MY WEEKLY BLOG<\/p>\n
WHO DO YOU TRUST?<\/p>\n
The typical figurehead of a cult lures innocent people into a\u00a0sticky web with drugs, sex and the spoken word. He assures you that he has the definitive\u00a0answers to all of your questions and he alone can show you how to fulfill your life\u2019s purpose. He\u00a0goads you to separate yourself from your loved ones who don\u2019t have your best\u00a0interests in mind and give yourself over to him. Then, if you do what he tells
you, you can be the second most powerful person in the world. Guess who the\u00a0first one is.<\/p>\n
We are familiar with the usual male suspects who make it\u00a0their business to steal power from and abuse female followers, but women become\u00a0cult leaders, too, and they gather their own menagerie of sad, isolated seekers\u00a0who are yearning for the family they never had. I was watching a rather\u00a0disturbing episode of an HBO series recently that was based on a real life\u00a0woman who thought she knew everything. She declared to have no mentors because\u00a0she didn\u2019t need any. According to her, no one knew better than she did about\u00a0anything and she made a big hoopla as she burned incense and sage, performed\u00a0rituals, and channeled people\u2019s dead relatives. She put on quite a show and from\u00a0what I could see, no one enjoyed it more than she did.<\/p>\n
While she continuously stroked and flipped her very long\u00a0brown hair around, flirting with \u00a0men and then scolding them for being sexually attracted to her, she claimed that her understanding of humanity and spiritual growth surpassed that of the Dalai Lama. Hers was the right way, THE ONLY WAY, and she would be willing to share her knowledge with you . . . if you believed what she believed and did exactly what she told you to do. In this way, you and she could take over the world. She had taken on an affect of strength self-assurance but in truth, she was so insecure, when anyone exited her organization, she said, \u201cYou might as well kill yourself because without me, your life has no meaning.\u201d When I heard her tell her staff that they needed to find her a multi-billionaire husband to \u00a0fund her invaluable work, I switched the channel.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve met three similar women in my life, arrogant people who\u00a0preyed on others with no compassion or kindness.<\/p>\n
One of them remained unmoved by other people\u2019s suffering, no
matter how bad it was, because she claimed to have suffered more than anyone in\u00a0the world and she had become enlightened.<\/p>\n
Another woman told me that she didn\u2019t read books because if\u00a0she held one in her hand, she knew everything in it. The irony was that she had\u00a0approached me to write her book but she refused to discuss it. During our and\u00a0only meeting, she spent the entire time trying to convince me how powerful she\u00a0was. \u00a0<\/p>\n
Finally, a third woman talked about how lonely she was
because there was no one of her caliber \u201cto play with.\u201d She was trying to help some\u00a0chosen women in her organization get smart enough to be interesting companions\u00a0for her.<\/p>\n
There are tried and true ways to spot these faux leaders,\u00a0male or female. Their \u201ctells\u201d are obvious. They look you in the eye and say, \u201cI know you better than you know yourself,.\u201d And then they take everything: your money, your power, your sexuality. And most importantly, your trust, as they convince you to transfer it from you to them.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I make a habit of steering clear of anyone who asks me to hold\u00a0them and their ideas in higher esteem than my own. I once heard someone call\u00a0them \u201cpsychic vampires\u201d and I thought that was an apt description since they\u00a0tried to steal souls. As human beings, we are naturally equipped with something\u00a0called intuition, a sense rather than a thought, that guides us toward our personal\u00a0truth and encourages us to trust our own feelings. In order to become
acquainted with this part of ourselves, we need to practice. The Dalai Lama,\u00a0whom in my opinion knows a lot more than any cult leader says, \u201cYou don\u2019t\u00a0create trust in one day or one week but over many months.\u201d If you keep on\u00a0taking a moment to tune in, you\u2019ll eventually find the guidance that is there,\u00a0even if you\u2019re feeling something you don’t like. In fact, that\u2019s when it\u2019s most\u00a0important to trust yourself.<\/p>\n
I knew an American Indian Chief, a lovely teacher, who encouraged
his students to become quiet and hear their inner voices. He didn’t try to take\u00a0people\u2019s power away. Instead he assigned spirit animals to each person and\u00a0explained their significance. What stayed with me was his definition of the\u00a0coyote. He called it a trickster and said that when one of them crossed your\u00a0path, be on alert that things are not the way they seem. The other day, I was\u00a0in my car on Mulholland Drive, fretting over something, when a coyote crossed\u00a0the street in front of me. I used the sighting to bring my attention to the\u00a0present moment and stop projecting into the future. Things inevitably turn out
differently than we expect, so why not take the time to look within and find the\u00a0conscious knowing that goes beyond appearances, the knowledge that never fails\u00a0us? That\u2019s how we build our self-confidence so we can keep our own counsel.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not suggesting that we always have to go it alone.\u00a0Feedback that makes sense is a good thing. Sometimes when I\u2019m making an
important decision, I discuss it with a smart person or two in my life to get\u00a0some different points of view. But ultimately, the decision I make is my own. I\u00a0choose to trust myself and if I make a mistake, I take the lesson I learned,\u00a0leave the content behind, try not to beat myself up and I try something else. Nothing\u00a0is set in stone except the cement in your driveway, and even then, it’s built\u00a0on soft and malleable earth.\u00a0<\/p>\n
As human beings, we are soft and malleable as well as strong\u00a0and durable. Our physical power comes from our center and so does our trust. When\u00a0you do a workout, if your trainer is a good one, she takes you through\u00a0exercises to strengthen your muscles and your core. Ballet training, the daily\u00a0form of exercise that I grew up with, required a soft and gentle presence on\u00a0top of powerful muscles and a strong center. The harder we practiced back then,\u00a0the more we came to trust our bodies to perform the difficult things that were
required while we moved in a soft and ethereal way.<\/p>\n
In my life today, I try to be patient, stay in the present\u00a0moment and remind remember that \u00a0I am capable of living a good life and being kind, no matter how tough things get. I\u2019m dedicated to learning how to be soft and strong, kind and assertive, confident and vulnerable, and trusting and skeptical, all at the same time.<\/p>\n
Philosopher Wolfgang von Goethe said, \u201cAs soon as you trust
yourself, you will know how to live.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
MY WEEKLY BLOG WHO DO YOU TRUST? The typical figurehead of a cult lures innocent people into a\u00a0sticky web with drugs, sex and the spoken word. He assures you that he has the definitive\u00a0answers to all of your questions and he alone can show you how to fulfill your life\u2019s purpose. He\u00a0goads you to separate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":2140,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2141"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2141\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2142,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2141\/revisions\/2142"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}