by Matt Kahn
Perhaps as compliments, attention, and support are offered, you become the one who tells others what they’ve been waiting so long to hear. From that space, you help to free another heart from a history of pain, while providing a unique frequency of consciousness that no one else can transmit.
Turn It into a Gift
One of the most common themes I have seen throughout all stages of spiritual development is a tendency to be awake in private and inflamed in public. This can influence energetically sensitive beings to stay secluded at home or entrenched in spiritual communities, while withdrawing from the world in view. Hiding from the world is mostly due to not knowing how to respond to the unresolved debris sensed in the energy fields of others.
On a subconscious level, when you do not know how to respond to the words and actions of others, you unknowingly lower your vibration to match their energy. This is done in an attempt to become a mirror of their consciousness, hoping they will view you as an equal, so you can be spared of their pain, persecution, or abuse.
The question is, How do you interact with a person, no matter where they are in their journey, without lowering the standard of your experience to match them in energetic defense? The answer is in learning how to communicate through the act of complimenting in a process I call turn it into a gift. I discovered this process during a rather intense conversation that spontaneously revealed creative new ways to love what arises.
A few years ago, I was working with a naturopathic doctor to detoxify my organs. I soon realized my healing session had transitioned into listening to this doctor share her beliefs on spiritual superstitions, fear, and conspiracy theories.
As I relaxed into listening, I saw that while this person was open to spiritual matters and likely had had some powerful experiences, her overstimulated nervous system hadn’t yet been addressed.
It was as if her ego was fully intact and decorated with an endless array of spiritual beliefs—with greater enemies to overcome, larger battles to conquer, and bigger concerns to anticipate. As she was talking about the potential downfall of humanity, I simply listened without a need to disagree with anything she said. As she spoke, I noticed how quickly and shallowly she was breathing. In response, I began breathing more slowly.
After she’d riled herself up into such a fearful frenzy, I could have justifiably interrupted and said, “I don’t wish to speak about such negative, fear-based things during my appointment.” Doing so would have created division between us and not have provided the opportunity to inspire and uplift her journey. I knew that while she was behaving from a state of inflammation, she was only here to be loved.
My challenge in the moment was to communicate without correcting her or matching her victimized, needy, and righteous inflammation. Because an ego cannot be content to solely make a point, it always needs to recruit other people into its agenda. She then asked me, “What do you think?”
I paused, took a breath, and allowed love to speak. I said, “It’s obvious that you’re very passionate about this subject matter. The fact that you’re sharing with me what is so important to you allows me to feel more connected to you than ever before. Thank you for this gift.”
She was completely stunned. I wasn’t trying to stifle her; she just didn’t know what to say. There was a ten-second pause of uninterrupted eye contact. As she resumed her role as the doctor in my appointment, she never mentioned anything fearful again.
Another example of turn it into a gift occurred in a mall when I ran into a friend I hadn’t seen in more than ten years. The first thing my friend said to me was, “Looks like you’ve gained about ten pounds!”
In that moment I realized, Here is another opportunity to turn into a gift.
With the utmost sincerity of heart, I said, “You’re right. I have gained about ten pounds, and the fact that you’re bringing it to my attention lets me know that you must really care about my well-being. With you as my witness, I declare a renewed faith in making my health a higher priority. As I vow to become healthier than ever before and shed this excess weight, I’ll make sure to keep you regularly updated on my progress since you seem so interested. Thank you for your support. What a gift it is for me. I really feel as if what you said is going to help me out.”
He looked at me in a really surprised way, and I could tell he was thinking, I didn’t mean it as a compliment! Of course, I knew his words weren’t spoken with care and concern, but I chose to take it as a compliment and turn it into a gift that I offered in return. No matter the circumstance, love can withstand any type of judgment or ridicule and turn it into something more redeeming as a gift for every heart.
Whether you think others deserve your compliments or not, your ability to respond more graciously to them becomes the determining factor in enjoying your experience, regardless of the characters you encounter. When others judge, persecute, and lash out, it reminds you how often their innocence gets ignored. While their actions show you where they are in their evolution, that creates an opportunity for you to give them a gift they aren’t able to give themselves. When the unconscious actions of others inspire you to turn it into a gift, you access the power of a true heartfelt compliment to transform reality with elegance and grace.
Cultivating Authenticity
Sometimes when I teach the practice of turn it into a gift, there can be a sense of discord arising within the inflamed personality that complimenting others is sure to dissolve. For some, it’s as if giving a compliment to someone who is not treating you well somehow calls your own integrity into question. For example, you may find yourself asking, “How could I compliment someone when it doesn’t feel authentic to offer such praise?”
Authenticity emanates from the subconscious mind. As I described earlier, the subconscious mind has two basic categories—familiar and foreign. When something new is brought into your energy field, the sense of this doesn’t feel authentic is felt because it’s something that your subconscious mind hasn’t logged into your history of experiences.
When a particular experience falls under the category of foreign, your body is typically not given permission to resonate with it. Sometimes, the turn it into a gift teaching can get caught in the filter of your subconscious mind, causing you to say, “Because I don’t have a history of doing this regularly and it wasn’t modeled to me at a young age, it feels unfamiliar. My body is not resonating with it, and that makes me feel as if it’s something that won’t be helpful.”
In your subconscious mind, it may be more familiar to defend or deny when people are unkind. When a heart-centered teaching like this comes along that invites you to love in response to personal turmoil, there can be a question of authenticity. One heartfelt compliment at a time, you are rewriting your subconscious mind to see every experience that comes your way as an opportunity to open up instead of shut down, withdraw, or lash out. All too often, shutting down occurs to protect yourself when under attack or in pain. While the hope of such a defensive position is to avoid more conflict or stress, it is important to remember that love is not a defensive energy. It is an offensive energy that only has gifts to share.
Through loving what arises, you start to realize that your daily practice of giving deeper eye contact, smiling to those who pass by, embracing yourself more often while turning anything that comes your way into a gift reveals the highest form of heart-centered joy. As an evolving master stepping forward into a new spiritual paradigm, you realize that all the wisdom you’ve collected in the privacy of your own journey is meant to be demonstrated as contributions for all. As that occurs, you are able to support the expansion of others, without their unconscious behavior undermining the quality of your experience.
When the question of authenticity is merely a matter of exposing your subconscious mind to a new series of inspired choices, you help to fulfill every prayer, dream, and desire by bringing love to life throughout each interaction.
No matter how hurt or disappointed you are in the behavior of others,
it is your willingness to turn anything that someone gives you into a gift that liberates you from the despair of human suffering. At that very moment, there are endless gifts residing in your heart. You are here, exploring an evolving world that is ready to receive the miracle of your immaculate grace. How you decide to deliver each healing gift is entirely up to you.
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The Merging of Mind and Heart
WHAT WOULD IT BE LIKE if you could go about your life, whether there is turmoil or harmony, without being limited by your experience of others? Instead of apologizing to someone for their experience or being in constant need of rescuing them, it is far more essential to honor your innocence as a way of inspiring relief in every direction. As your mind and heart unite as one, the more you see others beyond their divided unconscious states. This invites patience, acceptance, forgiveness, and compassion to become cornerstones of your encounters, no matter how inflamed anyone seems to be.
Whether as the activity of the mind or as reactive patterns in your body, loving what arises gives you full permission to be in a world without being victimized by the characters you see. As your mind and heart merge together, the comings and goings of life tend to lighten up. What used to bring disappointment and make it easy to lose all hope in humanity have become moments to cultivate an even higher vibrational frequency than ever before. As your vibration skyrockets, one inspired heartfelt choice at a time, your evolving perception of life expands the world around you.
No matter where you go, the world has been designed by the Universe to remind you when it’s time to love your heart. Despite the circumstances at hand, your experience reveals the innocence of a child crying out for the reassurance, support, and attention of a loving parent who could only be found wherever you stand.
The Mind and Heart: A Union of Emotional Oneness
As the mind and heart come together in a union of emotional oneness, it informs the Universe that you are ready to explore the interconnection of all, as the eternal one I AM. Often referred to as self-realization, each glimpse of awakening allows you to experience the joy, sovereignty, and transcendence of viewing life through the eyes of the Universe. Perhaps such a universal view is already here. Maybe it’s merely waiting for your heart to open so you can witness firsthand a truth that only you are destined to see.
While masquerading as the antics of an overstimulated nervous system, your true nature is a seed of consciousness that can often express itself in childlike ways. This is why I refer to it as your true innocent nature. Through each and every response, your childlike nature invites you to cherish the majestic wonder of your heart, just as a parent embraces their own child. As you develop an active connection with your innocence, you engage in a dialogue within the highest levels of unity consciousness.
As the mind and heart reunite in holy matrimony, you are able to see how everything that comes your way can be turned into a gift, and with greater receptivity and ease, you can cultivate love in every encounter.
However, when the personality gets inflamed, the eternal truth of consciousness fractures to divide emotional oneness into two seemingly separate parts: an overthinking parentlike mind, along with a cautious, innocent, vulnerable childlike heart. Even so, as the overstimulated nervous system unravels, the division between your mind and heart dissolves.
This process is much like a parent getting reacquainted with their own vulnerability by watching their child explore life for the very first time. The parent begins living vicariously through their child to reexperience things from a renewed perspective. Simultaneously, the child receives the attention, care, and protection they need to open up and grow to full potential.
Both child and parent are aspects of consciousness that come to terms with one another as your heart begins to open. When this occurs, it creates an environment in which you can return to your true nature as the light of divinity in form.
From a unified space of heart-centered mastery, you can be for everyone you encounter the parent they never knew, the best friend they forgot they had, and a transmission of grace they may not have known was here to be received. Once the truth of life’s timeless beauty has been discovered, it flows through you to awaken the consciousness of all who come your way.
To unravel the overstimulated nervous system to the point where such a deep recognition can occur, your innocence brings to mind all the things you may have judged about yourself or others or that you experienced others judging about you. One moment of connection at a time, your childlike heart takes you through your own initiation into unconditional love as the most direct means to awaken the master within you.
Loving the one who judges or has been judged by others ensures that your innocence has your absolute trust, no matter what it says or requests. Throughout this process, the recurring theme is reminding your innocence of the support, understanding, and attention you are always here to provide. Over a period of time, your consistent attentive actions reassure your innocence that you are not going to treat it the same way it was mistreated by characters from the past.
As your initiation is completed to earn back the faith and trust of your true innocent nature, you emerge as the wise guardian of your radiant childlike heart. You may not always say “yes” to its impulsive demands, but you always know each request is not the purpose of each dialogue. Rather, each interaction between parent and child is rooted in love, as the Universe celebrates its long-awaited destiny throughout the heart-centered awakening of every being.
The Art of Self-Compliment
In the same way you have learned to do for others, you can meet the innocence within you and turn anything it says into the gift of a compliment as well.
Perhaps you’ve had experiences of fear, sadness, or anger and wondered how to respond in an authentic complimentary way. While it’s natural to respond to fear by focusing on how to get away from it, you may not realize that any attempt to pull away from emotions only sends another message of abandonment to your heart.
Maybe when you felt sadness you’ve wondered, How do I cure myself of sadness? How do I overcome it? Such questions can leave you feeling quite defeated until you realize that sadness wasn’t created to be overcome. To overcome sadness is to push away your innocence until it begins to act more “appropriately.” Just like fear, moments of sadness cannot be defeated, cured, or overcome. They can only be transformed through your willingness to love. By learning how to support the one who is afraid, sad, or even angry, you heal each layer of conditioning as you change your relationship with the feelings that cannot be controlled or denied.
In the process of responding to these emotions through the art of self-compliment, you come face-to-face with all of the layers of conditioning within you. When the childlike heart brings you fear, sadness, and anger, the deepest wisdom within you can be inspired to respond in a complimentary fashion as a way of letting your heart know each emotion is safe to feel. Through the power of compliments, you focus your attention on the most redeeming qualities of each feeling. As you learn to respond to difficult emotions by finding the gift in each one—even the most tumultuous, frightening, or painful experience—you discover a more intimate way of living in harmony with the flow of life.
For example, when you experience a moment of fear, I invite you to activate the art of self-compliment by repeating the following healing mantra to your heart:
It’s okay that you’re afraid. The fact that you’re afraid is letting me know that you wish to avoid a particular experience. I also know that whenever you’re afraid, this is a chance for me to ask if you’re using fear to get my own attention or as a way of informing me to venture in a different direction. No matter what is revealed, fear is offering me a chance to be clearer in the way the Universe guides me while honoring the chance to love you, my innocent heart, as never before. What a gift you’ve given me. Thank you.
When you offer yourself the respect to welcome inner guidance instead of trying to be in charge of guiding your jo
urney forward, the clearest, most direct answers can be realized. Whether fear is trying to tell you what not to do in any moment or is simply attempting to get your attention, it can always be met with the gift of unwavering support.
Feel what happens when fear is complimented and acknowledged. No matter how intense it seems, even fear is an expression of the Divine and not something to be overlooked, ignored, ridiculed, or denied.
When sadness arises, it can become an opportunity for love to activate the art of self-compliment by saying to your heart:
I welcome your sadness. I wish for you to share with me everything you feel about it even if it’s due to a loss of something that you weren’t ready to let go of. No matter how sad you feel, these feelings just show me how meaningful things are to you. When you’re sad because of loss or things that change, it shows me how deeply you appreciate what has been given to you and how much you value the gifts that come your way. I find that quality admirable and courageous.
Similarly, when anger erupts, frightening you with the magnitude of your own power, you can breathe slowly and allow love in by saying to your heart:
Hello, anger. I want you to know that you have a right to be upset. You are free to express in this way. I invite you to be upset for as long as you wish. You are free to point your finger at anyone you please and plead your case. I am listening to you. I acknowledge and compliment you because you respond so quickly to the actions of another who is not measuring up to your standard of conduct. Even though you are pointing your finger as a way of dealing with feeling disappointed, it just lets me know how high your values are.
Underneath the surface, the values that you embody enable you to point out disappointment and injustice in others. This shows me how eager you are to act as my protector even though I really don’t need to be protected. Thank you for always looking out for me. As a result, you tend to get angry when things don’t go my way or when others don’t measure up to certain levels of expectation. You have the right to be heard, and you will not be punished, no matter what you think or say. I want to hear everything you wish to share, including every insult and judgment against those who persecute or judge. No matter how explosive you seem to be, I’m always here to listen, admire, and welcome you as the eternal one I AM.
