Spiritually Transformed | A Path to Find True Freedom: Being Your Authentic Self | Radical Honesty

I’ve heard some people arguing that spirituality is a by-product of religion. The application of spiritual principles is a decision that everyone can take regardless if they believe in the existence of God or not because the sense of justice that we all have is nothing else that a reflection of us being spiritual beings.  To apply spiritual principles is a decision we take because we know our of consciousness will improve to reach high level of well being simple by, at the beginning, stepping out of fear and take a step into actions that they have never taken before. To take any action out of fear we have to have faith that if we took any action by applying a spiritual principle, the outcome will be always for the good, including first our sense of integrity, connection and purpose which equal to happiness. 

When we apply spiritual principles in our life on a constant basis and our soul is clear from fear, anger and resentments because we finally allow ourselves to feel the feelings sitting under dullness or anger (dullness generally sits on top of anger) which are fear and  grief, in this order, we will find connection and emotional freedom. Some people says they cannot feel their anger. This is simply because they judge themselves for feeling angry or the are feeling shameful of feeling anger. In this case they will have to find the 'top emotion' being judgment or shame for example sitting on top of the anger.  [think of yourself of just 'being', you are just a a vehicle for your feelings to be expressed internally, to come and go like a wave, like the wind, like rain -  they come to you, you feel them and so on and so forward - you let them flow without trying to control them, without interference from your mind, without judging them as good as bad, you feel the pain of ...

There is a transparent line, like an umbilical cord that goes from me, my being, my soul towards the world outside and it feels, and perceives it, and we become one. I am connected. I am present now, to this time and space, into this time, into this space. I am time, I am space. I feel it, is it still, like the water of a lake, still, like the full moon in the sky, sometimes, like the air after the snow; in this stillness, and under the surface of everything there is the beauty of life, the emotions, nature, persons and places and my story, who I was and who I am now and who I have been in between, including all the uphill roads and the sprints downhill and the cold air in my face. It all makes all sense now because I am exactly where I want to be and where I allow myself to be and it has always been this way. Dani Tringale Image - "God is in the Air" 

It is said that regular meditation gives us the opportunity to became aware of our thinking. This is always a good starting point. Without awareness of our thinking we cannot really dig deeper and get to know who we really are.   Once awareness of our thinking has became an habit, a thing we really need to develop, something that needs to became our second skin since our spiritual development depends on it, is analysing our actions, or to be more precise, the underlying reasons [or motives] of our actions. An action can be passive or active, so for 'taking an action' I intend everything, including not taking an action, refraining from saying something, even thinking about something is taking an action (since our thinking reflects in our reality).  Everything we do (or omit to do) is an action. Every action has an effect on our reality, on ourselves and others. Which are the effects of our actions? TO OURSELVES: Our actions can do only two things: A. move us towards actin...

We all postpone, postponing is is a way of avoiding something. We avoid things we do not like and we do things we like, we avoid pain and search pleasure.  To understand which pain we are avoiding we have, as usual, to analyse our motives: Which pain are we trying to avoid?  Obviously if we are avoiding going to the gym, for example, we might be avoiding the physical pain of exercising.  But sometimes in analysing our motives, we have to look at the underling feelings of "what do do not like" since sometimes it is not the activity itself we are postponing / avoiding but it is the feelings it creates. We are postponing feelings, certain feelings, those which cause pain. For example, if we are postponing to write a post on our blog (nothing personal here...LOL) it could be that we are avoid some fears, for example fears of feeling rejected or inadequate or not being loved or liked.  We may find ourselves trying to avoid facing an addiction not to feel some feelings too...

If you believe in God and in the writings in the Bible, it is written that before Adam and Eve, we were immortal (may be the Bible was speaking of the soul). If you do not believe in God, you may want to believe that there is a part of us, which is common to all Human Beings, our soul, which is said to be Immortal. It is a nice thought to have, even if you doubt about it, so hold to it :) The Christian tradition says that we were immortal because we were pure, the Jewish tradition says that we were immortal because evil was kept separated from us.  In any case, the Bible says it was Adam and Eve fault if we became mortal ;) so if there is someone to blame is them ;) - there is always a guilty one in the Christian tradition! :(( -  Their disobedience to God was the cause of us becoming mortal. Citing the Bible in the Genesis 6:3 (CSB): "And the Lord said: 'My Spirit will not remain with mankind forever, because they are corrupt. Their days will be 120 years'." So if th...

The world we perceive is a reflection of what we feel about ourselves. You’ve heard me right, I did say a reflection of what we feel we are, I did not say a reflection of who we are.  When we feel insecure or we feel we are not good enough, we see a world that is defective, decadent, not good enough. So in the attempt to have a reality we like we try constantly to change the world, our house is not good enough, our friends are not good enough, our partner is not good enough, our job is not good enough. After thousands of attempts, anger, resentments, delusion, tears, sometimes suicide attempts, some of us come to the conclusion we cannot change anything apart from our inner world. For some people is difficult to accept that an inner transformation is all they need to change the world and their life is exactly where it can be, there is no other space, it will change as much as we allow ourselves to feel. Once this acceptance is done we are blessed! We can start a change that is real...

Self will, we praise it. We encourage it. We recognise it as a quality. We seek it and, if we do not have it, we feel ‘less than’… Self will, the devil of human nature, the joy depriver, the egoism who takes what does not belong, the ‘one’ to whom everything has to be given: other people feelings and our humanity, and theirs.  Self will, the liar, telling us that we can do it on our own force, without help, because we are strong, because we are…God There is not strength in self will, but only a stubbornness that will dissolve, like sugar in the water, like love into hate, like big into small, one step at the time, toward the abyss and into nothingness. To resuscitate into humbleness. And after that, when of us, of our ‘self’ nothing will remain, we will blossom from the humbleness of the grandiosity of the grace of God and we will be reborn, as human beings for the first time.

Which is the connection between feelings and needs? Why it is so important to allow ourselves to feel our true feelings? It is anger a true feeling or just a cover up feeling? We've have learned that expressing anger is 'bad', it is 'rude', it is inappropriate. Lots of us have learned to repress their anger, to let it go inside of us, becoming a series of self-defeating behaviours and self-hate (a much more subtle way of expressing our anger). To feel and recognise our anger helps us to understand our feelings and our needs. Having learned not to express our anger, we are unable to make any decision at all, because the inability to feel our anger removes from us the ability to feel and understand our needs. We are 'needless', empty shells, basically we are only 'anger' but we cannot see it, having built a 'facade' that is very similar to 'being human' but disconnected to our true feelings. Therefore every time we feel anger, we have t...

It is in our common language to use the saying: “Let it go”. With love, we generally suggest this technique to family members and to friends who had a bad experience, or are feeling resentment, or are holding a grunge to someone, towards something, or towards a place. This is a marvellous technique and we all use it, but sometimes we misinterpret what letting go means and, instead of actually “letting go” we keep everything in.  Thus, we believe we are doing a great job to “let it go” but  in reality we are compounding those feelings.  They get pressed down, inside of us in such a way that we even became unaware of their existence in us.  They became like a rock we carry around, like a ball and chain we drag, day in day out.  By doing so, little by little, we are darkening our soul and we became unable to feel and express innocent, instinctive joy, which is one of the juices of life. We are unable to experience bliss [we start surviving in life instead of living...

The clash between reality and idealisation and why humbleness works. We all know how painful it is sometimes to see what is real and abandoning any idealisation.   This painful process of growth into ‘adultness’ is part of our humble acceptance of the fragile condition intrinsic to being ‘human beings’ and, as such, fallible, mediocre and, in one word and overall, affected of the state of believing to be different from what we are, governed by unawareness and the ability of blaming others of the same defects and drawbacks we cannot (which means ‘we do not want to’) recognise in ourselves.  Flaubert Madame Bovary’s is the example of the failed norm of human life, exposed in Emma (Bovary) in the failed idealisation of love as an absolute ideal and in the lack of acceptance of realty (including oneself and one’s vulnerable humanity). Since realty is always disappointing with respect to an absolute ideal, Emma hates it, and, when reality materialises from a state of pure pote...

We, Human Beings love to feel we have control over our life, this comes from a state of pure fear connected with our physical vulnerability for example.  We have this massive illusion that we can control, with our actions and behaviours, the outside world and our life.  I do not believe in this simplistic way of looking at reality, it does not work.  Of course we can try to control the outside world, people, places and things and sometimes we succeed or we have the impression of succeeding, until something else happens that shows us our failure of this "mission impossible".  Generally our subconscious mind, past emotional rubbish gets in the way: as for the universal law that wants our soul to be clear we attract the very thing we are trying to avoid by trying to control. We are a magnet for all our fears, because our fears hide emotions we need to feel.  When I let go control and I allow myself to act instinctively I am free. My only obligation (if you want to ...

I studied Law since I have always loved the meaning of words, they are fundamental: the words we use are the building blocks of our life, are the measure of our success, are the pathways to reaching our full potential. Let's be aware, like eagles, watching every thought and every word we say (aloud or in our head or whispered). Only with this rigorous scrutiny we can analyse our behaviour, 'become awake' and change, moving towards joy and fulfilment and bliss.  Sometimes when we look back or we look at our behaviours or others' , we tend to use the word 'should': 'I should have never...', 'I should have said...' 'He should have known...' etc, etc... I have banned the use of the word ‘should’ from my vocabulary. When we say 'should' in respect of ourselves or others, we are regretting, we are not forgiving, we are judging, we are negating our reality.  There is no judgement in love. In love there is only acceptance of reality, this...

Experience all your emotions but do not live in your emotions - let them flow - you are a vehicle for your emotions. Love & Gratitude are the forces bringing us forward - express them - feel them strongly and you’ll fly high.  *For 'BEING InLove' I mean not being in fear. To be 'not in fear' we need to feel all our feelings, even those 'difficult emotions' we rather not feel (get the free eBook: 'Feel to be Free' here soon).

Dani Tringale Image - "White Immensity" Today I have experienced joy, it was in the glance I had with another human being while waiting for the cross light to be green for the pedestrians, like me. We smiled to one another and we knew we were on the same level, we were the same, two of the many souls looking for meaning and finding it within and outside at the same time. Today I’ve experience joy, when I went back home and the lights were dimmed and the moon was over me, big and majestic and a little bit dumb looking outside my window into our fragile world above the figs tree I planted with my love; apart from the fig trees my love and I also planted acceptance and empathy and courage to stay and connect even if one day one of us will deadly miss the other - we did this not always in a linear way - like when you plant seeds - but as best as we could, because we both believe love always prevails.  Today I experienced joy to be alive and stand free as a woman in this planet wh...

 As Human Beings we all search for meaning, and we all search for purpose. Becoming more spiritual means to find purpose and meaning. It means to get connected with a part of us that some of us identify with our souls, others with our conscience; to a part of us we all recognise as bigger than us.  Our consciousness equals to our sense of justice which is inherent to every Human Being regardless of their age. Our consciousness tells us that we are spiritual being, that there is a part of us which is unique to humans and it never fails.  In our search for purpose and meaning we need connection with ourselves. We need to feel our feelings to understand what is important for us, what gives us joy and pleasure, for example. In our search fur purpose and meaning we also need to feel connected to others.  Therefore to establish a true connection we need to apply one of the most important spiritual principles, which is honesty. We cannot connect with ourselves, our feelings...

The most debilitating ‘success blocking’ mental state is the fear of failure. I love playing tennis, it is my sport, I love the sound of the racket hitting the ball, the feel of the ball on the racket, the precision needed to place the ball where I want, the concentration needed to live in the moment, the fast motion of the legs, the slow motion of the toss of the ball when I serve. I love being in the zone, my higher self having fun; the rest, the world, people, places and things are in existent. There, on the court  it is only me, a ball, a net and a point to be made. One point at the time.  I love tennis, because it is me playing against myself, against my limits, against my fears, it is me who cries yes to life, who experiences the joy of success.  I was 14 when my father died, he died of a heart attack while I was at a tennis camp learning to become unbeatable. From that moment tennis became my enemy, it became my grief, my loss, it became my fear, my failure. It bec...

Every time we justify our behaviour we are acting out of Pride. Pride is a debilitating self defeating ego driven behaviour stopping us from growing spiritually (when we place ourselves above others by justifying our behaviours for example, or when we carry on believing, sometimes for years with disastrous results - see the compulsive obsessive behaviour of an addict for example whom despite the evidence of the contrary he still thinks he can control - or even stop - his drinking, or gambling or drug using -  that we can overcome a problem or achieve something with the only force or our self will) and that stops us from achieving what we most desire in life (regardless of what this is).  Pride will stop us from trying again when we do not get what we want at the first try, or will stop us from admitting defeat, pride will prevent us to see our true nature, will stop us to see our part in a controversy, or from searching inside ourselves to find the truth of our feelings or of ...

The million dollar questions! The questions everyone has have a simple answer.  And (even better)...it has the answer every human difficulties can be tackled with and overcome. Sometimes it is easier to answer a question by saying what the contrary to the question is.  So what does grind our self esteem, what does destroy our self esteem?   What is low self esteem?  A person with low self esteem acts like a dog trying to bite its tail.  Why? Because what activates low self esteem is fear.   And when we act from fear we go round and round in a circle and the more we act in fear the lower our self esteem becomes. Why? Well, because when we act out of fear we act dishonestly. And when we act dishonestly we lose our integrity.  Have you ever met a dishonest person who is successful? I haven’t.  The basis to love yourself unconditionally is being rigorously honest.   A lot of people here will argue over this, I bet, because there is a lot of misun...

Some people believe meditation is a very difficult practice to master.  They sit down with the best intention to meditate and as soon as a few thoughts come up in their conscious mind they start becoming nervous and start thinking that they cannot meditate, they are not able to stop the thinking and the harder they try the worse it gets. They convince themselves they never will be able to do it and it is just a big waste of time sitting down while they could do sort out their busy life.  They think they cannot control they thoughts because someone, sometimes, has told them that ‘being in meditation’ means being in absence of thoughts. Nothing more false (at the beginning and for a while). We want to became the master of our minds.  For every beginner, when they became more aware of the constant output of the mind (thoughts) there will be thousands and thousands of thoughts invading the conscious level. The fact is, the brain function is to create thoughts. Is is true that...

When I was growing up, for various reasons, including my dad death when I was 14, emotional pain like sadness and grief, was very present in my life. It was such an unbearable pain that automatically I was trying to avoid feeling it by running away from it.   So the pain, the grief and the sadness, became compressed inside me and grow bigger and bigger. My understanding is that when there is too much pain we cover it up with anger because we feel less vulnerable in feeling angry than in pain.   So I used anger as an addiction to avoid feeling the pain. The anger then transformed itself in self-defeating behaviours and the emotional pain was then growing bigger. But when I became aware of the trick I was using I decided to allow myself / to have the courage to feel the pain / the grief that was sitting below the anger.   To do so I had to cry but be careful the tears need to be of grief and sadness and not of self-pity, if I cry out of self pity I do not clean my soul from...

I speak and listen to a lot of people and I know that there is a common idea that rich people or wealthy people are somehow ‘bad’: egoists, do not care about others, greedy, etc…etc… Like all generalisations this is a generalisation :) and, as such, is a untrue statement. Every generalisation is untrue: each of us is different: in our approach to life, to money, to spirituality, to values.  In our own human fragility, we are all unique in the way we perceive reality. What I know though is that when we are struggling for survival, to get food on the plate, and to help and protect the people we love most, when we act out of desperation, we are more likely to act in ‘non-spiritual’ ways, because we have lost faith. When we act out of desperation we act out of fear, therefore we have lost faith.  [Desperation is not a nice place to be. Desperation comes from lack of faith in the fact that the Universe always provides, this is my understanding and my experience, if we look at the r...

Never took a certain action? Terrorised or just anxious to move forward? Do it once, it will be like lifting a big rock…do it again it will have less weight…do it again…and again…it will become normal and then move forward to another action you’ve never taken… Practice makes perfect! 

Sometimes we are fearful to be humble, to say the truth about ourselves, or admit a mistake we've made or a decision we've taken out of fear (decisions taken out of fear are essentially and intrinsically dishonest because fear, being it based on a false conviction, is a dishonest state of mind - mostly a projection on the future based on past events or experiences - what is it more untrue/dishonest than this?). Why are we so fearful to be humble, to make ourselves 'seen' from others? The reasons are multiples but all connected to an internal belief that if we become vulnerable, if we are honest expressing our feelings, our beliefs, our anger (this is a big one we want to hide at all costs) we will be disliked, rejected, judged, abandoned. It is exactly the contrary, the more true we are the more we are sure we are being loved from the people who likes us! The more exercise we make to be honest by becoming vulnerable the more we become connected with our true self (which...

I feel so grateful today, I’ve seen the world with the eyes of God, with the eyes of love and compassion and joy, with the eyes of empathy, with the eyes of wisdom; with the same eyes some others see the world so we can see the same and feel the same: the sense of the days becoming smaller and the little things becoming bigger, like the eyes of my brother today when he looked at me and we said goodbye, he looked like the little boy I played with, running to collect seashells, endlessly during the summers of our youth, with fake tattoos (recurrent gifts of our mother’s best friend) stamped in our harms and flat chests, fading tattoos with animals, sun rays, dolls, cars and all the rest: the monolithic hope in our hearts and the stupid children’s innocent certainty that things could only get better. I feel so grateful today. 

Why sometimes it feels so scary to be Honest? We are social beings and we need social interactions to survive. We feel we need to be appreciated and loved. Sometimes we try to ‘grab’ those things by forgetting our values, our truth, our integrity. By doing so we became even more dependant and weak. When we are dishonest because we feel that we will be disliked, unloved, abandoned, we are abandoning ourselves first.

FEAR: Fake Experience Appearing Real LOVE: Libertas Omnius (Rerum) Veritas Est Fear is lack of faith, generally connected with the lack of knowledge of the truth which is what gives us freedom. When we are free (we know the truth) we cannot be in fear because we are not fearful of the the truth, we are fearful of the actions we might have to take when we know the truth. So freedom comes from knowing the truth, freedom to choose, even if we decide to choose what we do not like, it does not matter because we have made a choice out of freedom (love) and not of fear.

Love is inside every individual and it is what expands our consciousness. I am not speaking about love but about LOVE which, in all capital letters, means a state of being. If we are not in LOVE, we are not in Fear. Fear prevents our consciousness to expand, Fear shouts down our awareness.  So the more fearful we became the less aware of what is happening we are. A terrible circle. The real fear we all have is of the responsibility that comes with knowledge, the real fear is to having to act based upon knowledge because this requires courage and we cannot have courage if we’ve lost hope. So the question is how to build hope in order to face our fears. [Look out for my post with the title: 'How to build hope]'. To be continued...

It is in our culture to learn to fight, we refer to children who have difficulties as: 'little soldier' and we praise them for being strong and facing abusive reality and accepting it (as injustice for example). When I have heard this way of saying for the first time I shivered inside.  A child behaving like a little soldier? A child who has learned to loose his vulnerability, who has built a facade and pretend everything is all right when inside he is crumbling? I felt so much pity for that little child.  We have been told to be strong, not to cry and face reality. We have been told that when we give up and we surrender we are losers, we have learned to fight and to win at all costs, our integrity included.  I am not saying that perseverance is a 'bad quality' I think perseverance is the only tool we have to reach our full potential as human beings, to move forward toward the unknown. Spiritual growth is painful, it is the most painful journey of humankind but after th...

When I was young - until I was around more or less 34 - I did not have any discipline. I would start something and if I did not have almost immediate results I would give it up, just to start something new. I have reflected on that behaviours (or habits of behaviour) several times and I realised a few reasons were the cause of my lack of discipline: 1. I could not find any pleasure in what I was doing. Why? Because I was not enjoying the process since the only reason I was starting something was to obtain a result, an end goal.  I was not going to play tennis to have fun but I was going to play tennis to reach a better level, I was not reading a book for knowledge in itself but to show off my knowledge, et etc… There was no one single thing I was doing for the simple pleasure of doing it in that moment only. I was acting projected in the future and refusing to enjoy my present.  2. I was always questioning my abilities and I was never happy with my capabilities of the moment. ...

When I did not know how to be free, or what freedom meant and how to obtain it (meaning following my wishes and desires, valuing my time, being able to say no when I felt so, speaking my truth) I was placing fake love above freedom. How is it? And what is the difference between true love and fake love? Is there something like fake love and how do we identify it within ourselves?  Fake Love: We exercise 'fake love' every time we think we ought to so something for someone else, or we ought to say something, or we ought to behave in a certain way, because we feel we own this 'something' to someone or because we are terrorised of asserting our needs (some people have behaved this was for so long they do not even recognise their needs anymore).  Every time we act in those ways we are exercising 'fake love'. What does fake love do to the person 'doing the fake love' and to others? TO THE PERSON DOING 'FAKE LOVE': it diminishes that person, his/her self...

We admire persons who act with integrity, meaning that they respect the words they say, they are honest and respect the promises they make. It is very difficult to act with integrity if we live in fear, fear of not being accepted, or not being liked, ultimately fear of not being loved, in this fear we forget our values and act dishonestly only because we are begging for love. This is common for a lot of people. How to move forward? How to overcame this paralysing  fear?  First of all we need to understand what we need, and to do so we need to give a name to our feelings.  Unfortunately one of the consequence of fear is that when we are in fear we loose awareness. We became less aware of our feelings, for example. So we have to find a way to remove the fear, to accept that even IF we will not be loved when we are ourselves or speak our truth (the idea of not being loved is a projection in the future a reflection of our thinking that creates the fear) we will survive. How t...