a healing into our lives of some kind, or it just was a change of direction, a new door opening.

Something happened, and since then, if we look back, we would really not want to go back to where we were before that happened. And I think it’s really important for us to understand that and know that, especially if you’re in the middle of something like this at the time, right now, you’re at the middle of a troubling time to know that these healing crises are times which we have in some way created in our lives, because we’re ready for a change and ready for something new. In fact, I think they actually happen because we have already shifted. Our consciousness has already grown. There is some way that we’ve already become more aware and we can’t go back to living the way we were before. We can’t go back to doing things, or relating, or just being the way we were before. It’s as if the growth in our consciousness comes in and just sort of pushes out the old forms in our lives, including things that we’re sometimes really attached to and don’t really want to let go of, but we need to.

Well, the same thing’s happening in the larger picture today in the world. There is a healing crisis going on on this planet of major proportions, and it has to do with the fact that humanity as a whole is an evolutionary process. And we have already made such a leap in consciousness in recent times that the old ways that we’ve done things are dissolving, because they really no longer fit for us.

The old structures that we’ve created, the old forms that we’ve held on to that have worked for us up until now no longer are working. They’re too tight, they’re too small, they’re too confining for where we are going now. So what we’re watching is the crumbling of the old structure. The dissolving of the old world as we’ve known it, and that includes our relationships, the way we’ve related. It includes our religious institutions, our government, our economic systems—it’s really everything is beginning to dissolve and fall apart. And that looks real scary to the degree that we’re attached to what has been and the way we’ve lived and to the degree that we hold on to our security.

It is very frightening to us. So I think it’s important to know—this is very distracting having me up here on the screen competing with me [Laughter]. Well, that’s about quite a few years ago, actually [Laughter]. Anyway, what was I saying? [Laughter] Was anybody listening? Do you remember what I was saying? [Laughter]

I think it’s important that we’re able to look at this with this in mind. That we’re able to look at this dissolving and the crumbling of the old with the understanding that it’s the old being pushed out by something new that’s coming into our consciousness. Just as each one of us individually has a tremendous influence on the creation of our own reality, meaning depending on the kind of beliefs and attitudes that we have in our lives, our own emotional patterns based on our life experience, we have a tremendous impact on what happens to us.

We draw certain people to us, we’re drawn to certain experiences, we interpret what happens to us in a certain way. Our own personal reality is really a reflection of our inner consciousness. The way we see the world and the way we experience the world is seen through our own filters of our own consciousness. So as you become more aware, more deeply knowing of yourself and of life, your whole perspective on life shifts and changes. I’m sure many of you have noticed this, that when your attitude changes all of a sudden a lot of things in your life change: people treat you differently, different kinds of people coming into your life, different kind of experience has happened to you.

Connecting to Mass Consciousness

So in a very real sense, each one of us is influencing and creating our own reality individually. What most of us don’t realize is that we are also, each one of us, individually is connected through our consciousness to the mass consciousness. To the collective consciousness here on this planet, on a certain level, we are all one mind or one consciousness. So that everything that anyone of us does, any step that we take in our own personal growth—in our own healing process, any step of self-knowledge, self-awareness, becoming more into alignment with our own deeper selves, with our own deeper purpose in life, expressing more of who we are in our lives—any step we take has an impact on the whole, has an impact on the mass consciousness.

And that mass consciousness is what’s creating the reality of the world. So anything that any one of us does really does have an impact in this evolutionary process that we are all a part of, the question often comes up, well, does that mean what we have to do is sit around and get conscious and we don’t have to go out there and do anything? What is the place for action in terms our own lives and in terms of the world, political and social action, is that important? My answer to that is yes, of course.

Action is important. Consciousness is not a passive process; it’s a process of getting in touch with our truth and then living that, acting on it, moment to moment, day to day in our lives, having the courage, taking the risk to really be who we are, say what we feel, and act on our own beliefs and our own feelings. So it is important to take action. The problem with what most of us do when we try to take action out there in our lives or in the world is that we don’t really recognize how the roots of everything that is happening to us really exists within our own consciousness, within our own psyche. And so we get out there and we try to fix, we try to change things, we try to change other people and to control the world around us to try to be the way we want it to be, and we don’t recognize that the world is reflecting how we are internally. So we have more power by changing ourselves.

By recognizing and becoming aware of ourselves internally, we have more power to shift the outside reality than we do by doing it the other way. So ideally, we make a commitment to our own conscious process. We start practicing, listening inside to our own deeper sense of truth. We practice acting on that.

We make a commitment to be willing to go through our own healing process on all levels—spiritual, mental, emotional and physical. And in so doing that we really will be more and more moved from inside of ourselves to take the kind of action that we need to take both in our personal lives and in our collective lives—socially, politically and so forth—to be able to really change things that are happening around us through changing internally first.

Honoring the Parts of Ourselves

Everyone that we draw into our life is a reflection of some part of ourselves, and we all have parts of ourselves that we don’t acknowledge, we don’t like to look at, we don’t think are OK, so we repress them, we disown them, we kind of try to push them aside and get rid of them. But you can’t get rid of any part of yourself because it’s part of who you are, and really we need all of those parts of ourselves.

We might think they’re bad or they’re wrong, but they all have a certain value in our lives, so any part of ourselves that we’ve tried to get rid of or ignore or just haven’t really fully expressed, we always start attracting it to us in our relationships. We started attracting people who reflect the very parts of ourselves that we most need to get to know, to get in touch with, and to begin to value and honor and express in all ways.

That’s why our relationships are so annoying, and frustrating at times because they’re [Laughter] always reflecting things to us that we don’t necessarily want to look at, but we need to. And that’s why our relationships are the best thing we’ve got going for us if we want to get conscious, because our relationships are absolutely relentless. They will reflect our consciousness to us, and they will not stop. And you really can’t get away from relationships. I mean, even if you decide not to have any primary relationship in your life, and not to have any families, not to have any friends, you’re still going to bump into people on the streets, or have somebody live next door to you, or you’re going to have an animal, pet in your life who’s going to end up reflecting your consciousness to you. [Laughter] I mean, seriously, this happens. I knew a guy who was really, really identified with being very strong, and very together, and very in control all the time, so he had this really needy little dog, who was, like, showing him the part of himself that he didn’t want to acknowledge and that he didn’t love.

Because the whole idea is to really learn to love all aspects of ourselves. And, of course, any of us who have lovers, husbands, wives, partners, know how annoyingly they tend to reflect those opposite parts of ourselves—that’s why we’re attracted to them in the first place, is because they’re here to teach us and to show us about some aspects of ourselves that we don’t yet really know how to express. But once you’re dealing with them or living with them on a regular basis, it becomes very frustrating because they do things differently than we do, and we think we’re doing it the right way, and they’re doing it the wrong way.

But in reality we’re really attracting everyone into our lives to show us and to teach us about ourselves. So in the book, I talk really specifically about how we can use the process of our personal relationships, and even more generally in the bigger picture, how we can use the reflection of everyone in the world, because we project our shadow onto other groups of people, onto other nations, onto other races, onto the opposite sex, and then we try to fix those people out there instead of really dealing with our own inner awareness.

So basically the message of this book is, you can make a commitment to your own consciousness journey. It’s very worthwhile, and in so doing, you do make a difference in the world—not only in your own life, but in the collective life of all of us. And we can use our relationships, our experience, everything that happens, even when we watch the news, we can look at the issues, the things that disturb us and upset us, and we can begin to see how they have their roots in the very conflicts and problems and processes that we have going on right inside of us individually. The other reason I wrote this book, and I want to touch on this just very briefly and then I’ll stop, because I know some of you are getting uncomfortable.

Becoming Spiritually Connected to the Universe

The third reason I wrote this book is, I really wanted to clear up what I considered to be some of the most common confusions and misconceptions in the so-called “New Age” or personal-growth movement. I see a lot of people struggling a lot because I think there are certain things they are not clear about, and I have the arrogance to think I have some clarity about some of those.

Not to say that I don’t struggle, which I do, considerably. And I think part of the human process has to do with strolling with our own emotions and feelings and our own growth process, but at least we don’t have to have misunderstandings that cause us even more conflict and struggle inside.

We’ve gotten kind of stuck in physical form, physical reality, thinking this is all there is and this is what’s really real and I’m just this person in this physical body with this personality, and kind of losing sight of the fact that we really have a much bigger spiritual essence within us that’s connected to the whole of life and the whole of the universe.

When we’ve lost that and we begin to reconnect with it, it’s the most incredible thing in the world, because we begin to really reconnect with our sense of purpose and meaning in life and the whole bigger picture of what life is really all about. And we begin to find a real deep sense of meaning in our lives. So, of course we want that, we want that spiritual connection. What we tend to do at that point is embark on this kind of a traditional spiritual approach, in which we see the spiritual realm as being superior to the human, and we begin to reject our human experience or deny it or see it as being less valuable.

You know, it’s like we start yearning to be really spiritual and to be really one with everyone and unconditionally loving, and we start wanting to sort of what we call, give up our ego, let go of ego, or get over a lot of our human feelings and emotions, and we really start to deny the human physical experience. And that sets up a tremendous conflicting inside of us, because the fact is, we are eternal spiritual beings, I think, but we’ve created this level of reality and decided to come here in order to experience something really magical and really powerful and really unique that doesn’t exist on any other level of existence.

We’re here for a reason; this is not God’s goof. This is not a big mistake, which is what you tend to think. It sort of looks like when you’re doing this transcended approach, it’s like all we want to do is get out of here and go back to back to God. Well, if you want to leave your body, that’s fine. And that’s a legitimate choice, but if you want to live here in a body like you chose to do, then that transcended process will put you in deeper and deeper conflict with yourself: the conflict between spirit and form, spiritual and human. So what I’m saying in this book is that there’s another choice that can be made.

Stepping Onto the Path of Transformation

A further step beyond the transcended is what I call the path of transformation, which has to do with integrating the spiritual and the human. Learning to develop and embrace all aspects of ourselves, all levels of our being—spiritual, mental, emotional and physical. Giving all of them equal appreciation and honor and really coming to the place where we can develop and express all aspects of who we are here in the physical plan.

I think that’s why we came here: We came here to discover something that hasn’t been done before, anywhere. How to live on earth in a really fulfilling, exciting, balanced way. Nobody’s done it. There are no enlightened gurus or masters on this path; all of the so-called masters are only developed in terms of the path of transcendence.

We are the pioneers and the inventors on this path of consciousness. Humanity as a whole is evolving, is moving along together and kind of in one big mass on this path by making a commitment to our process, and by being willing to do the work it takes, and it does take hard work.

We can emerge as leaders of that process, and we can help one another and we can just really help everyone here on the planet by being committed to doing our own inner work. And doing our own inner work doesn’t just mean developing spiritually; that’s one important part of it. Doing some kind of spiritual practice, doing our inner work means finding some kind of spiritual practice that’s meaningful to us, whatever it might be, whether it’s meditation, walks and nature, going to church, listening to music, whatever it is that helps you feel connected to your own essential being is absolutely necessary and important. But it’s not enough. We have to do the mental work, which means getting in touch with our beliefs and our ideas, and being willing to allow those to change, being willing to take on new beliefs and new ideas that serve us better. Looking deeply into our belief systems to find out what we hold about the nature of ourselves, and the nature of life. It also means doing the emotional healing work, the psychological work. And this is the place where a lot of so-called “New Age” people get stuck. We want to just do the spiritual and the mental because that’s easy and it’s fun and it feels good.

Integration Through Emotional Healing

We’re afraid of the emotional healing process, because it takes us into our pain, it takes us into our vulnerability, it takes us into the places where we don’t feel very together, and we have to be willing to look in those places and get to know ourselves on those deep levels, and find out the places where we were wounded in our childhood and in our lives, and learn how to love ourselves and take care of ourselves the way nobody has really taught us how to do, learning how to relate deeply and intimately with other human beings.

There’s a lot of work on the emotional level and a lot of people hope they can skip that level, but you can’t—not if you want really profound integration in your life. And then, of course, the physical level we live in, and all of those other levels—the spiritual, the mental and the emotional—all come to fruition in our physical bodies.

It’s, like, however much healing we do on those other levels is how alive we’ll feel and how healthy we’ll be. And also, we need to get in touch with our bodies and learn to trust them and listen to them and give them what they need. The body knows how to live on the physical plain, the spirit doesn’t. So in order to learn to live in a balanced, integrated way on the physical plain, we have to learn to trust and listen to our bodies and let them teach us and learn to really love and appreciate them for what they have to give us.

So the path of consciousness is not easy and it doesn’t happen overnight; it’s a lifelong process. It’s not, you know, instant cake mix, like sometimes I think we wish it would be and we just go to this workshop or we just practice this method or whatever everything is going to be perfect.

It’s not like that it’s an ongoing, ever-deepening process. It’s an adventure and we never know where it’s going to take us. But one thing we do know is that it’s going to take us deeper and deeper and deeper into ourselves, into each other and into life. And when it really comes right down to it, what else is there to do? [Laughter] I mean, it’s really the only game in town because when it comes right down to it, nothing else has real meaning.

Until we are committed to this journey and then everything we do has meaning. Even the craziest, weirdest, most painful strange experiences in our lives can be healing, can be fascinating. So we really need to get over the idea of getting there, wherever there is some state of enlightenment or peace or love or whatever, and really get fascinated with the journey itself.

Manifesting Through Visualization

So you can get up every morning and go, “Wow, what’s life going to teach me today? What is it that I’m going to be learning here today? I want it, I’m open to open to it, I want the gifts that life has to give me here and I’m willing to do whatever it takes.” Creative visualization is only a tool, and tools are tools. They can be used successfully, they can be used unsuccessfully, they can be used wrongly, they are not perfect, and they are not always going to make everything work in your lives, so they have their limitations, I guess is what I’m trying to say.

Visualization is a very powerful and wonderful tool; it won’t necessarily make everything in your life happen the way you want it to, consciously because you got to understand on a deeper level, this whole process is being directed by our soul and everything that we think we want to have happen the way we want to have it happen isn’t necessary what’s for our highest good, or we may need to do a lot of healing in the process.

So, it is good to have some kind of support group or support system to help you go through that process. Ultimately, I think we can have whatever our hearts really, really desire in life, whatever our hearts and souls really desire we can have, but it doesn’t come the way we think, it doesn’t come in the timing we think.

You know, I started wanting the right relationship with a man in my life about 10 years before it actually happened, and I had to go through a lot of really deep and painful healing in that process before I was really ready to have that. And when I was really ready, it happened in like three weeks. See, I thought I was all the time before that, all of those years I thought, “I’m ready for this, why wasn’t it happening?” And then I did the deep work I needed to do and I could feel something coming together in me and I went, “Whoa! Now I’m ready and now I know,” and it happened just like that.

Everything Happens for a Reason

The most difficult chapter for me to write in this book? God that’s an interesting question, I don’t know. [Laughter] I wrote this book under very difficult circumstances. I had a million things going on in my life at the time and I suddenly had to sit down and get the book written anyway. It just got written by the grace of the universe. But I can’t honestly say that there’s one chapter that I can think of that was more difficult. Really, it actually flowed pretty easily for me. What I was talking about earlier about healing crisis, those things come in the category of major healing crisis, something really traumatic, really, really upsetting, and what I’m saying about that is you’ve got to go through the grief—I mean, there’s no way around it when we have those experiences in our life. Part of what we need to do is grieve deeply and feel the fear, and feel everything that it brings up, because that’s all part of the healing.

But yes, I do believe on some level that we do bring those experiences into our lives precisely to teach us and heal us. And that everybody concerned is all learning from that process, all growing from it. That’s my belief. I don’t really expect people to totally accept that because it’s a pretty radical thing to accept, but I find that it’s the most empowering thing in my life is to really trust that on some level, everything that’s happening to me is happening to me for my learning, and for my deepening and for my growth. You know, even if you don’t believe that you have anything to do with creating it, it’s still better to look at it this way and say, “OK, it’s happening.”

However it happened, or why it happened, I don’t know, but it is happening. So therefore, I am going to ask for the gift in this. I am going to use this in some way to become a deeper, more balanced person. And then things reveal themselves, the gift will reveal itself in every single experience.

You know, I have a beautiful house on the island of Kauai and I recently had a hurricane hit my house and demolish a big piece of it. I knew right away that it was a transformational experience. Now, it doesn’t happen that it was a really negative thing for me at all.

I wasn’t there at the time, although I would’ve liked to be. It didn’t severely hurt me in any way. In fact, it was almost magical how a lot of things got demolished but nothing that was really precious to me got touched. Real interesting. And it turns out this thing is the greatest blessing that’s happened to me. My whole house needed work—it needed remodeling, it needed repainting, and I didn’t have the money to do it. After the hurricane, I got an insurance settlement, and I have been able to completely transform this house—it was so beautiful. And really, I had had a conversation with the universe before this. I said, “OK, look, I’ve got termites, my kitchen needs remodeling. I don’t have the money to do it, you give me the money to take care of it, OK?” Bingo, we had a hurricane. [Laughter] I got the money, my house is beautiful. Now, a lot of people suffered in that. A lot of people are still suffering. I don’t minimize that. It was hard for me in a lot of ways, too, but the thing is, that’s transformation for you. It’s change, and you either go with it and you learn from it, and you use it and you see the universe work with it, or you suffer. So again, I want to reiterate, let yourself grieve. Don’t cut off the feelings by going to some spiritual reality about this, going oh well, it’s just the university work and everything’s cool.

The Power of Visualization

That’s part of the healing, but know that there really is a gift, always. How often should a person do visualization for it to be effective? Once. [Laughter] It can be effective once, be effective if you do it once a day, or a few times a day. It doesn’t really matter. Find what’s comfortable for you and what’s easy for you.

If you do it once a day, that’s nice. I wouldn’t worry about doing it much more than that. If you get obsessed with it, you tend to work against yourself. Anything that you’re trying too hard to do usually you’re trying to control it and you’re trying to make it happen and you’re kind of working against the energy.

What do you do when you see somebody and something that’s reflecting some part of yourself? I know it’s a little bit complex and I don’t really have time to go into it in much detail tonight because it’s a complex topic. I do talk about it in much greater detail in the book and also in The Path of Transformation. And I also recommend other books and tapes where you can learn more about this concept and really go into. It’s very important.

But just to answer in a nutshell, if you see a problem in a relationship or something and someone else that you sense is reflecting something in you but you don’t know what or how to deal with it, just ask. Go inside and ask the universe and then let it go, partly, but it’s usually more complex than that.

It usually has to do with showing you some part that you really do need. OK, thank you very much for being here.

The Path to Transformation: How Healing Ourselves Can Change the World

By Shakti Gawain

In this easy-to-read message for the new millennium, Shakti Gawain questions the traditional transcendent spiritual path, and challenges many popular “New Age” beliefs as she describes the journey we must all make in order to heal ourselves and our planet. In it, she illuminates the path back to our most beloved selves, a place of healing and truth.

By confronting personal challenges in jobs, relationships, finances and health, Gawain shares the ideas and perspectives that have been the most helpful to her and guides readers in healing physical, mental, emotional and spiritual wounds, providing tools for dealing with challenges and suggesting that personal transformation is the path to transforming the planet.