“I Find It So Hard To Love Myself.”

When you say “I find it so hard to love myself”, the one in You who finds it so hard to love yourself isn’t really You. It’s not the ’I’ you mean, the actual You. The one in you who finds it hard to love yourself is a wounded, working-from-outdated-data, brainwashed-by-untrue-beliefs little character that lives in you, that wants to protect you from getting it wrong and that has been so prevalent that they, and all their negative beliefs, seem like they are the real You –

– but the REAL You has no problem loving and forgiving yourself. The real You, the one I’m talking to now – can you hear me? I think you can. You know very well that you’re innocent and just as worthy of love and care as anyone else. You’ve been through what you’ve been through, you’ve had your own unique childhood of wounding and confusion, and you’re still a well-meaning, kind person. You may not deserve more than the next person…just the same love and care and benefit-of-the-doubt that you’d extend to anyone else in your life. No big grandiose drama.

Yes…You. You know you deserve love. The ‘I’ you were talking about before that finds it hard to love you isn’t You. It’s one of Headfuck FM’s DJs who’s been given so much repetitious airtime in your inattentive head that they seem like truth, like ‘who you are’. Actually the list of undeserving, self-loathing, or self-ignoring, protocols that this character filters life through is not You but a mode you defaulted to long ago, well-meaning but ignorant….and obsolete now.

I know you get this. Please try and keep it for at least the next hour.

jamiecatto.com/workshops

#academyofthesacredfool

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The War On Women and Why

Why have men waged war on women throughout recorded history? I’m assuming that if you’re reading this you don’t need me to make the usual, obvious list to support that under-statement.

Don’t freak out but women are closer to god or spirit or magic (or whatever you call your essential source of All That Is)…than men. OK OK I said don’t freak out!

Women are the physical, human doorway between heaven and earth. They have a womb and a vagina and life literally arrives through their cosmic stargate portal. Men obviously do not have this ability and are one step further away from ‘heaven’.

For a man to enter heaven, he has to do it with or through the woman and one of the ways that he can experience even an echo of that access to core spirit is when she welcomes him to be sexual with her.

Women hold the key to the doors of heaven and men have been terrified to be excluded or not have access to that place so in blind, ignorant panic, as the barbarians and hunters and warring animals they are, men’s conclusion has been to make war on women, and subjugate them in every way, to own and control them and what they do wth their bodies, and make them afraid of male violence if they don’t obey, all to make sure that men can always get access to the core spirit they hold, and never be excluded from it. The price of women’s constant terror, even often to walk down the street or go dancing – constantly tracking to make sure there isn’t male-predator energy lurking around the next corner, is a price men are willing to live with and the endless river of available pornography is the lowest grade access point for men who can’t get it through love or control, the last resort for the bereft junkies.

This trajectory started long long ago….

The men also created clubs (religions) where they excluded women and debased women’s higher value as spiritual conduits, and pretended the men were spiritual conduits (priests). The priests, criminally faking that they were the channel to god ended up having their circuits fried by the level of spirit that came through, and became sexual abusers and power freaks and false judges and even torturers, all the while pretending that the women, who were the only ones capable of being ‘priestesses’ and channelling that amount of spirit, were lower and even dirty, even evil and responsible for the Fall of Man! So they murdered them, burned them at the stake and still to this day only recently will even start a conversation that there could even a shred of equality in this area (let alone acknowledge their superiority in this realms). The men gathered in numbers in monasteries, secluded, praying and meditating, trying to find the doorway to god without women. They never once found it after decades and decades of freezing their asses off in the mountain caves.

Through controlling women’s right to choose whether she will or won’t reproduce, to control that sacred doorway, and to brainwash women and all culture that women are ‘less’ and that they should be paid less for the same job is still totally normalised in our culture (incredibly) – and to reduce her divine power to a grubby buying and selling market of sex addicts, porn and advertising – reducing the purest gold we know of to cold coins – men are still, through ignorance and desperation – warring on women.

It is only very recently that finding a way to heaven through protecting the woman, listening to the woman, and bowing at the temple gate of the woman, holding and upholding the woman in a mutually respectful and reverent dance, has been even contemplated. It takes some vulnerability to do that and that’s counter-intuitive to someone who’s been warring for eternity.

It’s time to end this war. It’s time to dissolve all structures which prostitute the sacred entrance to heaven such as glamour advertising and pornography. All archaic institutions which support lack of equality, lack of equal respect and pay and promote sole male seniority need to be phased out and used as cautionary tales for the new children to learn the wrong way. To learn that the male warmongers who tried to force a path into heaven with their armies only opened up the gates of hell for themselves and their ancestors.

Can we men ever be forgiven for thousands of years of violence? Can the men who grew up in this culture but realised soon enough that they didn’t want to participate in that abuse be welcomed into the inner sanctum to rebuild a equal and mutually honouring world together?

What would it take?

jamiecatto.com

Intuition or Projection? Are you too sure you’re right?

For me, one of the biggest subjects in how we interact with each other these days, is about knowing the difference between our intuitions and our projections. We often judge things and people negatively when we are unconsciously reacting from a projection of ours from a painful past experience, and yet we can kid ourselves that we are sure we are ‘right’ and that person is ‘doing this’ or ‘behaving like that’ when they are quite innocent and our ‘certain truth’ is really us reacting to an old feeling inside ourselves that we are unaware of.

My partner told me yesterday about a clip she saw online where the speaker described a court case of a convicted murderer, and the jury were deciding whether he’d get prison or the death penalty. When they chose the death penalty it was on the grounds that his face was totally blank and he showed no remorse. But then it was discovered that in that man’s culture a blank expression WAS remorse. Oops.

I have noticed that when I feel hurt or triggered by someone’s behaviour, it is not always ‘the thing they did’ that hurts me but the ‘meaning’ or ‘interpretation’ of their actions and choices, that I have added, that hurts. I will think “that means they don’t love me” or “that means they don’t care about me or respect me”, or “they’re trying to get one over on me”. The person involved could have totally innocent intentions but because I am hurt or suspicious, my mind, in it’s usual misguided and self-protecting way, will come up with these extra versions and judgements which may or may not have anything to do with reality. I’m concerned that we have developed a curious kind of paranoia here where we knee-jerk expect the worst and give everyone the opposite of the benefit of the doubt.

Here’s an example: someone could be coming home for dinner and stay slightly later at work to make sure everything is cleared and done so that there will be absolutely no distraction once home to have a wonderful undisturbed evening with their partner. Upon arriving home a bit late, the partner who has been also looking forward to the evening and been cooking a beautiful meal, could easily interpret the late homecoming as disrespect and uncaring when it was really the exact opposite. That’s a slightly contrived and lumpy example but I have noticed that I am much more likely to judge someone’s actions towards me from the negative presumption when I am triggered or worried than to imagine the positive version and look through the lens of trust and positivity.

We’ve all been bitten in the past and have good reason to be careful. We also need to guard against genuinely uncaring or toxic people, but I feel we may have drifted into a kind of automatic, negatively assuming mode where we expect ill-will before we expect innocence and care towards us.

Let’s really notice, when we are so ‘sure’ that someone is being uncaring or selfish or sexist or sleazy or ignorant or avoidant….let’s be careful that our certainty that they are ‘being like that’ is really coming from a clearly felt sense in this moment and not from our reactivity to all the people and negative experiences from our past that we are lumping this person in with.

To do this we need to become much more intimate with our feelings and sensations and notice ourselves feeling them before the mind jumps in and gets busy making stuff up.

We have been trained to be externally fixated but it is our attention and intimacy with our INTERNAL state which will keep us on the authentic and un-enslaved path.

jamiecatto.com/workshops

How To Be Released From The Spell

From the moment our human life begins most of us are traumatised by at least one, if not all, of these three things.

First the birth itself. Whether you believe in the great spiritual Oneness before human incarnation or just the oneness of the Mother’s womb, coming out onto planet earth as a baby, where before we were part of something bigger, in a yummy float tank with everything taken care of, now into individualisation, solitariness, Me-ness, and everything that comes with it, is a huge deal. The cord is cut and you are helpless, dependent, and begin the human experience in varying degrees of freak out. ‘What is this skin and nerves and sensations thing???? Help!!!’ Add to that the immense amount of fear and bright lights and disempowerment and death that’s surrounded ‘birth’ in our culture and how unconsciously, until recently, babies’ fragile psyches have been handled on the way in, and a trajectory of fear and loneliness, to varying degrees, is set in motion. (There are some wonderful rebel alliances working to change this but they are struggling to be heard.)

Second, the homes we were born into and the carers assigned to us, almost without exception, feed us a totally false set of rules on how we should be, based on the crap rule book they were given as children. ‘Don’t be like this’ ‘Don’t let anyone see you being like that’, painfully and scarily removing love and approval when not obeyed, or you get it wrong, or they’re just tired or stupid – and the whole model of ‘how to be a person’ is handed down, missing the real truths of Life, in fact, recommending the opposite. We’re taught, through our experience, not to be vulnerable, not to fail, always to obey, to not stand out, not to be magnificent, to manipulate other’s responses by reading them and catering to their model even if it’s not authentic for us, to say yes when we often mean no…and on and on…. We have all been given a different set of incorrect instructions and it has felt exhausting and self-abandoning to keep living to that toxic model. And most people don’t even notice this. They live as if their model is still right and should be working for them, crisis after crisis, still clinging to that early, ignorant, rulebook. Ouch.

Third, the cultural environment the humans have created is just so fucked up it is banal to even list it here. The attitude of fakeness and superficiality with which mainstream culture feeds itself is baffling. The normalisation of gun-running and creating war for profit. The way illness and medicine have become a business for profit. The way we treat animals. The way much of the world treats women. The taboo of male vulnerability. The way we’re taught to all pretend that we’re not going to die. The utter plunder of the environment…a culture where intimacy is treated as high risk. It’s just unrelentingly backward out there. Who said that it’s no measure of sanity to be ok living in a sick society?

So with our varying experiences of those three shadows, is it any wonder everyone’s in such a state of trauma? I know that I am and that the accumulation of only doing minimum damage limitation on my trauma when I’m forced into a crisis is not enough any more. I’m calling for a global pow wow to really acknowledge the state of trauma that most humans, even in wealthy countries with no bombs dropping, are in. And when we acknowledge this, to collectively team together to bring in the medicine to heal us all – and that is TURNING TOWARDS IT AND BEING VISIBLE TOGETHER.

I know looking weak or ugly or like a failure is a taboo and our lives have taught us that if we let those parts of ourselves be seen we will lose out or be exiled. We live religiously protecting the shop window of our attractive and palatable appearance – but it’s killing us slowly with loneliness.

Intimacy is not as big a risk as our reptilian brain parts claim. It feels much more dangerous than it is. In fact it’s a cuddly sheep in wolf’s clothing. We’ve made maps of ourselves, cut ourselves down to what we think will get us love and acceptance and success, and we’ve put ‘there be dragons’ around the edge of our maps as an alarm system to make sure we never risk those ‘other unwelcome parts’ being seen. But it only takes a tiny quarter turn towards those dragons to see that they are merely children’s chalk drawings of dragons and with one soft breath they evaporate and a pile of treasure and homecoming and intimacy is available.

And the starting point, I feel, for this time, is for each of us to acknowledge the trauma we’ve absorbed and start to take much more diligent and focused steps to release it. You can see how reactive we have become. Do you ever go a week without being triggered into it? A day?

Please let’s acknowledge the collective trauma and sober up about any expectations of life sorting itself out while we’re pinballing around from one self-protecting strategy to the next, ignoring the incredible need for releasing that trauma rather than living life in constant compensating for it and bouncing from crisis to overreactive crisis.

There’s so much heartfelt, nourishing, intimate, connected, laughter-and-tears-filled healing available if we can wake up from the trance for a moment.

3 – 2 – 1 – and we’re back in the room!

Hi……you deserve healing too, even if you had a happy childhood….come to the edge.

www.jamiecatto.com/workshops

If you ever want to go deeper

It occurred to me today that while I have quite a lot of coaching and mentoring ‘clients’ I’ve never described it or deliberately offered it before. People get in touch with me through word of mouth and occasionally I tell Facebook ‘I have some spaces next week’ but I’ve never shared with you what I actually offer or do….so in case you’ve ever considered it, here goes:

I run two kinds of support.

The first way I work is to offer a flexible hour plus two weeks of email dialogue support, by text or email or any written follow up, and together we unblock or ignite any mission, problem, idea, need, pattern, issue or life-challenge, (which usually involves exploring other areas of your life than you thought you’d come to talk about!), and with very few exceptions, a huge illumination and dissolving of what’s in the way and/or a well needed redirecting of your focus and framing of what’s going on to where you can be powerful. The fundamental twist in this process is that most people come to a session with something they want to get rid of or a problem of some kind, and of course, in the linear, problem-solving way we’ve all been brought up to address challenges there’s an assumption that we’re going to clear an obstacle, remove something – that that’s what we should do. But that’s where the great misunderstanding is, from my model, of how I see progress and healing and unblocking working, because the agenda I’ve just described is based in turning away from or pushing away what’s going on, as if we’re here to get rid of something and yet the quickest and most efficient way to both dissolve an obstacle or problem and also, most importantly, harvest it for the blatant, neon sign-post I believe your Life’s genius is trying to give you through the experience, (and which usually bears much more precious gifts than the issue you think you came to explore with me) is to turn towards, not away from the edge. It’s all in the way we turn towards it, and, a sneak preview, it always includes a way you’ve forgotten to self-care. For this flexible hour plus 2 weeks of written dialogue support I charge £250 and usually do it on Skype but if you can get to Oxford or London or somewhere else I am, of course, in the flesh. For me, to go so deep but then not have a 2 week follow up period for what is left, for what comes up, how it settles and any adjustments needed for the commitments you’ll make in the session, would be a bit weird to me and I’m surprised that most coaches and even therapists, just offer their time in hourly slots without that availability afterwards.

The second way I work, as I usually only offer a single or at most two of the above one-off sessions, is a fully hands-on Mentoring relationship which, again perhaps uniquely to how it makes sense for me to work, I only know how to do by offering my 100% availability, seven days a week, holidays, evenings and even nights if I’m awake – limitless. I feel that if you want my brain and heart that deeply in your life then I need to be right there on your shoulder for whenever you have a dilemma, an upset, a confusion, a need for clarity, support, encouragement and especially being smartly directed to your own wisdom in any and every moment of your life. It’s an all-you-can-eat buffet for the period we’re working together. So I’m there on the end of the phone or Skype or text or in person for as much as you need me, (unless I’m on a plane or feeding a child), I pick up – or certainly within an hour or two, no needing to book a slot – you just call, day or night. This is a very intense journey and is only offered in 3 month chunks of commitment. For this I charge from £2000-£5000 a month (means tested) and it’s not for the faint hearted! My past and current clients have offered to tell you more if you’re serious about this option.

It feels good to tell you all that because I’ve never written it down before and the one-on-one work is some of the most extraordinary, nourishing, intimate and profound stuff I do, yet I’m always going on about the Insanely Gifted book and the workshops….so if you’d like to know anything more just email me at jamiecatto@mac.com and it’ll come straight to my inbox.

Thanks for, in whatever way you are, being part of this army of walking permission slips we are becoming – just by being authentic and embodied ourselves, we create a space for everyone around us to be real too, vulnerable even, and everyone breathe a huge sigh of relief as we allow a deeper connection, less superficiality, more intimacy and power.

www.jamiecatto.com

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Unsafe Fences

One of the many characters roaming around in my mind, looking for trouble, is a kind of groundsman of my life’s landscape, perpetually checking on the areas of my perimeter fence which look insecure or vulnerable. He keeps returning to them, doing his rounds.

Some of them can be attended to and fixed or at least seemingly soundly protected but there will always be a few fences where he doesn’t have the tools to secure it. Some fences aren’t in our control or capacity to secure. This can make the groundsman a bit flummoxed or even anxious sometimes and he returns to those fences again and again to just stare at them holding his chin and sometimes imagine the danger of what might come through.

I read that the Samurai is instructed to, even in his most comfortable and joyful moments, imagine his own death, to imagine being swept away by a tumultuous river or ripped apart by wild dogs.

I also know that all the disasters that I used to dread and panic about earlier in my life, once they happened, I survived and often thrived unexpectedly and the experience was nothing like the dread I had pictured (often endlessly, exhaustively and exhaustingly).

Tell it to the groundsman.

Send the Samurai to stand by his side too.

Look at that fence.

Ask:

What am I believing is true when I keep focusing on the unfixable boundary of my perimeter fence?

Historically you’ve always been an epic survivor, no?

In our new film (nearly finished!) Ram Dass says ‘Not getting what I want is just as interesting as getting what I want it turns out.’

Trusting the curriculum is a very different life.

The fleet of groundsmen and groundswomen that we now have patrolling the permimeter fences of our lives charged with clear instructions: never let me look stupid, never let me look like a failure, never let me look ugly, never let me be destitute, never let me get exiled…rejected….abandoned…

…religiously guarding against those things was an agenda we set in motion as small children when the pain of being laughed at or excluded or told off was just too painful, so we understandably charged our incredible brains to never let us feel those things again – and we’ve lived by the urgency of those decisions ever since.

But we were children then.

Setting our amazing minds to be preoccupied with those protections is like getting Einstein to sweep the floor in the laboratory.

Mark Twain said ‘I’ve lived through some terrible things in my life… some of which actually came to pass.’

I can’t secure all fences but I am an epic survivor and I trust the curriculum.

In times of chaos I return to that.

www.jamiecatto.com

Your Inevitable Path to Generosity and Service

What are you striving for…(or gently heading towards)? What is the thing that when you get it will make everything peaceful and complete and ok in your life? For many it’s imagined as a certain amount of money or regular financial security – for others it’s just the right lover or partner or home – it could be Worldy or local success, being seen as valuable and special somehow by everyone – or having reached some other finish-line of achievement…maybe when you’ve done more yoga or attained a certain level of wisdom then everything will be great – pouring through books for that elusive aha moment that’s going to make everything acceptable and peaceful at last…

…but the thing is, having been around a lot of people that headed for those things before you and I, and achieved them, I can tell you that none of those finish-lines delivered that everything is ok now feeling to any of them for more than a flicker of a moment – and then it was back to the shadows and lights of being a human again, still feeling the same ups and downs and hopes and worries they had before.

In fact, the achievement of those this will make me complete and content goals and ultimate disappointment and emptiness that soon follows can be worse for some than the constant heading towards that most people live through, because once you’ve earned that money and got married and everyone’s chanting your name from the cheap seats on your world stadium tour, and yet you still return to feeling empty and disconnected when the lights have gone down and everyone’s gone home, then you REALLY have a problem – because where can you go from here?

This realisation, when it comes, is a bit like a rock-bottom moment for an addict – when all the unhealthy ways to avoid that feeling of disconnection have failed and one is left with no more options to escape the loneliness of being a person, an individual among billions of other individuals, all searching for that deeper sense of peace and connection in inefficient and unfulfilling places.

The inevitable realisation that occurs next, whether you’ve made it BIG or run out of addictions, and no more shopping or scrolling or consuming is filling the hole any more, is that the way to open the aperture of nourishing, fulfilling and joyful contentment sustainably is to GIVE.

Generosity and service are guaranteed to deliver that thing.

Having our generosity received is one of the most nourishing things on offer on this planet. How much more enjoyable is it to see someone open a present that you took some time making or selecting than you, yourself, opening another scarf? Having been appreciated for your love and care in any form, from a fleeting smile of presence or loving complicity to a big favour, or just being there for someone when they needed it. These things FILL our hearts and sense of being at home with the other humans during this brief, often scary, flash of human life. Writing music or creating is an act of generosity, offering our gifts as artists, chefs, guides, technicians, healers, helpers….the feeling of being received, the connection and intimacy that opens up is fulfilment.

So whatever material or spiritual path you think you’re on, wherever you think you are headed, please forgive my dogmatic tone here but I can save you a lot of trouble and tell you now, you are going to realise at the end of it, or at some point along it, that having an attitude of ‘where can I give?’ in small and big ways, either just with the people you know or to the furthest reaches of the planet, is the only thing that will sustainably bring you contentment. Whether it be devotion to your garden, your children, you friends, the environment, people who need help and care, or the song you are writing – wherever you can give of yourself devotionally will be where you find that thing and can build your castle of contentment on solid ground.

Might as well get on with it. Please let us know how it goes.

jamiecatto.com/workshops