Summary
Hi, I am Lau Guerreiro, and SOELmethod is the means by which I make my form of enlightened personal development available to the world. I am 57 years old, and I have been involved in personal and spiritual development for over 30 years.
Our mission at SOELmethod is to make available a well-structured, logical system of personal development that produces quick results, and also teaches the underlying principles, so that you will be able to adapt what you learn, to suit whatever circumstance you may encounter in the future.
Enlightened Personal Development
I have developed a more holistic approach to personal development, which I call “enlightened personal development”.
Traditional personal development is predominantly focused on attaining external goals and achieving material success—as epitomized by Tony Robbins’ style of personal development.
At the opposite extreme of the spectrum is the enlightenment path espoused by Eastern spiritual traditions, which tells you to focus on internal aspects, and to give up on external goals.
The truth is rarely found at the extremes, and that is why my enlightened personal development approach takes a more balanced, middle path between the two.
We don’t live in mountain-top caves or monasteries, and therefore, we need to master the modern lifestyle. But external wealth and success does not guarantee internal happiness and fulfillment, and therefore, we need to wisely allocate our time and energy to the personal development aspects that will bring us the greatest benefits.
My Personal & Spiritual Development Journey
I developed my enlightened personal development approach as a result of having been through many different phases of my personal development and spiritual development journey. Below is a brief summary of the stages of my journey. Below that, you can read a more detailed account of my journey.
- I began as a passionate atheist with a Degree in Mathematics majoring in computer science.
- Then I immersed myself in personal development, which significantly improved my life.
- While engaging in open-minded scientific experimentation, I became a New Ager for several years, which added a wonderful spiritual dimension to my life.
- However, I let go of most aspects of New Age spirituality when I immersed myself in ‘enlightenment’ spirituality, which quickly led to an amazing ‘awakening’ experience.
- Having found the inner peace and fulfillment that I had been seeking, I mostly got on with my life as a software developer. On the side, I co-facilitated a personal development course for people on probation and parole, and ran personal and spiritual development workshops.
- I had peace of mind and was happy, and gradually I had less and less to do with spirituality and ended up as an agnostic, wondering whether it could all have just been chemicals in my brain?
- Eventually, I began writing a personal development text book, to collect together the most important aspects of the wide variety of personal and spiritual development topics. I have spent the past five years doing background research for the book: reading the latest scientific research, finding out what the current best practices are, combining it with my own personal experience, and analyzing and distilling it all to figure out the commonalities and the essence of it.
- Writing the book has led me to once again dive into spirituality, this time with a fresh perspective and decades of experience under my belt. The result is an approach to personal development that I call enlightened personal development.
My forte is being a generalist
who picks the best from the various areas,
then combines and synthesizes it
to make it more powerful.
Personal Development Coaching & Workshops
In the latest phase of my journey I am passing on what I have learned and experienced, in a more immediate way, by working directly with people. I do this as a personal development coach and by running coaching groups and workshops.
More and more people are discovering that maximizing their psychological health is at least as important as maximizing their bank account. As these people improve their own psychology, and improve their lives, they become role models for the people around them, and gradually influence society in a more positive direction.
I am passionate about coaching people
who want to improve their own life, and
help make the world a better place.
My Journey in Detail
In The Beginning
I have a Bachelor of Mathematics majoring in computer science, and my day job has predominantly been as a software developer, where my strength has been analyzing business processes and figuring out how to make them more efficient.
I have applied those same analytic skills to personal and spiritual development: figuring out what various approaches have in common; what is essential; what is superfluous; and how to create the most efficient system for personal transformation/improvement.
I have a very logical and scientific approach, but like all good scientists I am very open-minded.
My Personal Development Phase
In my later twenties, I was lonely and having difficulty finding a girlfriend. A friend recommended that I attend a personal development workshop because it was life-changing and there would be three times as many women as men there. I didn’t think I needed any personal development, but attended the workshop in the hope of finding a girlfriend. I did find a girlfriend there, but I was also shocked to discover how much I learned about improving my life.
My mind was completely blown, and it radically changed the course of my life.
Personal development became the central focus of my life.
Within a few years I had transformed myself, and improved my life significantly. I was
- much happier,
- less anxious,
- more confident, and
- much more comfortable in my own skin.
- I was also much better at relationships and interacting with people
Attending that first personal development workshop was the best decision I ever made.
My New Age Spirituality Phase
Personal development made me more open-minded. It showed me that I had much more to learn about life. So when I, an ‘evangelizing’ atheist, found myself dating a woman who was into astrology (I met her at that first workshop!), and sharing a house with a guy who was into spiritualism, channeling, and spirit-guides, I didn’t just dismiss those ‘weird’ things as ‘crazy woo woo’ like I would have done previously.
Instead, I decided to take the scientific approach and investigate it. But I didn’t want to just read books about it, because I didn’t know if the authors were trustworthy. Therefore, I conducted my own research: I experimented on myself.
I attended trance channeling training classes, and was amazed at what I discovered—enough ‘evidence’ to propel me headlong into investigating many aspects of the New Age movement. There were some aspects of New Age spirituality that I never got on board with, but there were many that I did.
A friend and I ran fortnightly New Age groups. I led the guided healing meditations and other group processes, and we had personal development and New Age experts as guest speakers. It was loads of fun, and we developed a great community!
I was also involved in running a holistic healing center, where I gave healing/therapy sessions that combined spiritual healing, sound healing and talk therapy (Dysfunctional Pattern Clearing).
The combination of personal development and spiritual development had totally transformed my life.
I felt great! I was happy. I was loving.
And I had many good friends.
My Enlightenment Spirituality Phase
Then I went on an eight week vacation in India, and my world turned upside down again.
In India, I attended a three week long Reiki Master course. The classes were held in the morning, and in the afternoons and evenings, a Canadian teacher, John DeRuiter was holding satsang at the same venue. I had no idea what a satsang was, but I started attending because I had nothing better to do, and he was only charging $2 per session.
It transformed my life yet again.
It was like leveling-up on a computer game.
Satsang comes from the Eastern Spiritual tradition. It’s a gathering where an ‘awakened’ or ‘enlightened’ person sits and answers questions from the audience. It’s not just about the answers, though. It’s also about soaking in the energy of the awakened person because that energy ‘rubs off’ on the audience members. At the time, I didn’t know about the ‘energy transmission’ aspect.
At first, I thought it was all a bit weird because I was accustomed to well-structured workshops that include practical activities to re-enforce the information being taught. Satsang had none of that. John didn’t even teach anything much. He just kept saying the same things over and over again: to “be okay,” to “introduce okayness wherever possible,” to “open and soften into the okayness that is already here.”
I didn’t get it—but there was definitely something about him that was different to anyone I’d ever met. I’m a good judge of character, and he seemed genuine to me, so I kept going.
For the first few days, there were only about 15 people in the audience, which grew to about 100 people by the end of the 21 days that he was there. Therefore, I had plenty of opportunity to ask questions. Everyone else was familiar with the satsang format and philosophy, so they didn’t ask any substantive questions, and simply accepted his “be okay with everything” teaching. I was the odd one out.
I questioned and pushed back at every opportunity.
I asked him about everything: meditation, personal development, therapies, energy healing, spirit guides, astrology, past lives and reincarnation, the afterlife, the soul, beliefs, manifesting, psychology, etc. His answer was usually that there was no point answering the question because none of that information is necessary. He said that those things were just irrelevant distractions, and that:
- all you needed to do was simply surrender to the okayness that is already present within you;
- there’s a part of you that knows that being open and soft and okay is the only true way to be, and that all you have to do is stop resisting that part, and let yourself melt into it.
It was a message that I didn’t want to hear because I had invested so much into my personal and spiritual development—I was an ‘expert’ on most of these things—and he was telling me they were irrelevant!
But because I am an open-minded, scientific type of person, who deeply values the truth, I was, once again, prepared to conduct the experiment on myself, to find out if he was right and I was wrong.
I tried finding the okayness he spoke of,
and surrendering to it.
Much to my surprise I gradually found it.
After about 10 days of satsang, as I was leaving the meeting, I noticed that I felt wonderful, but in a very strange way that I had never experienced before. It felt like I was glowing from the inside: a bit like when you get a sunburnt face and you can feel the heat radiating out of your skin, but I was radiating contentment from my entire body. I felt like I had taken a drug like ecstasy, but all I had been doing was sitting and listening and trying to surrender to my okayness. I hadn’t even been meditating. This is what convinced me that there really was something to this man and his simple teaching.
A consequence of being okay right now is that you have to be okay with things as they currently are. That means that you have to be okay with not changing anything, which means that you have to be okay with none of your hopes and dreams coming true. That was a big one for me, because I had big hopes and dreams.
But I followed through with the experiment: I gave up on my hopes and dreams. I became okay with living the life of one of the poor goat herders that we saw on the nearby fields. I cried, and I surrendered, and after 21 days, when John returned to Canada,
I was happier than I had ever been.
I returned to Australia with the intent of saving enough money to go to Canada to spend more time with John. Amazingly, I immediately landed a 4 week software contract that paid three times my normal hourly rate. The universe was providing!
A few weeks later, I flew to Canada where I spent 5 months attending John’s satsangs. He only held 4 3-hour meetings per week, and I had nothing else to do, so I spent the rest of the week meditating 8 to 10 hours per day. Even during the meetings I meditated. Prior to this I had only meditated about 3 or 4 hours per week.
This prolonged meditation took my meditation to another level.
I was able to completely stop my thoughts for long periods.
Even when I wasn’t meditating, my mind was silent except for the essential thoughts.
I also gradually developed a greater and greater sense of expansiveness: of being able to ‘feel’ the space around me, as if everything is gently vibrating. It’s a difficult thing to describe, and there are various degrees of it, but Eastern spirituality associates it with some degree of ‘awakening’ or Samadhi, or knowing the real Self.
When I returned to Australia after 5 months,
I was in a constant state of mild joy.
I loved every breath I took, literally:
the sensation of each breath was enjoyable,
and I loved it.
I loved everyone and
I was peaceful beyond belief.
I thought that I would become a spiritual teacher, but the universe had different ideas.
It was 1999, at the height of the Dot Com Boom, and my best friend had become a web developer and was a founding partner in an e-commerce startup to build the first online flower shop in Australia. He asked me to become a partner and do all the back-end programming. I knew nothing about the internet, but said yes.
I would not be paid, just a receive a 10% share of the company. I was broke because I had just spent all my money in Canada, so I moved back home with my mother, and spent 16 hours per day, seven days a week for the next four months programming. Unfortunately, the Dot Com stock market crash occurred the week after our website was put up for sale, and nobody wanted anything to do with buying it. But a venture capitalist was impressed by what we had built, and brought us on as partners in a much bigger project that kept me extremely busy working 60-70 hours per week for the next 5 years.
It was a bizarre turn of events—I had expected to be teaching personal and spiritual development, and instead found myself doing almost nothing else but software development—but I was happy, at peace, and fulfilled. I had given up my hopes and dreams, and I was just doing what I felt was true to do in the moment.
Somehow, I also managed to squeeze in a little teaching. I was asked to co-facilitate a one evening per week personal development course for prisoners on probation and parole, which I did for about 3 years. I also ran my own workshops:
- Love and Hugs: A fun personal development workshop to help people expand their comfort zone and connect with other people.
- Love and Peace: An eye-gazing meditation based workshop to help people let go of the ego and connect with their true Self.
I rarely had the time to meditate, and over the years, the joy that was initially constant, dropped in intensity and then became less and less frequent, and eventually disappeared. The sense of presence also dropped in intensity, and then disappeared.
What stayed was my quiet mind and sense of peace.
My Agnostic Phase
I got married. Had a daughter. And moved to a small country town 1000 kilometers from Sydney, which meant that I lost contact with my personal and spiritual development community.
But life was good, and I was happy.
I had no need for personal or spiritual development, so it played absolutely no role in my life.
Then gradually something strange happened. As the memory of my spiritual days faded, I started to occasionally question whether what I had experienced was real.
Was there really a spiritual dimension to the universe?
Or had I just managed to get my brain to generate an abundance of the natural neurotransmitters that produce pleasurable experiences?
It was an interesting development to watch, but it didn’t matter to me at all, because regardless of what the cause was—whether it was spiritual or brain chemicals—the outcome was the same: the outcome was real. Real peace. Real contentment. Real joy.
About fifteen years after my awakening experience, I felt moved to write a personal development text book. I didn’t want to just write something off the top of my head, I wanted it to be a well-researched book that included the latest scientific research and best practices. Therefore, I spent a couple of years reading up on philosophy, and then moved on to reading the latest psychological research findings, and neuroscience, and then I eventually started having to decide what I was going to say about the spirituality side of things.
There was a big part of me that didn’t want to believe in spirituality because for the past few years I had been fully immersed in the atheistic mindset—reading scientific research papers—and I wanted to write a book that would be taken seriously by those scientists. I knew that if I sided with spirituality, a large segment of the population would instantly dismiss the book without even reading it. But one of my highest values is the truth, and therefore, I follow it wherever it takes me.
My Return To Spirituality
It was with great reluctance that, for the second time in my life, I began investigating whether there was any truth in spirituality.
I began by recalling all the evidence for spirituality that I had gathered the first time around—this time with much more experience and wisdom under my belt. I was soon forced to admit that there is definitely some sort of spiritual energy that science has not yet detected. The main proof for this was my first-hand experience of being on the receiving end of the transmission of such energy, not only from John DeRuiter, but also from Amma (the hugging guru) and many times in my trance channeling group/class. I don’t know what that energy is, nor where it comes from, but it definitely exists.
Then I began researching awakening experiences, and I was pleased to discover that there is so much more information available on the internet than there was when I had previously been into spirituality. Twenty years ago, I had to rely on the ancient writings of Eastern religions and books by modern gurus—neither of which I could trust completely. But now there are so many videos of people who have had these awakening experiences. As well as forums were ordinary people, who aren’t trying to make a buck from anyone, are comparing their experiences.
I now see that these experiences are more common than I had previously believed. And hearing the unfiltered experiences of real people adds a different perspective to the accounts given by ancient books.
I also started meditating again, to see if I could regain that sense of presence and joy, without having to get an energy transmission from a guru. I was pleased to discover, that
The joy has not returned to the same intensity as it was previously, but I lead a quite busy life and haven’t had that much time to meditate. I’m sure if I were to dedicate an entire week to meditation that the intensity would increase significantly.
It has been funny to watch my recent change in attitude towards New Age spirituality. During my agnostic phase I had become quite derisive of it, but now I see it from a fresh perspective. I disagree with John DeRuiter’s opinion that it is all unnecessary. I think that certain elements can be quite helpful to many people.
I certainly disagree with DeRuiter’s opinion that personal development is unnecessary. I think that type of opinion is common among people who were lucky enough to have had a spontaneous awakening thrust upon them, without having done anything much to generate it. The vast majority of us are not so lucky,
we have to gradually work our way up to an awakening.
In addition to the many practical benefits of personal development, I think that personal development is an essential step for anyone on the road to awakening, because it’s a prerequisite for developing a quite mind. If you are in denial of anything, or harboring unprocessed emotions in your subconscious, then when your mind becomes quiet for a moment, those repressed thoughts and emotions will rise to the surface to be dealt with. They are down there waiting for the opportunity to grab your attention, and that’s why you distract yourself with work, alcohol, drama, sex, etc.
Therefore, you need to
use personal development and therapy to clear out your repressed thoughts and emotions.
The sooner you deal with them, the sooner you can enjoy a quiet mind. And a quiet mind makes it much easier for you to notice the sense of presence, which is who you really are.
The Present
I was born in Australia but in 2020 I moved to Arnhem, in The Netherlands (because my wife is Dutch). Now that all the Covid restrictions are over I have started running personal development groups, workshops, coaching and meditation classes.