Archive for month: December, 2016

Cooperation, the second law of spirit, is the proverbial wisdom of making lemonade when you have lemons. You might have been in the mood for ginger ale, but what you have is lemons. So either you go to where the ginger ale is and fulfill that desire, or you stay where you are and make the best darn lemonade you ever had. The key to cooperation is working with what is present rather than working against it with negative expressions of dissatisfaction, judgment, denial, and resistance.

When you encounter a situation and find yourself interpreting it as a matter of someone else hurting you or the situation being unfair to you in some way, try to find the space between the situation and your understanding of it. From that position of neutrality, consider the possibility that you are misreading the situation and that your suffering is a result of that rather than the situation itself. Life happens. Sometimes we like it and sometimes we don’t. When we suffer, it is usually because we are not accepting the situation (the first law of spirit) and therefore cannot move on to cooperating with it. Cooperation is only an option when you are in a state of acceptance. Rather than thinking the other person should change their point of view, consider expanding your perspective so that it is larger than your hurt. See if you can look with compassion at those involved with you and yourself and recognize that you are all doing the best you can and sometimes we bump into each other in unpleasant ways. Cooperation is about responding to those situations in a kind and responsible way for the highest good of all concerned. And that’s not always easy.

Did you ever notice how much easier it is to cooperate with something you like than something you don’t? Yet, even in our enthusiasm, we can sometimes go off the deep end and be out of sync with others involved in the situation. Cooperation is something you do inside yourself, not something you demand or expect from others. It is about achieving balance inside of you and acting from that place.

The key to cooperation is to be of good cheer (or get to good cheer as soon as you can) and to go with the flow of whatever circumstances you find yourself in. Does this mean being passive? Absolutely not! Quite the contrary. It means being fully conscious and responsible for the choices you make and the impact of your behavior on yourself and others.

Consider the following situation I found myself in recently. For two weeks I had been trying to get an appointment with my hairdresser. She offered me a date when I had another commitment, and we went back and forth on emails to no avail. She kept giving me reasons why she couldn’t accommodate me and no options for when she could. I was not of good cheer when I wrote back letting her know that as a client for over 15 years, I was not pleased. I asked if perhaps I was failing to pick up on a hint that I should be looking for a new hairdresser. Her answer, still offering no appointment times, simply said that I wasn’t alone in not being able to get an appointment. Clearly I was getting nowhere with her, and was moving farther and farther away from my good cheer. In anger, I contemplated calling my previous hairdresser. Then I caught myself. I was neither accepting the situation nor cooperating with it. No wonder I was angry! So I ate a little humble pie and admitted to myself that it was neither the situation nor my hairdresser that was responsible for my distress. I caused that all by myself! I forgave myself for getting caught up in this state of affairs and chose to find my way out by first establishing acceptance inside myself. The facts were simple — I wanted an appointment and my hairdresser was unable to accommodate me. Instead of getting mad about it and making her wrong, I decided to look at my options. My hair looked awful and I was going on a trip and needed the psychological lift of an overdue good haircut. Besides, it is wedding season and I need my hair to look good for officiating wedding ceremonies. As I thought this through, I noticed that my anger was gone. I was able to see that it was the cut, not the color, that was most needed. So, I did make an appointment with my previous hairdresser, who happens to also be a friend, and she gave me the haircut I’ve been wanting for months. Then I returned from my trip and found an email from my regular hairdresser to have my hair colored the next day. Pretty good, huh?

Things seem to have a way of working out when we are not spewing forth a lot of negative thoughts, behaviors, and energy. So next time you find yourself resisting your reality, see if you can step free of your point of view and observe the situation from a position of neutrality. All kinds of possibilities and opportunities are visible from an impartial stance that are imperceptible from a biased point of view.

One of the most beautiful things about cooperation is that it allows others to have their needs met as well. That means there can be multiple winners and no one has to lose. In the example of my need for a haircut, I got a great cut, my usual hairdresser got me off her back, and my previous hairdresser got the satisfaction of giving me a great cut and we had the opportunity to spend some time together in our busy lives. That’s a lot of winning. So, next time you get caught in a situation where you are hurt and unhappy, look for a pathway out of it that leads to as much winning as possible for all concerned.

I hope you will tune in next week for the third law of spirit — understanding. Until then, I look forward to your responses and reactions to this piece.

Cooperation, the second law of spirit, is the proverbial wisdom of making lemonade when you have lemons. You might have been in the mood for ginger ale, but what you have is lemons. So either you go to where the ginger ale is and fulfill that desire, or you stay where you are and make the best darn lemonade you ever had. The key to cooperation is working with what is present rather than working against it with negative expressions of dissatisfaction, judgment, denial, and resistance.

When you encounter a situation and find yourself interpreting it as a matter of someone else hurting you or the situation being unfair to you in some way, try to find the space between the situation and your understanding of it. From that position of neutrality, consider the possibility that you are misreading the situation and that your suffering is a result of that rather than the situation itself. Life happens. Sometimes we like it and sometimes we don’t. When we suffer, it is usually because we are not accepting the situation (the first law of spirit) and therefore cannot move on to cooperating with it. Cooperation is only an option when you are in a state of acceptance. Rather than thinking the other person should change their point of view, consider expanding your perspective so that it is larger than your hurt. See if you can look with compassion at those involved with you and yourself and recognize that you are all doing the best you can and sometimes we bump into each other in unpleasant ways. Cooperation is about responding to those situations in a kind and responsible way for the highest good of all concerned. And that’s not always easy.

Did you ever notice how much easier it is to cooperate with something you like than something you don’t? Yet, even in our enthusiasm, we can sometimes go off the deep end and be out of sync with others involved in the situation. Cooperation is something you do inside yourself, not something you demand or expect from others. It is about achieving balance inside of you and acting from that place.

The key to cooperation is to be of good cheer (or get to good cheer as soon as you can) and to go with the flow of whatever circumstances you find yourself in. Does this mean being passive? Absolutely not! Quite the contrary. It means being fully conscious and responsible for the choices you make and the impact of your behavior on yourself and others.

Consider the following situation I found myself in recently. For two weeks I had been trying to get an appointment with my hairdresser. She offered me a date when I had another commitment, and we went back and forth on emails to no avail. She kept giving me reasons why she couldn’t accommodate me and no options for when she could. I was not of good cheer when I wrote back letting her know that as a client for over 15 years, I was not pleased. I asked if perhaps I was failing to pick up on a hint that I should be looking for a new hairdresser. Her answer, still offering no appointment times, simply said that I wasn’t alone in not being able to get an appointment. Clearly I was getting nowhere with her, and was moving farther and farther away from my good cheer. In anger, I contemplated calling my previous hairdresser. Then I caught myself. I was neither accepting the situation nor cooperating with it. No wonder I was angry! So I ate a little humble pie and admitted to myself that it was neither the situation nor my hairdresser that was responsible for my distress. I caused that all by myself! I forgave myself for getting caught up in this state of affairs and chose to find my way out by first establishing acceptance inside myself. The facts were simple — I wanted an appointment and my hairdresser was unable to accommodate me. Instead of getting mad about it and making her wrong, I decided to look at my options. My hair looked awful and I was going on a trip and needed the psychological lift of an overdue good haircut. Besides, it is wedding season and I need my hair to look good for officiating wedding ceremonies. As I thought this through, I noticed that my anger was gone. I was able to see that it was the cut, not the color, that was most needed. So, I did make an appointment with my previous hairdresser, who happens to also be a friend, and she gave me the haircut I’ve been wanting for months. Then I returned from my trip and found an email from my regular hairdresser to have my hair colored the next day. Pretty good, huh?

Things seem to have a way of working out when we are not spewing forth a lot of negative thoughts, behaviors, and energy. So next time you find yourself resisting your reality, see if you can step free of your point of view and observe the situation from a position of neutrality. All kinds of possibilities and opportunities are visible from an impartial stance that are imperceptible from a biased point of view.

One of the most beautiful things about cooperation is that it allows others to have their needs met as well. That means there can be multiple winners and no one has to lose. In the example of my need for a haircut, I got a great cut, my usual hairdresser got me off her back, and my previous hairdresser got the satisfaction of giving me a great cut and we had the opportunity to spend some time together in our busy lives. That’s a lot of winning. So, next time you get caught in a situation where you are hurt and unhappy, look for a pathway out of it that leads to as much winning as possible for all concerned.

I hope you will tune in next week for the third law of spirit — understanding. Until then, I look forward to your responses and reactions to this piece.

If you would like to know more about me and my work, please explore my website here.

Also, if you know anyone who might get value from this article please email or retweet it or share it on Facebook.

Suffering is a valuable thing. Enjoy your life without rejecting problems or suffering…

The trick is knowing how to accept discomfort without being caught by it.

– Suzuki Rochi

One of the quickest ways to improve the quality of your mental and emotional experience is to learn how to effectively handle pain and suffering. The bad news is pain and suffering is a fact of life. From petty disturbances to major heartbreaks, we all get our fair share of life’s annoyances, disappointments and tragedies. The good news is that learning how to master these experiences can significantly improve your quality of life inside of yourself.

No matter how you respond to pain and suffering, you will get more. The goal is not to eliminate it, but to figure out how to use it as a stepping stone into something better. Since the days of the cavemen, humans have been hardwired to resist and pull away from pain — a great strategy to avoid getting eaten by a saber-tooth tiger. However, this autopilot response no longer serves us and needs to be rewired.

Nowadays, most of our suffering occurs in response to the frustrations and disappointments of everyday life, like standing in long lines, being caught in traffic or not getting the promotion you wanted. The scale of our mental and emotional suffering can escalate to being the victim of starvation, violence or terrorism. However, most of us don’t experience that. The height of our suffering might be heartbreak over the end of a marriage or the death of a loved one.

Consider what happens when you automatically respond to negativity with resistance. It’s like duct taping yourself to the source of irritation. What you resist persists because you are focusing upon it and thus giving it your attention and energy — you are fueling the fire. This is equally true whether you are escalating your irritation over a traffic jam or caught in endless sorrow over the loss of a loved one. In both cases, you are attaching yourself to the source of your distress and not integrating the experience. I am not suggesting that one should “get over it” when a loved one dies. Grief has a natural life of its own. However, sometimes people are unable to move on.

There are three steps to mastering your experiences of pain and suffering. The first is to notice what your instinctive response is when negativity comes up inside of us. Rather than focusing on the source of your distress, pay attention to your response to it. Do you try to dissipate the energy by exploding — for example, blaming and judging others? Or do you implode? Do you silently suffer as you stuff the distress back down inside of yourself through addictive behaviors like compulsive eating, or drinking or spending? Pay attention. Observe your own pattern of response.

The second step is to breathe into the experience of pain and suffering. Build your tolerance so you can stay present in the moment. This will give you the opportunity to buy a little time to make different choices. Instead of unconsciously doing what you have always done, study your patterns, lean into them, get intimately familiar with the sequence of events that cause a minor disturbance to escalate into a learned response and then a repetitive pattern and so on. How do you do it? How do you go from being just fine to being in a rage or falling into a depression? Does your energy cycle up and out or in and down?

The third thing is to do something different. You might wonder why not just do that first? The reason is that the first two steps are what create your willingness and ability to change your behavior. You have to first know where you are and that you don’t want to stay there before you are going to effectively and creatively find and build other responses to the negativity in your life. You need to develop response strategies that lift you up rather than swirling you into a rage or a downward spiral.

Let’s use the example of being stuck in traffic. Some people have so little control over their mental and emotional behavior that they allow this irritation to escalate into road rage. It goes something like this: “Not this again. I’m sick and tired of this. I wish these people would just get out of my way. Look at that idiot.” And so on. The energy spins and feeds on itself and the driver probably experiences an elevation of blood pressure. Here’s the alternative:

Step One — Notice Your Response: “Whoops, here I go again. I hate this traffic.”

Step Two — Lean Into Your Experience: “Every day it’s the same thing. As soon as I get to Route 92, I’m in for at least a 20 minute delay and I get hot under the collar. It shouldn’t be this way. I don’t like this. I feel trapped.”

Step Three — Do Something Different: “When I get home, I’m going to see if I can find another route home. For now, I’m going to think about where I would like to go for vacation this year. Let’s see … Tuscany? The Bahamas?”

This three step process may be a little less obvious with an experience that spreads out over time like the loss of a loved one. However, it works the same way. In order to change your response, you must first notice what your pattern of response actually is, then breathe into it and really take ownership of what you are doing. Finally, intentionally try something different.

With practice, you will find yourself mastering the art of recovering faster with less drainage of your energy and less creation of negativity. See how fast you can get back in balance with yourself. This is not a game of pretending nothing ever happened. Rather, it is a matter of developing the art of recovery.

If you would like to know more about me and my work, please explore my website here.

Also, if you know anyone who might get value from this article please email or retweet it or share it on Facebook.

Did you ever notice how some things really grab your attention but not the attention of others? Or how you edit out the background noise in a bustling restaurant when you want to hear what someone at your table is saying? That’s selective attention. Both consciously and unconsciously, we edit our environment and pay attention to some things while ignoring others. With the increasing bombardment of stimuli we deal with each day, this capability becomes more and more important to us to sort out what matters to us and what doesn’t. On the other hand, sometimes we edit out very important and useful information.

I thought of this the other day when I saw a chipmunk determined to cross the road. In front of him were four busy lanes of traffic and a huge parking lot. Behind him was an enormous lush field. What was he thinking? What did he imagine was more desirable in the road and parking lot than in the field? I still wonder what happened to that chipmunk.

This got me thinking. How often do I do that to myself? How often do I set my mind on doing, being or having something and ignore all other possibilities that might help me make a more informed decision? Just because I think something, doesn’t make it so, nor is it necessarily a good idea.

It’s very easy to assume our point of view is a perfect match to reality. Unfortunately, anyone with a different opinion or any conflicting information available to us gets either rejected or ignored because it doesn’t fit our picture. This process of selective attention operates both automatically and consciously, but doesn’t always serve our best interest — like the chipmunk above.

Experts in the field of psychology and psychiatry hotly debate the question of how and why we select to pay attention to some things and not others. They also disagree about the degree to which this editing process is conscious. Typically, we filter out what we deem to be unnecessary or unimportant without being aware of the fact that we are exercising this filtering process. As a result, what we think is not necessarily so. It is simply a result of our beliefs, prior experiences, the arousal of our senses and other factors that play a role in our editing function.

Extreme problems with the selective attention function are evident in individuals with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) who have difficulty focusing their attention, while those with Autism flood their senses by paying attention to too much at once. Then there are the rest of us. Consider, for example, teenagers who selectively do not pay attention to parents who repeatedly try to get them to do their chores. Or, the woman who ignores the warning signs of abuse from her partner because she doesn’t want that to be true. Or the endless party politics where each side tries to outshout the other with their talking points, never really listening to opposing views.

The advertising industry is built on selective attention. Look at my product! Look at this beautiful model and buy into the illusion that you too will look this great if you buy my product!

In observing my own behavior, I notice that my selective attention really supports me well when I am writing and able to edit out all distractions except my cats — but they delight me so I don’t want to change that. I notice I am very task-oriented. When I choose to do something, I focus my attention on it and get it done. On the other hand, sometimes my attention is non-selective. For example, during meditation when I have difficulty shutting off my mind. Also, when I go shopping, I don’t always selectively attend to my shopping list. I give myself too much freedom to be distracted and seduced by non-essential purchases.

Selective attention, while often unconscious, is a powerful tool when exercised consciously. It can work for us or against us depending on the situation. Here are some suggestions about how to hone your selective attention skills so that you can use them more to your advantage:

Do a selective attention audit on yourself:

• When do you see selective attention working for you and when does it get in your way?

• Notice how often you choose to ignore warning signs or negative implications and why.

• Notice when you are talking with someone, whether you focus your attention on the conversation, zone out or divert your attention elsewhere.

• When multi-tasking are you aware of where you are placing your attention or is it simply fragmented?

• When making a purchase do you make it a point to look at both the pros and the cons or just talk yourself into the purchase by only focusing on the positives?

• Who do you choose to listen to and who do you choose to ignore and why?

• Do you notice any differences between how you pay attention to people and things that you like versus those you don’t?

Practice using your selective attention to better advantage:

• Choose one area of your life where you tend to get distracted and practice intentionally holding your focus where you want it to be.

• Observe yourself in an area where selective attention works for you and notice how you do that. Then see where you can apply that elsewhere in your life.

We are selectively focusing our attention all the time. The real question is how aware of it are we? The more conscious we are of this process, the more opportunities we have to direct our attention to our advantage.

I welcome your comments.

If you would like to know more about me and my work, please explore my website here.

Also, if you know anyone who might get value from this article please email or retweet it or share it on Facebook.

Many languages and cultures carry the same wisdom: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” One would think that is always good advice. However, there are two fundamental assumptions in The Golden Rule that require a note of caution in its application.

Consider the following situation. Several years ago, I was working with a client who was in an abusive marriage. She was very clear that she wanted to leave her husband and needed to do so. But, she just couldn’t do it. When we explored why, it turned out to be attributable to her deep belief in The Golden Rule. Her interpretation was that her husband was unemployed, fairly unemployable and generally down on his luck and if she was in his shoes, she certainly would not want her spouse to leave her. While enormously compassionate, she was still being abused.

Her literal interpretation of The Golden Rule blocked her from seeing the full picture of what was going on. The reality was that if she was in her husband’s position, she would not behave as he was behaving. He was one of those downright nasty people who took pleasure from manipulating and hurting other people and making his life challenges other people’s problems. Somehow, it gave him a sense of being superior.

The first caveat to The Golden Rule is that it must be applied to one’s self first and then to others. In other words, do onto yourself as you would have others do onto you. If you extend your loving kindness to others at your own expense, then you become your own abuser. Put another way, if there is a conflict between treating yourself and the other person with loving kindness, it is wise to take care of yourself first so that you can come from a position of strength and balance in being of service to others.

I learned this wisdom when I was ordained. The charge of my ministry was to first minister to myself, not in a selfish way, but rather as a loving parent tends to the needs of a child. The ministry then extends to others. It took me many years to appreciate the wisdom of making sure I was maintaining my own health and balance so that I could relate to others in a more loving way without doing so at my own expense.

Here’s how the first caveat applied to my client. She was so focused on how she was treating her husband that she neglected to look at how she was behaving towards herself. She was allowing herself to be abused continuously. When I shared the first caveat with her, she recognized that she was allowing herself to be abused by ignoring her responsibility to herself and focusing only on how she would feel in her husband’s shoes — completely unaware of the fact that she would never behave as he did. Just as repeatedly burning your hand by placing it over a flame is unwise, so is opening the door to repeated abuse.

The second caveat is the assumption that you are dealing with a healthy person of integrity. Sometimes you are not. When someone is in such an unhealthy place in their consciousness as to be repeatedly abusive to others, the most loving response for one’s self and the abuser is often to leave or refuse to engage in an adversarial response. This refusal to support the abuser in his or her weakness can be the wakeup call needed. Our most loving behavior is often to refuse to tolerate abuse.

The bottom line is that we all want to be loved by each other, but sometimes we lose sight of that and treat one another in terrible ways. The way I interpret The Golden Rule is not that we are supposed to turn the other cheek by inviting more abuse, but rather serving one another by example. Figuratively, we can turn the other cheek by not responding to aggression with aggression but with what we truly believe is for the highest good of all concerned. For example, when my client left her husband she wrote him a long and loving letter in which she affirmed her love for him, wished him well, encouraged him to get help and made it perfectly clear that the marriage was over and that it was time for her to look after her own health and well-being.

For me, the message of The Golden Rule is to treat each other with loving kindness. Sometimes this means demonstrating our unwillingness to meet aggression with aggression by choosing not to participate in what others are dishing out.

If you would like to know more about me and my work, please explore my website here.

Also, if you know anyone who might get value from this article please email or retweet it or share it on Facebook.