Wow, that is a mouthful.  What does this phrase even mean?  What is a fragmented self?

If you are experiencing a fragmented self, it simply means that your intentions are not in line with your actions.  We as humans will probably go in and out of this many times in our souls as we navigate our paths in this life.   To start we have to first ask ourselves what our intentions in life are and then learn the skill and discipline of applying the action of those intentions in a real way.  Obviously, this entire concept takes an intermediate level of self-awareness.

But who cares?  The main reason you should care if you are living with a fragmented self or not is that if you are, there is a high probability that you are not accomplishing anything efficiently or at all.  If you do not want to accomplish anything in life, that is fine and I am not judging you but this article is for the people in the world who desire to continuously grow and accomplish new things in life.  This is the story of my soul shattered and scattered; my fragmented self.  This article is a story, advice, honesty, rambling; whatever is to you I hope this article bestows a sense of compassion and healing to all who read this and can relate.

For the last ten years I have been living with a fragmented self that I am just now repairing.  Due to a series of tragic, paradigm altering events in my early 20’s, everything I thought about who I was and where I was going in life shattered into a thousand distant pieces.  In many ways this was a good thing for my soul’s advancement because it broke up stagnant patterns and introduced me to new options and ideas.  The frustrating paradox became that I couldn’t carry out those new options and ideas, because my heart was separated in many pieces, each one stowed away in their respective locked chests, unable to communicate let alone concur on a harmonious plan.  What this equated to, in less metaphoric terms, is that my dream in life was to be a healthy, happy and thriving person who inspires others to do the same.  My reality was I was in so much emotional pain that I was stuck in self sabotaging, destructive behaviors towards my body, mind and spirit.  I was in so much emotional pain that I simply didn’t want to exist anymore.  Feeling this way was the exact opposite position of my goal of thriving in life and being an example of health, happiness and abundance to others.  That was the original great divide and the crevices of my shattering began to spread out from there.

I became interested in learning about how energy works in this world and the concept of manifesting what we desire through the mind when I was only a teenager.  It was appalling and scary to me that all the adults I saw in my life seemed drenched in their own miserable grasp for material riches.  I saw that they were wasting their best years breaking their backs and spirits to participate in what I saw as a very limited and outdated way to approach life.  This impending observation of doom inspired me to seek a more evolved, efficient and joyful way of existing in a material world.   I read many spiritual and scientific books and articles that discussed the theory that whatever state we are in internally is what we will manifest externally in our life because the universe is made of a physical vibrating energy that is magnetized a certain way.  Therefore we draw to us energy that is like our own, whether we know we are doing it or not, and so our physical realities tend to mirror our internal realities.

The concept that we unconsciously or consciously pull certain things to us and into our lives, feels truthful in my heart.  However, the door swings both ways.  We can bring awful chaotic energies into our lives or peaceful fun energies.  We can be doing this haphazardly or with directed intent. 

I believe in the notion that we were meant to thrive in a material plane, we have just been approaching it all wrong.  Instead of believing in lack and fighting each other over perceived limited resources, I believe there is more than enough abundance for every living thing on this planet to be provided for naturally and there always has been. 

According to my understanding in the belief of abundance and energetic magnetism,  this journey starts with shifting our paradigm from having to toil down in an inevitable rat race to focusing our work on the state of our internal being.  We begin working to achieve physical and spiritual homeostasis, balance, gratitude, serenity and joy of the spirit.  A beautiful harmonious internal state, which then mirrors into manifestation all the wonderful things we have worked on internally.  If we are generous in spirit, the physical world is generous back.  We get what we give.  However you want to put it, many people’s hearts feel this innate truth when they are first introduced to the concept that human energy is magnetized and that life mirrors back what we emanate.

Alas knowing of this concept at such a very young age, did not guarantee that I truly understood or was ready to practice it.  Let alone did I realize the long and winding road I would have to take to learn more about manifesting abundance in a physical and energetic  world.  What happens when terrible and painful circumstances in life bring you to your knees and your internal state fills with the emotional parasites of anger, grief, despair, confusion?  Well I will tell you- your external world starts to mirror and therefore manifest matching circumstances in the form of failed relationships, poverty, illness and many other trite misfortunes.  So you see the law of energetic manifestation can very much work both ways.  Whether you are aware of doing it or not your energy is attracting things to you for better or worse.  This energy is impartial and only works within the laws of physics, it does not judge or discriminate but only imitates.

The esoteric "catch 23" as I call it, was the injustice I felt over being hurled into a shitty internal state by negative circumstances I could not control in life and then through my lack of knowledge and experience of the law of spiritual physics, unconsciously manifesting a matching amount of shittiness to my external world.  Damn, that isn’t fair.  Well now I know that nobody cares if it’s fair or not, it is time to do something about it, which means performing a slow and painful 180 turn out of my personal shittiness, by healing from the inside out.

After exhausting myself by nonchalantly diving head first into kamikaze escape routes for the last decade, the light finally dawned on me bright enough to realize that no substance, no person, no job, no place could heal my fragmented self; that there was nowhere left to run or hide and it was time to start the long, slow and painful process awakening my inner self and taking responsibility for consciously aligning my actions with my intentions.  It was time to turn a 180 in the other direction of every way I had been living.  

90 DEGREES: Acceptance and accountability were the first task.  Not blaming my problems on the world and its sometimes unfortunate realities or expecting someone or something else to take charge of cleaning up my internal/external mess got me turned around a good 90 degrees. 

135 DEGREES: Letting go of my feelings of anger and injustice towards things I couldn’t control turned me 45 more degrees into 135 degrees the right direction. 

180 DEGREES INTO SELF LOVE: The next 45 degree rotation came with taking an honest look at myself in every aspect.  When I was looking at myself honestly I could see where a lot of my daily actions did not match my innate personal philosophies or true desires.  I could see where I disrespected myself and did not know how to exercise or express self-love.

Through much counseling, honesty, struggles, lessons, heart aches, setbacks, courage, perseverance, acts of self-love, saying no, saying yes, taking a leap of faith, trusting, forgiving, crying, allowing myself to feel being sad, being angry, being hopeless, trying new things, failing, succeeding, being vulnerable, being defensive, seeing where it all gets me I have “trial-ed and error-ed” my way out of a very real and personal hell where my fragmented self was destroying every chance for anything good around me because my intentions did not match my actions.  Now that my actions are starting to match my intentions and heart, my true authentic self, I am able to manifest many treasures into my life with minimal effort.  Everything is easier and less painful when your intentions match your actions.  "Where intention goes, energy will flow".

        I.            If you say you want to be healthy, then examine the reasons you do things that are not healthy and change them, even if you feel resentful and whiny about it at first.  You aren’t doing yourself any favors by lying to yourself and justifying your harmful behaviors.

 

      II.            If you want to travel, learn a new instrument, go back to school, start a business etc.  You can find a million and one reasons why it probably won’t work but you only need one to believe that it will.  Trust that if you sit on your ass and only talk about what you are going to do but never make any daily effort towards that goal that it will never happen, there is no one day, there is only today.

 

    III.            If you say you want the world to be a better place, than remember these wise words my parents used to say- “if you are not part of the solution than you are part of the problem”.  This means if you don’t like what you see then don’t keep supporting it.  You do this every day in the products you vote for with your money when you purchase them, the people you choose to surround yourself with, the field of work you are participating in, your behavior (and yes even when no one’s watching like in traffic, at stores, etc. don’t be a dick) You can’t say you want one thing and then directly act the other way.  Posting philosophical memes on Facebook or going to church doesn’t mean you are taking responsibility in real life, nor that you are being accountable for your daily actions.

 

    IV.            If you are wondering why nothing in your life ever seems to turn out how you want it to, maybe it’s because you don’t actually put any real effort into looking at why and taking responsibility for the fact that we are the co-creators of our lives.  You can just float on the current that is already there and wonder why you didn’t arrive at any particular destination or you can jump in your own boat with your own paddle and start rowing the direction you want to go.

 

      V.            Once you get in your boat and are rowing along the river, in the direction you consciously chose to go, you will find all those fragmented pieces of yourself along the way.  You will have time to see how they all fit and put them back together because you won’t be busy with getting caught in rapids, on shorelines, tangled in others paths, or flipping your boat back upright at every turn.