Clear for Life

Acne may be the greatest gift life has given you so far.

When you are looking at the mirror in anxiety about the big, new pimple you just got and worrying how you are going to get through the day it may not seem like much of a gift. More like a curse.

You may not realize it yet, but in those moments of anxiety and despair lay they keys to happiness and clear skin.

Bad times give us much needed shaking. They lay bare the insane ways we live our lives. This is true in both collective and individual levels. Collective tragedies, such as war and injustice, expose our collective insanity. Similarly your personal tragedies, such as acne, can show your own insanity.

I’m not talking about insanity as mental disorder. I’m talking about insanity as creating unnecessary suffering in your own life. Insanity is living in despair and frustration when you could live in peace and happiness.

Challenges act as stress tests. They show the parts in you that aren’t working. Suffering and negativity is like a friend shaking you and shouting at your face “just look at what you do to yourself!”. If you are willing to listen, you can learn a valuable lesson.

All suffering starts in the mind

Your mind creates all your suffering. External events are simply excuses for your mind to create more suffering. You suffer when you focus on something you don’t want. That’s the only way to feel bad. Try focusing on something you want and feeling bad at the same time - it’s impossible.

Most people don’t exercise much control over their focus. The focusing process is on autopilot, and so are their emotions.

The mind is a bit like a computer; it works by executing installed programs. Your beliefs and ideas about yourself and the world are examples of these programs. The job of your mind is to make those beliefs and ideas come true to you. If you don’t think much of yourself, well… then that’s what you are going to get. If you believe you are sad and lonely, then it’s the job of your mind to make sure that’s true to you. Your wish is your mind’s command.

Your mind scans the environment you are in for information that matches your programming. It then brings that information into your awareness for you to focus on - and to feel bad about.

Your beliefs work a bit like colored glasses. If you look at the world through green glasses everything is tinted with green. The glasses don’t change the world you are looking at, they simple change your perception of it. If you look at the world through glasses of desperation, frustration and low self-esteem that’s what it looks to you.

Changing from green glasses to red ones gives you a new perception. Everything looks red now. Going from sadness and frustration to happiness and hope gives you a whole new perspective on the world.

Can you see yourself with clear skin?

This has a lot to do with getting clear. First, negative emotions are toxic to your health, but that’s not the main reason. Your external life always reflects your internal life. What goes on inside of your head happens outside of your head. If you see yourself as an acne victims who is plagued with this invincible curse, that’s what you get. It cannot be in any other way.

To get over acne you first have to see it as something you can get over with; then you have to see and accept yourself as a person with clear skin. You have to put on new glasses.

This is the missing piece from all acne cures and books. The updated version of Clear for Life talks about this in more detail. Since this is such an important point I’ve made this section available to my customers even before the updated version of Clear for Life is released.

If you are my customer you can get the section here:

http://community.natural-acne-solution.com/forum/topics/emotional-and-spiritual

There’s more to this than simply changing glasses. Most people are totally identified with their mind. They think they are this [insert your name] person, who is so and so many years old, works/does this, and this and that is going on in their life. In other words they are identified with their story, or their ego, as some would call it.

You are not your story

They don’t realize that this story is the glasses they wear, not who they really are.

Once you become aware of the mental processes (glasses) that color your perception you’ll see this clearly. Once you’ve changed these processes few times and seen how that changes your world it’s easy to see they are not you. That you are not your story.

If you are your story then how could you change it? Who would be the one that changes it?

This realization will forever change your world. An irrevocable change process begins. The grip of your mind over your life starts to weaken. And with the mind goes the insanity and suffering it creates. To the extent you can see you are not your mind, not your story, to the extent you experience peace and joy - regardless of what happens to you.

Without the mind playing its dirty tricks on you it’s impossible to suffer.

When you realize that the I, [insert your name] as a desperate acne victim, is just a story you’ve accepted, you can let go of the story. When you let go of the story you create an opening for a different reality to emerge. Perhaps one where you have clear skin?

Clear skin doesn’t happen by some divine magic or any other mystical means. It happens by you taking concrete action to create it. But when you let go of your old story you also let go of the limitations it imposes on you. Remember, your life always matches with your story. When you let go of your old story you open up to new possibilities. Perhaps a book just jumps off the shelve that has the answers to your problem. Perhaps you just stumble on a website that has the answers.

Your mind finds a way to bring you new internal reality into your external world; just like it did with the old internal reality.

The power of Now

Challenging times and suffering create the opening for that transition to happen. When you suffer you can go inside and see how that happens. When you observe yourself doing suffering, you’ll see that the suffering is not a part of you but rather something you do. This realization spells the end of suffering and feeling bad.

You can only do this when you are present in the moment. Luckily it doesn’t cost you anything and is to do easy with practice.

Learning to be present in the Now is a skill, and like any skill, takes some practice to get good at.

Here are few ways to bring your focus into the present moment.

Observe your breath. Breath is one of the easiest ways to access the present moment. Simply watch as breath flows in and out of your body. Observe how your lungs, abdomen and chest expand when you breathe in and contract as you breathe out.

As you watch your breath notice how thinking stops. Your mind cannot survive in the present moment. It wants you to focus on the future or the past. To your mind present moment is simply means to a better future and thus to be discarded. But if you ignore the present moment you throw away the only way you can make a meaningful change in your life. Better tomorrow never comes as long as you try to escape the horrors of today.

So when you notice yourself thinking about the past or the future bring your focus back to the present moment and notice how the constant stream of thinking stops. That’s when you are in the present moment and free to see the mind for what it is.

Another way to access the present moment is to focus on what you experience in the moment. If you are sitting, feel what it feels like to sit. Focus on how your clothing feels on your skin, and the pressure on your buttocks and the backs of your legs. Feel your feet touching the floor. Again notice how you can’t focus on your experience and think at the same time.

In the Power of Now Eckhart Tolle gives another way to access the present moment. Become aware of your ‘inner’ body. Feel the energy in your body. Initially it may be easier to just focus on one body part, such as your hand, and feel the energy there. You may feel just the light tingle, but that’s it. Just focus on that feeling and it gets stronger. Later on you can feel the same energy in and surrounding your whole body.

I highly recommend you pick up Eckhart Tolle’s Power of Now and read it. He talks about the power of the present moment and how to access it in much more detail. His other book The New Earth also helped me a lot. I got the inspiration to write this as I finished it earlier today.

Please try these exercises today. See which you like and make them a part of your daily life. Use any idle moment you have to practice. That way you’ll never be bored and always have something ‘to do’.

At first you may be able to access the present moment only for few seconds before your mind takes over again. But that’s enough. It’s enough to create an opening and with practice the gaps in thinking get longer and longer.

Accepting what is ends suffering

When you are at the present moment your next job is to accept it as it is. What is, is, and nothing you can do about it. So if at the moment you experience any negative emotions simply accept them. Resistance is the domain of the mind and only perpetuates the negative emotions.

Simply acknowledge how you feel and that is it. Accepting doesn’t mean resigning to your fate and thinking you can’t change anything. Accepting means seeing your reality as it is in the moment. It’s the only sane thing to do.

If it helps you can try seeing the negative emotion as some external object and resistance as pushing it away. When you stop resisting you stop pushing.

The negative emotion probably weakens significantly as you accept it, it may even go away completely and you’ll notice you are at peace.

If the negative emotion didn’t go away completely just observe it with curiosity. Don’t try to change it or push it way. Simply observe it. See what’s behind it. Ask yourself “could I let go of this feeling?”. As you keep doing this you’ll notice that the negative emotion vanishes completely.

Can you accept your acne?

Here’s how to take this a step further. This may be a bit uncomfortable at first, but please try this.

Find a mirror and look at yourself. If you see acne and that makes you feel bad, even better. Then focus on your breath and access the present moment. When you are present work on accepting what you see.

If you have acne, no power in the world is going change it today; probably not even this week. Your skin is what it is. The only sane thing to do is to accept it as it is.

Resisting your skin or wanting it to be something else simply creates more suffering. It’s no different than frustrating over the fact that rocks are hard. You wanting them to be soft won’t change the facts. It only creates suffering for you.

If you can’t let go of resisting your acne, accept that. Acknowledge that you can’t stop resisting it. Stop resisting the resisting. Then simply observe the resistance with curiosity and see what happens.

Then work on accepting your skin as it is. I’m not saying you have to be happy about your skin. You probably won’t be. It also doesn’t mean you resign to it. Acceptance simply means seeing your skin for what it is. Accepting means letting it be what it is, for now. When you accept you stop doing suffering. When you stop suffering you create an opening for a different reality to emerge.

As you work on accepting your acne the story of yourself as helpless acne victim weakens. As your story and external reality always match, along with the story goes the struggle and frustration it brings.

What do you think happens to your acne if your new story is one where you are at peace with your skin? The worst that could happen is that your acne stays the same, but it doesn’t bother you anymore. You simply look at it with no emotion at all.

So, in your head you have your little Aladdin’s Lamp. Your wish is its command. If you choose to see acne and a harbinger of misery and suffering, that’s what you experience. You can have this experience as long as you want. And you can end it anytime you want. Simply choose again. Choose to see acne as a gateway to happiness and overcoming your limitations and that’s what you get.

It’s your choice.

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Clear for Life - The lifestyle for health, happiness and clear skin