Believing is Seeing

What’s important is not what happens to you as much as how you interpret it. The underlying belief that lends meaning to your life influences your experience more than the actions of others. For example, a friend is rude. What’s your reaction? Take a moment now and note your first impression.
You can focus on having a friend, your history, the value of that person in your life, and how she must be having a hard time. Or you can (again) realize that (predictably) no one is there for you, disappointment is imminent, and life is just one hurt after another. It’s really your choice but the first and essential ingredient is to realize that you have a choice.
So much of the “filter” through which we see our life is unconscious. From infancy we’ve developed beliefs without knowing it. We’re comfortable and we decide the world is safe and welcoming. We’re frustrated and we expect life always to be difficult. We channel our feelings (our inner world experience) into thoughts about the outer world. Then we focus on what’s outside of us and become the victim or grateful recipient. (What’s your underlying belief about the world?)
No matter what happens we can fit it to our belief. If we distrust the world and someone is kind, we know not to take him at face value. If we believe we’re not good enough and someone appreciates us, we tell ourselves she doesn’t really understand. If we expect life to be welcoming, we chalk up the occasional unpleasantness to happenstance. It seems our beliefs are irrefutable. We’ll organize our experience as we must to support the beliefs that have long existed and may be mostly unconscious! Even if it leads us to misery, we remain loyal to those old beliefs.
We do so as long as we don’t examine the beliefs. When we stop and turn around and switch on the light, when we’re truly ready to see our filter instead of blindly accepting our assumptions, we notice different elements inside our heads. We all have a Critic. The Critic tells us we’re not good enough, we never have been good enough, and we never will be good enough. The Critic assures us no one could ever love us because we are so unworthy. The Critic doesn’t like the way we dress or walk or look. Many days the Critic doesn’t say a decent word to us.
We probably don’t “hear” the Critic’s voice as much as we feel a heaviness. The invisible wet blanket that smothers our vibrancy comes from the Critic. The Critic leads us to be less of ourselves because who we are naturally is unacceptable. The Critic blunts our awareness of joy, hope, creativity.
The Controller is another aspect of us. When the vulnerability is too painful to bear and we don’t want to remain stuck in suffocating muck, we resolve to avoid our feelings. We develop an intellectual façade. Or we become aggressive. Or we take care of others and hope they will appreciate us. The Controller wants to make life turn our “right” and will act to avoid feeling. The Controller wants to assuage the Critic.
Always the Critic and the Controller push on us. Very subtly but unceasingly. When someone in the world acts in a manner similar to the Critic or the Controller, we react with a minor atomic explosion. When we hear outside us what we’ve heard forever inside us, it’s too much. We can’t see the other person objectively, we lose our Adult status, and we take the other fellow’s words personally.
Until we remember we have a choice.
And then we choose to give thanks for our upset and to look behind the words instead of being carried away by the emotion. And we see the Critic and the Controller which exist inside our own head. When we look at them, we don’t identify with them. We stay in the Observer and we see the immaturity and the fear and the belief that we are powerless. And then we recognize that these attitudes are from an earlier time in our life. A time when we didn’t have a choice. Unconsciously, we got stuck there but now that the light is on we make the unconscious conscious. We see the forces driving us and we step aside. We watch but we don’t react or identify or lose our anchor. We just notice.
And at this point we have developed another belief. Now we trust that who we are is fine and we are firmly rooted in that awareness of our OKness. Nothing can shake us. We feel the gusts from our Critic and our Controller but we are rooted in our Observer and in our Adult. And when we interpret life from that standpoint we have en entirely different experience!

Embracing Vulnerability

It seems reasonable and, certainly, benign to avoid what is painful or even unpleasant. But that avoidance constructs our prison walls. We fear our own feelings which we shove behind the walls. We don’t want to look at them or even acknowledge their existence.
But our feelings open our heart and soul. Yes, they do imply incredible vulnerability. Sometimes that vulnerability overwhelms us and we don’t think we can continue. But always we do. We want to be careful not to make decisions about curtailing our vulnerability from a place of fear.
Embracing our vulnerability needs to be our chosen path every day and every minute. When we block our vulnerability we construct our prison.
How have you cut off your feelings today? Do you prefer busyness to time for reflection? Are you unaware why you eat/drink/smoke? What do you hate about your inner world? How do you distrust your feelings? Would you make a major decision from a feeling place rather than an intellectual place?
And how will you open to include your feelings a little more in our life this week? Maybe taking a few seconds to be aware of what you are feeling several times a day? Maybe allowing your feelings to be present and just noticing them?

How do you imprison yourself?

We’d all like to say “Oh, no, I don’t do that.” But the truth is we do. We all do and usually we don’t know we’re limiting ourselves.
Do you ever think, “I can’t achieve that?” Or “I’ll never have what I want. It’s just not possible for me.” Or “Life’s not fair and I’ve been dealt a truly terrible hand.”
Excuses abound. It’s easier to point to something or someone outside us as the cause of our misery but it’ never NEVER the truth. Children are victims but if you are over the age of fourteen I want to know how you think and how you cut off your feelings and what you believe. We are our worst enemy.
What is your belief about receiving love or money or success or acclaim or friendship or justice?
What is your belief about your own worthiness? What about losing what you want?
What is your belief about trusting Life?
How do you hate yourself? Procrastination? Overdoing anything like eating, drinking, gambling, working, exercise, TV viewing, talking? What is your addiction?

Our Prison

The inmates hate themselves. They say it’s for what they’ve done but I suspect they did what they did because they hate themselves. Certainly they receive enough hate, from everyone it seems, so that some of it must be absorbed. They are considered a menace to society regardless of their behavior within the penitentiary system. No one says to them, “You’re more than your actions. There is a light deep within you that you can never extinguish. Believe in yourself and serve others.”
I experienced unconditional acceptance in a surprising way when I listened to an inmate. We were just passing in the yard and chatted briefly. I had met him over the course of nine years but I didn’t know him. However, in those few minutes an acceptance I have never felt flooded me. It wasn’t personal since they clearly weren’t my feelings--he and I didn’t have a personal relationship. But I felt such intense acceptance, knowing that regardless of his choices or his behavior, he would always be loved. I don’t say it was I doing the loving, rather, love moved through me. I realized it was God’s love for him. I was honored and humbled to serve as the conduit for that unconditional acceptance and love.
And I learned from it. I learned that that acceptance is there for all of us all the time. We block it out with our self hate, with our refusal to forgive ourselves for our mistakes and bad behavior, and with our fear. There is a time after so much recrimination that we forget we are worthy. But we always are. Sometimes we need to learn big and painful lessons. But even then the love doesn’t fade. It’s a choice we make about which path to follow. But God is always there.
Personally, the idea of going to jail scares me to death. I would do anything to avoid losing my freedom. If an authority told me, “No more left turns the rest of your life,” I would adjust. My fear is deeper than my curiosity. So when an inmate tells me that he has taken extreme risks and has accepted extreme consequences, I listen. In this case John lived without being known by anyone in the prison system and without help to recover from severe addictions. And he did it through meditating and spiritual practices. “Who knew that spirituality was behind addiction?” he said to me.
He has worked to rehabilitate himself but isn’t rehabilitation of some sort what we humans are on earth to do? We all have an addiction, some way we hide from ourselves. And if we hide from ourselves we really are hiding from God. There is some place or places inside we don’t want to go. It’s funny that adults still fear their feelings. You’d think that after years and decades of frustration and disappointment we’d learn to accept what is in front of us at the second and abide but we resist. John could have resisted and continued on a path of anger and frustration and alienation but he surrendered.
The addictions whipped him. Sitting in Folsom he simply wanted to survive. He ached and wept and hid and felt everything he had avoided for seven years with drug addiction. And after more than two years he came out of his own personal hell. His commitment to sobriety has been unwavering, he has taught other inmates reading and yoga, and he has worked in the office with custody officers. What more could he do?
Three times the Board of Prison Terms recommended his release and three times the governor denied it. “That’s OK,” he says, “If I never leave I’m OK with that.” Initially, I was impressed with his humility but I soon realized it was self hate. He hadn’t forgiven himself. His victim’s family still hates him and he couldn’t see his way to believing in himself. Unconsciously, he was sabotaging his own release by his lack of self acceptance.
When I felt God’s overwhelming acceptance of him, I knew that his Controller had usurped God’s position in his head. He had forgotten to ask what God wanted from him for the rest of his life. If God preferred him to remain in prison that was acceptable but I was dissatisfied with his Controller making the decision in the shadows.
Most of us lose connection with God and only listen to our Controller. It’s easier-- the Controller works in absolutes and focuses on behavior. We always know exactly where we stand with our Controller. God, however, is another matter. Assuming that we re loved and accepted no matter what we do, then knowing God becomes a matter of paying attention in the second. We’re not striving to get to God, we are God. There is nothing to earn; we have God’s complete love and acceptance already.
Our challenge is to experience God in the moment, to know God. And that is totally a matter of allowing. We don’t praise God, we don’t promise God, we don’t apologize to God, we don’t barter with God. Either we allow God or we don’t.
Staying busy doing good works is an effective way to avoid God. We don’t have to listen, we’re not asking to be guided. We’re on automatic and we’re buzzing our way down the pike. But to experience God we can’t be on automatic. Being present demands slowing down, listening, and being available. Who knows what we will hear? Who knows what God “wants” for any of us. What if we are led to own our power and to allow God to work through us? That’s undefined but very present. What if we are led to leave our lives as we’re living them? The only was to know is to surrender and to commit to total availability at every second. A huge step.
It would have been easier for John to settle into his self hate and depression and give up his life to his Controller’s punishment. But he chose to know God and to allow God to work in his life. And when his consciousness allowed for receiving God’s love and letting it guide his steps, he was released from prison.
What prison are we keeping ourselves locked in? Shame or resentment from childhood? God exists in this second, never mind this minute. What does God’s love for you feel like this second? Are you open to receiving it? And being led by it? Are you available?