Why I Have Clarity on Everything

An introduction to the Onion Method and what intentional living actually means.

One night when I was 8 years old, I looked myself in the mirror when I was washing my hands.

It was clear to me that there was me but also another me watching myself watching me in the mirror. It wasn’t a two-head monster kind of horror moment; it was a realization that the “I” was never a singular entity.

I have been able to observe myself this way ever since. At first, I needed a mirror to help me. If I was devastated and crying, I would look at myself in the mirror and observe my feelings. Eventually, I don’t have to; and overtime, I have control over my feelings.

I can choose how to feel.

The significance of this ability hasn’t become evident to me until life became more complicated and I had gone through the worse break-up of my life. Betrayal, abandonment, co-dependence, it was ugly. But using the same method, I chose happiness each day until I got out of it. Lesson learned but unharmed.

Then I read about spiritual awakening from Eckhart Tolle’s book The Power of Now. The ability to detach from emotions and manage them is the essence of spiritual awakening because, by doing that, we master suffering.

So when I tell you I have clarity in things, I am not joking or arrogant; I just am. I break down my 22 years of practice, so it’s possible for you to do that too if that’s something you’d like to do.

Emotions, Awakening, Clarity, Suffering

When we are mastered by our emotions, which usually have so many layers, we can’t reach clarity. Spiritual awakening and inner peace aren’t about getting rid of feelings or emotions (that’s suppression, and it’s very dangerous), but to be able to feel them with control.

Many people need psychedelic drugs to reach a place where they can be comfortable with their emotions/feelings; they thought they could feel deeper with these drugs and elevate from the pain at the same time.

I don’t take drugs, and I feel that when we take drugs, it depends on how much and what drugs we are giving up control of our body and mind to a chemical.

Logically, that doesn’t sound like mastering anything to me.

Spiritual awakening is a logical experience, unlike what I observe among the hippies (which are abundant here in Brighton, England) who seek a kind of freedom that seems to be more restrictive and angry than the one I feel.

So the first step to transcending suffering, i.e., to be spiritual awakened through having clarity, is to breakthrough emotions.

My Onion Method

I love onions; they add so much depth to any type of cooking. Not only do they make us cry at very dangerous times (i.e., when cutting them…), but there are also endless layers in an onion.

That’s like our emotions —they add flavors to our lives, make us cry at dangerous times, and also have many layers. The deeper we can analyze our emotions (preferably as a third person as mentioned, but it’s ok if that’s not the case) and break them down, the more we become conscious of it, the more likely they will succumb to our power. Essentially, we want to make our emotions our bitch.

Let’s use my favorite topic — body image. I have written extensively about how my low self-esteem and being body-shamed have screwed my life over again and again.

I will run through a step-by-step guide to breakthrough emotions with something that happened to me when I was 14 years old. Please pick an event that triggered you recently.

Step 1: Stick the event that causes an emotional response at the top of a paper.

For me: The staff at the shop couldn’t find my size

Step 2: Write down the emotion you feel immediately because of this event under step 1; it's the strongest emotion.

For me: Embarrassed.

Step 3: State how you feel about the feeling on step 2 underneath it (you might have a lot of feelings at the same time, this method allows you to see what’s primary and what’s secondary, so on).

For me: annoyed, both at my fat tummy and at the jeans I couldn’t button up.

Step 4-infinite: Basically, repeat step 3 to as many layers as you need to until you get to this — your fear.

I can guarantee that if we keep digging, we will always reach some kind of fear. Some people’s fear is very obvious, like my mum is very fearful of uncertainty, losing control. That’s why by body-shaming me, she’s trying to control my diet (because she lost control when she was young, so she was not skinny, and she had problems with her marriage).

For me, being body-shamed like this has made my response to gaining weight or not finding the clothes that suit my size a traumatic experience — I feared that I wouldn’t be loveable by my mother as well as others. The narrative was, “I am scared no one will find me attractive if I’m so ugly.”

Find your fear, don’t be afraid; you have much more power than you think over this.

Now you have hit the jackpot. This might sound really insensitive as the journey of self-discovery is almost never fun. But even though my body image has been giving me grief since I was young, because I have learned to look at myself almost like a third person since I was so young, for me, self-discovery is like an experiment. I become both the scientist and the lab rat, and I can look at myself with such impartiality.

It’s a very empowered state I can vouch for it.

After Hitting the Jackpot, We Live Intentionally

I love my jackpot of fear. After this incident, I did many other experiments with different events that triggered me, from being nervous in a social setting to being forgetful, etc. The outcome is almost always the same — I was fearful that no one loves me.

Think of our unknown fear as the monsters under our bed that haunt us when we sleep. Like Boo, once we discover Monster Inc., we have power over these monsters.

The only power of these fears lies in being hidden. Once it’s discovered, they are pretty much useless.

What we want to do with knowing this deep-down fear is to recognize how illogical it is. We can then remove all these layers within the onion and return to a neutral event and deal with it differently.

Mastering Your Fear, Then You Can Master Your Emotions

In my case, what really happened is that particular shop didn’t have my size. There’s nothing to be embarrassed, annoyed, or ashamed about. And being my size will not stop me from being loveable. Not loving myself is the only thing that will stop me from being loveable by others.

This kind of self-affirmative chat is very specific to ourselves, unlike the blanket self-affirmation which we find in guided meditations. We are now actively and consciously replacing the inner-criticism that we have let ruining our lives for far too long.

You can even say to your fear, “you don’t even make sense, so go away.”

Like meditation, which focuses on our breath, one inhale, and one exhale at a time, the Onion Method focuses on our inner fear, one triggering event at a time.

We don’t know which event will have a huge triggering impact on us suddenly; life is very unpredictable. What we want to do is to become so conscious of our inner fear that the Onion Method becomes the default response every time something comes up.

Can you see how this practice will elevate us from suffering? Can you also see that you are now looking at yourself like how I was looking at the mirror when I was 8 years old?

Believe in ourselves; when we experience the magical properties in this experience of splitting ego from self, we have reached a powerful state of spiritual awakening. I want you to know that spiritualism is not always that dramatic and whimsical; it’s equally logical and mechanical.

More of my words here: