Underingstanding Your Issues That Deal With Trading

Understanding Your Core Issue

Part One: Van Shares His Story

by
Van K. Tharp, Ph.D.

After many years of doing coaching work with people, studying human psychology and behavior, as well as doing much work on my own self exploration, I long ago concluded that everyone has a core issue inside of them—one issue that rules the subconscious more so than any other. Because people are so afraid of that one core issue popping up, they tend to hide it deep within themselves. Most hope it never surfaces and will do anything to keep from experiencing it. So it goes unresolved and continues to run thoughts, emotions and actions from deep within ourselves.

It’s important for each of us to remember we are not our emotions. Instead, our emotions are energy flowing through us. And what you resist tends to persist, even if it is buried deep inside.

I’ve been busy this summer doing a new kind of self exploration that has led me on an extraordinary journey in dealing with my very core issue. This has been a powerful experience for me, and I’d like to share some of it with you.

So let’s jump right into a little of Van’s early childhood history.

Childhood History

Six months after I was born, my father left for the Philippines. He was involved in reconstruction after the war, but I was too young to understand that. All I knew was that suddenly, I didn’t have a father. My mother told me that I was so upset that I wouldn’t eat and it took a lot of work on their part to get food into me.

As I gradually got over my father leaving, my grandfather became my father-figure. When I was two years old, my father returned. Then my family moved to Japan—without my grandfather. Thus, I was now losing my grandfather. And for most of my childhood, I always thought of my Grandfather’s house as my home.

In Japan, I became particularly close to a Japanese housekeeper that we called Mitzi. She was like a mother to me and to this date one of my treasures is a picture of Mitzi and I together.

But at five years old, I left Japan and I never saw Mitzi again. It felt like my heart broke. Gratefully, I went on to have my core family with me for the rest of my childhood. Nevertheless, I think the psychological damage from the losses was done at that point.

I don’t have any charge on any of these individual happenings because I’ve done many, many years of clearing work on my issues neutralizing them. However, my one core issue was still there, even after all the work I’d done.

Let me share another thing that happened. My mother died of cancer in 1993 at the age of 85. She’d lived a good life and I was at peace with her. I was actually happy that she had made her transition and could now join the rest of our family (my father died in 1977 and my sister died in 1988). What I didn’t expect was a reaction that I had going through my mother’s things.

What I found among my mother’s things was a letter from Mitzi’s husband, written in 1958, trying so desperately to reach us. When I read that letter, I became about as emotional as I can ever remember being. It was my mother’s funeral, but I was crying over Mitzi.

Mitzi had eventually married a U.S. soldier and moved to the U.S. My family was living in England, so we never saw her. But my understanding is that my sister said something to upset her that caused a rift between our families. Furthermore, I’d been told that Mitzi had died a few years later of a brain tumor before my family returned from England.

So what does all this have to do with my core issue? Well, my core issue has been a very deep sense of loneliness and emptiness inside. I’ve only felt it a few times, but when it came up it was so bad that I never wanted to feel it again. In fact, I tend to believe that my whole life has been about doing whatever was necessary not to feel that feeling. I wouldn’t get too close to people because they might leave me, and I’d distract myself with work or escape activities. I’ve always felt like that emptiness was around someplace that I had to hide from it.

And Then Something Happened!

In June, I was in Florida doing a preparation course for my Oneness course in Fiji. We were doing an exercise on strengthening your inner guidance. We were asked to imagine the qualities we wanted our inner guidance to have so that our relationship would become very, very strong and wonderful and we were given blessings to help us produce that. I decided that I wanted an internal guidance that was very, very joyful.

We were doing an exercise in which we concentrated on the qualities we wanted, asking the universe to give them to us. And while we were doing that we were getting “hands on” oneness blessings. I had three of them. The first two felt very masculine, strong, and comforting. But that wasn’t what I was looking for. However, the third blessing given transferred a very gentle feminine energy into me. And when I felt it, an immense joy came over me. And suddenly, the word “Mitzi” came into my heart.

That evening, I felt this utter sense of completeness inside of me. And I knew that it was now part of me and that I could never feel that dreaded sense of emptiness again. I realized that feeling of emptiness was just an illusion. It was just a feeling that I identified with and resisted. Now, I have a new feeling of being whole and complete inside of myself, like I will never have to look outside myself again for that sense of fulfillment. That feeling is within me and it is always available.

At that point I felt very, very happy. And my internal guidance (which feels like it is Mitzi) says that this is only the beginning of something much more magnificent to come.

Next week I’ll share an amazing twist in this story. My memories of Mitzi triggered an amazing series of events, and I look forward to sharing more with you.

About Van Tharp: Trading coach, and author, Dr. Van K. Tharp is widely recognized for his best-selling book Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom and his outstanding Peak Performance Home Study program - a highly regarded classic that is suitable for all levels of traders and investors. You can learn more about Van Tharp at www.iitm.com.