I’m writing at a time when Tony Robbins, the well-known personal development guru is being slammed all over the internet for disparaging the #MeToo movement. A video has gone viral which was taken at one of his events that shows a woman standing up to him on his views. So in this article, I will be examining Tony Robbins, #metoo and asking if this is a new opportunity for compassion.
We don’t know exactly what was said just before the video that started the whole discussion but the clip begins with audience member, Nanine McCool explaining to Robbins that he might have misunderstood what the #metoo movement was all about. Robbins quickly interrupts her and explains what he thinks the movement is all about – people holding onto victimhood and trying to gain significance.
Misunderstanding?
So far in the conversation, you can just about put a case that he hasn’t fully understood what the movement is about and that he is asking people to not hold on to the victimhood mentality as it doesn’t get them anywhere. He does state firmly that he believes some people are using this movement to attack people to gain “a drug called significance to make yourself feel good”.
At one point in the video, Robbins physically pushes McCool back several feet and tells her not to push back to demonstrate his point that pushing back never works. Perhaps he has used this exercise successfully before before but in this context the towering man over the much smaller woman being pushed by him came across as intimidating and in a way demonstrating what the #metoo movement is about: powerful men and women using their physicality to overpower and intimidate women and men who are not as strong as them.
Even so far, you may characterise him as simply misunderstanding everything.
Victim/ Perpetrator Confusion?
Yet if you look at what he says next, there is no doubt that he believes the #metoo movement is bad. He explains that he knows powerful men, dozens of them apparently, who are not hiring well-qualified women over their male, less-qualified counterparts because the women are so attractive that they are seen as too much of a risk.
Amazing! Apart from the fact that he is basically describing illegal, discriminatory practices, he is confirming so much of what women already suspect – that we are judged on our looks and perhaps other factors such as fertility over and above whether or not we can actually do the job.
It is this statement of Robbins that is particularly offensive. It might also suggest that he himself has perpetrated some acts that he may not feel so comfortable with speaking up about. In fact, earlier in the video he tries to get the room on board with him by getting people to raise their hand if they have done something that they feel guilty about. I am personally not aware of any accusations against Robbins of any kind so this is purely a speculation based on his behaviour in this clip.
The Nature of Victimhood
Image: Shutterstock
I have personally never been drawn to his brand of personal development and his courses of any sort, although I did read one of his books years ago. I do recognise that in general, he seems to help a lot of people.
But in this article, I wish to discuss the earlier statements in the viral video with Nanine McCool – that he recommends that we do not stay in victimhood because I think there are many opportunities here to understand how to be more compassionate with each other.
When saying that people, shouldn’t choose victimhood, Robbins is talking about people who are victims of sexual assault and harassment. The woman who stood up to him, McCool, actually made a video on Youtube in which she described how she was sexually abused as a child. In fact, she demonstrates how much she has not stayed in victimhood because she is strong enough to have stood up to him.
But even if she was dwelling on things, does Robbins really suggest that as a person who was molested as a child that she should have immediately brushed it off and moved on? And that nobody should push back against child molesters and rapists because it doesn’t make us any safer?
The Shadow Self of Tony Robbins?
In the backlash against him, he has come out with something interesting that may be the key to not only understanding his behaviour that day but his whole philosophy. He said that he too was also molested as a child.
I think this may be the key to why he behaved in this way. I suddenly see a man in so much pain that he himself cannot process his own emotions. I haven’t said this publicly but part of the reason why I wrote The Genius Groove is that I saw a video with Tony Robbins in which he described how you shouldn’t dwell on your emotions and rise above them. This is the exact opposite of what my message is all about.
Facing the shadow
I have found over the years that unless you face these emotions when you are ready and strong enough to do so, they can have powerful effects on your life. We are actually a fabric of consciousness. I think that below the speed of light this consciousness can have charge and polarity. These are emotions and they are not some extraneous nebulous thing – they are who we are and they make up our very vibration. We all know from the law of attraction and sympathetic vibratory physics that like vibrations attract, so these vibrations are attracting what our lives are made up of.
So if we work on our emotions and truly resolve buried issues, from a vibrational perspective this will change the very fabric of who we are. But if you take Robbins’ advice you are just plastering over the cracks. It may work for a while but after some time your buried emotions will resurface.
Elevation and avoidance
Putting all this together I think perhaps Robbins is working from a place of severe avoidance of his own pain. He is telling everyone not to go into victimhood because he cannot connect to his own victimhood. He has learnt a strategy of not dealing with his emotions but elevating himself and pushing himself harder rather than facing those shadow aspects.
In a way, this reflects his whole career – to make a different ‘choice’, rather than face the shadow. His whole teachings can be seen in a new light of pushing himself into an elevated state in order to escape the pain of his own abuse. That might be why he reacted so badly because facing the true victimisation of people who have been abused and are standing up and discussing it, would be like facing himself and that is too painful. So perhaps that is why he interrupted McCool so quickly.
An opportunity for compassion
Image: Pixabay
In any case, it is a lesson for all of us that we need to truly understand each other. If someone has indeed been the victim of sexual assault, they are indeed a victim (at the 3D level in any case). They have had something done to them which they have no control over. It is up to them how they heal and it is is going to be different for everyone. Nobody can tell them that they need to get out of victimhood if they need more time to heal.
And if, because of our current changing attitudes, that person is emboldened to speak out against the perpetrator who has, after all, committed a crime, then we should support them, not slam the victim. Robbins is actually making the people accused of the assault and even the ones interviewing people for jobs into the victims. The victims of beautiful women trying to get a job and of being caught out for what they have actually done. Don’t forget we are speaking about the perpetrators of crimes here – job discrimination and sexual assault. Yet the actual victims of the crimes he shows no sympathy for in this clip.
I am glad that this has come to light for many reasons. Maybe Robbins will now actually take the time to understand the #metoo movement and has indeed pledged this. He has also modelled for us some of the prevailing attitudes that some people brush incidents of sexual assault under the carpet and blame the victim when they try and stand up.
I suspect also, as I outlined earlier, that due to his own abuse when he was a child he is avoiding facing his shadow emotions about this. Perhaps this is compounded by feeling that, as a man, he is unable to face his emotions about his abuse as many other men also feel unable to do.
The End of Ra Ra?
I think the way to move forward is not to vilify Robbins but to maybe understand where he might be coming from – his own emotional landscape and drives and how he is mirroring certain attitudes in our society. We need to make it safer for men and women to come forward and face when they have been sexually abused otherwise, they may not just want to put a cap on their own emotions but shut up anybody else who might trigger them.
Image: Shutterstock
Exploring emotions are the key to moving forward. So maybe this is the death of the Ra Ra when it means elevating your mood and attitude as an act of denial of emotional shadow. Papering over the cracks of your emotions and pretending they don’t exist is not going to work because, like with Robbins, they will eventually rise up to the surface to be looked at just as his emotional shadow has now.
I know this is a controversial topic and I appreciate respectful comments below.
As mother’s day is approaching in the UK at the time of writing, I would like to do something I have never done before and come out in public as a person who is Childless not by Choice or CNBC. For the first time, I am going to sharing my personal journey and also be reflecting on childlessness and The Genius Groove.
Some of you may have noticed that my website was absent from between 2015 – 2017. There is a myriad of reasons for this but one of them is that I was on a journey of grief due to childlessness. This has led me to lots of realisations as to who we are as human beings and what our purpose is on this planet so I thought I would share.
The assumption of family
I have always wanted to be a mother. I grew up with two sisters and a working mother and father. Ours was the sort of house where we would gather around the kitchen table and chat. We also went places as a family to visit other families, as is the norm for Asian culture, so I always expected this family-centric life to continue.
I did get married quite young at 21 years old, but I was still a medical student and because I had a working mother who was away for long hours, I didn’t want to have children during my years as a junior doctor. I wanted to be in a position where I could focus on my children.
So, in the late 1990s, I envisaged a future for myself where I would travel the world as a speaker and author, earning enough to also have time for my children. My future children were always at the heart of my career plans.
To juggle or not juggle?
Image: Shutterstock
I went on to train as a GP and this is when a lot of my colleagues started to get married and have babies. I looked at them juggling their breast pumps and their bleeps and I thought again that I did not want to put my own children through all that. I thought it best to wait until I could take a career break.
But as many of you know from my book The Genius Groove, by the time I had finished my training as a GP, my marriage was on the rocks. I would not dream of bringing a child into a relationship that was not stable and about to collapse so although my long hours had diminished, I was no longer in a suitable relationship.
My marriage ended and after a few years I found my new partner and looked forward to starting a family with him. To save our privacy I will not go into the details of what happened next, but suffice to say that we did not have a child together. All the while my career as an author and speaker took off, but it was a lot more work than I envisaged back in the late 1990s.
There were many times when I would travel with very little notice. Looking back, hand on heart, if I had been a mother at that point I would have had to say no to all those dream opportunities. And I would be sitting here now without that sense of achievement.
Reaching the end and reaching out
It all came to a crashing halt when my body went into menopause a lot earlier than expected whilst still in my early 40s. That same year no less than eight of my friends were in various stages of pregnancy, some of them for the first time. So not only was I facing a future of childlessness, some of my friendships would never be the same again.
I had an uneasy feeling growing inside me. I was happy for my friends. I love children and babies and even did a conference about indigo children so I am delighted to spend time with children. But the uneasy feeling would come to me at times.
I looked online for discussions about women without children and only found articles about people who were adamant that they never wanted children and were happily childfree. Or I found sites discussing infertility. But what if the fertility journey had come to an end? I did a google search for ‘childless and don’t want to be’ and at last, I found Jody Day and Gateway Women.
A new gateway
Jody Day is a British author and psychologist who found herself childless by circumstance. She has broken down barriers in this taboo subject and is doing a lot to get the subject of being childless not by choice into the public eye.
Crucially, she realised that people who are childless not by choice, feel grief. Grief is normally only assigned to parents who have lost children but those who have never had them also feel a type of grief that is often not recognised as such.
She has founded an online community called Gateway Women. They also have in-person meetups around the world. This subject is still so secret and taboo that I had to go through various checks before being allowed in.
Healing the healer
So here I was, an international speaker, Amazon best-selling author and even TV host. I had written books on the subject of emotions and had been a holistic therapist for some years not to mention having been a GP. But I had no road map for these emotions. I needed help to navigate the torrent of feelings that were going through me about not being a mother when I so badly wanted to be.
Being part of the community for some years now has helped me so much to heal the grief I feel. Along the way, I have come to learn a lot about the dynamics of having children and also where we get our sense of purpose. So here are some of the things I have learnt.
Children and Purpose
This is one of the biggest lessons I have learnt on my healing journey. It is sometimes an unspoken tenet of society that your children are meant to be your greatest purpose in life. Otherwise, why would you be working at a job you hate to bring in money if it wasn’t to build a life for your family? Having children makes it all worth it.
It’s been said straight to my face – what is your purpose if you don’t have children? Luckily for me, such comments are rare as I have a public life. My sense of purpose is out for people to see. It has amazed me that in all the time I have spent travelling the world speaking when I was on my own, nobody asked me if I was married or if I had a man in tow. My work spoke for itself.
I found my Genius Groove but people don’t always find theirs. Our education system is designed to numb out our creativity and funnel us into jobs that pay the bills instead.
So if the children that your life was supposed to revolve around do not manifest then what are you supposed to do after that? People stay in jobs that they do not love where they don’t feel a sense of purpose and not having children compounds these feelings.
Excusing our dreams
But what does that say about wider society? That to some degree, we have substituted having children for having a purpose and fulfilling our creative dreams. For some, having children and being a parent might truly be their creativity. But we are also individuals and part of our inner journey and our path in life is to discover who we are in our own right.
But this can be hard work: to stand up and be counted for what you really want to do and who you really are. It feels much easier to cover all that over and children give the perfect excuse to not fulfil your true potential. You can point to your children and your responsibilities.
A lot of children are not planned so it cannot be said that they are consciously brought into the world as an excuse to not face ourselves. But once they arrive they can take on that role.
So this gives another double whammy for childless people. They not only haven’t had the child and have all that readjustment to do, they also have to face questions that people with children may put aside such as why am I here and what is my purpose?
Moving on
With childlessness from all causes on the rise and about a quarter of women in Europe and the USA reaching menopause without having had children, these conversations are only going to become more prevalent. Thanks to Jody Day and Gateway Women and others for getting that ball rolling. They have helped me immensely.
As time goes by I feel very different. The grief, although it never entirely goes away does diminish as I do the work of processing my feelings. I realise now that I could not have fulfilled so many of my dreams if I had been a mother. Although it has been a tough journey, I understand and even now celebrate why I chose at a soul level not to have children.
It is mainly the work of Jody Day and her community that gave me a map to understand my own feelings that I could not articulate that has moved me forward into this place where I feel whole again.
At this unprecedented time in human history when childlessness from all sorts of reasons is so prevalent, we can gain new insights into our dynamics around parenthood and our sense of purpose. Together we can greater insights into parenting and The Genius Groove.
I know this is a controversial post. Please do not leave suggestions in the comments as to how I can adopt or some other solution that you think is being helpful. I would welcome your thoughts on the main points though.
What I am about to say is probably going to trigger a lot of people but here goes. Some of the ‘green’ sentiment that occurs in the “eco-warrior” world actually represents feelings of attachment to the three-dimensional plane. There I have said it. Now I will explain why.
What you may not know about me is back in the 1990s I was a regular little eco-warrior. I was a member of the Women’s environmental network, I helped organise London’s first organic picnic and even went to marches and sat in fields to protest GMOs.
The main thrust of the eco movement is that we must save the planet and that changes in climate and to the planet are disastrous. I think it is only common sense that we should stop stripping the plant of resources or pouring waste into the sea that is choking marine life and the many other toxic hazards that we create as a result of our polluting human lifestyles. I still applaud all the efforts to halt these.
The Emotional drive behind being Green
However,there is an emotional drive to many green philosophies that I have come to recognise represents an attachment to three-dimensional existence and a concurrent resistance to spirituality.
Yes, I believe that we can make the planet more pleasant by reducing the waste and pollution, but underneath a lot of green sentiment is a desire to keep the planet as it is.We don’t want the Earth to change its climate and we blame ourselves if we see any signs of it happening.
With every unusually hot summer or turbulent winter, people panic that we are not doing enough to halt these Earth changes and that our polluting lifestyles are causing them. There appears to be a massive drive to keep the planet as it is forever.
What is a planet anyway?
But what if the planet is meant to change? What is the planet anyway? We assume it is a big lump of rock made up of matter. But if a century of quantum physics is anything to go by then breaking down matter to the subatomic level gives us a lot of empty space plus fundamentally nothing more than information. The planet also consists of matter and atoms and is therefore fundamentally made up of information too.
If the Earth is a big ball of information perpetually spinning in a mysteriously frictionless manner that we don’t even understand then we have no right to want it to stay the same. The fact is, we really don’t understand the Earth at all. We have no idea what lies at its core. We are told the core is made of molten iron because we observe the Earth’s fluctuating magnetic fields but we really don’t know if that is true. It is only recently that we have discovered that there is water near the Earth’s core.
So if the Earth shows signs of changes in terms of climate and volcanic eruptions, how do we know what is really going on? It is only a series of assumptions that lead us to believe that we are the cause of it all. The more I have researched the background science of my work with black holes, the more I am shocked to find just how limited our understanding of Earth phenomena really is.
Do we really understand the Earth?
Meteorologists do not have a complete understanding of why water comes from rain clouds and seismologists are not sure what triggers earthquakes. The antimatter found coming out of thunderstorms was a big shock to most scientists. Clearly, we are ignorant of some of the basics when it comes to our home planet.
Why we blame ourselves for Earth changes is due to our emotional makeup. Humans generally like to feel guilty about something. Feeling guilty is an emotional pattern that is instilled in many of us in childhood after being berated by parents and carers.
Habitual emotions can become familiar and if the cause of the original emotion is removed then we will find something to replace it with. It is as if we become addicted to guilt and if we constantly feel guilty about something then it keeps that emotion going.
What is causing the Earth to change?
If Earth changes are not all down to humans then why do we have climate change and an increase in earthquakes and freak weather? If we go back just a few thousand years we can find many recorded incidents of climate change in different regions of the world which may have been responsible for wiping out civilisations in certain areas. These changes happened before the onset of industrialisation, so pollution cannot be the cause of them.
Going back even further, in a lot of ancient cultures there is the idea that the Earth goes through very long cycles. In some traditions this is 26,000 years and involves the planet going from a golden age, falling into a dark age and back again. The Hindu traditions have perhaps preserved this best in the concept of yugas.
The turning point and The Flood
In the current cycle, there seems to have been a clear delineation point: The Flood. The Flood that we read about in the Bible has been recorded by many cultures around the world. Despite people trying to diminish the scope of the flooding to a local inundation in Mesopotamia, there is evidence in scripture for there having been a global flood.
It is interesting what happens pre and post-flood according to historical texts. Before The Flood, people are recorded as having very long lifespans. This is true in the case of the Sumerian Kings lists and of the Pyramid Texts of Egypt. Even the biblical Abraham is recorded as having lived a long time. After The Flood, the lifespans of the kings start to shorten.
I have made the point elsewhere at length (such as in the video below) that I believe this is because space and time itself were different in what we call the past. Dimensions were closer together and therefore the gods, or interdimensional beings were more present in peoples’ lives. The Flood makes a sort of delineation point, it possibly indicates the fall from a golden age to a dark age.
From Earth Shifts to ascension?
If this is true and the Earth cycles from the golden age to dark age and back again with the very fabric of spacetime shifting as this happens, then it is likely that we are in the middle of shifting back again to a golden age. If so, then this shift could be contributing to the extreme weather and earthquakes that we see happening right now.
The very fact that the Earth is shifting could be a good thing. Obviously not for those who are suffering in the short term, but in the long term we could be moving towards a golden age. In that case, we don’t want to the planet to stay the same. In fact, it doesn’t matter what we do or think because the cycles of the Earth are going to happen anyway.
The ultimate attachment to material reality?
So the green approach which is about holding onto the planet and wanting it to stay the same also comes from an emotional need to hold onto something in our personal lives. It shows an attachment to the three-dimensional paradigm. For all we know, the Earth is changing because it is starting an ascension mode. By wanting the Earth to stay the same, we could be trying to avoid an ascension process back to a golden age.
A need to hold on to the Earth is really the ultimate in attachment to material reality. It is not a multidimensional approach. Does that mean that we shouldn’t take care of our planet? Absolutely not, I don’t mean that. We are currently burning through fossil fuels and creating a lot of problematic toxic waste that is dumped on land or in the oceans. Fumes create health problems for us too.
Seeing the bigger picture
But to blame the massive changes in climate and earthquakes purely on our actions is not seeing the bigger picture. It is fine to want to be good to the planet but be aware that the Earth may be shifting multidimensionally.
So maybe we shouldn’t want to save the Earth but to allow the Earth to go through its changes whilst cleaning up our act and exploring so-called Free-energy technologies.
In this way, we may truly progress from concern for the Earth being a purely three-dimensional affair to taking a Multidimensional perspective. And who knows what may happen when we lose the collective guilt and better understand our planet.
I hope you enjoyed this article. To find out more about the Black Hole Principle and how it affects Earth Science, check out Punk Science here.
Since then she has founded so many initiatives as a visionary coach and genius accelerator but most of all Soleira is so ahead of everyone else’s teaching that she is impossible to define.
If ever anyone is constantly evolving the ‘new’ it is her and her network.
In this interview, she gives a succinct explanation of genius a long time before the rest of the world caught up to this way of thinking.
She explains how true genius is the place where the inner and outer genius pool meet and that tapping into this meeting place can be taught.
Enjoy the interview. There is more about The Genius Groove here. Find out more about Soleira Green and Genius here.
In this article we are going to be talking about Forgiveness. Is there something in your life that you just can’t seem to let go of? Has someone in your life really bothered you? You know you should forgive them but you just can’t forget or let go of what happened.
This happens to a lot of people – they know that forgiveness is something they should strive for but can’t quite get there which makes them feel even more guilty.
It’s no wonder, as the way in which we are taught to forgive makes it difficult. I think we are taught to forgive in a way that is all wrong; we are told we should forgive and forget and it feels that we are letting that person off the hook.
This also makes us feel that anybody can do anything to us and we will say it is OK. This can make us feel vulnerable to being attacked again in the same way by that person and that we will just let them off the hook.
It is healthy for us to have boundaries and personal integrity so the usual advice on forgiveness can cause conflict within us. So how can we get peace from the memory of the situation without feeling like we are allowing someone to get away with it?
First – you don’t need to forgive the person or be open to them do it again. What they did was not OK by you, you don’t want that to happen again.
Image:Shutterstock
If you change your perspective and realise that it is not the person that you need to let off the hook, but to understand the situation, then you can move towards healing within yourself. You need to understand and process why the situation has come into your life. Once you get that ‘aha’ moment then the inner shift can occur so that you can move on from the emotions.
In Simply Divine we discuss how the Black Hole Principle implies that we have aspects of our consciousness out of space and time beyond the speed of light. This is what is traditionally called the Higher Self.
This is the aspect of us that chooses our lives and everything that happens in it. The key to our healing is to move towards an understanding of why our Higher Self has introduced a particular incident and the healing journey that this has engendered.
What has been this gift in this?
Just asking the question ‘what has been this gift in this?’ can shift the entire feelings about a situation. Sometimes this type of work is so effective that the situation will not affect us anymore and we will feel much more free.
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