HEAL | GROW | AWAKEN | THRIVE
Lee Bladon's Articles
Interesting articles about psychology, spirituality, the enneagram and metaphysics
Lee Bladon's Blog
What Is Somatic Therapy? Body-Centred Healing
When we experience stress, trauma or emotional pain, our body remembers – even when our mind has moved on. Somatic therapy is a form of psychotherapy that recognises the profound connection between our bodily sensations and our psychological wellbeing. It offers a path to healing through embodied awareness (presence).
What Is Enlightenment And How To Attain It?
Enlightenment is the recognition of our true nature beyond our mind, personality and separate sense of self. It’s essentially a shift in our identity from our conceptual sense of self to a living field of presence and awareness.
Levels of Consciousness – And How to Raise Yours
Learn about the levels of consciousness from shame to spiritual unity, and how to raise your frequency through awareness, presence, healing and conscious living. It’s a guide to evolving beyond fear and into fulfilment.
What Is Nonduality And How To Experience It?
Nondual awareness is a higher/subtler level of consciousness that can perceive deeper into reality than regular awareness can. It can sense below the surface of reality to experience the underlying unity of everything.
32 Blocks to Spiritual Awakening (and How to Avoid Them)
Blocks to Spiritual Awakening: Here are 32 things that can block or slow your spiritual awakening, and you’re probably doing some of them without even realising. Spot them, shift them, and unlock deeper freedom on your awakening journey.
What Is Spiritual Awakening? 14 Signs & Symptoms
What is Spiritual Awakening? A spiritual awakening is the process of waking up from the illusion of separation and recognising your true nature as awareness, consciousness or soul. Over time, the volume increases until you can no longer ignore it.
The Nervous System in Healing and Awakening
Our nervous system is the bridge between our body, heart, mind and soul. It connects our past traumas to our present-moment experience, so it’s an essential component of all inner work – healing, growth and awakening.
The Wisdom of Acceptance: 4 Powerful Truths
From resistance to release, suppression to expression – these powerful truths offer a path to emotional freedom through the wisdom of acceptance. Learn emotional maturity and develop self-acceptance.
How to Feel Safe with Think Safe, Feel Safe
How to feel safe: This process integrates mindfulness and body awareness to create a holistic experience of safety. The mind-body connection is bidirectional, which means when the body feels safe, the mind feel safe, and vice versa.
REM Release: A Natural Emotional Release Technique
Emotional Release Technique: REM Release is a gentle, natural therapeutic process that helps dissolve emotional distress and trauma by combining mindful awareness with spontaneous eye movements, similar to those experienced during REM sleep.
Emotional Reactivity And How To Control It
Psychologist Tara Brach has developed a simple yet powerful mindfulness practice for emotional healing and self-compassion. It’s called RAIN, which is an acronym that stands for: Recognise, Allow, Investigate & Nurture.
HeartMath Heart Breathing: Restore Your Inner Balance
Heart Breathing is the foundational HeartMath technique, designed to calm your emotional state, reduce stress and increase inner resilience. It’s simple yet powerful, and only takes a few minutes. Learn to do it right now.
HeartMath: The Science of Inner Balance
HeartMath is a system of science-based techniques that are designed to improve emotional wellbeing by synchronising the mind, heart and body. HeartMath helps to build resilience, reduce stress and enhance mental clarity.
Using The Enneagram For Spiritual Growth
Discover how to harness the wisdom of the Enneagram for spiritual growth and awakening. This practical guide invites you to approach your enneatype’s patterns with kindness and curiosity – notice them, accept them, allow them to soften, and your essence will gradually reveal itself.
The Enneagram and Spiritual Awakening
The Enneagram and Spiritual Awakening: The Enneagram is a powerful tool for self-discovery and spiritual growth. Its true potential is in helping us to understand the factors that keep us stuck in limitation and disconnected from our true nature.
Enneagram Type 9 (Enneatype 9)
Nines feel that they lack an intimate connection with the universe, so they yearn to be included, noticed, loved and appreciated in their everyday lives. Their strategy for achieving this is to be supportive and loving to others, and to never do anything that might cause them to be rejected.
Enneagram Type 8 (Enneatype 8)
Eights believe that strength is the answer to all of life’s problems, so they assert themselves over others to try to maintain control over their environment. They have little tolerance for “weakness” in themselves or others, so they have difficulty being receptive, vulnerable or showing their softer side.
Enneagram Type 7 (Enneatype 7)
Sevens want to experience positive feelings so they are always looking for things to get excited about, and they always appear optimistic and enthusiastic to keep up the (often subconscious) façade. They lack the trust that life can be naturally joyous so they often plan their activities well in advance.
Enneagram Type 6 (Enneatype 6)
Sixes doubt their ability to protect themselves or make the right decisions. They are plagued by insecurity, fear, anxiety, suspicion, indecisiveness and self-doubt. They believe that all of these issues will be resolved if they have the support of someone who will give them confidence and dispel their doubt.
Enneagram Type 5 (Enneatype 5)
Fives believe that they need to understand life in order to make sense of it, so they observe life from a distance and mentally analyse everything. Fives like the solitude of their mental bubble because it protects them from direct engagement with the real-world, which they fear.
Enneagram Type 4 (Enneatype 4)
Fours lack their true sense of “beingness”, so they try to emulate it by being seen as individual, original and authentic. Their disconnect from true “being” means that Fours often feel isolated, lonely and disconnected from others, and are highly sensitive to abandonment and neglect.
Enneagram Type 3 (Enneatype 3)
Threes are driven to achieve their full potential, but their attempts to emulate completeness and perfection are distorted into achieving and vanity. Their desire for approval drives them to continually strive to achieve a self-image that matches (what they believe is) society’s idealised image.
Enneagram Type 2 (Enneatype 2)
Twos are very loving and sensitive to other people’s emotional needs, but it is a case of giving in order to receive. They don’t like to ask for affection or attention because they expect others to be like them and sense when it is needed. They can be perceived as being clingy, needy and sentimental.
Enneagram Type 1 (Enneatype 1)
Ones attempt to embody the qualities of perfection, purity and completeness, and impose them on others. This gives Ones a very clear sense of (what they consider to be) right and wrong, and they believe that the world would be a better place if everybody lived by their standards.
How To Stop Taking Things Personally
Emotions are the most polarised aspect of our being; i.e. they carry the most charge. So the more emotion we experience the more difficult it is to remain objective. The more emotion that accompanies an experience the more we identify with it, and the more we take it personally.
The Truth About Wanting
Wanting is a big cause of suffering. When we tell ourselves “I’ll be happy when I get what I want”, we are telling ourselves that we can’t be happy or contented until we get what we want. But even if we get what we want, it won’t satisfy us for long, and we’ll soon want something else.
Radical Acceptance
Radical acceptance means learning to accept what you cannot change, and change what you cannot accept. It involves fully experiencing ‘what is’ without any resistance, judgement or agenda. When we are fully experiencing “what is” without any resistance, we are fully present.
False Beliefs
We all have a primary belief that shapes our fundamental approach to life, and a collection of core beliefs that influence our different strategies for life. Discovering these false beliefs is the key to liberating ourselves from the ego’s narcissistic, controlling and fear-based strategies.
Holistic Wellbeing
Holistic Wellbeing is about bringing every aspect of your “being” back into equilibrium, and restoring balance to every area of your life – physical, energetic, social, emotional, creative expression, mental and spiritual.
When balance is acheived, you naturally experience greater flow, vitality, clarity and inner peace.
The False Self (who I am not)
Unless we are enlightened or self-realised, we we have lost touch with “who we truly are”, and we live from a mentally-created false self or ego-self. Our belief that we are our ego-self makes us feel separate and insecure – cut off from the unity and oneness.
Who Am I? What Am I?
A Human Being is comprised of a Self, a Soul and a Personality. Our Self (divine spark) is the transpersonal element of our being; our mind, heart and body are the personal elements; and our soul is the field of experiential awareness and unique blend of “essential qualities” that integrates them all.
What Blocks Happiness
Authentic happiness is blocked by a (false) belief that life is not how it should be; i.e. how we want it to be. This unfulfilled false belief gives rise to negative emotions, which make us feel uncomfortable. The ego equates the discomfort with unhappiness, which it tries to alleviate by seeking happiness elsewhere.
The Key to Happiness
We are all looking for happiness in different places, but the places all have one thing in common – they are outside of ourselves. And that’s the issue, because when we look outside of ourselves, our level of happiness goes up and down like a roller-coaster in response to external events.
The Inner Journey
The Inner Journey requires us to discover “who we are not” (and disidentify from that) before we can truly discover “who we are”. We must allow our consciousness to unfold naturally through living consciously (being), and by proactively working with that natural process (becoming).
Conscious Awareness
Conscious awareness is witnessing or observing the mind, heart and body without getting caught up in thoughts, emotions or sensations. It gives us the power to notice our thoughts, emotions and bodies without identifying with them or defining ourselves by them.
Conscious Living (accessing the power of now)
Conscious living is about waking up from the trance of our ego structures and enabling our Self to become the conscious director of our life. Our subconscious beliefs, reactive emotions and conditioned behaviours will continue to run our lives until we make them conscious.
Feel It To Heal It
If we don’t consciously and fully experience our physical, emotional and mental responses to life, as they occur in the present moment, our fear or resistance causes them to become stuck and problematic. Feel It to Heal It is a simple somatic healing technique that can free us from these issues.
Psychological Healing
The soul’s “presence” is key to the psychological healing process because the soul’s intimate contact with the separate “part” is what allows this mis-identified piece of our consciousness to heal and re-integrate back into the wholeness of our being.
What is Focusing?
Focusing can help us to become clearer about what we feel or what we want, to develop new insights and to facilitate change. But it is primarily used for understanding ourself better, moving past old emotional pain, accessing inner wisdom and realising our full potential.