By Shai Tubali and Tim Ward
Guest Writers for Wake Up World
“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.” ~ Ernest Hemingway.
It’s healthy to possess a feeling of power. It feels wonderful, as if you are on top of everything and have become a master of your life. True power, however is not attained through dominating everything and everyone in your life by force of will. Even dictators and empires eventually weaken and fall. Instead the awesome experience of true inner power comes from knowing that life, just as it is, and no matter how bad it might get, cannot break the strong and solid self that you have built.
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This principle has been the cornerstone of Shai Tubali’s work for the past several years, and the heart of our book, Indestructible You: Building a Self that Can’t be Broken. Shai uses the transformation of inner power to rehabilitate traumatized people who seem to have lost all sense of power. We believe it is the key to psychic health and balance.
Whenever you settle into a deep feeling of inner power, it’s like settling into the saddle of a strong horse, or into the driver’s seat of a car with a powerful engine. You’ll feel bigger than any obstacle or challenge you might meet. You’ll know you can withstand the outer turbulence of life, and you’ll feel powerful enough to overcome any inner resistance or frailty.
How can you create this magnificent state of true power inside you? The secret lies in working correctly with your will-driven self.
When you experience a drive, urge, wish or ambition, where do you think this feeling comes from? You might say simply that it comes from your personality or ego. But this is not the original source. Your individual will is just one expression of life’s will that springs from the perpetual fountain of life’s drive to emerge, become and expand. So your will-driven self is not just a set of egoistical wishes. Your will is egoistical only the way that trees and bees and rivers and winds are egoistical – individual parts of a larger living whole. If you think of life as a holistic movement you can see that any individual’s drive is in fact life’s drive to overcome and outgrow itself.
Natural evolution can be easily grasped in this way, rather than from the usual point of view of competing species and individuals. You can even understand the universe itself as a whole that ceaselessly moves to overcome and outgrow itself. When you feel the surge of will inside you, you truly feel a spark of the totality of life’s wish for expansion. It’s a natural impulse that precedes psychology, a life force in you essentially no different than your sex drive. Imagine yourself sitting outside at night under a brilliant starlit sky, and realize that the force that powers those stars is the exact same force that fuels your desires. Think of life in these terms and you’ll soon fall in love with the gushing, rushing will inside of you. Connect the universe’s great will to your individual will and you will find yourself throbbing with life in every cell.
Once we becoming aware that life’s will is our nature, we have the amazing ability to consciously decide what we wish to do with that will: whether we want to express it as it is, refine it or transform it. Most people respond to their will by simply striving to fulfill it. Sometimes they refine it because they realize that it’s not socially acceptable. But their will is almost always directed to the external world of objects and people: they wish to appropriate external powers they find thrilling and overcome whatever stands in their way. This is, of course, far short of the full potential of life’s will in you; it’s limiting this great flame of passion in you to the narrow channel of instant gratification.
Life’s will is neither good nor bad, but you definitely can use it for destructive or constructive ends. One of the most constructive directions you can take is turning part of life’s will inwards. Instead of trying to become stronger in your external power struggles, direct life’s will towards increasing your knowledge, intelligence, awareness and creativity. In this way life’s will can urge you to transcend your current level of development. When you direct your primordial will inwards, the basic restlessness and dissatisfaction that drive you to want things in the world become a very positive kind of restlessness. It becomes an insatiable hunger for self-discovery and self-expansion. This transforms life’s biological drive to become and expand into a spiritual drive for internal growth.
Once you activate this internal power you’ll realize there’s much to overcome in your mind and psyche. Surprisingly, you will not feel distressed thinking of all the hard work that lies ahead. Instead you will be thrilled to break old limitations and begin recreating yourself as a new type of human being. You will want to do it not because of some moral duty to become a “better person” but simply because you won’t be able to accept old limitations: egoistical thoughts, infantile emotions, anxieties and apathy. You will want to be done with these because you will sense they are getting in the way of what is next for you. What’s great about self-overcoming is that you never feel it as an obligation or a chore. You will want to do it. Towards this purpose you are more than willing to abandon some of your external power, and to build an unbreakable self.
Building A Self That Can’t Be Broken
The above article is an extract from the new book, Indestructible You: Building A Self That Can’t Be Broken, by Shai Tubali and Tim Ward (Changemakers Books, May 2015).
Indestructible You is a practical guidebook for making yourself so strong inside that life’s relentless ups and downs cannot shake you and cannot break you. It will help you uncover the powerful, driving force of your true self, and let go of everything that holds you back.
The book is based exercises and practices developed by Shai Tubali through his research and work guiding several hundred individuals through psycho-transformational processes. Indestructible You reveals the way to step down from the eternal seesaw and build an unbreakable self, a self that remains fearless and strong no matter what life throws at you.
Indestructible You: Building A Self That Can’t Be Broken is available here on Amazon.
About the authors:
Tim Ward is an author, publisher, teacher, traveler, and blogger for the Huffington Post. He has written eight books, including four about his travels through Thailand, India, China, Tibet, Greece and Southern Europe, and Africa.
Shai Tubali is a highly professional published author who specializes in the field of self-transformation. His fourteen books are all dedicated to establishing new pathways of genuine inner self-change.
Shai Tubali is currently running the first Indestructible You training certification program for therapists and others, which can be attended worldwide via the Internet. www.shaitubali.org for more information.
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