A few days back I put up a post about desires and beliefs. Stating that in life, we don’t get what we desire, we get what we believe. This statement doesn’t blow you away? Well I think it should ;). Just chew on it for a moment. Did you ever feel frustrated, that you don’t want poverty in your life, you have fought not to have poverty in your life, but still it is there? Or ever felt frustrated that you work so hard to maintain a beautiful partner relationship, but every time it goes wrong and breakup happens and you are back to point zero?
Frustration happens when we somehow feel life should be giving us what we want. Because then when our desires are not met, we either blame life (life isn’t fair!) or ourselves (I’m a failure!). The key understanding you need is that life follows/reflects your beliefs, your cognitions, your basic ideas about what the truth is about you and life and everything. It’s an insight worth understanding, so if you didn’t read it yet check my earlier post.
At this point you should be convinced it’s your beliefs that matter. And that for changing the reality of your life, you need to change those basic cognitions. That’s the first requirement for being able to dig out those beliefs and work on them.
Let’s start with an example.
Dancing in the rain
You were a kid, say four years old. You are looking out the window and it starts to rain and you simply run outside and dance around, having loads of fun and enjoying the experience of the downpour. Next thing you know, your mom is there shouting at you, pulls you inside and shakes you up. At that moment in time, you have no idea what is happening, what it is that you did wrong, why your mom is so upset. For you it is very simple: you were in the rain, enoying yourself, no harm intended. Then your mom came and got angry and pulled you away. You feel upset, and you draw your own conclusions: when I’m enjoying myself and having fun, for no obvious reason life comes and ruins my fun and even punishes me. Boiling down to: life is not fair. And having fun is a dangerous thing.
It’s a small example. All of us have tons of these small examples, simple memories. The situations are different for each of us, the conclusions we take from them are different for each of us. But what happens is, these simple conclusions, that we take from these little incidents – if we don’t attend to them, they become the building blocks of our lives. For example, for a person who went through this dancing in the rain and getting scolded by her mom experience, even at 50 years of age she might hesitate to enjoy something unreservedly. Somewhere in the back of her head, she’ll always remember that it’s dangerous to simply enjoy, because the fun can be taken away at any moment and can even turn into a bad experience.
Incompletions
So what does this have to do with changing your beliefs (and thus changing the reality that goes with it)?
To change our reality, we need to change our beliefs. Those beliefs are born in moments of incompletion, powerlessness, like the one described above. Anything which happens in our life, from big to small, can stir something in us and lead to powerlessness and incompletion. Whether it is that your father hit you, or that you asked your brother to share his candy and he refused – it really doesn’t matter so much what the incident was, it matters how it made you feel and the conclusions that you decided on in this situation. And every one of us responds differently and comes to different conclusions. For one person, the brother refusing candy simply doesn’t matter, for the other, a strong feeling of rejection happens and a cognition that other people are mean and only think of themselves.
Incompletions are moments of powerlessness which we have left unattended till now – they have not been completed yet. Those moments still carry pain, confusion, sadness, guilt, or any other emotion, but especially powerlessness. An incompletion is a hangover from the past, sitting in your present and destroying your future. To understand the relationship between the incomplete emotions and the conclusions that you have taken away from them, think about it like this: the conclusions – your beliefs – are your text written on a post-it, the emotions are the glue that make those post-its stick to your inner space.
For example: your father hit you, and in your moment of powerlessness and feeling rejected you decided that life is cruel and people cannot be trusted. It is very important to understand that your decision about life at that point, that life is cruel and people cannot be trusted, was your decision. Another person in the same situation might have decided something else. Or, you could have decided something else. But since you, in your moment of incompletion and powerlessness, have decided about life that it is cruel and about people that they cannot be trusted in, now that becomes the reality you experience about life. You start living your life from this cognition, and because the outer world is the mirror of the inner world, life will reflect this cognition back to you. You will expect life to be cruel and people not to be trusted, and that will also be the reality you experience, making you even more convinced about the belief you carry. This goes on and on, till at some point you realise that you are going in a circle, that the life you live isn’t as beautiful and fulfilling as you want it to be. Till you realise that life isn’t what you wanted, because your beliefs about the world are the prison you are living in. And the only way to step out of that prison is by healing the emotions, by completing the incompletions where your binding cognitions and beliefs first happened in your life.
Completion technique and its origin
Incompletions can be healed by practicing completion. It’s not my technique or our technique, not at all. I’ve come to know about this technique through the teachings of Paramahamsa Nithyananda, a Guru who has his ashram close to Bangalore in India. For a half year now, me and my husband live in The Netherlands again. Before that, we stayed with this Guru on his ashram for one and a half years. That is where we got a lot of experience in practicing the completion technique and other great tools for happy and successful living. So we first learned about this technique through Paramahamsa Nithyananda, but the technique is much much older, first described in an ancient Vedic (Hindu) text Vijnana Bhairava Tantra, verse 22. For more in depth understanding of this technique, I can definitely recommend you look up his teachings, just search Completion + Nithyananda in YouTube and you’ll find a huge amount of amazing videos. For now, let me give you a first simple understanding of the technique, what it does and how to practice it, then you decide if you want to deepen your understanding.
Completion and how it heals you
So what is the completion technique? How will it help you? To put it in a simple way: it is a technique to heal those incomplete emotions. And once those emotions are completed, any conclusions, any cognitions that got stuck to your inner space at the moment of that incident (life is cruel, people only care about themselves, life is unfair, it is dangerous to be happy) simply fall away. Without having to convince yourself about the opposite, as soon as those emotions are completed, your old beliefs and cognitions simply drop away from you, they become irrelevant. And the space opens up for you to experience life in a different way, and to actually experience a different life. Because life, in its compassion, will give you a reflection of your inner space. So that you know what else needs to be healed inside of you. When those angry and spiteful cognitions are there, life reflects them back at you. When you heal those cognitions and your inner space becomes free and light and beautiful, then the life you experience will reflect that beauty and inner peace.
How to do completion
Here’s a short YouTube video we did a while back (at the beginning of our time on the ashram) about how to practice completion. If you’re interested in the technique, don’t miss the video it gives some more detail and more examples than I’m giving here in this post.
The video describes these steps for doing completion:
- When you face an incompletion in your life, for example something happens in your day and you are deeply hit by this feeling ‘life is unfair, and I never get what I want’, go back to the incident where you first felt this same way. So allow yourself to really feel the emotion you are in (anger, disappointment, powerlessness) and remember the incident where you first felt this way.
- When you have found the situation in which you first felt this way, you start to relive the incident. Go back to that moment in time and relive it in all detail, recall all you can remember. Where you were, with whom, what was being said, how you felt about it. First, write all of this down. As detailed as possible. Then sit with your back straight, close your eyes and relive the situation at least five times. Allow yourself to live through the emotions of that moments. Just the reliving will be enough to complete the incomplete emotions and for the cognitions and beliefs to fall away, to become irrelevant. Continue with reliving till the emotions are completed, the situation is not so important to you anymore.
To practice the completion technique correctly, you need to understand the important difference between remembering and reliving. When you remember, you still have the experience of your present day self (maybe 20, 30, 50 or 90 years old) and you look back on the earlier incident. For example, you think about that day that you were dancing in the rain. And instead of experiencing it again as the four year old kid, you just remember the situation. Maybe you even feel you understand your mom for pulling you inside, it’s what you did with your kids also because you didn’t want them to be too cold and get sick. But by remembering, you will not heal the incompletion. You have to go back to the incident and to the person you were when you were first in that situation. Don’t mull over. Complete.
Is doing completion easy?
This is an important question: is doing completion easy? Think of it this way. All your life you have been going through situations and in those situations, you left some emotions incomplete. You never attended to it, just went on with your life. Doing that is similar to cleaning your house and sweeping the mess underneath the carpet – at some point whatever is there beneath the carpet starts to rot and to grow and to smell. It will make your experience of living in that house a very bad one! If you’ve left the garbage underneath the carpet unattended for a long time, you might feel resistance to actually lifting the thing. It might seem more easy to avoid that confrontation altogether. But as long as you do not lift the carpet and have a look underneath, the rotting and smelling will just continue to be there in your life, making all things difficult. Lifting the carpet and getting your cleaning tools out and actually doing something about that mess – yes, that takes some courage. But, you could also say, living in a house with all that rotting and smelling going on takes courage as well. Better to choose for the first kind of courage, where things can actually take a turn for the better!
So I wouldn’t say doing completion is easy. Not because it is complicated, but because we tend to carry a certain fear to go through those incomplete emotions that have been sitting there, neglected, for all those years. But. The results of your efforts in doing completion will be so absolutely worth your while! I cannot even begin explaining the kind of relief it brings to clean and heal that old bunch of hurt and pain and mess and rot and smell. Literally, life clears up and starts to shine and you do too, when you get rid of the incompletions and the damaging beliefs and cognitions that you carried for all this time.
There is actually a step 3 to doing completion. And that is: just do it. All this might sound very interesting, and you might feel this could really work. But nothing changes till you actually put it to practice. So simply decide not to procrastinate. This moment is as good as any to try it out. See if you can remember a moment in this day where you felt hurt, where you went through an emotional peak, a feeling of shrinking, a moment of powerlessness. Then go through the steps: find out where you first felt like that, remember the incident in detail and relive it!
Why I'm sharing
Thank you so much for reading through this post. The reason I want to share this information with you is because this technique of completion has brought me happiness, wealth, beautiful relationships, and everything in my life that is valuable. Because with this technique, I was able to remove my incompletions and with that, remove the beliefs and cognitions that were running but also ruining my life. With the completion technique, I’ve been able to create a peaceful and very enjoyable inner space, reflecting back to me as a life of abundance and happiness and beauty. I can’t be grateful and thankful enough for this shift that happened for me, and the best I can do is share it so that more people can benefit.
If you have any questions on how to do completion or why it works, please let me know! If you are interested in tools like these, tools that help us to make our life more powerful, beautiful, meaningful – then don’t forget to follow. And if you want to help me to get the message out to more people, please upvote and share! Thank you so much, and all best of luck with practicing completion!