The Direct Path to Self Love

What is it?

The Direct Path to Self Love is both a framework and an inquiry into how to live life in a way that's aligned with our deepest truth and highest potential, through a homecoming to ourselves.

At its core, it's about returning back to a place of “Self connection” in a simple, loving way: a place within us where there's nothing wrong and nothing to fix. From this place we can be empowered to be present with whatever is arising in us.

The path is grounded in, but not limited to, the practices of Transformational Connection and Surrendered Leadership. It emphasises simplicity, it's direct, it opens to possibility, and it's integrative: it's about the way we live our whole lives, not just how we are in a practice space. 

It is also a spiritual path.

At its core is a premise: When we're able to come back to Self connection, it's much more possible to love and welcome all the parts of ourselves, including those parts we've avoided, shunned, and demonised within us.

What takes us out of connection with ourselves is the unsafety that comes with our survival needs not being met. This unsafety can look many different ways, but if we are unable to be with it, it will take us out of Self connection, and create resistance to reality as it is.

The practice is not about changing any of this, but about a moment-to-moment practice of meeting more of our unsafety in connection, and then taking the next step in creating the safety we need, to really be with what's happening in us. 

Components

We separate The Direct Path to Self Love into different components to make it easier to digest.

Some of its core components are:

Cultivating Foundational Safety

This is the embodied safety that comes from the trust that we can always come back to Self connection, no matter what we're experiencing. We can learn to take gentle, loving steps to bring more safety, by directly meeting that unsafety in us, rather than turning away from it, avoiding it, or suppressing it. As we do this more and more, a deeper and more existential sense of safety begins to emerge. This “Foundational Safety” comes to us as a gut-level truth, a knowing that we always have the choice to come home to ourselves.

Seeing the beauty and intelligence of our parts.

Rather than seeing our parts as problems to be fixed, we open to the radical possibility that there's a deep intelligence in us that we may not be seeing right now. When we open up to this possibility, this gives us space to more deeply meet ourselves without a need to fix anything, and to see our own innocence. Fundamentally this is a humbling stance to take: if we’re experiencing ourselves as problem to solve, then we’re not yet seeing clearly what’s actually happening for us, and there is more truth yet to be revealed to us about ourselves.

Witnessing and non-duality

When we say Self in our work, we are also referring to the concepts of “No Self” or “True Self”, rather than our small self, or ego. At the core of this is about dis-identifying from our experience, building the capacity to be the witness, the presence that holds experience, rather than the content. We can learn practices to come back to and re-ground ourselves in Self, where we're able to observe or explore our parts without any need to change anything. From this place of Self, Love is also readily available: from here we don’t need to effort to love ourselves or to welcome the parts of us we’ve pushed away, meeting ourselves is just what’s already here and already happening.

Bringing our needs into connection

If we are disconnected from our needs, this creates unsafety in us. From here it’s easy to collapse into a part and to lose our connection to Self. It’s a skill to bring our needs and how we want to be seen in connection, and how that looks can depend on the situation or context we find ourselves in. When we're able to reveal what we need to ourselves and others, to courageously bring it into connection, we will immediately feel ourselves more, and regain our presence and power.

Owning our experience

We need to learn to discern our boundaries, what’s ours and what belongs to the other. Doing this allows us to take more responsibility for more of what's happening in us. Often, if we’re unable or struggling to meet our experience, it’s because there’s a deeper ownership available: parts of us that need to be reclaimed, felt and honoured fully from the inside out. The more we do this, the less separated we become from ourselves.

Honouring the Nervous System

Dysregulation is how our system responds to unsafety in an embodied way. It’s very hard to maintain Self connection when we’re dysregulated. When we develop an awareness of the different states of our nervous system, and learn to recognise dysregulation in us, we become empowered to take care of ourselves. From there we have simple and powerful practices to move us into a more regulated place and honour the needs of our nervous system.

Trust and Surrender

Sometimes (often) the move back into Self connection is hard. It’s challenging to see what’s happening in us, especially when there are many parts active at once, whose needs are all entangled. There are also cases where we have “Self-like” parts - as described in IFS: high functioning parts that identity as Self, but are actually subtle forms of fixing and control. Any tools, frameworks or support we give to those parts might actually be used for more fixing. Survival of our finite self is as complex as it is beautiful and unique, and there is no guarantee a scripted move back to Self is always possible. In such cases, it takes a leap of faith, that if we trust and surrender into the unknown, the breakthrough will eventually come to us. In the Direct Path, we practice opening up to such grace.

How do we transmit this work?

- Tie it in self love sessions, registration process now goes here..

-Frameworks we include.

-Events we’re holding

-The vision

We will be leading a series of live 2-to-4-day events in London over the next year. The first event is “ASasasd” -> link it