There Is A Door

A Prayer to Start Your Day

2012-03-06T18:46:00.003-08:00

Put before me what You would have me do today and with Your strength, wisdom and aid I'll give it a whirl ... Amen

If Only We Could See

2012-02-27T19:52:00.001-08:00

We are at a place of conjunction of spirit and an anniversary pointof fate, reason and lack of understanding.

Sept 11th is one decade since our world became lost in the egocentricdesires of philosophies that are diametrically opposed.

Here is the problem ... Everyone works for God ... but most have nospiritual connection. Most are of the opinion that they are deeply spirituallyconnected and their form of spiritual connection is all there is.

Now it follows that: if I don’t have a way to talk about my deepseated emptiness ... then I will act it out in some form ... I will act it out ... I will act it in ... or ... I will transfer mypain and what I believe are its causes onto something or someone else and then attackthem for it; hence the crusades, Hitler’s Germany and everyother bit of silliness that was acted out in the name of God by men who hadulterior motives hedged in grandiosity.

If only we could see what we are really up against ... rather thenwhat it appears to be ... God is not a Muslim, nor a Catholic and the list goeson and on ... God is not anyone of them, but all of them are an extension ofGod.

There is not one of us who are more special than anyone else. Theactual evidence of me being special in God’s eye is that I am here having this experiencein the first place.

If only we could settle with this thought as being truth, just imagehow the world would change.

Family Systems Approaches

2012-02-23T18:19:00.000-08:00

Family systems approaches, including those advocated by treatmentcenters attempt to unearth and catalogue the unspoken rules that govern dysfunctionalfamilies. That is when various family members have to learn to adapt and changetheir life style to avoid the acting out of the prime stressor; some of themost common adaptations fall under threebasic categories:

· Don't talk,

· Don't trust,

· Don't feel.

These rules basically layout all the prohibitions about speaking out honestlyabout the problem and/or one's feelings within the system. Understanding that acceptance is a necessaryneed and if one is to be accepted in the family or system then these unspokenrules must be obeyed. The oddity is if you don’t follow these rules you areseen as a deviant by the other system members and treated accordingly.

There are hundreds of variations on a theme of roles that can develop assubgroups under those umbrella categories:

Caretaker, The Bully, People-Pleaser, Workaholic, Martyr,Perfectionist, Tap Dancer, Lost Child, Enabler, Gad Fly, The Clown, TheScapegoat, The Rebel, The Good Guy/Nice Guy, The Parent, The Hero, The Mediator,The Charmer, The Victim, The Offender, The Addict, The Healer, The Organizer,The Prophet, The Queen Bee and The Odd duck Role.

This is the short list.

These roles are all self-defeating behaviors that are greatlyexaggerated and complicated by a pathological relationship to anyone who fillsthe role of prime stressor within the system ... These roles will, over all diminishour capacity to initiate and or be able to participate in loving relationships.

Taxi Cab Driver's Story

2012-02-08T19:37:00.000-08:00

Twenty years ago, I drove a cabfor a living. It was a cowboy’s life, alife for someone who wanted no boss. What I didn't realize was that it was also a ministry. Because I drove the night shift, my cabbecame a moving confessional. Passengers climbed in, sat behind me in total anonymity, and told meabout their lives. I encountered peoplewhose lives amazed me, ennobled me, and made me laugh and weep.

But none touched me more than awoman I picked up late one August night. I was responding to a call from asmall brick four plex in a quiet part of town. I assumed I was being sent to pick up some partiers, or someone who hadjust had a fight with a lover, or a worker heading to an early shift at somefactory for the industrial part of town.

When I arrived at 2:30 a.m., the building was darkexcept for a single light in a ground floor window. Under these circumstances, many drivers wouldjust honk once or twice, wait a minute, and then drive away. But I had seen toomany impoverished people who depended on taxis as their only means oftransportation. Unless a situationsmelled of danger, I always went to the door. This passenger might be someone who needs my assistance, I reasoned tomyself. So I walked to the door andknocked. "Just a minute," answered a frail, elderly voice. I could hear something being dragged acrossthe floor. After a long pause, the dooropened. A small woman in her 80s stoodbefore me. She was wearing a print dressand a pillbox hat with a veil pinned on it, like somebody out of a 1940s movie.

By her side was a small nylonsuitcase. The apartment looked as if noone had lived in it for years. All thefurniture was covered with sheets.

There were no clocks on thewalls, no knickknacks or utensils on the counters. In the corner was acardboard box filled with photos and glassware.

"Would you carry my bag outto the car?" she said. I took thesuitcase to the cab, then returned to assist the woman. She took my arm and we walked slowly towardthe curb. She kept thanking me for mykindness.

"It's nothing," I toldher. "I just try to treat mypassengers the way

I would want my mothertreated,"

"Oh, you're such a goodboy," she said.

When we got in the cab, she gaveme and address, then asked, "Couldyou drive through downtown?"

"It's not the shortestway," I answered quickly.

"Oh, I don't mind,"she said. "I'm in no hurry. I'm on my way to a hospice."

I looked in the rearviewmirror. Her eyes were glistening.

"I don't have any familyleft," she continued. "Thedoctor says I don't have very long."

I quietly reached over and shutoff the meter. "What route wouldyou like me to take?" I asked.

For the next two hours, we drovethrough the city. She showed me thebuilding where she had once worked as an elevator operator. We drove through the neighborhood where sheand her husband had lived when they were newlyweds. She had me pull up in front of a furniturewarehouse that had once been a ballroom where she had gone dancing as a girl.

Sometimes she'd ask me to slowin front of a particular building or corner and would sit staring into thedarkness, saying nothing.

As the first hint of sun wascreasing the horizon, she suddenly said, "I'm tired. Let's go now."

We drove in silence to theaddress she had given me. It was a lowbuilding, like a small convalescent home, with a driveway that passed under aportico. Two orderlies came out to thecab as soon as we pulled up. They weresolicitous and intent, watching her every move. They must have been expectingher. I opened the trunk and took the small suitcase to the door. The woman was already seated in a wheelchair.

"How much do I oweyou?" she asked, reaching into her purse.

"Nothing," I said.

"You have to make aliving," she answered.

"There are other passengers,"I responded.

Almost without thinking, I bentand gave her a hug. She held onto metightly.

"You gave an old woman alittle moment of joy," she said. "Thank you."

I squeezed her hand, then walkedinto the dim morning light. Behind me, a door shut. It was the sound of the closing of a life.This moved me so much that I thought I would share it with you all.

I didn't pick up any morepassengers that shift. I droveaimlessly, lost in thought. For the restof that day, I could hardly talk. Whatif that woman had gotten an angry driver, or one who was impatient to end hisshift? What if I had refused to take therun, or had honked once, then driven away?

On a quick review, I don't thinkthat I have done anything more important in my life. We're conditioned to think that our livesrevolve around great moments. But greatmoments often catch us unaware beautifully wrapped in what others may considera small one.

People May Not Remember Exactly What You Did, Or

What YouSaid ...

But,

They Will Always Remember

How You Made Them Feel.

Controllers Don't Trust

2012-01-10T09:40:00.000-08:00

A controllerdoesn't trust his/her ability to live through the pain and chaos of life. Thereis no life without pain just as there is no art without submitting to chaos.
--Rita Mae Brown

Itis very hard for most of us to see how controlling we are. We may feel uptightor careful, but we haven't seen it as controlling ourselves or controlling howpeople respond to us. We may be worried about a loved one's behaviour orsafety, but not realize our hovering over that person is a controllingactivity. We may be keenly aware of other people's controlling behaviour withus, but unaware we have equalled their control by monitoring them and trying tochange their behaviour.

Whata moment of spiritual adventure it is to risk living through the pain! When wedo not seek an escape or a quick fix but have patience with the process, newpossibilities often do develop. We can only let go of our control - or turn itover to our Higher Power. And we will do it and forget, taking control backwithin minutes or within an hour. Then we let go again.

Today,I will submit to the insecurity of a changing universe and have faith that Ican live through the process and grow.

from Hazelden Thought of the Week

Into the Light page 28

2012-01-03T16:06:00.000-08:00

TrueConfessions of a Therapist

There doesn't appear to be a way for me to givesomeone else what I know. All I can do is help create opportunities wherebythey might see "different" for themselves.

When I do attempt to give someone else what I knowor what I think I know and then make the fatal mistake of believing I havesucceeded in passing on this piece of wisdom, I often discover I have not. I have often discovered to my own chagrinthat by thinking I have succeeded in keeping someone from going through onemore private, painful little hell, I haven't. And the long run always proves me wrong. That can be disheartening attimes. It seems that it is a universalrule that they have to go through that private, painful, little hell forthemselves. It is as if it wasnecessary, a rites of passage, part of the 'deal' of being here, it needed tobe done - it seems as simple as that. So …

The truth of the matter seems to be that eachperson has to learn 'it' for themselves and usually experience it over and overagain before the message is ferreted out and understood at the deepest levelsof the psyche. And.

They seem to be able to do this better when I havestepped out of the shadow of my good-guy helper role and am just here as afacilitator. So …

It's obvious to me now that many of the problems Ihave to face in my life are a result of how things were when I was growing up.This seems to be true for just about everybody else too!

It follows then, that my life's conundrum is:

So I am here spending the rest of my life sufferingfrom personality traits I never really asked for.

Where is the justice in that?

Well, there isn't any ... is there!

But on the other hand I was never promised justicewas I. So ...

It seems that healing, health and life style areall really the same thing.

They are all simply habits. Habits that will, one way or another, developalong the way; learned as actions and/or reactions that should becomeinvoluntary or habitual at some point. Habitual, and hopefully, helpful towardsdiscerning my life and what to do with it now that I am in the middle of it.

That's The Theory Anyway! So it seems that there are more complex conundrums to solve as I movedeeper into my journey. It seems that I have to overcome my original"involuntaryisms" - habits - the ones that I picked up early in lifeto save me from a fate that nearly scared me to death. The ones that helped me originally survive'til now. I still carry them with me anduse them daily. Actually I trip over them now more then I use them but they areand were the habits that I really trust.

Here is the problem: These habits are the'grandchildren' of those habits I used to survive, in the face of overwhelmingevidence that I either wouldn't survive the next few moments or shouldn't havesurvived those few moments but did. These 'grandchildren' of my survival traits are all cloaked in a strangeaura that seems so inviting and strangely familiar but I am learning that theyare dangerous. They seem to work bestonly in my mind.

What I am coming to learn is that when I (do)attempt to put those old habits into practice in reality ... they hurt, andcause pain for, both others and me.

But they are so familiar, and they are my habits.

John Steinbeck

2011-12-22T13:48:00.001-08:00

“There Are Those WhoMust Live In Rooms Of Experience That The Rest Of Us Can Never Enter - PerhapsWe Should Quit Trying To Intrude Into These Places, And Simply Learn To GuardThe Door.”

John Steinbeck

Page 72 ... Into the Light

2011-12-07T13:38:00.000-08:00

On Having and Finding Respect

Respect

This starts with the individual’s sense of self and that sense of self is a by-product of very early developmental experiences.

Its clearest defining qualities are related to time and how time and interaction with affective adults was spent … with those who reflect how that individual was viewed by them during the child’s first 30 to 60 months of life.

It Is True That:

It is a necessity that we must first have respect for ourselves … it then follows naturally … that we next have to have respect for the rules we chose by … which we agree to … and conduct our living accordingly and build our social order around.

On the other hand if we do not have this sense of respect instilled at a very early age then ... it is with great effort and difficulty that we will move through our lives.

Respect is something that is purely experiential … it can be obtained anytime … but first we must know what it is that we are looking for … and then … where it is we must search to find it. 12 Step programs help enormously here as do other self help programs. The book Iron John asks the question “Where is the Key hidden?”

One of life’s conundrums is that sooner or later we get ourselves involved in attempting to make something happen or a series of things happen … herein lies the problem; a necessary ingredient for those things to happen is we need to respect ourselves to accomplish or complete the tasks we have set out for ourselves to complete … now the complexity sets insomuch that for the most part most of us don’t carry the necessary tools to cause the respect to be there because it is not part of our working tool kit … it somehow got overlooked … thus the task at hand that should not have been all that difficult becomes a very difficult task.

The Basics of the concept is:

• A person cannot respect himself unless he knows the truth of himself.

For most the truth about us is lost back in the early beginnings … at times and places where we simply had to begin to pretend to be someone else just to be able to get along in our families of origin That Hurt(s).

It is also true that our every effort is to maintain the lid on this painful thing so that it does not get out and hurt us again. The problem is that (neurotic) defense strategies themselves become more painful than the pain they were masking but our only defense to pain is to build another neurotic structure … mask … false self … to protect us from our pain of our reality.

Finding our lost self-respect is a prerequisite to healing; something a kin to Peter Pan recovering his lost shadow from Wendy’s drawer. Now we have a place to look … and a direction to go in.

Daily Reflection

Made a decision to turn my will and my life over to the care of God, as I understood Him and sought through prayer and meditation to improve my conscious contact with God, praying only for the knowledge of God's will for me and the power to carry that out.

13 On Appreciating Deeper Processes - Past Made Present

2011-12-01T18:57:00.000-08:00

EXPERIENCE has taught us that most of us are secretly reliving things that are no longer present in our lives. We are protecting ourselves from demons that are no longer there.

Psychic shadow boxing - again it appears.

It is true that life is a place filled with the weird, the wonderful, and the colorful, and we do have to consider using caution with some things. But we can do it from an adult perspective and see things as they are, not as they used to be.

The demons were real once; that much is true. It just may not be true now.

Being Open To The Fact That The Past Is Not The Present

Allows Room For The Soul To Come Out Of Hiding And

To Grow And Mature.

46 On Seeing Simple Truths

2011-12-01T10:10:00.000-08:00

EXPERIENCE has taught us that there comes a time in our lives when we must cross barriers or change paths if we are to get on with facing our destiny and change.

This is often referred to as “giving it up,” or “letting go,” or “turning it over.”

But what are we giving up or letting go of?

Simply put long-held sacred cows.

Often we interpret these times of transition, of giving up sacred cows, as difficult, not necessarily because they are, but because we believe they are supposed to be.

If, in our old mind-sets, we have programmed a belief structure that difficult is a necessary part of change, then the process of change will seem to be difficult. Otherwise, we don’t believe it’s change.

We blend this misconstrued thought into what we have predetermined to be the only route available to the new and different, and we believe that the journey through change has to be difficult.

What If It’s Not?

What If You Just Think It Is?

(Heads up on this one, it is a corollary to you depending on you!)

Lessons on Life: Beginning Middle and an End

2011-11-22T12:25:00.000-08:00

There was a man who had four sons.

He wanted his sons to learn not to judge things too quickly.

So he sent them each on a quest, in turn, to go and look at a pear tree that was a great distance away. The first son went in the winter, the second in the spring, the third in summer, and the youngest son in the fall.

When they had all gone and come back, he called them together to describe what they had seen. The first son said that the tree was ugly, bent, and twisted. The second son said, no it was covered with green buds and full of promise. The third son disagreed; he said it was laden with blossoms that smelled so sweet and looked so beautiful, it was the most graceful thing he had ever seen. The last son disagreed with all of them; he said it was ripe and drooping with fruit, full of life and fulfillment.

The man then explained to his sons that they were all right, because they had each seen but only one season in the tree's life. He told them that you cannot judge a tree, or a person, by only one season,

and that the essence of who they are and the pleasure, joy, and love that come from that life can only be measured at the end, when all the seasons are up.

If you give up when it's winter, you will miss the promise of your spring, the beauty of your summer, and the fulfillment of your fall.

Author Unknown

Lessons Learned From Life’s Experiences

2011-11-11T09:34:00.000-08:00

• Have Empathy For The Source Of Your Pain. Who, What, Where, When and Why. There is the strongest possibility that whatever is causing you pain may be reflecting you back to you.

• Rational Thought Won't Work. My rationalization is Biased by my experience. That much is true. My Experience influences my best thinking. Again True. And my rational thinking is pre determined by the aftermath of my experience. Therein lay the Bias. So what makes sense to me might not be either sensible or reasonable, the problem is, it makes sense to me. There are times when I am prepared to fight to the death for those beliefs; that doesn’t make any of those beliefs either True or Right. They are just my belief(s) biased by my experience.

• There Is Something At Work Behind All This And That Is Beyond Me And My Self Centeredness And All That I Can Imagine. A Force far greater than me. Can you imagine that. Imagine something you couldn’t possibly imagine.

• Be Prepared To Re Examine Your Motives And Your Reasons As Well As Your Morals For Doing What You Do. This gets to be interesting when you discover how to use rigorous honesty and apply it to self.

• In Order To Do Your Journey You Will Have To Confront Evil. This is true. It has happened to me several times in my life. It happened at times and in places that one would not necessarily think it would be present but it was. Evil does not have to be coarse. It can be ... but sometimes it is very subtle.

• Never Say Never. Occam’s Razor underscores this sentiment ... “Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate” … Principle of Parsimony. The precursor to the KISS principle.

• You Can't Change Human Nature. The only thing you can change is Your Mind About Human Nature.

• Human Nature Is The Curriculum Of Life. It Is What You Do With It, That Matters.

With Time Spent On The Path

There Will Come A Time

When You Can Return To The Starting Gate

And

See It For How It Truly Is

For The First Time

“With Eyes Unclouded By Longing.”

EXPERIENCE has taught us -- 175 Missing Pieces

2011-11-08T12:45:00.000-08:00

66 On Seeing Clearly

EXPERIENCE has taught us that as we begin to come from a place of deeper understanding, from a place of connection with a Higher Power or with the Way of Things, we may begin to notice that there are several truths quietly at work in our lives.

First: if we try to escape from life’s situations without allowing them to heal or to come to completion, the need for the completion will rise again someplace else in our lives, sometimes changing its form or appearance, but still being of the same necessity: that’s Karma at work in our lives.

Second: there is a thought that seems almost inconspicuous in all this, yet it is probably one of the more important principles in recovery. It also has a Catch 22 quality to it: what we believe is what we will experience, and healing takes place only in our minds, although it seems to manifest itself in other places as other things outside ourselves. When we remove ourselves from a dilemma without resolving it to the soul’s satisfaction, and thereby avoiding the healing process contained in the resolution of that dilemma, we are not allowing the spiritual forces to prevail. What we are doing is simply mood-altering, and that is avoidance. So the need for the process to take place will follow us around like a lost puppy dog from situation to situation. The circumstances will be recreated again and again as the soul attempts to have us resolve these deeper conflicts it perceives as needing completion. This seems to be The Way of Things.

Third: when you try to fix a situation all by yourself and you choose to rely only on yourself and your own resources, know this: You Are In Serious Trouble.

The Way of Things is simply to address life with gratitude in our hearts. To face the tasks that arise on the path before us. Then to ask for the guidance we need. Then to allow the healing to come to us.

Put another way:

Round Pegs Square Holes.

Larger Mallets

Simply Don’t Work.

67 On Seeing Clearly Perhaps for the First Time

EXPERIENCE has taught us that when we cover our pain with cognitive insights we lose sight of what really needs to happen for us to heal or to come to a place of spiritual completion.

It is a fact that most people are well into their recovery processes before they truly begin doing the “feeling work.” For some it takes years to come to this place. Unfortunately, some never reach this place within themselves. The search for cognitive insight into why is often the culprit that keeps most lost in their private little prisons avoiding the feelings they need to process in order to escape the prison walls that confine them.

They are both their own gatekeeper and keeper of the keys.

There Are Signs, Posters, And Slogans That Are Put On Walls At Some Of The Various Recovery Group Meetings, And One Says:

THINK

Translated, This Means:

After Three Thinks, Give It Up

You Will Only Hurt Yourself.

68 On Seeing Clearly Perhaps for the First Time

EXPERIENCE has taught us that all who enter this territory of willing exploration and recovery have to, sooner or later, put down their devices of mood alteration.

These devices may be some variation on chemical or substance use, or they may be activities that we do as part of our daily rituals, or they may be people with whom we are in relationships. Still, they are devices that we use either overtly or covertly to mood-alter, and they stand between us and our escape from the prison of our minds.

The Key Is Always In The Hand Of The Seeker.

69 On Seeing Clearly Perhaps for the First Time

EXPERIENCE has taught us that the process of no longer using any mind-changing, mood-altering devices (chemicals, or otherwise) can induce a twisted form of thinking for the first while. This twisted form of thinking sets into motion a false belief that the worst is over (this is called the pink cloud effect) and that all our problems are fixed.

Not true, but . . . well, not really true is a better way to try to describe it. If we really stopped and thought about it, not really is not even close to the truth of the matter, but we have taken a step in the right direction, finally. More land mines up ahead, though.

The truth is, life’s conundrum has just changed faces. It just sits there in another form, waiting, like a huge, silent demon, waiting and wanting to control everything in our lives that it can.

Quietly It Waits.

. . . You Stumble . . .

. . . It Stirs And Smiles . . .

Yet Again.

Systemic Maturation

2011-11-02T20:06:00.000-07:00

Systemic maturation occurs both in the healthy functional family and the dysfunctional family. These stages are called The Early Phase, The Middle Phase and The Late Phase.

The Early Phase:
This is the time when new families form boundaries, rules, regulations and rituals to govern themselves. The healthy family establishes boundaries to meet the needs of the family members. The dysfunctional family establishes boundaries to meet the needs of the Prime Stressor and the family as a unit. Accommodation rather than cooperation is the primary factor. I live my life adjusting to someone else’s problem.

The Middle Phase:
This is a time of consolidation. In the dysfunctional system, this phase is marked by the necessity of commitment to the family and a growing consistency of regulatory behaviour according to the family. It really boils down to each member of the family being there for the family but the family not being there for them. It is during this stage that dependency behaviour(s) of the Prime Stressor is reinforced. The family consistently meets the needs of the Prime Stressor/and the system ... at the expense of the needs of the individual within the system. Members of the system get abandoned with everyone home. During this phase there is strong resistance to either growth or change. New rules and norms form around how the family can operate. These become the rules of the road within the system. Everyone adapts:

The family adjusts their thinking to make the unacceptable acceptable. This is not healthy, but it is the norm and acceptable because it has been sanctioned by the system to define their Way of Doing Things. Acceptable according to the rules developed by the family to cope.

The Late Phase:
It is during this phase that the legacies for future generations form. The way of things for the family system becomes the customs and rituals especially at celebratory times of the year. Co dependent families experience this phase with the most difficulty. With the progression of the dependency cycle severe health problems begin to arise and the family resists the need for change and becomes more rigid in their ways. As the family tries to cope with the crisis of the moment they are totally unable to prepare for their future and more importantly they have never considered facing the demons of their past.

Recipe for Sanity

2011-11-01T11:10:00.000-07:00

Only by discussing ourselves, holding back nothing, only by being willing to take advice and accept direction [can] we set foot on the road to straight thinking, solid honesty, and genuine humility.

Repeat Often

Another Truth Ego vs Spirit and Miracles

2011-10-28T09:21:00.000-07:00

The Ego clings to the past in the present and fears the future.

Where as:

A Miracle/Spirit releases the past in the present and gives us back our future.

A Dream Oct 24th 2011

2011-10-25T19:24:00.000-07:00

It was a perfect room, straight lines, sparkling clean, with everything in its place. Not a single plant, animal or human being were in the room except for John Lennon. He sat behind a large wooden desk and I stood in front ... facing him as he told me in an assertive yet nice way... he said, "I want nothing around me that knows me as nothing!"

The Focus of My Thoughts . . . for the next while will be

2011-10-25T12:43:00.000-07:00

Once my perception is disengaged from the domination of the preconception and my personal interests, it is free to experience the world as it is and to behold its inherent magnificence...

Perception of the miraculous requires no faith or assumptions. It is simply a matter of paying full and close attention to the givens of life, i.e., to what is so ever-present that it is usually taken for granted. (Michael Stark and Michael Washburn. “Beyond the Norm: A Speculative Model Self Realization” Journal of Religion and Health Vol 16 No.1 pp58-59)

The true wonder of the world is available everywhere, in the minutest parts of our bodies, in the vast expanses of the cosmos, and in the intimate interconnectedness of these and all things.

We are part of a finely balanced ecosystem in which interdependency goes hand-in-hand with individuation.

We are all individuals, but we are also parts of a greater whole, united in something vast and beautiful beyond description.

Perception of the miraculous is the subjective essence of self reali-zation, the root from which man's highest features and experiences grow.

Self realization is born and matures in a distinctive kind of awareness, an awareness that has been described in many different ways by many different people.

The mystics, for example, have spoken of it as the perception of the divinity and perfection of the world.

Dr Richard Bucke referred to it as Cosmic Consciousness; Buber described it in terms of the “I-Thou relationship”; and Maslow gave it the label “Being cognition.”

We shall use Ouspensky's term and call it the Perception Of The Miraculous. “Miraculous” here refers not only to extraordinary phenomena but also to the commonplace, for absolutely anything can evoke this special awareness provided that close enough attention is paid to it.

Once perception is disengaged from the domination of preconception and personal interest, it is free to experience the world as it is in itself and to behold its inherent magnificence ...

Here is a little homework of consideration and observation. Divide the month up into even days and odd days ...

On Even Days consider the following using the guidelines that are suggested.

So why is it I do what I do?

Now as I consider why it is that I do what I do ... know this!

• Every step toward understanding loosens the grip of conditioned experience and its resultant fear on my point of consciousness.

• With each new insight, I will gain a glimpse of what creation really is.

• Each glimpse increases my creative power until the balance between my mind and the ego is tipped in the mind's favor.

• When that happens, progress is rapid indeed.

2011-10-19T19:02:00.000-07:00

The source of much of our unhappiness is the Failing or Failed relationships with those who are important to us: with our spouses, parents, children, friends and colleagues... their lack of conformity to how we imagine they should be.

Herein lay the problems most relationships will suffer during the course of their existence. It is not so much that the relationship is flawed; it is more that the individuals bring to the table a series of unmet needs and personality bruises that stand in the way. It’s not a couple’s problem. It is individual problems that were there long before the couple met that stands in the way... unfinished business from years ago.

The symptoms of unhappiness are widely variable and are often seen as mental illness. M Scott Peck makes the observation that most if not all human mental disorder is structured in an individual’s inability to face their legitimate suffering.

Most personality disorders are defence strategies gone sideways, but they become ways of dealing with life and they leave each of us wanting.

The Reader and The Door

2011-10-19T12:40:00.001-07:00

Noticing, Simplicity and Truth

2011-10-14T09:32:00.000-07:00

AVAILABLE AT http://www.amazon.com/

What you will see on the next four or five pages are observations made on the principles of Noticing, Simplicity and Truth.

I would like you in your groups to read it, first to yourself and then aloud within your groups.

Take your time.

Then before you discuss it amongst yourselves get your thoughts down on paper . . .

Write about it …

Then Discuss It Within The Confines Of Your Various Groups …

Then we will have all the groups discuss and share.

On Seeing Simple Truths

EXPERIENCE has taught us that this path of looking more closely at ourselves, although certainly not easy, is truly the only route by which we can at last leave behind the cruel invisible prison walls created in our childhood exploration of our humanity.

We become free by transforming ourselves from unaware victims of the past into responsible, responsive individuals in the present. People who are aware of their past have processed and accepted it for what it is, and are thus able to live with it.

The irony is that most people do exactly the opposite, even those who profess most loudly that they are on the path. Without realizing that the unprocessed past is constantly determining their present actions, most people avoid learning anything meaningful about their history. They continue to live their lives in the state of their repressed childhood roles, ignoring the fact that these situations no longer exist, except in the mind of the beholder. They continue to live with the old and repressed assumptions; they continue the posture of fearing fears and avoiding dangers that, once real, have not been real for a long, long time.

Psychic shadow boxing

Fighting a fight I can neither win nor protect myself from. Why? Because that was then and this is now and it is not here now.

We now know that people are driven by these unconscious memories, repressed feelings, and unfulfilled needs, and this state of affairs determines nearly everything they do or are willing to attempt to do or fail to do.

Life is something that happens while I’m busy doing something else.

Statement of Truth

A truth once gained is the loss of innocence.

The processes of self-inflicted denial and delusion are like old, warm, woolly sweaters that we wore to protect us from the cold, harsh, hostile world we live in. When the truth is revealed for what it really is, those old familiar sweaters can never go back on over our souls and fit properly as they once did.

The innocence of our childlike ignorance is lost the moment we come to understand that we do not rule the universe or any of its inhabitants, no matter how hard we might try.

Much of the human condition of suffering hangs on seeing or not seeing this simple truth; for suffering is a state of mind, not a condition of existence.

To begin a soul-searching journey is to begin to take our rightful place in this universe. There are requirements, one of which is that we must come to terms with this simple truth or forever be bonded to a hell of our own making.

Freedom from the bonds of our past is freedom from the bonds of our own way of thinking. Thus, freedom from the prison of our own minds is freedom from the process of resistance, from a demon called against.

The walls of the prison of our own minds and all the processes contained therein are always made up of us against something.

Our very survival seems to be at stake.

This process is always filled with resistance and deep-seated fear.

But

Experience Has Taught Me

That as I give over my need to be against, my need to hide, then I will naturally merge with all that is

The Way of Things.

Observations about People with bumped and bruised Souls

1) We have to guess at what is normal.

2) We have difficulty following through with projects.

3) We lie when it would be just as easy to tell the truth.

4) We judge ourselves without mercy.

5) We have difficulty having fun.

6) We take ourselves very seriously.

7) We have difficulty with intimate relationships.

8) We over react to situations over which we have no control.

9) We constantly seek approval

10) We are either super responsible or super irresponsible and or swing back and forth between those polarities.

11) We feel that we are different from other people.

12) We are extremely loyal in the face of overwhelming evidence that we should not be.

13) We are impulsive and as such we tend to get ourselves locked into situations or circumstances or courses of action without giving due and proper consideration to the outcome or the possible consequences. This impulsivity leads to confusion, self-loathing and a loss of control over the environment. As a result Bumped and Bruised people often spend excessive amounts of time cleaning up messes they get themselves into.

From An Adult Point of View

2011-10-05T13:53:00.000-07:00

available in PDF format at neiltubb@shaw.ca

The business of trying to achieve a sense of self/power in one's adult life can (but doesn't have to be) become an obsessive/compulsive expression of childhood neediness and unmet needs that stems from deep core belief structures. In the more extreme circumstances, this is expressed as personality disorders that can be coupled with addictions, obsessions and compulsions.

When one reaches out into life for adult relationships, the relationships so formed become a sounding board for buried pain and the repressed core issues. That is when all hell will break loose.

So it follows that if one only tries to resolve the relationship problem(s) in the present moment and the core belief issues are never dealt with ... that is, they remain quietly in the deeper and darker recesses of the mind, they will rise again at another inopportune time to keep the individual from having the very thing they want ... a loving relationship with another human being.

What one has to do is: take hold of what they are doing in the present ... have a real good look at it ... then come to understand that they are being driven by parts and places of their own past ... then come to terms with knowing they can act differently ... and finally, understanding there are deep forces at work here when our basic needs are not being met ... then begin the process of meeting those needs from the adult perspective and not the child's.

Know This

2011-10-02T18:13:00.000-07:00

Every accomplishment starts with the decision to try

from Understanding Me While Being We (page 59-61)

2011-10-01T10:24:00.000-07:00

There Is No One Need

That Is Greater Than Another Need

There are times when an individual may feel a greater need from one aspect or another ... just so they can recover a sense of balance in their personal world.

We are all driven to fill these needs one way or another. It is the undercurrent of all our behaviours. These needs will be met by either a positive approach or negative approach ... When I use a negative approach it will be to my detriment ... and often at someone else’s expense ... When I approach this from a positive place it causes me to invest in me and thus causing a growth. It then follows that I am invested in me ... and this investment in me creates growth from within ... socially, psychologically, spiritually, emotionally ...

• From the front door ... positive ... the only expense here is to me ... this is my investment into me.

• From the back door ... negative ... I do this at the expense of others ... I invest in me by a negative approach.

Research asserts that 95% of all relationship problems are the misguided efforts of people trying to achieve a sense of self/power. The business of not having a sense of power is a learned phenomena and usually experienced initially early on in life. Now the classic aspect is that once learned, this misguided effort transfers into our Deep Core Belief Structure. That behaviour claims its place in Our Way of Doing Things. It then quietly moves forward with the individual into their adult life and slowly and deliberately wreaks havoc in their life ... (called the Adult Children Syndrome) ...

The business of trying to achieve a sense of self/power in one's adult life can (but doesn't have to) become an obsessive/compulsive expression of childhood neediness and unmet needs that stems from deep core belief structures. In the more extreme circumstances, this is expressed as personality disorders that can be coupled with addictions, obsessions and compulsions.

When one reaches out into life for adult relationships, the relationships so formed become a sounding board for buried pain and the repressed core issues. That is when all hell will break loose. So it follows that if one only tries to resolve the relationship problem(s) and the core belief issues are never dealt with ...that is, they remain quietly in the deeper and darker recesses of the mind, they will rise again at another inopportune time to keep the individual from having the very thing they want ... a loving relationship with another human being.

What one has to do is: take hold of what they are doing in the present ... then come to understand that they are being driven by parts of their past ... then come to terms with knowing they can act differently ... and finally, understanding there are deep forces at work here when our basic needs are not being met ... then begin the process of meeting those needs from the adult perspective and not the child's.

Note: In negative approaches to finding needs satisfaction, one of the most common indicators is that it is being done at someone else's expense ... “if he would only” or “if she could just” ... someone else is the brunt of my pain ... the reason why I can’t ... the hurt and pain is about transfer and counter transfer. This one is very important to understand.

If a child can't find the sense of power to identify themselves as an individual, then they will be on a life long journey of attempting to establish that Sense of Self as an adult. One of the inherent problems in this is that it is the child's needs that are in question not the adult ... Hence the Adult Children Syndrome. It can and usually does become a very ugly tread mill to be on.

By understanding the drives for SURVIVAL, POWER, LOVE, BELONGING, FREEDOM and FUN in people, we become more conscious of the need for our world to be a Quality World of our choosing.

2011-09-27T19:28:00.001-07:00

STATEMENT OF FACT: Know this; the vast majority of people who appear to be in adult bodies are in fact those who have not, nor do they intend to make the jump to adulthood because of fear. They do not know how to muster the power to make the emotional and psychological break from their parents and the power that their parents had over them.

from The Door

2011-09-27T10:10:00.000-07:00

Five Simple Tools

Guided Imagery ... is a way of understanding and employing the language of the unconscious mind ... Thus it follows that it can help reprogram the deeper mind for more effective living and can help us better understand its output the moment illumination comes forward.

Affirmations ... a closely related tool to guided imagery ... Affirmations is a way of reprogramming the unconscious Idea and Image processor ... how we see things ... through mental and verbal repetition of the ideas and images we want our minds to accept as input.

Relaxation/Meditation ... is a feature designed to induce what medical science calls the relaxation response. This is the incubation period... a time where the non conscious mind works a problem in its own way.

Dream Work ... takes us right into the heart of the deeper mind’s processer ... the deep consciousness ...”and shows us how to mine for and bring back the nuggets of wisdom we find there ... Start A Dream Journal .

“Self, I have a problem, Dream, here let me show you ”

Journaling ... gives us the opportunity to express the deeper mind at the conscious level on a daily basis ... It allows me to see me eventually... “With Eyes Unclouded By Longing ”.

Rinpoche Around the Corner

2011-09-22T19:01:00.000-07:00

Lama Guendun Rinpoche:

Happiness is not to be found with many efforts or will

But is here, nearby, in your relaxing and surrendering.

Don't worry; there is nothing to be done.

Everything that comes up to your mind has no importance because it has no reality.

Don't conceive any attachment for it.

Don't judge yourself.

Let it be.

Let it come up and down without changing a thing.

It all vanishes and begins again, endlessly.

Nothing but the quest for happiness prevents us from seeing it.

It is like a rainbow that one is always chasing without ever reaching it.

It is because it has no existence.

It has always been here and goes with you all the time.

Don't believe in the reality of experiences, good or bad.

They are like rainbows.

Because we want to grasp what is not to be grasped,

We exhaust our strength in vain.

As soon as we relinquish our hold, space is here, open, welcoming & comfortable.

So, do enjoy it.

Everything is yours already.

Stop searching.

Don't go into the jungle to look for the elephant that is quietly waiting for you at home.

There is nothing to do.

There is nothing to force.

There is nothing to desire.

And all comes by itself.

From the Mahabharata, the great Indian epic:

2011-09-21T19:36:00.000-07:00

A line from the Mahabharata:

"What is the most wondrous thing in the world, Yudhisthira?"
And Yudhisthira replied, "The most wondrous thing in the world is that all around us people can be dying and we don't realize it can happen to us."

Quote from a long time friend

2011-09-19T19:04:00.000-07:00

"Lessons learned: Time heals all wounds, never be afraid to jump into the unknown, nothing is as bad as it seems, and you can re-invent yourself as many times as you wish."

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

2011-09-16T17:03:00.000-07:00

The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep, loving concern.

Beautiful people do not just happen.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

Thoughts on 9/11

2011-09-08T09:45:00.001-07:00

We are at a place of conjunction of spirit and an anniversary point of fate, reason and lack of understanding.

Sept 11th is one decade since our world became lost in the egocentric desires of philosophies that are diametrically opposed.

Here is the problem ... Everyone works for God ... but most have no spiritual connection. Most are of the opinion that they are deeply spiritually connected and their form of spiritual connection is all there is.

Now it follows that: if I don’t have a way to talk about my deep seated emptiness ... then I will act it out in some form ... I will act it out ... I will act it in ... or ... I will transfer my pain and what I believe are its causes onto something or someone else and then attack them for it; hence the crusades, Hitler’s Germany and every other bit of silliness that was acted out in the name of God by men who had ulterior motives hedged in grandiosity.

If only we could see what we are really up against ... rather then what it appears to be ... God is not a Muslim, nor a Catholic and the list goes on and on ... God is not anyone of them, but all of them are an extension of God.

There is not one of us who are more special than anyone else.

The actual evidence of me being special in God’s eye is that I am here having this experience in the first place.

If only we could settle with this thought as being truth, just image how the world would change.

Neil Tubb Victoria 2011

Entertainment One Oh One

2011-09-08T08:30:00.000-07:00

It is written someplace or other that time reveals all too all who have the patience to wait for its passage. But sometimes the pain is too great, sometimes the need to find out “Why” is so strong that one has to push at life and find the answers more quickly. Some of us are content to wait, and some of us are not.

During the mid 1930's, Mahatma Gandhi was travelling through India, campaigning for the freedom of India from the British Raj. He had been jailed a decade before by the British, and when he came out of prison in 1933, he brought with him a single broken spoon and bowl. He ate, washed, and basically did everything out of this one set of utensils. Someone in his following noticed that he was doing so and felt that there was great meaning behind what he was doing, and so they began to do so also. This cult grew and grew, and the philosophy of the “One Bowlness of Life” developed. Now the key here was that no-one had asked Gandhi why he did so. No-one had taken the time to come to the understanding of the Why's and the Where to Fore’s of his practice. One day, it was reported, one brave soul finally asked why Gandhi was living so to speak from one bowl. Now you have to understand that the group had grown over a period of six or so months to encompass several thousand persons. Gandhi replied to the young student that “It was Easy to Keep Clean;” nothing great, nothing deep, just a very simple practice that made life an easier place to be.

We tend to over complicate our lives just for the sake of the “supposed” understanding of it. It just muddles and muddies the waters even more, the more we think about, and it has been found that if you set your mind hard enough to work on a problem it will always give you an answer, “not necessarily the appropriate one,” but an answer none-the-less, just as that small group in India did when they tried to understand what Gandhi was doing, when all they had to do was ask.

It supposedly allows the so called secrets of life to percolate to the surface, to be examined and adapted into the day and my “terrible dailyness" of my life and its' passage through time.

and that much is true

2011-09-02T14:16:00.000-07:00

You don’t have to know what the future holds ... to know what needs to be done ... and that much is true

Its Coming

2011-08-31T20:06:00.001-07:00

Basic Ingredient for Self

2011-08-23T11:00:00.000-07:00

There seems to be four aspects of human interaction that are the essential for spiritual growth.
These are For, At, To and With.
These four basics essentials are:

Being responsible For someone

Being responsible At someone

Being responsible To someone

And

Being responsible With someone

These sound similar but in reality are miles if not universes apart in application.
If each of these components is not properly utilized and an appropriate balance maintained between them, then the basic bulwarks of life 101 simply will not work. It follows then that what I offer out into the day-to-day world will always come out twisted somehow, no matter how hard I try, no matter what my intent. What I do with someone, what I do for someone and what I do at or to someone are the basic criteria for my own spiritual growth. Why, because as I do  with, for, at and to  then I am in fact making an offering to myself of similar proportions and intent. If I do this with wounded intent then ... no matter what I do it is off the mark. The trick to the whole thing is, knowing how to bring the four aspects into balance. Most of us have no idea what to do with “WITH”... hence the lack of balance.

It is something like fueling your car. Put in first grade fuel and you generally get first grade performance, but if you pee in the gas tank, you will be lucky to get off the starting grid.

The Last Piece of Advice I got before I was Born

2011-08-23T09:53:00.000-07:00

Warning

Times

This Path Way Can Be Slippery

And

The Water Deep

Alex the Flying Frog

2011-08-20T14:25:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time in a tiny town, there lived a family with a pet frog named Alex. The family lived a modest comfortable existence on what they earned working at the Wal-Mart but always dreamed of being rich. "Alex!". They exclaimed one day, "We're going to be rich! We're going to teach you how to fly!" Alex, of course, was terrified at the prospect: "I can't fly, you idiots....I'm a frog, not a canary!" The family, disappointed at the initial reaction, told Alex: "That negative attitude of yours could be a real problem. We're sending you to special classes”. So Alex went to a three day seminar and learned about problem solving, time management, and effective communication...but nothing about flying.

On the first day of "flying lessons", the family could barely control their excitement (and Alex could barely control her bladder). The family explained that their apartment building had 15 floors, and each day Alex would jump out of a window, starting with the first floor and eventually getting to the top floor. After each jump, Alex would analyze how well she flew, isolate on the most effective flying techniques, and implement the improved process for the next flight. By the time they reached the top floor, Alex would surely be able to fly. And, of course, the family would be rich, proud and fulfilled. Alex understood that the fate of the entire family depended on her success.

She pleaded for her life, but it fell on deaf ears. "She just doesn't understand how important this is..." thought the family, "but we won't let nay-sayers get in the way."

So, with that, the family opened the window and threw Alex out (who landed with a thud).

Alex tried many different techniques for dissuading the family and became very proficient at manipulating, cajoling, using humor and persuading but to no avail (she had read somewhere that the light bulb had to want to change?). The family continued and Alex tried her best. But try as she might, she couldn't fly.

By the seventh day, Alex (accepting her fate) no longer begged for mercy...she simply looked at the family and said: "You know you're killing me, don't you?"

The family pointed out that Alex's performance so far had been less than exemplary, failing to meet any of the milestone goals they had set for her. With that, Alex, said quietly: "Shut up and open the window," and she leaped but, taking careful aim on the large jagged rock by the corner of the building. And Alex went to that great lily in the sky.

The family was extremely upset, as their project had failed to meet the single goal they set out to accomplish. Alex had not only failed to learn to fly, she hadn't even learned to steer nor had her productivity improved when told to "Fall smarter, not harder".

The only thing left for the family to do was to analyze the process and try to determine where they had gone wrong. After much thought, the family smiled and said: "Next time.... we're gonna get a smarter frog!" Tiny-town is incapable of change or insight – only expectations for others to make them feel OK.

As Long As I

2011-08-17T18:57:00.000-07:00

It's not difficult to recognize how deep are the ways our mind has been conditioned to deal with unpleasant situations when we examine how we resist those situations. Throughout our entire lives we have been encouraged to do anything we can to escape "from" rather then to explore and investigate "into" our unpleasantness. Our society literally consumes tons of aspirin daily. It is not just the physical pain we try and avoid, but all kinds of unpleasant conditions: boredom, restlessness, self doubt, anger, loneliness, hurt and the list goes on. In our culture we do all we can to push these experiences aside, or keep them at a distance. When you think of "it" this way, we actually choose to be entertained in the fashion that we are.

No Bus and Late for School

As long as I was pushing away the pain, it had me nailed to the wall. But then I stopped resisting it. I sort of let it in. It was actually a relief. I felt better in spite of it. No longer at odds with everything.

adapted from How Can I Help Rass Dass and Paul Gorman

A Necessary Listen

2011-08-13T15:39:00.001-07:00

Economics writer Tim Harford studies complex systems -- and finds a surprising link among the successful ones: they were built through trial and error. He suggests us to embrace our randomness and start making better mistakes.

http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_harford.html

I Got A Note In The Mail This Morning

2011-08-05T10:43:00.000-07:00

Neil, for many years I felt I never fitted in ... even before my accident, and being 'popular' didn't really make it better. I use to party hard to be comfortable, of course that didn't make it any better either. Now, being stripped of everything I am forced to face myself...and I found that I'm ok. In fact I'm more than ok. But sometimes that old 'low self esteem, no confidence' ... that old me still shows up...but not for long though. As long as I 'fit in' with myself...that’s most important. I = numero uno!!

If I don't have to try hard with myself why do I have to do it for anyone else?

I should be good enough as I am.

As simple as that my friend.

Love yourself first and the rest will fall into place.

It’s easy and it works. I try to teach that to my kids, but it can get tricky.

I think that its best learnt with life’s lessons, unfortunately the hard way...otherwise the ego gets in the way and it can result in self obsession instead of that balance that is required in putting yourself first. But both son and daughter are good, thank God. We are a nice little uncomplicated trio:-) For now it’s working well.

CJ ...

Why are we afraid?

2011-08-03T13:26:00.000-07:00

SIMPLE

We’re afraid because there appears to be no truth ... except in the most superficial way.

No one can agree on what “the realities” of any situation are or on just where meaning and importance lie.

One voter sees a truth about a particular politician, yet to another voter the reverse is true. An obvious truth for one city or nation is not true at all for a neighboring city or nation. Within families, merely discussing what is true or important about the smallest of issues can cause deep division. During televised games, not only do fans and commentators disagree about what just happened, but, in addition, each camera angle reveals a different “point of view.” And in a trial, a witness will swear in the name of God that he saw something different than another witness. This apparent absence of truth makes “getting at” the truth a world-wide obsession, despite the fact that we feel a nagging doubt about almost any pronouncement we make or hear someone else make.

An Old Man and His Heart

2011-08-02T16:35:00.001-07:00

One day a young man was standing in the middle of the town proclaiming that he had the most beautiful heart in the whole valley.

A large crowd gathered and they all admired his heart for it was perfect. There was not a mark or a flaw in it. Yes, they all agreed it truly was the most beautiful heart they had ever seen. The young man was very proud and boasted more loudly about his beautiful heart.

Suddenly, an old man appeared at the front of the crowd and said, "Why, your heart is not nearly as beautiful as mine."

The crowd and the young man looked at the old man's heart. It was beating strongly, but full of scars, it had places where pieces had been removed and other pieces put in, but they didn't fit quite right and there were several jagged edges. In fact, in some places there were deep gouges where whole pieces were missing. The people stared. How can he say his heart is more beautiful? they thought.

The young man looked at the old man's heart and saw its state and laughed. "You must be joking," he said. "Compare your heart with mine, mine is perfect and yours is a mess of scars and tears." Yes," said the old man, "Yours is perfect looking but I would never trade with you. You see, every scar represents a person to whom I have given my love - I tear out a piece of my heart and give it to them, and often they give me a piece of their heart which fits into the empty place in my heart, but because the pieces aren't exact, I have some rough edges, which I cherish, because they remind me of the love we shared. Sometimes I have given pieces of my heart away, and the other person hasn't returned a piece of his heart to me. These are the empty gouges - giving love is taking a chance. Although these gouges are painful, they stay open, reminding me of the love I have for these people too, and I hope someday they may return and fill the space I have waiting. So now do you see what true beauty is?"

The young man stood silently with tears running down his cheeks. He walked up to the old man, reached into his perfect young and beautiful heart, and ripped a piece out. He offered it to the old man with trembling hands.

The old man took his offering, placed it in his heart and then took a piece from his old scarred heart and placed it in the wound in the young man's heart. It fit, but not perfectly, as there were some jagged edges.

The young man looked at his heart, not perfect anymore but more beautiful than ever, since love from the old man's heart flowed into his.

They embraced and walked away side by side.

Author Unknown

Zen and the Art of the Fine Whine

2011-07-26T15:32:00.000-07:00

Zen and the Art of the Fine Whine: It is in the incessant noise of critical complaining and whining where we learned to bond with people.

We, as co-dependents, use our problems, our ailments, our spectating into other people’s lives, world events or neighbourhood situations as a bonding formula. It is a negative recipe about what is wrong with me, or with you or with the world or how things are or should be that unites us in the moment. We Hope!

Classically, we either were or are subject of harsh criticism and dissection by others and today we analysis everything into a place where we turn into the harsh critics that haunted us in our childhood.

We know what is wrong with us and what’s wrong with others and we use that knowingness to cling to people, so that we can become the one who knows ... to become “special” finally ... to, at long last, be the one who is noticed because, when our history clearly demonstrates that we were ignored to the point of deep abandonment and abuse.

This is a learned defence strategy that has run amuck. One of the nasty facts that go with this format of needs fulfilment is that we actually drive those people out of our lives in our very efforts to bond with them. Why? Because our posture is highly manipulative, complaining and controlling ... the very thing we cherish, the very thing we desire, our sense of self, sense of belonging, sense of being special, is lost in the very efforts we put forth in our vain attempt(s) to resolve the problem that is really lodged deeply in our past and not in our present moment.

If we can know what we are really up against

Then we can do something about it.

Into The Light - CoDependency A Spiritual Journey ... to be Released in August 2011

2011-07-26T09:59:00.001-07:00

The Way Of Things in Healing from Trauma

2011-07-20T19:42:00.001-07:00

• ... When the trauma in life has been hidden from the conscious mind, the integration of new information about one's own past can be deeply disorganizing and disorienting. It can also disrupt one’s sense of self and worth.

• ... Nature "knows" when to shut people down because of PTSD. It also often knows when it is time to open people up again. The reintegration process needs to reintegrate the pain, the shame and the memories of the past. One needs to come to understand that compartmentalized pain and shame can only be held in at great cost to the beholder.

• ... Conversely, it is important to understand that the reopening process is also a costly/painful experience.

• ... It was disturbing for some to realize that to recover their own feelings and their lost humanity, they had to both realize and grieve just how inhumane their pasts had been.

• ... The path of recovery often takes people to a place of greater unhappiness while enroute. It is the Way of Things, and the Way of Things will eventually release the pain of the past in the present and give us back our future. So we can have the life we were intended to have.

Adapted from Ed Schmookler

observations on the healing process

from Post Trauma Stress Disorder

Maybe This Is Not For Me? Thoughts on Step Five and Six

2011-07-20T10:34:00.000-07:00

If this thought has not scampered across your mind yet, it just might shortly … all this thinking and all this writing … some of this stuff might just seem surrealistic or even scary.

Maybe it’s not for me?

That’s just your mind rationalizing and attempting to set up blocks to pain it anticipates … it knows it is right up there just waiting to jump out at you and hurt you all over again.

The truth of the matter is that this pain that we are attempting to rationalize our way around is really right out there in front of us … forming all our fears ... actually … it acts like a traffic cop, trying to organize how you think and how you should act and where we could go, who we could do it with and what to do when things become too much for us to handle, or so we sometimes think.

Sort of like, here … think me, I’m your worse fear … think me … I’m real …now do this … it doesn’t matter … this is all that will work … think me … I’m real… do this now or die.

The fear simply just sits there … waiting for us to make a move, but in this step our job is just to sit there and stare back … and notice, that’s all … notice and admit … but mainly notice … notice what it is that has held you prisoner all these years.

There will be many times during this process when you will feel anxious and afraid … and you may end up wondering what to do next.

Well … what to do next is simple … just follow the directions given in the step … with another person … that you trust … in the presence of what you have come to believe is your Higher Power … just examine and reveal … that’s all … just examine and reveal … Uncover … Discover … Discard

Know the feeling?

Action is the Key Word here.

Simply get on with it and do it.

The Second Awakening

2011-07-19T16:05:00.001-07:00

The Second Awakening comes when the Ego emerges from its long sleep of Knowingness and dependency on itself solely for guidance.

This is a much deeper and a more profound spiritual event.

For this event to happen in any significant fashion the spiritual travelers must be willing to let go of what they think they know¾ego function, dependency needs etc¾and begin to trust in what they cannot see or for that matter what they probably do not readily relate to.

· Having faith in …

Faith has strange mystical qualities to it that aren’t readily noticeable at first.

Faith:

· cannot think for itself:

· does not have a consciousness.

· will do what it does and where it is directed to do it, by it’s beholder.

· will do whatever it is directed to do faithfully; after all, that is its job.

· is blind.

So this business of having faith is as much a matter of where you place it, as it is a matter of having some.

If you have faith in something unreal or something unhealthy, then you will feed the unreality or the lack of health and your faith will actually turn into a vehicle that works against your process of awakening while you appear to be making every effort to awaken.

· Faith in something must be examined with great regularity. Just what the frequency of regularity is, will determine your future more so then having faith in the first place.

· Note: as you examine this newfound faith you may notice your own self-centered motives at play under the thinly veiled guise of faith and spirituality. Creative selfishness.

· The knack to the whole thing is to have some faith and then take direction from the experience of risking having that faith in the first place. Then applying the wisdom and understanding gleaned from the risk taking and applying that into your next moment.

· Then be prepared to either make change happen, or accept change as it happens to you.

This is difficult, because the factors that the Ego used to make judgment calls about life and change are now absent.

· Faith doesn’t have fear, hate, distrust, like, or dislike. In fact those feelings hinder the process of faith.

Opening the second eye is a more profound event. It requires something pro-active to happen. It requires an exchange between the seeker and the universe. The exchange happens on the path (and only on the path) as the seeker surrenders into the greater unknown. This always equates to surrender into the fear. It probably isn’t but that is what it equates too.

Fear is defined in the Course in Miracles as the absence of Love¾with capital L¾ and it is a given in this business that it is far easier to hang on to what I know then it is to face the demons that hold me fast and frozen in my place.

For those who decide to face their demons, the decision to surrender is for life. This decision will affect everything you do, touch, say and think.

Again it is a given that the vast majority of people who say they want to change are simply too terrified of change to make change happen.

Decisions have to be made.

· Do I stay?

· Do I go on ahead?

· What is it that I must do?

Know This

You came to this world singularly and unclothed. That is your path. The others that you encounter are here on the path with you and are on the same journey but they can only serve as guideposts for you, and they can only provide you the opportunity to find your own blind spots, that's all.

There is a vast world of difference between solitude and loneliness and that is your discovery to make.

I am alone and my world is a dangerous place

2011-07-13T21:18:00.000-07:00

“I am alone and my world is a dangerous place”. There are times when I feel I am so desperate, lost and alone.

There were times when life was so heavy I could not imagine going forward at all. Moving through these heavy circumstances taught me things. What I did was I learned to cope with “lonely” and I learned to deal with “abandoned and empty.” There were times when my normal was defined by Hopelessness...

I developed little tricks of the trade along the way just to get by on, especially when life was cloudy, grey and moving toward black. I found that I could depend on these tricks of the trade. Sort of the Artful Dodger of the 20th Century. All these tricks of the trade had one thing in common, they hailed from outside of me. I never really noticed this for the longest time. They were things I had been taught by others who were experiencing their lives in about the same fashion I was. These tricks of the trade had odd qualities and I firmly believed I needed them. In fact as I look back on it now, they were "magical” almost. And the key word in that statement is almost. They were things like activities, substances, rituals that I could rely on ... just to get through to the end of the day. They were there for me when nothing else was.

They worked beautifully or so I thought ... after all I did get through. I was also noticing that some of those people I was associating with were not making it. Their little tricks of the trade took them off the face of the planet ... figuratively and in some cases literally.

It was back there someplace a decade or two ago when I heard that I could look inward for solutions. I didn’t find any instant fixes but oddly enough I began to notice things.

One of the things I noticed was that I in fact had faith; this surprised me because in my opinion I had been forsaken by all that is and I was totally and completely on my own. I was the only person or thing I could have faith in. Why? Simple, because what I did, worked for me when nothing else was there ... but ... what I did was only ... Temporary ... But what I discovered that this faith thing was far broader then I had imagined.

As I looked within I found myself acknowledging that the old faith and belief system was not all it was cracked up to be ... “Temporarily” was becoming a four letter word as far as I was concerned. Those tricks of the trade really did not work all that well. It was about then in time that I bumped into The Door. It was about then that I penned There Is A Door ... It was about then that I began the journey into places and parts in me and unknown to me ... This Door was just there waiting for me to give over my fear and to place my faith in a new direction ... Within ... rather than Without.

I began to notice the insanity of my old beliefs, of how and where I had placed my faith. I also noticed something else that was very important. I, like everyone else had faith ... it was there from the get go. It was as if we are all issued X amount of faith each day and it was up to us to do something with it. It was now a choice ... Go Exploring into the Unknown or Hang On For Dear Life and Hope that I was not going to be destroyed by the process I was born into. I had done the latter for years. I was about to begin the former ... into the adventure of Exploring. I had a choice now, a choice I never really knew I had. A choice of how I wanted to use my faith ... Within or Without ... I began to lean on That Door to see if it would open for me.

Experience Has Taught Me

That I am out of control

And

I know I am not happy.

I know that my beliefs have not and cannot make me happy.

I know I must find “different” to be happy.

Where will I look?

What will I see?

And who will help me?

12 Basic Instructions for Step 4/5 and 6

2011-07-12T13:42:00.000-07:00

1. Choose any one of the four umbrella topics, resentment, anger, fear or me and my sexuality: take for example resentment, but anyone will do.

2. Then simply begin a sentence with “I resent so and so” and don’t take the pen off the page until the thread is complete. Now the subject may seem to change often as the thread unwinds. It may not seem to be connected. Simply write on and on until the proverbial spool is empty, until you are empty. What I discovered as I did this purging on paper was that it often went on for 26 to 30 pages. Then it often took days before I was ready to write again. Not that it was traumatic . . . oddly enough it was not - I was just empty. Of course there were those times when the tears came, and when that happens, just let it happen.

3. In rotation, choosing one of the umbrella topics, and write about you and what happened to you or about those who influenced you from each of the four perspectives, and know that you will probably do so many times before the well is dry. You may have to visit each one many times.

4. It is imperative that you ask for assistance with Step Five.

5. Step Five requires the outside help of another living, breathing human being by its very nature. It is suggested that you find someone whom you can trust, possibly someone who will not be going through the rest of your life with you, like a priest or member of the clergy or your therapist as your helper or listener.

6. It is also suggested that you have someone else, a sponsor, someone who can be there just to bounce things off and to ask questions of when there is a need as you go through the process of developing your Step Four. Both are important.

7. Often as not, there will be things in Step Five that you will feel should never see the light of day, but to cleanse them, it is an absolute must that they be exposed to the light of day. Sometimes it is too difficult to reveal things with a sponsor or therapist. Choose a neutral third party who is well aware of the necessities of Step Five. Someone who, when you have completed your Step Five work, you can walk away from and leave it all behind.

8. The symbolic gestures are just as important as the work of the step. You may find that your Step Five individual may have a ritual or two that he or she suggests to you as follow through for completion of the step. Do them, it is important. There are many who are trained for precisely this function and if need be your therapist or counselor can assist you in setting yourself up with someone appropriate.

9. Take the time to research and come to an understanding of how different aspects of the recovery movement handle a fourth and fifth step. Attend some open AA meetings or some Al-Anon and NA meetings. All conduct what they call open meetings. Phone numbers are available in the yellow pages.

10. As a suggestion, after you have completed the day’s writing or even after you have allowed several days to pass following a session of writing, go back through the writing and pull out who/what happened and look for the patterns and how those patterns affected you both then and now.

11. Look for the legacy that Susan Forward suggests in her book Toxic Parenting, should be there, the ghost monsters and demons of Xmas past.

12. Ask yourself regularly, “What is the legacy?” Look for patterns! Always be looking for, “How am I complicit in my own pain?” and “What patterns have been established that contribute to my pain, my loneliness, etc.”

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Someone's Story

2011-07-09T10:23:00.000-07:00

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The jungles of Nam caused it in some, the jungles of my childhood caused it in me.

I was a child, born unloved and sold, again and again, to men for money. Not just sold for sex, but for sadistic rituals as well, some in which my mother participated. To the point that my body was damaged (broken bones, etc.) not just my mind, my heart, my psyche. Given birth by a mother who didn't love me (she told me more than once how she tried to abort me before I was born). She was, in fact, my creator. A child's creator is the first source any child looks to for validation and love. Instead of validation, I was treated like I wasn't worth loving, was only good to be used and abused by others, not protected from torture, not taken to the hospital when wounded or broken, constantly told by men who were strangers, and my mother, that if I didn't submit, I would be killed. This went on for many years.

One creates any coping skills that will work if one is to heed the primal instinct to survive. Until one is no longer helpless, we remain passive, quiet, and ... endure. We escape to a world within our own minds - or latch onto other families that seem much healthier and fantasize that they are our true family. Or that we were kidnapped and are not truly part of the family that is abusing us. Denial works as well. "Don't remember". And we develop selective memory. Make up a different identity for ourselves. One that isn't "damaged goods". One that others can love. Deep down, suppressing the rising panic in our bones that keeps telling us that at any time, people are going to find out ... find out that we were never good enough to love from the beginning.

How, once we're grown, is this suppressed PTSD expressed? Some express rage outwardly. Violent outbursts. Terrible anger. Acting out. Others, like me, who were helpless to protect themselves from the beginning, learned to be very quiet and passive in order to literally stay alive, and directed the rage that had to go somewhere, inward. Once away from the abuse, those of us who were passive were now free. And as for me, no longer overpowered and raped regularly over 11 years by mother's customers, or locked in the basement, or hung by my heels and tortured, or forced to take drugs in order to be compliant - I was free. And with that freedom I ran. I ran with exhilaration. I ran with abandon. I ran from fear and pain. And ran ... and ran ... and ran.

And looked for places to hide. I saw all men as monsters and stayed as far away from them as possible. I rarely allowed myself to be touched. Or, as in the case of marriage, I did my duty in the bedroom, but my mind was carefully placed somewhere else ... anywhere else, so I could control the scream that would always start to rise from my belly, choking to get out my mouth. Somewhere deep inside, I sensed that if I ever started to scream, I would never be able to stop. And then I would be put away. Trapped again, but this time in some psych ward somewhere. Never free again. So I had to stay quiet. But this time, it was to protect my hard won freedom.

Once an adult, and on my own, I would protect what small space I might allow myself to claim with all that I had (I was simply on the road for years, never staying in one place for more than 3 months at a time). I stayed behind closed doors. Walled myself in where it was safe. Safety is paramount. Safety matters. Nothing else. Run, hide, find a place to be safe. But this seclusion intensified to the point of, as an adult, not being able to relate socially to most anyone in any normal kind of fashion. But that didn't even matter. I was safe. That's all that mattered.

How do some of us ever initially get into any relationships? And how do we think we will be able to make them work? Well, most of us don't reason it out on a conscious level. But we want to "fit in". We want to live a normal life, so ... we observe. Copy others who seem normal, and who other people seem to like, and we try to act that way. We look around and realize that it is a man's world, and try to find a strong man to protect us from all the "bad men" out there. Most often, though, we've walked into a relationship where the strong man is the very type of abusive person we most wanted to be protected from.

How? ... we don't know. How many of us can afford counseling to begin to tell us what we're doing wrong? That we're repeating patterns from our childhood and being subconsciously drawn to the "known" (an abuser) because that is less frightening then the "unknown". Who has time to figure that out when you're always running and looking for protection and trying to find love, be lovable, pretend to be like everyone else, and on and on and on. And God knows how many bad relationships we're in before we finally begin "to get" that, even in choosing a man to be with us, we can't even trust our own choices anymore. So now, besides not being able to trust the people around us, we must deal with the total shock of not being able to trust our own judgment to keep us safe, either.

So, even though the abusers are no longer with us - they are. They've become a part of us. Chase us inside ourselves, and keep us running, looking for ever more safe places to hide. And the rage? It yells at us that we are unworthy to be loved. Not important enough to be noticed. Or to receive kindness. Or to even seriously aspire to a life of happiness like others have. Like "the normals" do.

So, this inner directed rage becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of self-sabotage. Without being consciously aware - something good comes along and all the deeply ingrained tapes say "You don't deserve this - you're not worthy" and somehow ... somehow we shut down, stop the process of love and kindness coming our way because, deep down, we know we can't sustain whatever it is that these people think they see in us as "good". It must be a lie. We must have fooled them somehow and they'll find out that it's a lie and be repulsed by us. We run, so we don't have to face their rejection once they see that we are really not worth their effort.

We reject ourselves before they have a chance too.

Now, there are many kind souls, who with not a clue of what they're triggering in us, say to us "OK. That was your past. Don't live in the past. Just forget it. Live in the present moment. Make the best of your life now." A reasonable thing to say. But only if you've led a reasonable life and have had only a few minor bumps along the road. To those of us who have endured serious abuse, that statement is heard by us as "You are overloading me with too many facts I can't relate too. You're not important enough for me to listen to you anymore or try to understand. Get back to "acting" like a lovable person or you're just not worth the effort of knowing anymore." OK. Now we know. If we don't keep up the act of "pretending to be normal" rejection is sure to come. Be quiet. Compliant. Lovable. And never, NEVER tell anybody again who you really are.

The sad thing about this conclusion is evident. Because we can't suppress who we are indefinitely, so in order to maintain others good opinions of us, we must leave before they find out, once we've seen the indicators that they are acting as if there might be something they don't like about us. That's all it takes. Just one trigger. And we're off. Gone. Running. The cycle starts over again and again from one new town to the next. One new relationship to the next. Never staying long enough to get anything accomplished in our lives. Never making friendships that last. And if there are any children involved, most probably losing them somewhere along the way, in the blur of the fear that rules our lives.

Now, should one have the opportunity of eventually getting into counseling, the rudiments of why one is acting like this as an adult, are learned. Some tools are picked up, from various and sundry counselors to help us handle certain triggers when they arise. We are assured by the counselors that there is no cure for us. Just learning techniques that can be taught to us so we can "manage" our "illness". Those of us with PTSD who have had good counselors are the lucky ones. Many never get that far. They've either successfully committed suicide, become permanent recluses, or continue the rest of their lives "on the run."

As one who has lived, or attempted to various degrees, all of the above, I have arrived at a point in my life where I've finally landed. I've lived in the same apartment for almost 5 years now. I've made several friends that actually have remained my friends for over 12 years now. And I continue, cautiously, to make more friends. I've overcome many of my repulsions to men and actually find some of them attractive, interesting, intelligent, humorous and kind. And yes, have even allowed myself to receive love, and give love, to them. I never thought I'd make it this far. But if I can make it this far, I begin to indulge in the hope that maybe I can make it all the way. All the way to happiness and the never before experienced feeling of "completeness". A life of balance and beauty. Love and the ability to handle conflict in a reasonable, harmonious and respectful manner.

Now, it's time to work on self-sabotage. And ... to learn that the right men can be trusted. I need friends and family who believe in me. Encourage and support me in the inner work that I must do if I am ever going to exist in a truly loving relationship with them, and those I am destined to meet.

I wrote this down because I just needed someone to hear me. Hear what I've worked out so far. Where I've come from and where I'm trying to go. And know that with my last breath, I will never stop trying to be ... someone.

A MASTERFUL ILLUSTRATION

2011-07-07T19:01:00.000-07:00

An aging master grew tired of his apprentice complaining, and so, one morning, sent him for some salt. When the apprentice returned, the master instructed the unhappy young man to put a handful of salt in a glass of water and then to drink it.

"How does it taste?" the master asked?

"Bitter," spit the apprentice.

The master chuckled and then asked the young man to take the same handful of salt and put it in the lake. The two walked in silence to the nearby lake, and once the apprentice swirled his handful of salt
in the water, the old man said, "Now drink from the lake."
As the water dripped down the young man's chin, the master asked, "How does it taste?"

"Fresh," remarked the apprentice.

"Do you taste the salt?" asked the master.

"No," said the young man.

At this, the master sat beside this serious young man who so reminded him of himself and took his hands, offering, "The pain of life is pure salt; no more, no less … the amount of pain in life remains the exactly the same. However, the amount of bitterness we taste depends on the container we put the pain in. So when you are in pain, the only thing you can do is to enlarge your sense of things . . . Stop being a glass. Become a lake."

[Unknown]

#5 Process Of Recovery

2011-07-05T16:39:00.000-07:00

Taking Back Your Projections.

When you attempt to become separate from what seems to give you pain, and please notice that I said ‘from what seems to give you pain’, and you do this by making “others” or “it” the wrong thing to do ... or ... being the bad one, or by knowing what is right and proper for everyone else ... always by being the peace keeper, or the hero, or the scapegoat, or by medicating your feelings with drugs and alcohol or distractions, you usually develop a life style based upon projection. You may twist reality to suit your need to be right etc. and justify your behaviour by making others wrong to justify your position, thought or activity.

Taking back these projections often requires the loving confrontation and support of group and/or family members, friends and business partners, your spouse or a therapist.

The projections tend to fall away slowly, often as not very slowly until finally enough of the denial is removed and the truth of who you and who others really are, is revealed to you.

Projection Make Perception

Projection occurs when you see split-off parts of yourself in other people ... You may not recognize them in yourself; they are hard to see. When you are protecting yourself from seeing those spilt-off parts of yourself, you may have trouble distinguishing between your internal world (fantasy) and the external world (reality). Things often as not, get very confusing and certain desperation seems to set up that drives compulsive behaviours.

Projection is complicated by the fusion of co-dependency and inability to feel and act separate from other people ... By seeing in others the very qualities that you refuse to acknowledge in yourself, this can allow you to continue on in your denial and delusion while at the same time avoiding taking responsibility for your own actions and feelings and for taking charge of your life.

Another important characteristic of the split-off parts is that the more they are ignored or denied, the more strength they gain as demonstrated by:

1. You may act out the part unexpectedly. For example, if your anger is split off, you may erupt in a fit of anger. It "happens to you" without you having much awareness.

2. Someone may act out the part for you.

Split-off parts are always outside your awareness.

Thought for the week

I am not separate.

I am one with

All that Is,

All that Was

and

All that Ever Will Be.

I can trust.

I can know.

I am responsible.

I am single-minded.

The Mythical Full-Length Mirror Of Self

2011-07-01T10:54:00.000-07:00

Each of us, in turn, must go to a place and stand in front of The Mythical Full-Length Mirror of Self, if we are in fact to heal. It is a place where we come to know and see probably for the first time just how much “stuff” we really carry and how it drags us down and holds us from our future. The one we were intended to have.

To Heal we must own it! And become ready to consider casting it off.

The Process of Recovery is described as Uncover, Discover and Discard.

People have to know what they are up against. Where and how we carried it, and how our sense of evil spiritedness, of not being good enough, sometimes called incubus (from the Latin: evil spirited, devil or demon. Things, metaphorically mostly, that most of us believe are locked down inside us and run our lives...).

It locks us into our guilt, hurt, pain and shame. How this burden of guilt, hurt, pain and shame serves as the drive engine for the behaviours that we hate about ourselves.

Those behaviours we can’t seem to stop doing and the ones that are killing us, the ones, oddly enough that we are trying to give up.

Ashamed and isolated and in the middle of a world,

That is full of people who are ashamed and isolated too,

Just like me and too terrified to admit it.

So now the opportunity sits here before me,

An opportunity both figuratively and literally,

To do something for the first time,

That is constructive,

About the state of my being.

Shame as an Identity

2011-06-28T19:13:00.000-07:00

When one suffers from alienation, that means that one experiences parts of themselves as alien. For example, if you were never allowed to express your feelings (anger, happy, sad etc) in your family then your feelings becomes an alienated part of you. And the outcome of that is you will feel shame when you feel particular feelings. This is a part of you that must be disowned or severed & avoided.

The problem with this is there is no way to actually get rid of your emotion without expressing them. For example, anger has odd qualities that most in recovery don’t associate with anger. Anger is self preserving, it is self protecting. Without the energy of Anger we would all become door mats and people pleasers.

When we deny our feelings and push them aside shame is generated. If left to its own devices shame becomes an identity. Now because it is so deeply and completely internalized shame stops having a proper place in our life. It no longer is a marker about what we are doing … it becomes who we are. When it is completely internalized and becomes an identity, it is impossible for any of us to speak about how we feel think or wish because we have become the object of our own contempt. I am shamed whenever I feel my feelings.

Thus it follows that to feel shame is to feel exposed or be seen for whom we imagine us to be and who we imagine us to be is always a considerably diminished picture of who and what we really are.

George Eliot, Silas Marner, p. 150

2011-06-25T09:23:00.000-07:00

"In old days there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction. We see no white-winged angels now. But yet men are led away from threatening destruction: a hand is put into theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they look no more backward; and the hand may be a little child's."

-- George Eliot, Silas Marner, p. 150

An Interesting Place to Be

2011-06-21T17:49:00.000-07:00

I seem to be pointed in an interesting direction now, but this is anything but easy, in fact it seems to be a lot like work. I seem to have a good sense of my Higher Power now but I seem to be weighed down by who and what I think I am.

Time to begin to examine who it is that I think I might be.

So, I find a place by a mystical stream and take off this metaphorical backpack and begin to examine whom it is that I think and thought I was and am.

My pack is full to overflowing with stuff. Old stuff, new stuff, embarrassing stuff, stuff I wouldn’t tell anyone, even on my death bed, and stuff I don’t even know that I have done. There is so much stuff, I cannot count it all. So I reach in and take hold of some stuff, a shiny sort of thing, and I begin to examine it. I have been told to catalogue what I find, just for posterity’s sake. Not too sure why, other then it sounded like something I should do and one of my fellow travelers said may be it was a good idea. Out comes the shiny thing and I see me reflected in it and I sort of like what comes out, it shows me off to be a nice, loving sort of a person. I am actually sort of surprised, but I catalogue it and carry on.

Then out comes a handful of goop, and it is black and sticky and smelly, and I just know everyone is looking at it and I am so embarrassed by it. I catalogue it too and then set it aside.

I watch both of these items in the light of day and notice something unusual. First the goop, as it is exposed to the light of day, it dries out and slowly the smell lifts. I notice that it could be brushed off, if I wanted. I acknowledge this, and as I do that the shiny sort of thing, the loving parts of me, begins to melt into the pores of my being and become part of what I know about myself. Interesting.

I check in with my Higher Power and I ask what should I do with all this stuff in the backpack? That Voice of Sanity tells me, with great certainty, to continue until all is examined and catalogued.

What a task; I don’t think I can go through with it, but I know I have to. It is part of my ritual of surrender. It really is my first action I have had taken toward my own recovery. I carry on into my future.

. . . Experience Has Taught Me That . . .

I am thankful for the opportunity to come to know me

Thankful for the opportunity to learn to trust.

Codependency is a child's reaction to families that are messed up.

2011-06-16T13:39:00.000-07:00

Codependency is a child's reaction to families that are messed up. It comes from; the children living their lives adjusting to someone else’s problem:

• Divorce

• Marital problems

• Affairs

• addictions

• Battering

• Abuse of all kinds like: unpredictability -- enmeshment -- abandonment -- emotional denial -- threats --neglect -- incest --parents being unhappy about themselves, their relationships and lives.

• Parents not dealing with their problems, expecting the kids to make it OK

• Lack of affirmation of self

• Parental unavailability which produces self-doubt in the child

• Shame inducing

• Excess pressure to fill the family needs Perfectionistic expectations -- covert stress and control -- issues of martyrdom by parents

• Children are overly involvement with parents' problems.

It is the crushing of our trust, identity, autonomy, safety, reality, self-image, industry, pleasure and creativity.

We learn to react to the needs, problems and dysfunctions of those around us, rather than to our feelings, our reality, our needs and wants. It comes from a child's insecurity of living with parents in a dysfunctional marriage—a family that produces fears, anxi¬eties, worries, phobias, hyper vigilance, and control issues.

As children we tried to make everything better and were unable to do so. We believed our survival depended on fixing the family. We be¬came over-responsible or totally irresponsible and swung frequently between the two places. The prem¬ises, the myths, our modeled behavior, rules, scripting and the repetition all contributed to our pain.

We re-enact dysfunction. As adults, we pass the legacy of our dysfunction and denial to whoever is handy: wives, husbands and children. As children we existed for our parents. The family roles were set up to take care of the parents needs—role reversal is abuse. Dishonest, spiritually bankrupt, hopeless, dysfunctionality, emptiness and undependability are all hallmarks of the dysfunctional family structure today. As the crisis and problems occur and recycle themselves in our present lives the solution to our healing lay back in the pain of our family of origin issues. We must go there and resolve our feeling for our healing to be affective. Nothing changes until it become real. We learned to protect, deny, obey and "live with” the intolerable. We have created a national parental protection racket. We try to believe that parents always did their best or at least tried to do their best. Not True! In protecting the family system we lose touch with the real source of our codependency and stay focused on symptoms not the problems.

Like a conduit, the child receives abuse and dysfunc¬tional lifestyle. We are unaware of the connection between our painful lifestyle and our unresolved childhood issues. Hiding what underlies our dysfunction makes change difficult, even impossible as long as the denial clouds our vision of the truth about what happened. Our behaviors, such as over-responsibility, enabling, excess tolerance of the inappropriate behavior in and by others; our mood swings or disordered eating and the list goes on and on, are truly expression of our compulsivity. It is our response to a system that did not meet our needs. The Fact Is We do not choose any of this. It may seem voluntary that we did or do what we do but we can only choose when we have full awareness, not just of the driving forces beneath the behavior, our feelings and our internal conflict. We subconsciously repeat the dilemmas, fears and pain of child¬hood—or we avoid repeating them to the point of going in the opposite extreme. 180 degrees from sick is still sick.

Many of us maintain our shame so our parents don't have to feel guilt. In role reversal and care taking children are set up to give meaning to parents' lives and as a result get lost or enmeshed in the parents' problems. The issues created become multi/intergenerational in nature. What doesn't get passed back gets passed around or passed on to the next generation. Our problems become our children's problems. Our children's problems become our cultural problems.

Family violence, social messages, school, church, culture and peers all play a part in creating codependents.

We live with an educational system that often:

• Stifles our ability to become who we were meant to be.

• Squelches our curiosity, creativity and interest. Smothers awareness of the awesomeness of creation. Breaks down creation into meaningless components.

• Forces us to stay within the lines with our crayons.

• Coerces us to memorize and repeat without understanding or interest. Compels us to compete and learn so little in such a long period of time.

• Denies our ability to question or think critically for ourselves.

• Demands of us to discover ourselves either as a failure or a success.

Survival in the system depends on one's ability to adapt to whatever school style or teacher style we happen to be in at the time and to be the recipient of the frustration of the teaching profession. This is codependency reinforced in our educational system.

Religion contributes with:

• Undercurrents of sexual shame, frequently over lapping onto female revulsion and hate. Concept of God as a judgmental, powerful, punishing father figure who selects those to favor and those to punish randomly.

• Focus on a God of miracles, of power, who alters the course of creation, who is jealous and petty, and vindictive. Over-ritualized liturgy. Religion being based on intolerance. Religious Institutions operating with addictive greed with a focus on punishment, shame and threats.

• Religiosity (an addiction) rather than spirituality. Religious arrogance. Religious extortion and exploitation & sick religious leaders.

Imago/Coupling ... Rules of the Road ... From Harville Hendrix

2011-06-14T10:43:00.000-07:00

You have relied on yourself to find your mates and partners. The days of arranged marriages etc are over. We take what we get or so we think. There is a place deep inside each of us that wants to guide you in your search for the ideal mate, someone who will both resemble your caretakers and compensate for the repressed parts of yourself. You like every one else has relied on self and the thought of freedom of choice to handle this aspect or better said relied on an unconscious image of the opposite sex or the ideal work mate or ... and that image has been forming since birth. This is called the Imago ... Latin term for 'image.'

The Concept of the Imago: It is for all practical purposes, a composite picture of the people who influenced you most strongly at an early age. This may have been your mother and father, siblings, or maybe a babysitter or close relative. But whoever they were, they were, a part of your experience and your brain recorded everything about them … the sound of their voices, the amount of time they took to answer your cries, the color of their skin when they got angry, the way they smiled when they were happy, the set of their shoulders, the way they moved their bodies, their characteristic moods, their talents and interests. Along with these impressions your brain recorded all your significant interactions with them. Here is the important part, your brain didn't interpret this data; it sim-ply etched them onto a template.

It may seem improbable that you have such a detailed record of your caretakers somewhere inside your head when you have only a dim recollection of those early years. In fact, many people have a hard time remembering anything that happened to them before the age of five or six-even dramatic events that should have made a deep impression.

But scientists report that we have incredible amounts of hidden infor¬mation in our brains. Neurosurgeons discovered this fact while per¬forming brain surgery on patients who were under local anesthesia. They stimulated portions of the patients' brains with weak electrical currents, and the patients were suddenly able to recall hundreds of forgotten episodes from childhood in astonishing detail .

Our minds are vast storehouses of forgotten information. There are those who suggest that everything that we have ever experienced resides some¬where in the dark, convoluted recesses of our brains.

Not all of these experiences are recorded with equal intensity, how¬ever. The most vivid impressions seem to be the ones that we formed of our caretakers early in life. And of all the interactions that we had with these key people, the ones that were most deeply engraved were the ones that were the most wounding, because these were the encoun¬ters that seemed to threaten our existence (literally a death threat to the observer).

Gradually, over time, these hundreds of thousands of bits of information about our caretakers merged together to form a single image. The old brain, in its inability to make fine distinctions, simply filed all this information under one heading: The People Responsible For Our Survival. You might think of the imago as a silhouette with few distinguishing physical characteris¬tics but with the combined character traits of all of your primary caregivers.

To a large degree, whether or not you have been at¬tracted to someone depended on the degree to which that person matched your imago. A hidden part of your brain ticked and hummed, coolly analyzing that person's traits, and then compared them with your rich data bank of information.

• If there was little correlation, you felt no interest. This person was destined to be one of the thousands of people who come and go in your life with little impact.

• If there was a high degree of correlation, you found the person highly attractive.

This imago-matching process bears some resemblance to the way soldiers were trained to identify flying aircraft during World War ll. The soldiers were given books filled with silhouettes of friendly and enemy aircraft. When an unidentified plane came into view, they hur¬riedly compared the plane with these illustrations. If it turned out to be a friendly plane, they relaxed and went back to their posts. If it was an enemy aircraft, they leaped into action.

Unconsciously you have compared every man or woman that you have met to your imago. When you identified a close match, you felt a sudden surge of interest.

This is all hidden behind the scenes so to speak. It happens as a natural process without our thinking but and here is the important part it has far more influence in the day to day doings of our life then most would care to admit. All aspects of the unconscious mind have this unknowingness of process in common, after all you had no awareness of this elaborate sorting mechanism was there or that it was operating in your life. There is a place where you can catch a peek at it in action, in your dreams.

• If you reflect on your dreams, one thing you will notice is that your old brain capriciously merges people together.

• A dream that starts out with one person playing a part suddenly has another person filling that role; the unconscious has little regard for corporeal boundaries.

You may be able to recall a dream where your spouse suddenly transmutated into your mother or father, or a dream in which your spouse and a parent played such similar roles or treated you in such a similar manner that they were virtually indistin-guishable.

Self: I have a problem

Dream: Here let me show you.

This is the closest you will ever come to directly verifying the existence of your imago. But when you do the stemming exercises especially in the off hand you will have a chance to compare the dominant character traits of your mate with the dominant character traits of your primary caretakers, the parallel that your unconscious mind draws between spouses and care¬takers will become unmistakably clear.

Let's take this information about the imago and see how it adds to our earlier theories of attraction.

The question that I'm frequently asked when I talk about the uncon¬scious factors in mate partner selection is this: how can people tell so much about each other so quickly?

Are We Soul Mates?

The reason that we are such instant judges of character is that we rely on what Freud called “unconscious perception.”

• We intuitively pick up much more about people than we are aware of.

• When we meet strangers, we instantly register the way they move, the way they seek or avoid eve contact, the clothes they wear, their characteristic expres¬sions, the way they fix their hair, the ease with which they laugh or lie, their ability to listen, the speed at which they talk, the amount of time it takes them to respond to a question—we record all of these characteristics and a hundred more in a matter of minutes.

• Just by looking at people, we can absorb vast amounts of informa¬tion.

• When I walk to work each morning, I automatically appraise the people on the crowded sidewalks.

• My judgment is instan¬taneous:

A. this person is someone I wish I knew;

B. that person is someone I have no interest in.

I find myself attracted or repulsed with only a superficial glance. When I walk into a party, one glance around the room will often single out the people that I want to meet. Other people ¬report similar experiences. As a police officer on Hwy Patrol, I could pick out which cars had booze in them while cruising at sixty-five miles an hour and be right. A Free Lunch ... bet with my partner... depended on the “call” being right.

Our powers of observation are especially acute when we are looking for a mate/partner, because we are searching for someone to satisfy our funda¬mental unconscious drives.

We subject everyone to the same intense scrutiny: is this someone who will nurture me and help me recover my lost self?

When we meet someone who appears to meet these needs, the old brain registers instant interest.

In all subsequent encounters, the unconscious mind is fully alert, searching for clues that this might indeed be the perfect mate, or soul mate ... New Age red-herring phrase for an attempt to understand what was unnoticed consciously but felt deeply.

If later experiences' confirm the imago match, our interest climbs even further.

On the other hand, if later experiences show the match to be superficial, our interest plummets, and we look for a way to end or reduce the importance of the relationship.

Not everyone finds a mate or partner who conforms so closely to the imago.

Sometimes only one or two key character traits match up, and the initial attraction is likely to be mild. Such a relationship is often less passionate and less troubled than those characterized by a closer match. The reason it is less passionate is that the old brain is still look¬ing for the ideal ‘gratifying object,’ and the reason it tends to be less troubled is that there isn't the repetition of so many childhood strug¬gles. When people with weak imago matches terminate their relation¬ships, it's often because they feel little interest in each other, not because they are in great pain. ‘There wasn't all that much going on,' they say.’ Or ‘I just felt restless. I knew that there was something better out there.’

At this point in our discussion of partnering, we have a more complete understanding of the mystery of attraction. To the biological theory and the exchange theory and the persona theory and family systems dynamics theory I have added the idea of the unconscious search for a person who matches our imago.

Our motivation for seeking an Imago Match is our urgent desire to heal childhood wounds.

We also have new insight into conflict:

If the primary reason we select our mates is that they resemble our caretakers, it is inevitable that they are going to re injure, stumble over, and be blamed for awakening some very old and sensitive wounds; when we sink into this quag¬mire of pain and confusion, need and control, called “the power struggle” that is a sure sign That History’s Strange Tale is unfolding before us, actually better said, deep within us.

AMBER SMILES

Amber flame burns clear in the night.

Pain and Strain pushed out of sight

Caring is lost

In history's strange tale

Life's just the Past made present in detail

No one sees that Amber flame

It slowly consumes

And leaves only pain

It smiles

Neil Douglas–Tubb (1993)

Suzuki Roshi

2011-06-08T19:36:00.001-07:00

In the Beginners Mind,

There are many possibilities.

In the Expert's Mind,

There are few.

135 On Healing Monsters Real and Imagined

2011-06-07T14:27:00.000-07:00

EXPERIENCE has taught us that if we are to heal or have any hope of healing, we have to come to terms with the concept that life is not what we thought it was.

Most of us developed opinions early on in life about how we thought life was supposed to be, and we spent the balance of our lives fitting whatever it was that came along in our life’s experience into our original version of Life 101.

An early opinion cast in bronze and destined never to change.

Well, that’s the job that lies ahead of us, if we are to change, to break out of our old opinions that were cast in bronze. To look into ourselves, to find the hurt, to find the pain, and to gently allow the past to pass, to recover our here and now and allow the pathway to our future to open.

Release The Past In The Present And That Gives Us Back Our Future[1].

Taken from Experience HasTaught Us --- 175 Missing Pieces Bright Star Press ...Available on Amazon.com

[1] A Course In Miracles – adapted from 50 Principles -- Text

First Rule of Holes

2011-06-07T14:20:00.000-07:00

First Rule of Holes

If You Are In One

Stop Digging

The Wound Is Part Of The Curriculum

2011-06-02T13:13:00.000-07:00

The Wound Is Part And Parcel Of The Curriculum ... Spiritual Curriculum

Four Ways The Soul speaks to us about what we are meant to do with our lives:

I get up every morning determined both to change the world and have one hell of a good time doing so. I have found that sometimes all this planning on how I should spend my day can make my day difficult.

We all leave childhood with wounds ... that is a truth ... In time we may transform these wounds from liabilities into assets. Those injuries suffered early on invite each of us to enter into the most human of experiences and vocations: to heal ourselves and others that we touch.

Signals From My Soul that can act as a guide as I make my way through this life...

• Being Bliss(ed): What brings me to alive ... What bliss’s me out... fascinates me ... excites me and or gives me energy ... makes me feel alive???

• Being Blessed: Who has blessed me ... who has told me I did something right ... something good ... who has believed in me ... supported me at the most critical time in my life ... my most difficult moments...???

• Being Pissed: Who/What pisses me off ... Righteous indignation ... What do I think needs to be changed or improved in this world ... What injustices need to be righted???

• Being Diss(ed)/Wounded: Who/What has wounded me ... what things still affect me to this day ... Where and when have I been disrespected or seen someone else treated badly and I was powerless to act ... what have I become sensitive to ...???

The difference between a wound that festers and diminishes us and one that leads to growth is whether or not we use the wound to energize us to change something in the world and make a contribution. We use the process of the healing to lead us someplace new in our psyche.

Do we sit by the side of the road and simply watch as life goes by?

We have choice!

It is a fact that if we withdraw due to the wound or shrink from engaging with the world or others then the wound cannot lead us to healing ourselves or the world. The wound is part and parcel of the curriculum ... It Is Part of The Curriculum For Life.

There are things, situations, people that energize me, bring me to alive, makes my heart sing. What they are for you?

• I am righteously upset about this situation or that circumstance in my life:

• I think I could contribute to changing this situation or that condition by doing:

• I have identified my wound(s) as:

• Because of my wounds and how I work at healing them, I have made the following contributions to my life:

• Who has told you that you were gifted ... that you mattered?

• Who has given you unconditional messages of love and support ... encouragement?

• Who mentor (s) (ed) you?

• Out of all these blessings and opportunities mentioned above, what path could you follow and what path have you followed?

The Shift In Perception

2011-06-01T12:35:00.001-07:00

The Miracle

The Shift In Perception

The Miracle is the shift in perception … that is the healing … simply shifting our way of thinking from this to that.

That shift may or may not cause other things to happen in your life, and for me many did happen as a result … but what I learned on my journey was the outcome is not the exercise. The miracle comes in the simple shift of focus , and the rest is simply how things will work out; First Comes The Shift Of How I Think, And Then The Process Of Change As It Reverberates Through The Universe.

Sometimes my cancer passes and sometimes I can die peacefully, but my point of view shifts; that’s all and I see that everything is exactly the way it is supposed to be. I borrow and adapt from Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book:

Acceptance is the key to my relationship with God today.

I have discovered in my journey that it is not in my best interest to just sit there and wait for God to unfold the universe before me.

What I have found is that I need to be doing something that I have come to know is constructive for me, and I need to do that in His world not just in my head. I need to do that for both others and me.

Then have the faith that the outcomes of my endeavors will be the outcomes He wants.

So, however life turns out, that is God’s will for me … me being proactive with my creator and creation.

I have come to learn that it is a must that I keep my ego’s thought processes off my expectations … of what I think life should be for me and for others. Why? Because my peace of mind is directly proportional to my level of acceptance of me and my circumstances … as they are, not how I want them to be.

“When I remember this, I can see I've never had it so good.”

Page 415 in first edition and page 455 in second edition of ACIM Chapter 21 paragraphs 1 and 2 adapted from AA’s Big Book

There Is A Truth

2011-06-01T11:34:00.000-07:00

There is a truth that I had to come to terms with as I did this stuff called my recovery:

My Awakening Has Nothing To Do With My Analysis Of My Awakening … or … The Analyzing Of Just What The Awakened State Is … or … for that matter … The Analysis Of The Various Types Of Blunders And Mistakes I Have Made That Kept Me From Awakening.

What I have come to know is this:

My Awakening Is Simply My Awakening … all I need to do is forget my latest dream or imagining on how I think things should be … then get past my Ego and my best thinking and simply Turn To God And Let Go.

Sounds So Easy

Yet So Very Difficult

Check List “B”

2011-05-31T19:29:00.001-07:00

What Is It That I Do

That Keeps Me Stuck In The Rut

That I Say I Want Out Of

Check List “B”

The Compliance Patterns

• I assume responsibility for other’s feelings and behaviours.

• I feel guilty about other people’s feelings and behaviours.

• I have difficulty identifying what I am actually feeling.

• I am afraid of my anger. But sometimes it erupts from me in Rage.

• I worry about how others may respond to my feelings, my opinions and/or my behaviour.

• I have difficulty making decisions.

• I minimize my feelings or my circumstances so I can alter, or deny how I truly feel.

• I am very sensitive to how others are feeling and I can feel their feelings and sometimes I take on their feelings as my own.

• I am afraid to express differing opinions or feelings.

• I value the opinions of others and their feelings over my own.

• I put the needs of others before mine.

• I am embarrassed to receive recognition and praise or gifts.

• I judge everything that I think, say or do very harshly, and nothing is really good enough. I am a perfectionist.

• I am extremely loyal, to a fault. I will stay in situations far too long and often I am hurt because I do.

• I would never really consider asking others for help, or to have my needs met.

• I consider myself as a lovable and a worthwhile person.

• I compromise my own values and my integrity to avoid rejection or someone else’s anger or perceived rage.

Check List “A” on Dysfunction "The Control Patterns" I Do

2011-05-27T09:17:00.000-07:00

What Is It That I Do
That Keeps Me Stuck In The Rut
That I Say I Want Out Of

Check List “A”

The Control Patterns

• I must be needed in order to have a relationship.

• I value other’s approval of my thinking, my feelings and my behaviours over my own.

• I will agree with others just so they will like me, or to avoid conflict.

• I focus my attention on protecting and saving others.

• I truly believe that most people are incapable of taking care of themselves.

• I tend to keep score of “all the good deeds and favours I do” and I get very upset when others don’t notice or repay me.

• I am very skilled at second guessing how other people are feeling or thinking.

• I can anticipate what others need and provide it before they ask.

• I become resentful when others won’t let me help (my way).

• I stay calm and efficient in the midst of someone else’s crisis.

• I only feel good about me when I am helping someone else.

• I freely offer others advice and directions without being asked.

• I put aside my own interests and concerns in order to do what others want.

• I can only ask for help if I am ill, and then reluctantly.

• I cannot tolerate seeing someone else’s pain.

• I lavish gifts and favours on those I care about or who I want to win favour with.

• I use sex to gain approval and acceptance.

• I attempt to convince others of how they should “truly” think and how they “should” really feel.

• I perceive myself as completely unselfish and dedicated to the well-being others.

74 On Seeing Clearly --- The Fantasy and the Reality

2011-05-25T20:10:00.000-07:00

EXPERIENCE has taught us that deep inside each of us is a part of us that wants everything right now and a place for it to hide—something like Peter Pan and Never Never Land. In combination, this place in us and that part of us are very insatiable and very demanding. Some call it the inner child, but I have to wonder at that. I believe this to be a misnomer because it seems more complex than that. I have come to believe that this is the soul wearing the cloak of the inner child, hiding from the world it has been born into.

This place seems to be a shadowy land of the phases of who and what we were meant to be and what we are to become hopefully; who we were last time around, and who we are right now, all rolled into one.

It is like a staging area for life, and the soul is hiding there, too afraid to come out into the life it was supposed to be born into.

Facing Your Destiny Is A Difficult Business,

Yet It Seems To Be The Only Business At Hand

If You Really Get Honest And Look.

What 30 plus years has taught me:

2011-05-23T15:24:00.000-07:00

Sage of an Olive Tree

If one can come to a point in their experience of life where their dreams are significant to them and they come to know that these dreams hold truths for them about the world and their circumstances then the dream state will deepen. It becomes a tool of awareness and perception. Their point of view of life and love and suffering broadens and deepens into compassion and understanding. Pain separates from Suffering. That seems to be The Way of Things and that much I know is true.

I have been active with this stuff since my days at Twin Valleys School (1979/1980) in one form or another ... I have been influenced by the work of Jung, Freud, Erickson, Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke, (Cosmic Consciousness published in 1901) Harman & Rheingold and many others but my all time favourite is Rass Dass, (Richard Alpert) together with a huge cast of contemporaries that runs the gambit of my experience of just over 3 decades ... and the list goes on.

One thing most of us have in common is the understanding that dreams hold truths. They do speak in metaphors to the beholder. And sometimes the beholder is frightened off by the depth of the message and the initial perception of the dream.

I borrow from Huge Prather:

Self: I have a Problem

Dream: Here let me show you

Dreams are like canvasses of the mind. There is meaning in there but so much is left to interpretation ... rule of thumb never interpret your own ... you’re too close to it. Write about it. Share it with others ... actually someone who has spent some time and effort working on this area and you will be surprised at what comes jumping out of the bushes at you.

Things I’ve noticed about dreams and dreamers and how the truth is revealed or accepted. If the beholder shows strong resistance then the dream is striking at some core issue. If the message is blatantly obvious to the observer but the beholder can’t or won’t see it, then the dream is striking at a deep and often painful core issue. Once the issue is revealed then time is the magic elixir and given time now the unconscious mind can begin the process of releasing the past in the present – in the dream - then the deeper healing from the pains of their past can begin in the present and that gives us back our future.

I always suggested to my clients to record their dreams; have a dream journal. It makes it so much easier to deal with them and the problems they bring to my door step. There also seems to be a universal problem that they bring to me in some form. It is always centered on love. What I have discovered in the process of working those themes of love and abandonment is that love is always the answer ... it really is a matter of where and how one looks. Similarly, with the business of pain and suffering the same fact is true ... it is how you are looking not what you are seeing that prompts or promotes the suffering: For Suffering Is a State Mind Not a Condition of Existence.

On Awakening

2011-05-20T09:19:00.000-07:00

If we can learn to be open to our pain; if we can get past how we imagine our pain to be and simply be with it; then we are open to explore into our suffering ... those two places in our minds are in fact two different places but often confused as being the same place.

It is best to have guidance and support when we do this “venturing into the exploration of our suffering” business ... but at the same time this whole process can be of immense value in our efforts to work with or be with others.

When our understanding of our own suffering deepens, the natural outcome of this process is, we become more available at deeper levels to those we care for.

When we are in this place of deeper understanding of our suffering, we are far less likely to project our feelings on to others, or diminish or deny what is real for others.

As we open to the depth of the Way of Things, the natural outcome is we become much more sensitive and alert to the Way of Things and the nature of human pain.

One of the great necessities of life is that each of us has to be able to separate our pain from our suffering. Once we have broken the link between those two places in our consciousness ... we can begin the arduous task of sorting through the reality of our past to find ourselves.

Know this: it is in our humanity that we suffer ... it is in our spiritual awareness (our divinity) where we feel the pain of our humanity.

When we see life from the latter vantage point, we can see life “with eyes unclouded by longing .”

It was the Buddha who said that when we view life from this place of separation of our pain and suffering, we can see our existence with “the Smile of Unbearable Compassion.”

Failure is Necessary for Success: ROSENBLUM TV

2011-05-18T12:54:00.000-07:00

I KNOW WHAT I KNOW
AND
I DON'T KNOW WHAT I DON'T KNOW
... The problem is I have to take the risk of letting those two places in my consciousness bump together
Then see what new soup materializes in the saucers of my mind.

the following is taken from http://www.rosenblumtv.com/2011/04/freedom-to-fail-4/

Loser!

Thomas Edison understood the concept of the lightbulb.

What he had a problem with was finding the right filament for the thing.

It took him more than 9,000 tries until he hit on the idea of carbonized bamboo - not my immediate first choice. Or second. But it worked.

The key to success, it turns out, is….. failure.

This may seem counter-intuitive. It certainly is counter-intuitive in the world of television and film – at least as we have known it so far.

Television and film are failure-phobic.

This is why, if you turn on your 1,000 channels of cable, almost all the shows are pretty much clones of one another – or repeats.

Astonishingly, BBC America, once a bastion of great risk-taking (at least in the US cable world), last week ran 8 hours of Top Gear, back to back in prime time and beyond. The pure terror that must permeate the office of The BBC in Washington…. one can only imagine. But it is not just the BBC (though they are currently my own personal ‘great disappointment’ of the moment).

Television and film in general have a long history of fear and terror of anything even slightly risky.

This is because, for pretty much all of their histories, the very act of making a film or a TV show was so expensive, there was so much at risk, that the best way to obviate that risk was to, from the beginning, make sure that the program had a proven track record. Hence we get Nanny 911 and Supernanny; every show on Travel Channel is an iteration on the successful Tony Bourdain food format; endless medical shows, all pretty much the same since Ben Casey; The Office UK and The Office USA; Britain’s Got Talent and American Idol and the other endless spin-offs, and so and so on. This list is, alas, endless.

But no worse than The Flintsones- the movie, or (IMHO the worst and most aggregious) Matrix 2 and Matrix 3. And it is true, that once it was indeed very expensive and complex to make a TV show or a movie and so that fear was warranted, but today the memory of it is corrosive to the creative potential of the medium. All it takes to take a shot at making a film or a TV show is a video camera, some simple editng software and an idea.

The know-how to make the stuff I can show you here. The idea is your department.

But we have an inherent resistance to risk-taking, borne of years of high costs. If every single piece of paper cost you $1,000, when you sat down to try and write your first novel – every novel would begin ‘It was a dark and stormy night’, because the pain of throwing away 40 bad pages that didn’t work out would have been too great.

Fortunately, literature doesn’t work that way. (Used to, when Monks hand wrote bibles) but no more.

So let us embrace failure as the key to success. Try and fail, try and fail, try and fail is the only way to figure out how to get something new that works. Nature has been using this method for about a billion years. It is the very foundation of biological evolution. And now, businesses are starting to get it as well.

An article in this week’s The Economist urgest businesses to embrace failure.

If it’s good enough for Alan Mulally at Ford, it should be good enough for TruTV. No?

29 On Appreciating Resistance

2011-05-17T17:44:00.000-07:00

EXPERIENCE has taught us that it is perfectly understandable to appreciate how deeply ingrained are the ways our mind has been conditioned to avoid dealing with situations that have connections to our deeper lost hurts, pains, and memories.

This is particularly noticeable when we begin to examine how we resist going into those situations that appear to want to take us down memory lane, past any scary bits that have been hidden in the deeper, darker recesses of our minds.

Throughout Our Entire Lives

We Have Been Encouraged

To Do Anything We Can To Escape From

Rather Than To Explore Into

And

Investigate Our Unpleasantness.

Taken from Experience Has Taught Us --- 175 Missing Pieces

The Shadow, by Hans Christian Andersen 1847

2011-05-16T18:52:00.000-07:00

The Shadow

In very hot climates, where the heat of the sun has great power, people are usually as brown as mahogany; and in the hottest countries they are negroes, with black skins. A learned man once travelled into one of these warm climates, from the cold regions of the north, and thought he would roam about as he did at home; but he soon had to change his opinion. He found that, like all sensible people, he must remain in the house during the whole day, with every window and door closed, so that it looked as if all in the house were asleep or absent. The houses of the narrow street in which he lived were so lofty that the sun shone upon them from morning till evening, and it became quite unbearable. This learned man from the cold regions was young as well as clever; but it seemed to him as if he were sitting in an oven, and he became quite exhausted and weak, and grew so thin that his shadow shrivelled up, and became much smaller than it had been at home. The sun took away even what was left of it, and he saw nothing of it till the evening, after sunset. It was really a pleasure, as soon as the lights were brought into the room, to see the shadow stretch itself against the wall, even to the ceiling, so tall was it; and it really wanted a good stretch to recover its strength. The learned man would sometimes go out into the balcony to stretch himself also; and as soon as the stars came forth in the clear, beautiful sky, he felt revived. People at this hour began to make their appearance in all the balconies in the street; for in warm climates every window has a balcony, in which they can breathe the fresh evening air, which is very necessary, even to those who are used to a heat that makes them as brown as mahogany; so that the street presented a very lively appearance. Here were shoemakers, and tailors, and all sorts of people sitting. In the street beneath, they brought out tables and chairs, lighted candles by hundreds, talked and sang, and were very merry. There were people walking, carriages driving, and mules trotting along, with their bells on the harness, “tingle, tingle,” as they went. Then the dead were carried to the grave with the sound of solemn music, and the tolling of the church bells. It was indeed a scene of varied life in the street. One house only, which was just opposite to the one in which the foreign learned man lived, formed a contrast to all this, for it was quite still; and yet somebody dwelt there, for flowers stood in the balcony, blooming beautifully in the hot sun; and this could not have been unless they had been watered carefully. Therefore some one must be in the house to do this. The doors leading to the balcony were half opened in the evening; and although in the front room all was dark, music could be heard from the interior of the house. The foreign learned man considered this music very delightful; but perhaps he fancied it; for everything in these warm countries pleased him, excepting the heat of the sun. The foreign landlord said he did not know who had taken the opposite house—nobody was to be seen there; and as to the music, he thought it seemed very tedious, to him most uncommonly so.

“It is just as if some one was practising a piece that he could not manage; it is always the same piece. He thinks, I suppose, that he will be able to manage it at last; but I do not think so, however long he may play it.”

Once the foreigner woke in the night. He slept with the door open which led to the balcony; the wind had raised the curtain before it, and there appeared a wonderful brightness over all in the balcony of the opposite house. The flowers seemed like flames of the most gorgeous colors, and among the flowers stood a beautiful slender maiden. It was to him as if light streamed from her, and dazzled his eyes; but then he had only just opened them, as he awoke from his sleep. With one spring he was out of bed, and crept softly behind the curtain. But she was gone—the brightness had disappeared; the flowers no longer appeared like flames, although still as beautiful as ever. The door stood ajar, and from an inner room sounded music so sweet and so lovely, that it produced the most enchanting thoughts, and acted on the senses with magic power. Who could live there? Where was the real entrance? for, both in the street and in the lane at the side, the whole ground floor was a continuation of shops; and people could not always be passing through them.

One evening the foreigner sat in the balcony. A light was burning in his own room, just behind him. It was quite natural, therefore, that his shadow should fall on the wall of the opposite house; so that, as he sat amongst the flowers on his balcony, when he moved, his shadow moved also.

“I think my shadow is the only living thing to be seen opposite,” said the learned man; “see how pleasantly it sits among the flowers. The door is only ajar; the shadow ought to be clever enough to step in and look about him, and then to come back and tell me what he has seen. You could make yourself useful in this way,” said he, jokingly; “be so good as to step in now, will you?” and then he nodded to the shadow, and the shadow nodded in return. “Now go, but don’t stay away altogether.”

Then the foreigner stood up, and the shadow on the opposite balcony stood up also; the foreigner turned round, the shadow turned; and if any one had observed, they might have seen it go straight into the half-opened door of the opposite balcony, as the learned man re-entered his own room, and let the curtain fall. The next morning he went out to take his coffee and read the newspapers.

“How is this?” he exclaimed, as he stood in the sunshine. “I have lost my shadow. So it really did go away yesterday evening, and it has not returned. This is very annoying.”

And it certainly did vex him, not so much because the shadow was gone, but because he knew there was a story of a man without a shadow. All the people at home, in his country, knew this story; and when he returned, and related his own adventures, they would say it was only an imitation; and he had no desire for such things to be said of him. So he decided not to speak of it at all, which was a very sensible determination.

In the evening he went out again on his balcony, taking care to place the light behind him; for he knew that a shadow always wants his master for a screen; but he could not entice him out. He made himself little, and he made himself tall; but there was no shadow, and no shadow came. He said, “Hem, a-hem;” but it was all useless. That was very vexatious; but in warm countries everything grows very quickly; and, after a week had passed, he saw, to his great joy, that a new shadow was growing from his feet, when he walked in the sunshine; so that the root must have remained. After three weeks, he had quite a respectable shadow, which, during his return journey to northern lands, continued to grow, and became at last so large that he might very well have spared half of it. When this learned man arrived at home, he wrote books about the true, the good, and the beautiful, which are to be found in this world; and so days and years passed—many, many years.

One evening, as he sat in his study, a very gentle tap was heard at the door. “Come in,” said he; but no one came. He opened the door, and there stood before him a man so remarkably thin that he felt seriously troubled at his appearance. He was, however, very well dressed, and looked like a gentleman. “To whom have I the honor of speaking?” said he.

“Ah, I hoped you would recognize me,” said the elegant stranger; “I have gained so much that I have a body of flesh, and clothes to wear. You never expected to see me in such a condition. Do you not recognize your old shadow? Ah, you never expected that I should return to you again. All has been prosperous with me since I was with you last; I have become rich in every way, and, were I inclined to purchase my freedom from service, I could easily do so.” And as he spoke he rattled between his fingers a number of costly trinkets which hung to a thick gold watch-chain he wore round his neck. Diamond rings sparkled on his fingers, and it was all real.

“I cannot recover from my astonishment,” said the learned man. “What does all this mean?”

“Something rather unusual,” said the shadow; “but you are yourself an uncommon man, and you know very well that I have followed in your footsteps ever since your childhood. As soon as you found that I have travelled enough to be trusted alone, I went my own way, and I am now in the most brilliant circumstances. But I felt a kind of longing to see you once more before you die, and I wanted to see this place again, for there is always a clinging to the land of one’s birth. I know that you have now another shadow; do I owe you anything? If so, have the goodness to say what it is.”

“No! Is it really you?” said the learned man. “Well, this is most remarkable; I never supposed it possible that a man’s old shadow could become a human being.”

“Just tell me what I owe you,” said the shadow, “for I do not like to be in debt to any man.”

“How can you talk in that manner?” said the learned man. “What question of debt can there be between us? You are as free as any one. I rejoice exceedingly to hear of your good fortune. Sit down, old friend, and tell me a little of how it happened, and what you saw in the house opposite to me while we were in those hot climates.”

“Yes, I will tell you all about it,” said the shadow, sitting down; “but then you must promise me never to tell in this city, wherever you may meet me, that I have been your shadow. I am thinking of being married, for I have more than sufficient to support a family.”

“Make yourself quite easy,” said the learned man; “I will tell no one who you really are. Here is my hand,—I promise, and a word is sufficient between man and man.”

“Between man and a shadow,” said the shadow; for he could not help saying so.

It was really most remarkable how very much he had become a man in appearance. He was dressed in a suit of the very finest black cloth, polished boots, and an opera crush hat, which could be folded together so that nothing could be seen but the crown and the rim, besides the trinkets, the gold chain, and the diamond rings already spoken of. The shadow was, in fact, very well dressed, and this made a man of him. “Now I will relate to you what you wish to know,” said the shadow, placing his foot with the polished leather boot as firmly as possible on the arm of the new shadow of the learned man, which lay at his feet like a poodle dog. This was done, it might be from pride, or perhaps that the new shadow might cling to him, but the prostrate shadow remained quite quiet and at rest, in order that it might listen, for it wanted to know how a shadow could be sent away by its master, and become a man itself. “Do you know,” said the shadow, “that in the house opposite to you lived the most glorious creature in the world? It was poetry. I remained there three weeks, and it was more like three thousand years, for I read all that has ever been written in poetry or prose; and I may say, in truth, that I saw and learnt everything.”

“Poetry!” exclaimed the learned man. “Yes, she lives as a hermit in great cities. Poetry! Well, I saw her once for a very short moment, while sleep weighed down my eyelids. She flashed upon me from the balcony like the radiant aurora borealis, surrounded with flowers like flames of fire. Tell me, you were on the balcony that evening; you went through the door, and what did you see?”

“I found myself in an ante-room,” said the shadow. “You still sat opposite to me, looking into the room. There was no light, or at least it seemed in partial darkness, for the door of a whole suite of rooms stood open, and they were brilliantly lighted. The blaze of light would have killed me, had I approached too near the maiden myself, but I was cautious, and took time, which is what every one ought to do.”

“And what didst thou see?” asked the learned man.

“I saw everything, as you shall hear. But—it really is not pride on my part, as a free man and possessing the knowledge that I do, besides my position, not to speak of my wealth—I wish you would say you to me instead of thou.”

“I beg your pardon,” said the learned man; “it is an old habit, which it is difficult to break. You are quite right; I will try to think of it. But now tell me everything that you saw.”

“Everything,” said the shadow; “for I saw and know everything.”

“What was the appearance of the inner rooms?” asked the scholar. “Was it there like a cool grove, or like a holy temple? Were the chambers like a starry sky seen from the top of a high mountain?”

“It was all that you describe,” said the shadow; “but I did not go quite in—I remained in the twilight of the ante-room—but I was in a very good position,—I could see and hear all that was going on in the court of poetry.”

“But what did you see? Did the gods of ancient times pass through the rooms? Did old heroes fight their battles over again? Were there lovely children at play, who related their dreams?”

“I tell you I have been there, and therefore you may be sure that I saw everything that was to be seen. If you had gone there, you would not have remained a human being, whereas I became one; and at the same moment I became aware of my inner being, my inborn affinity to the nature of poetry. It is true I did not think much about it while I was with you, but you will remember that I was always much larger at sunrise and sunset, and in the moonlight even more visible than yourself, but I did not then understand my inner existence. In the ante-room it was revealed to me. I became a man; I came out in full maturity. But you had left the warm countries. As a man, I felt ashamed to go about without boots or clothes, and that exterior finish by which man is known. So I went my own way; I can tell you, for you will not put it in a book. I hid myself under the cloak of a cake woman, but she little thought who she concealed. It was not till evening that I ventured out. I ran about the streets in the moonlight. I drew myself up to my full height upon the walls, which tickled my back very pleasantly. I ran here and there, looked through the highest windows into the rooms, and over the roofs. I looked in, and saw what nobody else could see, or indeed ought to see; in fact, it is a bad world, and I would not care to be a man, but that men are of some importance. I saw the most miserable things going on between husbands and wives, parents and children,—sweet, incomparable children. I have seen what no human being has the power of knowing, although they would all be very glad to know—the evil conduct of their neighbors. Had I written a newspaper, how eagerly it would have been read! Instead of which, I wrote directly to the persons themselves, and great alarm arose in all the town I visited. They had so much fear of me, and yet how dearly they loved me. The professor made me a professor. The tailor gave me new clothes; I am well provided for in that way. The overseer of the mint struck coins for me. The women declared that I was handsome, and so I became the man you now see me. And now I must say adieu. Here is my card. I live on the sunny side of the street, and always stay at home in rainy weather.” And the shadow departed.

“This is all very remarkable,” said the learned man.

Years passed, days and years went by, and the shadow came again. “How are you going on now?” he asked.

“Ah!” said the learned man; “I am writing about the true, the beautiful, and the good; but no one cares to hear anything about it. I am quite in despair, for I take it to heart very much.”

“That is what I never do,” said the shadow; “I am growing quite fat and stout, which every one ought to be. You do not understand the world; you will make yourself ill about it; you ought to travel; I am going on a journey in the summer, will you go with me? I should like a travelling companion; will you travel with me as my shadow? It would give me great pleasure, and I will pay all expenses.”

“Are you going to travel far?” asked the learned man.

“That is a matter of opinion,” replied the shadow. “At all events, a journey will do you good, and if you will be my shadow, then all your journey shall be paid.”

“It appears to me very absurd,” said the learned man.

“But it is the way of the world,” replied the shadow, “and always will be.” Then he went away.

Everything went wrong with the learned man. Sorrow and trouble pursued him, and what he said about the good, the beautiful, and the true, was of as much value to most people as a nutmeg would be to a cow. At length he fell ill. “You really look like a shadow,” people said to him, and then a cold shudder would pass over him, for he had his own thoughts on the subject.

“You really ought to go to some watering-place,” said the shadow on his next visit. “There is no other chance for you. I will take you with me, for the sake of old acquaintance. I will pay the expenses of your journey, and you shall write a description of it to amuse us by the way. I should like to go to a watering-place; my beard does not grow as it ought, which is from weakness, and I must have a beard. Now do be sensible and accept my proposal; we shall travel as intimate friends.”

And at last they started together. The shadow was master now, and the master became the shadow. They drove together, and rode and walked in company with each other, side by side, or one in front and the other behind, according to the position of the sun. The shadow always knew when to take the place of honor, but the learned man took no notice of it, for he had a good heart, and was exceedingly mild and friendly.

One day the master said to the shadow, “We have grown up together from our childhood, and now that we have become travelling companions, shall we not drink to our good fellowship, and say thee and thou to each other?”

“What you say is very straightforward and kindly meant,” said the shadow, who was now really master. “I will be equally kind and straightforward. You are a learned man, and know how wonderful human nature is. There are some men who cannot endure the smell of brown paper; it makes them ill. Others will feel a shuddering sensation to their very marrow, if a nail is scratched on a pane of glass. I myself have a similar kind of feeling when I hear any one say thou to me. I feel crushed by it, as I used to feel in my former position with you. You will perceive that this is a matter of feeling, not pride. I cannot allow you to say thou to me; I will gladly say it to you, and therefore your wish will be half fulfilled.” Then the shadow addressed his former master as thou.

“It is going rather too far,” said the latter, “that I am to say you when I speak to him, and he is to say thou to me.” However, he was obliged to submit.

They arrived at length at the baths, where there were many strangers, and among them a beautiful princess, whose real disease consisted in being too sharp-sighted, which made every one very uneasy. She saw at once that the new comer was very different to every one else. “They say he is here to make his beard grow,” she thought; “but I know the real cause, he is unable to cast a shadow.” Then she became very curious on the matter, and one day, while on the promenade, she entered into conversation with the strange gentleman. Being a princess, she was not obliged to stand upon much ceremony, so she said to him without hesitation, “Your illness consists in not being able to cast a shadow.”

“Your royal highness must be on the high road to recovery from your illness,” said he. “I know your complaint arose from being too sharp-sighted, and in this case it has entirely failed. I happen to have a most unusual shadow. Have you not seen a person who is always at my side? Persons often give their servants finer cloth for their liveries than for their own clothes, and so I have dressed out my shadow like a man; nay, you may observe that I have even given him a shadow of his own; it is rather expensive, but I like to have things about me that are peculiar.”

“How is this?” thought the princess; “am I really cured? This must be the best watering-place in existence. Water in our times has certainly wonderful power. But I will not leave this place yet, just as it begins to be amusing. This foreign prince—for he must be a prince—pleases me above all things. I only hope his beard won’t grow, or he will leave at once.”

In the evening, the princess and the shadow danced together in the large assembly rooms. She was light, but he was lighter still; she had never seen such a dancer before. She told him from what country she had come, and found he knew it and had been there, but not while she was at home. He had looked into the windows of her father’s palace, both the upper and the lower windows; he had seen many things, and could therefore answer the princess, and make allusions which quite astonished her. She thought he must be the cleverest man in all the world, and felt the greatest respect for his knowledge. When she danced with him again she fell in love with him, which the shadow quickly discovered, for she had with her eyes looked him through and through. They danced once more, and she was nearly telling him, but she had some discretion; she thought of her country, her kingdom, and the number of people over whom she would one day have to rule. “He is a clever man,” she thought to herself, “which is a good thing, and he dances admirably, which is also good. But has he well-grounded knowledge? that is an important question, and I must try him.” Then she asked him a most difficult question, she herself could not have answered it, and the shadow made a most unaccountable grimace.

“You cannot answer that,” said the princess.

“I learnt something about it in my childhood,” he replied; “and believe that even my very shadow, standing over there by the door, could answer it.”

“Your shadow,” said the princess; “indeed that would be very remarkable.”

“I do not say so positively,” observed the shadow; “but I am inclined to believe that he can do so. He has followed me for so many years, and has heard so much from me, that I think it is very likely. But your royal highness must allow me to observe, that he is very proud of being considered a man, and to put him in a good humor, so that he may answer correctly, he must be treated as a man.”

“I shall be very pleased to do so,” said the princess. So she walked up to the learned man, who stood in the doorway, and spoke to him of the sun, and the moon, of the green forests, and of people near home and far off; and the learned man conversed with her pleasantly and sensibly.

“What a wonderful man he must be, to have such a clever shadow!” thought she. “If I were to choose him it would be a real blessing to my country and my subjects, and I will do it.” So the princess and the shadow were soon engaged to each other, but no one was to be told a word about it, till she returned to her kingdom.

“No one shall know,” said the shadow; “not even my own shadow;” and he had very particular reasons for saying so.

After a time, the princess returned to the land over which she reigned, and the shadow accompanied her.

“Listen my friend,” said the shadow to the learned man; “now that I am as fortunate and as powerful as any man can be, I will do something unusually good for you. You shall live in my palace, drive with me in the royal carriage, and have a hundred thousand dollars a year; but you must allow every one to call you a shadow, and never venture to say that you have been a man. And once a year, when I sit in my balcony in the sunshine, you must lie at my feet as becomes a shadow to do; for I must tell you I am going to marry the princess, and our wedding will take place this evening.”

“Now, really, this is too ridiculous,” said the learned man. “I cannot, and will not, submit to such folly. It would be cheating the whole country, and the princess also. I will disclose everything, and say that I am the man, and that you are only a shadow dressed up in men’s clothes.”

“No one would beleive you,” said the shadow; “be reasonable, now, or I will call the guards.”

“I will go straight to the princess,” said the learned man.

“But I shall be there first,” replied the shadow, “and you will be sent to prison.” And so it turned out, for the guards readily obeyed him, as they knew he was going to marry the king’s daughter.

“You tremble,” said the princess, when the shadow appeared before her. “Has anything happened? You must not be ill to-day, for this evening our wedding will take place.”

“I have gone through the most terrible affair that could possibly happen,” said the shadow; “only imagine, my shadow has gone mad; I suppose such a poor, shallow brain, could not bear much; he fancies that he has become a real man, and that I am his shadow.”

“How very terrible,” cried the princess; “is he locked up?”

“Oh yes, certainly; for I fear he will never recover.”

“Poor shadow!” said the princess; “it is very unfortunate for him; it would really be a good deed to free him from his frail existence; and, indeed, when I think how often people take the part of the lower class against the higher, in these days, it would be policy to put him out of the way quietly.”

“It is certainly rather hard upon him, for he was a faithful servant,” said the shadow; and he pretended to sigh.

“Yours is a noble character,” said the princess, and bowed herself before him.

In the evening the whole town was illuminated, and cannons fired “boom,” and the soldiers presented arms. It was indeed a grand wedding. The princess and the shadow stepped out on the balcony to show themselves, and to receive one cheer more. But the learned man heard nothing of all these festivities, for he had already been executed.

this is food for thought

Three Thoughts

2011-05-10T18:35:00.000-07:00

You came to this world singularly and unclothed. That is your path. The others that you encounter are here on the path with you … are on the same journey … but they can only serve as guideposts for you, and they can only provide you the opportunity to find your own blind spots, that's all. There is a vast world of difference between solitude and loneliness … that is your discovery to make.

"It isn't just the pain in my body that really hurts, it's all the pains of my life that I have to pull away from; “that” which imprisons me in my impression of how I think life should be. Me, beginning to see my feelings in me just as they are, brings me to a point of seeing just how little time have I ever given to me having real feelings in my life and those real feelings included initially my pain, both physical and psychological."

EXPERIENCE has taught us that finally we can step out into the world and experience life on life’s terms. That seems to be what is called for at this juncture, and doing it knowing full well that we don’t know and that we can’t imagine all that is, even though we are intrinsically part of all that is. A part of things that we can’t even imagine, in places we could not conceive of, and in conditions that are beyond us.

But there it is, the answer, just sitting there, staring back at us. Not the one we expected, but an answer nonetheless.

My Life with the Wave ... By Octavio Paz (translated by Eliot Weinberger)

2011-05-10T13:09:00.000-07:00

When I left that sea, a wave moved ahead of the others. She was tall and light. In spite of the shouts of the others who grabbed her by her floating clothes, she clutched my arm and went off with me leaping. I didn’t want to say anything to her, because it hurt me to shame her in front of her friends. Besides, the furious stares of the elders paralyzed me. When we got to town, I explained to her that it was impossible, that life in the city was not what she had been able to imagine with the ingenuity of a wave that had never left the sea. She watched me gravely: “No, your decision is made. You can’t go back.” I tried sweetness, hardness, irony. She cried, screamed, hugged, threatened. I had to apologize.

The next day my troubles began. How could we get on the train without being seen by the conductor, the passengers, the police? Certainly the rules say nothing in respect to the transport of waves on the railroad, but this same reserve was an indication of the severity with which our act would be judged. After much thought I arrived at the station an hour before departure, took my seat, and, when no one was looking, emptied the water tank for the passengers; then, carefully, poured in my friend.

The first incident came about when the children of a nearby couple declared their noisy thirst. I stopped them and promised them refreshments and lemonade. They were at the point of accepting when another thirsty passenger approached. I was about to invite her also, but the stare of her companion stopped me. The lady took a paper cup, approached the tank, and turned the faucet. Her cup was barely half full when I leaped between the woman and my friend. She looked at me astonished. While I apologized, one of the children turned the faucet again. I closed it violently. The lady brought the cup to her lips:

“Agh, this water is salty.”

The boy echoed her. Various passengers rose. The husband called the conductor:

“This man put salt in the water.”

The conductor called the Inspector:

“So you put substances in the water?”

The Inspector in turn called the police:

“So you poisoned the water?”

The police in turn called the Captain:

“So you’re the poisoner?”

The captain called three agents. The agents took me to an empty car amid the stares and whispers of the passengers. At the next station they took me off and pushed and dragged me to the jail. For days no one spoke to me, except during the long interrogations. When I explained my story no one believed me, not even the jailer, who shook his head, saying: “The case is grave, truly grave. You didn’t want to poison the children?” One day they brought me before the Magistrate.

“Your case is difficult,” he repeated. I will assign you to the Penal Judge.”

A year passed. Finally they judged me. As there were no victims, my sentence was light. After a short time, my day of liberty arrived.

The Chief of the Prison called me in:

“Well, now you’re free. You were lucky Lucky there were no victims. But don’t do it again, because the next time won’t be so short. .

And he stared at me with the same grave stare with which everyone watched me.

The same afternoon I took the train and after hours of uncomfortable traveling arrived in Mexico City. I took a cab home. At the door of my apartment I heard laughter and singing. I felt a pain in my chest, like the smack of a wave of surprise when surprise smacks us across the chest: my friend was there, singing and laughing as always.

“How did you get back?”

“Simple: in the train. Someone, after making sure that I was only salt water, poured me in the engine. It was a rough trip: soon I was a white plume of vapor, soon I fell in a fine rain on the machine. I thinned out a lot. I lost many drops.”

Her presence changed my life. The house of dark corridors and dusty furniture was filled with air, with sun, with sounds and green and blue reflections, a numerous and happy populace of reverberations and echoes. How many waves is one wave, and how it can make a beach or a rock or jetty out of a wall, a chest, a forehead that it crowns with foam! Even the abandoned corners, the abject corners of dust and debris were touched by her light hands. Everything began to laugh and everywhere shined with teeth. The sun entered the old rooms with pleasure and stayed in my house for hours, abandoning the other houses, the district, the city, the country. And some nights, very late, the scandalized stars watched it sneak from my house.

Love was a game, a perpetual creation. All was beach, sand, a bed of sheets that were always fresh. If I embraced her, she swelled with pride, incredibly tall, like the liquid stalk of a poplar; and soon that thinness flowered into a fountain of white feathers, into a plume of smiles that fell over my head and back and covered me with whiteness. Or she stretched out in front of me, infinite as the horizon, until I too became horizon and silence. Full and sinuous, it enveloped me like music or some giant lips. Her present was a going and coming of caresses, of murmurs, of kisses. Entered in her waters, I was drenched to the socks and in a wink of an eye I found myself up above, at the height of vertigo, mysteriously suspended, to fall like a stone and feel myself gently deposited on the dryness, like a feather. Nothing is comparable to sleeping in those waters, to wake pounded by a thousand happy light lashes, by a thousand assaults that withdrew laughing.

But never did I reach the center of her being. Never did I touch the nakedness of pain and of death. Perhaps it does not exist in waves, that secret site that renders a woman vulnerable and mortal, that electric button where all interlocks, twitches, and straightens out to then swoon. Her sensibility, like that of women, spread in ripples, only they weren’t concentric ripples, but rather eccentric, spreading each time farther, until they touched other galaxies. To love her was to extend to remote contacts, to vibrate with far-off stars we never suspected. But her center . . . no, she had no center, just emptiness as in a whirlwind, that sucked me in and smothered me.

Stretched out side by side, we exchanged confidences, whispers, smiles, Curled up, she fell on my chest and there unfolded like a vegetation of murmurs. She sang in my ear, a little snail. She became humble and transparent, clutching my feet like a small animal, calm water. She was so clear I could read all of her thoughts. Certain nights her skin was covered with phosphorescence and to embrace her was to embrace a piece of night tattooed with fire. But she also became black and bitter. At unexpected hours she roared, moaned, twisted. Her groans woke the neighbors. Upon hearing her, the sea wind would scratch at the door of the house or rave in a loud voice on the roof. Cloudy days irritated her; she broke furniture, said bad words, covered me with insults and green and gray foam. She spit, cried, swore, prophesied. Subject to the moon, to the stars, to the influence of the light of other worlds, she changed her moods and appearance in a way that I thought fantastic, but it was as fatal as the tide.

She began to miss solitude. The house was full of snails and conches, of small sailboats that in her fury she had shipwrecked (together with the others, laden with images, that each night left my forehead and sank in her ferocious or pleasant whirlwinds). How many little treasures were lost in that time! But my boats and the silent song of the snails was not enough. I had to install in the house a colony of fish. I confess that it was not without jealousy that I watched them swimming in my friend, caressing her breasts, sleeping between her legs, adorning her hair with light flashes of color.

Among all those fish there were a few particularly repulsive and ferocious ones, little tigers from the aquarium, with large fixed eyes and jagged and bloodthirsty mouths. I don’t know by what aberration my friend delighted in playing with them, shamelessly showing them a preference whose significance I preferred to ignore. She passed long hours confined with those horrible creatures. One day I couldn’t stand it any more; I threw open the door and launched after them. Agile and ghostly they escaped my hands while she laughed and pounded me until I fell. I thought I was drowning. And when I was at the point of death, and purple, she deposited me on the bank and began to kiss me, saying I don’t know what things. I felt very weak, fatigued, and humiliated. And at the same time her voluptuousness made me close my eyes, because her voice was sweet and she spoke to me of the delicious death of the drowned. When I recovered, I began to fear and hate her.

I had neglected my affairs. Now I began to visit friends and renew old and dear relations. I met an old girlfriend. Making her swear to keep my secret, I told her of my life with the wave. Nothing moves women so much as the possibility of saving a man. My redeemer employed all of her arts, but what could a woman, master of a limited number of souls and bodies, do in front of my friend who was always changing—and always identical to herself in her incessant metamorphoses.

Winter came. The sky turned gray. Fog fell on the city Frozen drizzle rained. My friend cried every night. During the day she isolated herself, quiet and sinister, stuttering a single syllable, like an old woman who grumbles in a corner. She became cold; to sleep with her was to shiver all night and to feel freeze, little by little, the blood, the bones, the thoughts. She turned deep, impenetrable, restless. I left frequently and my absences were each time more prolonged. She, in her corner howled loudly with teeth like steel and a corrosive tongue she gnawed the walls, crumbled them. She passed the nights in mourning, reproaching me. She had nightmares, deliriums of the sun, of warm beaches. She dreamt of the pole and of changing into a great block of ice, sailing beneath black skies in nights long as months. She insulted me. She cursed and laughed; filled the house with guffaws and phantoms. She called up the monsters of the depths, blind ones, quick ones, blunt. Charged with electricity she carbonized all she touched; full of acid, she dissolved whatever she brushed against. Her sweet embraces became knotty cords that strangled me. And her body, greenish and elastic, was an implacable whip that lashed, lashed, lashed. I fled. The horrible fish laughed with ferocious smiles.

There in the mountains, among the tall pines and precipices, I breathed the cold thin air like a thought of liberty. At the end of a month I returned. I had decided. It had been so cold that over the marble of the chimney, next to the extinct fire, I found a statue of ice. I was unmoved by her weary beauty I put her in a big canvas sack and went out to the streets with the sleeper on my shoulders. In a restaurant in the outskirts I sold her to a waiter friend who immediately, began to chop her into little pieces, which he carefully deposited in the buckets where bottles are chilled. [1949]

Thank you Maria ... Hugs Neil

WALKING NORTH by Mark Nepo

2011-05-10T13:07:00.000-07:00

No matter how I turn
the magnificent light follows.
Background to my sadness.

No matter how I lift my heart
my shadow creeps in wait behind.
Background to my joy.

No matter how fast I run
a stillness without thought is where I end.

No matter how long I sit
there is a river of motion I must rejoin.

And when I can’t hold my head up
it always falls in the lap of one
who has just opened.

When I finally free myself of burden
there is always someone’s heavy head
landing in my arms.

The reasons of the heart
are leaves in wind.
Stand up tall and everything
will nest in you.

We all lose and we all gain.
Dark crowds the light.
Light fills the pain.

It is a conversation with no end
a dance with no steps
a song with no words
a reason too big for any mind.

No matter how I turn
the magnificence follows.

3 On Seeing Simple Truths

2011-05-03T17:49:00.000-07:00

3 On Seeing Simple Truths

Taken From Experience Has Taught Us 175 Missing Pieces

Published by Bright Star Press

Author Neil Douglas-Tubb

Available on Amazon.com

EXPERIENCE has taught us that the absolute importance of sorting through the truth of our real experiences is essential to our well-being (at all levels—mentally, emotionally, and spiritually). The loss of this truth to the mythology of our defensive delusions is almost always expressed, sooner or later, in some form of grave illness.

In order to become whole we must try, over a long period of time, often until death, to discover the truth of our history, a truth that may often cause pain before we reach past it to our freedom.

If we choose instead to content ourselves with an intellectual appreciation and understanding of this loss of truth, often referred to mistakenly as wisdom, we will remain lost in the sphere of delu¬sion and self-deception.

We Begin Our Journey To Awaken With A Single Step

The Judge

2011-04-26T12:59:00.000-07:00

To be in a place of judgement ... Judging ... The Judge ... one has to consider themselves superior over those who are being judged.

When you are in a place of self-judgement then your house is divided against itself. That, oddly enough, becomes a classic expression of ego vs spirit. It is in the resolution of that conflict that becomes an expression of spiritual growth.

To resolve this, we have to overcome the false beliefs we have picked up along the way and settle with life’s truths being what they are ... not what we want them to be.

“We” all go through this. It’s normal, not fun, but normal.

“We” judge ourselves in a vain attempt to support pre existing conditions set out in the false beliefs we learned and were passed to us by toxic significant others in our lives. These hand me downs are sometimes referred to as “my” truths. Most often as naught, the truths that we are depending on and calling true are not even close to being true.

One of life’s conundrums is our outer world has to be in balance with our inner world. When it’s not, we have to bring things into balance; by bringing my inner world into line with my outer world. The easiest way to do this is to drag down my outer world to match my feelings about my inner world. Doing this explains why we feel so terrible about ourselves. So if we blow it in some way we have the reason for those crappy feelings in the here and now, rather than looking into hurts and pains of my childhood abandonment issues.

The false believes were passed on to us by those who were caught in the same situation we are and who had no idea what to do with it other than give it to someone else and hope that they can solve the problem.

I Am The Diamond

2011-04-22T12:24:00.000-07:00

I am the Diamond:

I have many many facits ... windows into the world I inhabit ... probably 100's if not thousands ... I have learned that I can look at my life through any of those facits, but my habit is to use just a few ...

I am the Diamond:

My design is flawless ... my view is sometimes jaded ... my character is strong but my behaviours, somedays is questionable ... I am not my behaviour ... but my design is flawless.

I am the Diamond:

I am colourful ... I sparkle ... there is a deep spark with in me ... I can reflect my world to the the world ... I have value beyond my wildest imagination ...

I am the Diamond:

I have been made in the deep chambers of time ... in the fires of existence ... very elemental ... very much a product of the my world ...

To live life to the fullest.

2011-04-20T15:32:00.001-07:00

We are here to live life to the fullest.

Simple statement...

True Statement...

One problem is; if you try to live it to the fullest without a relationship with spirit, then the whole process becomes an impossibility.

Why?

Because one of the primary ingredients is missing, when you try to do this all by yourself ...

You sink into a hell of your own making ...

And rather quickly too.

No matter how well intentioned you are ... you sink.

Try seeing it from spirit’s prospective;

It is very hard to save someone who is reluctant to be saved ...

You have to be willing ...

Willing to be open ...

Willing to be in the open ...

And

Willing to interact with spirit

And Then

Follow.

Simple but True