Welcome to “Healing from Within.” I am your host Sheryl Glick author of The Living Spirit which shares stories of spiritual awakenings, spiritual communication healing energies miracles and awareness of soul intuitive guidance and am delighted to have Clayton John Ainger author of The Ego’s Code and will share the guidance he has spiritually received to help turn around self-sabotaging thought patterns which then resulted in a total transformation and new life path for him.
As listeners of ‘Healing from Within” are so well aware Sheryl and her guests share intimate amazing experiences and insights that help them and others realize life in its infinite multidimensional aspects as they learn about the Universal Laws of Energy and the personal power we all possess in order to create and manifest a healthier happier life journey. It all begins with self-investigation, self-mastery of our emotions, and greater clarity in understanding the balance of our human and divine nature.
Clayton begins by sharing his difficult childhood and sense that he had to find ways to overcome the negativity presented to him by outside influences and begin to rely on his inner sense of peace wisdom and love. Clayton and Sheryl are well aware that we all have negative thoughts: actually about 50 percent of our thoughts on any given day are negative but recently a guest on the show told Sheryl that it could actually be as high as 90 percent of our thoughts being negative each day.. But what do we do if they consume you?
Clayton wrote, ”I have learned over the years that there are no coincidences and that in hindsight everything happens for a reason until you stop living in your past. Yes, like you, I have experienced challenges, hardship and negativity, sometimes to the point of incapacitation. Would I change the challenges that I have experienced, the hardships I have overcome, and the negativity I have endured? Absolutely not, because what I have experienced in my life has helped me to design who I am today and the life I choose to live. However, what I recognized is that the challenges, the hardships, and the negativity went on a lot longer than was necessary, because even though I intellectually knew better, I did not do better, by making the necessary changes in my life when I could have. I kept on playing out what seemed like the same scenarios in my life. It was like I was a zombie living in a trance.” Life is here to be lived, through our experiences, good and bad, and by definition you will experience adversity, challenges, hardship and negativity, but you are not meant to “live in it.”
Sheryl says…. So if you listen to the negative thoughts of yourself or others you limit yourself from appreciating the beauty goodness and potential you have within and the life only you can create once you recognize and discard the myths and beliefs that society has imposed on your physical life thoughts but not your soul life.
There is a reason for the negativity of human thinking…What if the reason is that if you experience 60,000 repetitive negative thoughts (plus the negative feelings, emotions, behaviors and self-talk associated with those thoughts) is because you don’t notice the patterns in your thoughts, feelings, emotions, behaviors, and self-talk and you don’t do something about it. I know from my own life, when we start to notice what is actually going on and decipher its meaning the negativity disappears, and your life changes for the better. You do have a choice!
In answer to the question “What is Negativity?” Clayton wrote, “In the first instance, ‘Negativity’ is a natural and normal psychological and physical message from your mind and body - a thought, a feeling, an emotion, an action, a behavior or self talk - letting you know that something is not quite right or how you believe it should be. Its primary purpose is to keep you safe. On a psychological and physical level, the negativity you experience today is an evolution of man’s normal and natural ‘fight, flight or freeze’ responses. But there is so much more to negativity as you will shortly discover…
What is a fight, flight or freeze response? This is a physiological reaction that occurs in response to a perceived harmful event, attack or threat to our survival. The principle states that the animal instinct within us reacts to threats with a general discharge of our sympathetic nervous system, priming us for fighting or fleeing. “My concern is that this will continue until we, as a global society, seek and truly understand why we experience negativity or its true purpose. Don’t get me wrong, scientists fundamentally understand the biology behind negativity. Neuroscience absolutely understands the brain and body responses, and a lot of philosophers have tried to understand its true meaning. However, if we knew better, surely we would do better, right? We would not react or repeat unhealthy patterns of behavior just to maintain the status quo. We would be living our dreams every day. That is indeed a hopeful intention.
We know we cannot run or hide from negativity. Guess what? It did not stay down for long because you cannot hide from it, dissolve it, ignore it, or stuff it down. Why? Because spiritually, negativity is not negative it has a purpose! This is why positive thinking does not counteract negativity in the long term.
Negativity is energy and all the different forms of negativity have their own unique energetic signature, frequency and vibration. The great thing about energy is that it can be changed, released or transformed into something that will serve you rather than incapacitate or hinder you. The most important thing you need to understand about negativity is that ALL forms of negativity, and I mean ALL negativity, are echoes or whispers of your past, i.e. they relate to and come from events in your past. Not just your past in your current life time, but your past in your previous lifetimes, too!
Clayton tells us how he opened up his awareness to energy work. He tells us that In his own life he has regularly experienced such intense negativity. he sabotaged his success, my weight, his health and vitality, his relationships, his career, finances and his spirituality. “Let me share a few examples with you… Regarding my health and weight. I used to weigh 252 pounds. I remember working in London and having a full English breakfast of sausages, bacon, eggs, beans, fried bread and French fries every day for nine months. Then, at lunchtime having foods like pasta, and in the evening, going out with colleagues drinking until I would fall into my apartment. Today, I am proud to say that I weigh a healthy 182 pounds and have for the majority of the past 10 years. Regarding my career and finances. I used to be an accountant and tax consultant, but for 10 years I was so unhappy and felt unfulfilled. I left with no money and high debts to start my own consultancy business, which I have grown to a six-figure turnover that is now on course for seven figures.
Regarding my relationships. I went from being divorced and alone to being happily married to my twin flame soul mate.”
Clayton tells us about his spiritual search and when he recognized he was utilizing psychic mediumship abilities. He writes, “Regarding my spirituality. I was so afraid of what people would think and say about me that I hid my gifts for years. I have experienced psychic attacks from other so called “teachers” who tried to get me to stop. I now give psychic readings to people all over the world. I run spiritual events and here I am writing my first book, The Ego’s Code. I am very comfortable in my own skin and I have accepted who I am and all that I am as a limitless being. I play many roles in my life – husband, father, son, brother, friend, entrepreneur, business owner, health nut, shaman, psychic medium, speaker, author just to name a few – and I love them all! So what is the Ego’s Code? There are patterns to your negativity. It has meaning! That is why the same things keep happening over and over again. Negativity leads us to explore our inner most goals needs and our life plan so we can move beyond what we perceive which may or may not be true to actually know ourselves better and create new situations and behaviors that work for our highest good.
Clayton and Sheryl believe we all have intuitive or psychic awareness but must learn how to recognize it and tap into that energy in a more practical and consistent way.
Sheryl says… In regard to Clayton’s response that everyone is psychic intuitive or sensitive to energy, they definitely are, but to tap into that energy you have to want to, you have to make a choice, you have to see the benefits and make a shift in thinking…. In my book The Living Spirit I wrote, “Reiki energy healing sessions have enabled many of my clients to feel their own flow of energy and to become aware of their intuitive nature. A more comprehensive knowledge of individual assets and powerful life force factors is the payoff for this exploration of self. Some people believe that spirituality and self-awareness a connection to the universe and understanding life and death are only available to the old and wise, the well-educated, or the affluent seeker and traveler. But in reality, there is no age, race, gender, socioeconomic, or religious requirement necessary to discover who we are, and what we want and need for a successful life journey.”
Every soul is on a ‘learning journey.’ Everyone in life, has two or three core fundamental lessons they need to learn – it may be about money, relationships, self-worth, love, career, health, appreciation, gratitude, etc. There are a whole host of things and what I know to be true is that they will be specific to you. e.g. my core life lessons are to feel safe in my spiritual teachings and to keep others safe that are on the journey with me, to feel worthy of receiving, to feel love, and not to fear wealth, but to accept financial abundance into my life.
In your book The Ego’s Code you talk about Oneness and Interconnectedness? To many people that is an arbitrary concept as they believe we are all individuals and separate in our beliefs and attitudes. We are all interconnected to the energy of creation or the beginning of life from Universal Forces and continuing evolution and expansion of a growing compassionate form of oneness and unity. A physical life offers us many opportunities to remember our eternal soul presence and interconnectedness to Universal Source. We are all on a spiritual journey of self-investigation and the mastering of our human and divine emotions.
In the process of remembering the Higher Self or Soul we can better understand the Ego or personality and physical component of life. Every time you experienced a trauma of any kind, on a scale from minor (e.g. someone shouting at you to the point you feel scared) to severe (e.g. being raped or murdered) it creates a tear or hole in your soul and part of your soul leaves. The piece of soul that leaves goes to a place in the consciousness where it feels safe. That is why so often people I work with say, “I just feel something is missing” or “I feel I have lost part of me.” As a shamanic practitioner, Clayton sees and experiences the consciousness as a “World Tree” with three levels: the lower shadow world, middle world (the here and now), and the upper world (our connection to divinity).
UPPER WORLD “The Divine”
MIDDLE WORLD “The Here and Now”
LOWER WORLD “The Shadow Self”
On a soul level, the tear or hole creates a ‘void’ and into the void goes all the negativity – thoughts, feelings, emotions, actions, behaviors and self-talk associated with that trauma. It is from here that the Ego is created. Yes, created! Before I continue, let me ask you two questions. When someone dies, what happens to his or her soul? Yes… it leaves the physical body and transcends. Every person I ask, every time replies with this answer or something similar. So here is my second question… what happens to the Ego, because we all have one? It is at this point, I want to give thanks and acknowledge a good friend of mine, Paul Cobley. Paul died a number of years ago, and it was when I visited him in the Chapel of Rest that he gave me this answer. When someone dies his or her Ego also leaves the body and transcends, in fact it goes home. It reconnects with their divine Higher Self. The Higher Self and the ego are one and the same. How is this possible? What is the Higher Self? Your Higher Self is an eternal, omnipotent, conscious, and divine intelligent being, who is your real self.
At the point of incarnation, i.e. when you begin your current lifetime something magical and wonderful happens – Your Higher Self splits in two – into your divine Higher Self and your Ego. Your Higher Self becomes omnipresent and is everywhere, and your Ego Self enters your physical body and mind.
As you embark on your life’s journey, your Ego attracts to you situations and people so that you can learn and release the negative energy. The whole purpose of which is to heal the tear or hole in your soul so that you can become whole again! But as we have already discussed above, we have been conditioned to give negativity a bad meaning and stuff it down inside, hoping it will never rear its head again or we ignore it and we wonder why the same things keep happening over and over again.
If you consider the meaning of Ego to be:
Expand
your Greatness
Out
You can absolutely experience wholeness during your life… you do not have to wait until you die! In other words, your Ego completely disappears and you live in the truth, your truth! The only reason you have an ego is because of the trauma you experienced in the past, so when you heal the trauma and release the energy, your Ego has done its job!
Clayton tells us there are no accidents or coincidences in Life and Sheryl’s first book was “Life Is No Coincidence-The Life and Afterlife Connection” Sheryl like Clayton discovered, “We are not alone, life is not random and as spiritual beings having a physical life we are quite gifted and able to pursue our goals and dreams successfully if we pay attention to our thoughts actions and ask for help at times.
Thoughts influence matter and negativity relates to this idea. There are patterns to your negativity. That is why the same thing keeps happening! It has meaning! There is something for you to notice. There is something fundamental that you need to learn that will help you in your life to heal some aspect of your life you are not happy with. The combination of your self-talk, thoughts, feelings, actions, behaviors and emotional wellbeing in given situations highlights a key that will help you to understand and decipher their meaning. This is called the Ego’s Code.
The eight Truths Clayton mention fall into the 8 categories below. Story 1 – I should keep quiet Story 2 – I can’t think for myself Story 3 – I don’t feel Story 4 – I can’t be me
Story 5 – I am unlovable Story 6 – I don’t get involved Story 7 – I don’t like me. Story 8 – It’s safer to play small
EXAMPLE: Story 1 – I should keep quiet
The mantra from your Ego’s Code is my voice matters; I love my voice!
You have a voice for very important reasons, namely to share your thoughts, feelings, opinions, insights, and wisdom, but if you have experienced anything like the following e.g. continually being ignored, talked over, shouted at, put down or punished for being outspoken (in this life or a past life), you may shy away from sharing or even hide (physically or inside), what is real and true for you. Remember, the core reason for all the “stories” you tell yourself is to keep you safe and avoid being hurt again as you were in the past – and that is a good thing , but it stops you from fully experiencing the best of you and your life. Rationally, when you consciously reflect on each story, they may or may not make sense unless you are aware of them or notice the pattern. Spiritually, they make perfect sense! They form part of the divine spiritual system and there is a divine order to them. In service to you, your Ego has invited you into repetitive situations for you to learn from your story or stories, to heal or to become whole. But here’s your challenge - your human fight, flight or freeze response has been conditioned to do all that you can to avoid the situation… until now.
The voices in your head… Each story begins with an unconscious thought, which is often accompanied by a voice in your head (which can be as quiet as a whisper, but it is there). My question to you is this, when you hear the little voice in your head, do you hear you? Is there one voice or more than one? This may seem strange, but you may hear someone else’s voice, a parent, grandparent, a friend, a teacher, or a boss. It may be the phrase, their tone, the energy or even the sound of the voice that will let you know. You are not crazy or going crazy! In fact this is normal.
The reason you experience a story is because unconsciously you still feel unsafe e.g., unsafe to voice your opinions, unsafe to think for yourself, unsafe being successful and so on. As for negativity, ALL stories, without exception, relate to your past, whether that is the past in your current lifetime or from your past lives. You may experience one, more than one, or many stories in your life. But you will experience at least one. Each story has arisen from any one or a combination of the traumas you have experienced in your past. Or a story may have arisen because in the past, you were given a lot of attention or recognition for behavior linked to a story.
Later you will understand how other people have impacted upon how you see, feel and experience the world. All of which are gifts. Some will impact on how you behave and show up in life. Through reading this book you will have a choice about what you want to keep for you and what you want to get rid of because it does not serve you.
ANOTHER EXAMPLE: Story 2 – I can’t think for myself The mantra from your Ego’s Code is my thoughts matter; I easily think for myself!
I learned many years ago, that when I say ‘yes’ to something or someone in my life then I am saying ‘no’ to something or someone else. For example, writing this book took a lot of time, energy and focused attention. Saying ‘yes’ to writing meant that I said ‘no’ on many occasions to spending time with my family. In my learning about the Ego’s Code I have found that this story often partners Story 1 - ‘I must keep quiet’ for similar reasons to those we discussed above. However, I would go one step further and say that this story can have a deeper and more painful impact on the way you experience life because as a minimum it can cause you to appear detached and become isolated, or at an extreme, completely incapacitated.
Story 5 – I am unlovable The mantra from your Ego’s Code is I am worthy of love; I openly receive love into all aspects of my life. When I reflect on my life, I have never been surrounded by a lot of close friends. Often at the center of this Story is trust. If you tell yourself this story, are you someone who gives 100% of your trust completely unconditionally, often without basis, or are you often wary of people and hold it back until there is proof that they are trustworthy? My guess is that in both situations, you find people often let you down or you sabotage the relationship confirming your Story that you are unlovable because people leave you. The very important point to note is that just because someone tells themselves this Story does not mean they have poor social skills, or cannot build relationships or get close to people. I have awesome social skills, and I build rapport and relationships very easily, but the majority of my relationships have been very ‘business like’, because of an unconscious fear of letting people in because people leave and I could get hurt. When I experience this today, I recognize that I am reliving a past experience both from this life time as a child, and also from many of my past lives.
I know from personal experience, that telling yourself this Story can be very lonely and lead to a superficial existence, which is why I invite you to choose your life partner and peer group wisely. Sharing my life with Lindsay has transformed the way I look at and experience relationships. I have learned to truly share me and it is a wonderful experience when someone touches your heart and allows you to touch theirs. It is the same with my friendships. I invite you to take the risk, share you, all of you and see what happens. It is truly magical.
Feelings are fundamental in helping you to fully experience all your life has to offer. As you know some feel good and positive, others feel bad and negative. The interesting and important thing to understand is that neither is more important than the other. Your feelings are your feelings. They are real! They are ALL important and they ALL matter because they are messages from you to you. It’s what you do with them that matters.
As you learn and Expand your Greatness Out, you will see that your reality will change with you because you are changing. If you have the Story ‘I can’t be me’, be clear about what you mean. Do you mean you have a yearning to be more of who you are in your heart and soul or do you mean that you can’t express the essence of who you are today because of the environment, or circumstances you find yourself in? In both cases, there is something for you to learn about honoring you, respecting you and seeing you for who you are. When you combine all three, you will feel the courage, drive and power to fully embrace you. That is the goal to learn to know love and express yourself.
In summarizing today’s episode of Healing From Within Clayton and I have explored the eight stories most of us tell ourselves which often limit our ability to explore the true breathe and scope of our magnificent inner soul life while at the same time we have shared a greater truth of soul and ego based realities which enable us to merge our spiritual and physical life experiences for greater integration awareness and development of our innate talents.
Clayton in his own astute intuitive observation writes with clarity and simplicity the following, “Every person, every soul on our wonderful planet has an important purpose, an important story to share. Even if it helps just one person, they matter, because it’s the ripple effects of their contribution… and it’s for that reason I know you matter. But it is all well and good me saying that if you don’t know that for yourself or you tell yourself the Story that you don’t like yourself… yet! You have a story, a story that matters, a story that can make a difference, for you and for others. Whether your story is one of happiness and joy, or one of hardship, trauma and devastation, it matters because good or bad it has meaning for you. A meaning that will help you to live the story you choose, for you - the one you design. YOU are unique! From your physical appearance, the way you think and process information, the way you see, feel, hear and interpret this world, your natural strengths, talents, your fingerprints, your DNA, right down to your very soul!”
Clayton and I would have you remember in your uniqueness from your physical appearance, the way you think and process information, the way you see, feel, hear and interpret this world, your natural strengths, talents, down to your very soul you must honor love and express yourself courageously truthfully and share this very special gift of life soulfully respectfully and honorably by simply being yourself…it is more than enough.
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