Dismantle the Core

"No matter what spiritual practice or tradition you follow, if you do not feel your heart area becoming softer and more open and loving, your practice or tradition is missing a vital piece of the awakening and embodiment puzzle.

I have a sense of where the missing piece lies for many people – the deficiency story.  At the core of every ego there is a deficiency story in the form of “I’m not good enough,” “I’m unlovable,” “I’m unsafe” or some similar story.  We unconsciously develop these false scripts earlier in life as a way of protecting ourselves from the deep somatic emotional wound that accompanies these stories.  Time and time again, in my private and group sessions with people, I find that this core story runs everyone’s life. The core story is a way of surviving, of keeping ourselves from truly connecting with others, of disconnecting from the deeper essence of love and goodness found in our beingness.  We are hiding, fighting, blaming, controlling and seeking love, approval and validation, all as a way to avoid meeting the profound sense of pain and fear that drives and keeps alive these stories in our minds.

I can’t tell you how many times (a lot) that I have worked or talked with spiritual teachers or people fairly far along the spiritual path who are still operating from this sense of deficiency on some level.  Their hearts are closed, locked up even.  They are focused on surviving and self-protecting, rather than loving unconditionally.  Many of them are carrying around unresolved trauma.  Worse yet, many of them say things like, “I’ll always feel not good enough on some level.”  They have made excuses for it and resigned themselves to always having it around.  They have stopped short of investigating this false story and its accompanying emotional wound.  And the price for stopping is quite high, for stopping leaves a realization half-baked.  It keeps the heart from blowing open.  Therefore it keeps deep and compassionate love and intimacy from being realized in every relationship, with every other person and thing on earth.  The price of this story is constant stress and anxiety in the body, which exacerbates disease.

Why are we so afraid to meet the pain of this deficiency story and why have we settled for a spirituality that keeps it in place and makes excuses for it?  The answer is fear.  You see, we truly don’t know who or what we would be if this story was to truly fall away.  A core deficiency story is the last stand of the ego.  It is the lynchpin that holds the separate identity in place.   Fearing what amounts to death, our resistance keeps us from deeply inquiring into it.

Become a skillful warrior.  Find the tools to investigate and dismantle this core story.  Find the courage to feel and dissolve its core pain.  Recognizing presence is not enough, for this story holds on like a wire tightly wound to our being.  It will fight and fight for survival.  But when you are a warrior, you will find the sharpest inquiry tools.  You will stop at nothing less than true and pure freedom.  You will not make excuses for keeping the deepest strand of unhealthy ego in place.

I have had the fortune of experiencing the complete dismantling of the core story “I’m unlovable.”  This story ran my life for over three decades.  The Living Inquiries were the answer to the dismantling.  I can’t begin to tell you how sweet and loving life is after the dismantling.  I can fall in love in any moment with intimacy with another person.  I find myself in love with life, with being itself.  Gone are the days when my mind would interpret virtually every word or act by another person as some sort of confirmation that I am unlovable or unlikeable.  Gone are the days when I would keep score on Facebook regarding who likes my posts or what teachers are more popular than me.  Gone are the days when my heart would ache when someone didn’t find me attractive or love me enough.  When this particular story broke, I realized that love is for me to show and give.  It is not for me to receive.  Desperately seeking to receive love, approval, attention, validation or acknowledgement came from the deficiency story.

Don’t you owe it to yourself to know who you really are?  Don’t you owe it to yourself to engage intimately with others, showing them love without expecting anything in return? Don’t you owe it to yourself to experience psychological safety wherever you go?  Don’t you owe it to yourself to experience that you are perfect just as you are with all your unique traits and odd quirks?

If you don’t believe you owe this to yourself, you are arguing for your own suffering.  You are choosing a false script as your operating system.  When that script is chosen, day after day, you’re essentially “fu*cked.”  There’s nothing you can do but continue to live out that script and all of the separation it brings.

Be a skillful warrior.  For more information or help with this deficiency story, visit www.livinginquiries.com.

Please share this writing with anyone you know who doesn’t fully love him or herself or who has stopped short of looking at this deepest strand of ego."

~ Scott Kiloby is an author and international speaker on the subject of freedom through non-dual realization, a Certified Addiction Treatment Counselor/Registered Addiction Specialist, Director of the Kiloby Center for Recovery, Inc. and Founder of the Living Inquiries Community.

"My addiction progressed from smoking marijuana as a teenager to drinking lots of alcohol and using many drugs, including methamphetamine, opiates, cocaine, and LSD later in life. Near the end of this dark cycle of using, I was swallowing handfuls of prescription painkillers several times a day. My health was failing. My skin was yellow. The guilt and shame were overwhelming. I hid my addiction from everyone, ashamed of what my life had become.

Through the help of wonderfully supportive friends and family members, I was finally able to quit using drugs and alcohol. Yet, the addictive cycle continued in other ways. I found myself caught in subsequent addictive patterns related to money, food, caffeine, tobacco, relationships, sex, attention or acknowledgment, and seeking self-improvement and enlightenment. I realized, as so many do, that drugs and alcohol were not the problem—“I” was the problem. There was something about me that made life on earth synonymous with the need to escape and avoid. I searched through many self-help, positive thinking, religious, and spiritual programs. I read tons of books, watched many videos, and followed the works of a long list of teachers. I was hunting for healing but nothing seemed to provide permanent release. I’d make a little progress here and there, in terms of reducing the addictive seeking, but even my desire to end my addiction became an addiction. Through the help of some wise teachers and an intention to look more deeply into my experience, I finally found the key…

Freedom from addiction is already contained in the one place an addict refuses to look—the present moment. This changed everything! How did I find that freedom? Well…the short story is this: After reading some books on mindfulness, I began to witness my thoughts rather than indulging them, feel my emotions and sensations without any labels or stories on them, and rest in the present moment as often as possible. This resulted in a gradual but major shift in perception, such that the present moment became the foundation of my life. A few years before this book was born, I developed the Living Inquiries—you can read about them later in this book. The Inquiries helped me tremendously in finally putting to rest the more deeply held self-esteem issues such as the sense of being unlovable and not good enough. The Inquiries also helped resolve trauma I had experienced in childhood, and carried into adulthood, as a result of being bullied repeatedly by classmates.

I eventually founded a mindfulness training program called the Living Inquiries Community that trains people all over the world in how to use natural rest and the Living Inquiries on all sorts of issues, including addiction, depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and trauma. The training program is for those who wish to help others—and themselves also—to go deeper into this work. Eventually, I began to develop the deeper bodywork...

This was the most profound stage of my journey, as deeply held energetic blockages and repressed emotions began to dissolve away, leaving my body feeling very light and transparent. When these blockages dissolved, the last remaining addictions fell away. During the process of learning, developing, and practicing the tools in this book, I had many subtle and powerful transformational or spiritual experiences, including a profound sense of the oneness of all of life. There were also times when I encountered deep emotional pain, and periods of time where I felt blocked. But all experiences come and go—good and bad. What has remained, and endured, is a deep and abiding peace and acceptance of life as it is. This has provided an amazing capacity to be and love myself, no matter how I show up in any given moment.

For many years, I kept quiet about this treasure, unable to fully articulate it in book form. Because natural rest has to be experienced rather than only understood by the mind, it took me a while to find the right words to share it with others. Finally, one day a few years ago, these words came. Actually, they gushed out of me like a heavy downpour of rain in early spring. The result is this book. This book is not a thesis on the science of addiction. It is not the story of my addicted life. It is an instructional book. I’ve mapped out these tools in great detail to help you with addiction. Once the book was written, I opened the Kiloby Center for Recovery in Rancho Mirage, California, and the Natural Rest House detox and residential center in Palm Springs, California, with the help of many gracious people. I also became a California Certified Addiction Specialist...

You will likely struggle along the way. I did. The struggle is part of the process. But if you stick with it, I believe you will find the treasure I have found and realize that this treasure is contained right here, right now in the present moment—the one place the addicted mind refuses to look."

~ Scott Kiloby, Natural Rest for Addiction