In the theater of one’s mind is a multi-dimensional consciousness in which our thoughts point our attention in a particular direction. Neuroscientists have discovered that repetitive thoughts form neural pathways as neurons that fire together get wired together. Thus, the more a particular thought or belief is activated and reinforced, the stronger these neural pathways become and the more automatically they become our “go to” pattern of perceiving. Ever feel like you were in a rut or maybe a little insane for doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results? Maybe there is something to be said for it being “all in your mind” – or at least to some significant degree. The power of human thought is also worth considering in terms of the ongoing influence that society and family beliefs have in molding our point of view as individuals – for better and for worse.
Here’s some good news about this. Neuroscientists use the term “neuroplasticity” to refer to the fact that our brains have the ability to change our synaptic wiring, which is reflected in our point of view. Thus, we have the opportunity to intentionally change our thinking by forming new neural pathways that in turn will change our experiences. Indeed, we have the opportunity to be powerful creators of our own consciousness or to be passive heirs to the autopilot programming of our own history and external authorities.
When we are operating unconsciously on autopilot, we are selectively perceiving our experiences by interpreting them in a way that is in alignment with our existing beliefs, fears, hopes, and dreams. Quite literally, it’s almost impossible for a different point of view to get through to us when we are on autopilot.
Our expressions and behaviors are quite literally self-fulfilling prophesies of our mindset. Over time, when we are running on autopilot, new experiences simply serve to validate our existing way of being in the world – our autopilot responses to future experiences. Thus, when we are not consciously encountering our lives, our experiences simply validate and reinforce our existing beliefs and fail to inform us of new possibilities.
When our perceptions of ourselves, others, and the world we live in are based on little or no conscious awareness and intention to create greater health and well-being, our lives are defined by the autopilot recycling of our attitudes, judgments, illusions, delusions, memories and memory patterns, thoughts, feelings, fears, hopes, and dreams. We exist in a veiled state unable to see what is right in front of us.
Autopilot is not all bad. For example, when we establish healthy habits like eating right, exercising, getting enough sleep, and having a healthy sense of self, we can put them on autopilot and not think about them unless and until we have the need to change them. However, autopilot can get us in trouble if we have negative patterns of thoughts or emotions running us and we aren’t even aware of it. The degree to which we allow our negativity to run on autopilot (without conscious awareness) is the degree to which we are powerless over it.
In contrast to autopilot, when we create through conscious intention, we bring our awareness fresh and new to each present moment and allow our beliefs, fears, hopes, and dreams to change based on new input. This updating process allows new and different thoughts and feelings to emerge, which in turn can result in new behaviors and ways of being and experiencing our lives. We have the ability to consciously direct our thoughts and feelings through the power of intention, thus taking a far more active role in creating, promoting, and allowing more of what we want in our lives. The state of our consciousness forms the bedrock upon which the dramas of our lives unfold. Within the privacy of our own consciousness – in the theater of our mind – we create our own sense of reality, which we inhabit as our role in the great drama of life. It is a complex structure, like a skeletal system for our consciousness.
An old Chinese proverb captures the power of our thinking in shaping our lives:
Sow a thought and reap an act;
Sow an act and reap a habit;
Sow a habit and reap a character;
Sow a character and reap a destiny.
This is true for us as individuals as well as for groups and societies at large. Thoughts persisted in become taken for granted and are often misidentified as the truth because of their familiarity. They become the building blocks and assumptions that serve as the foundation for a point of view that, unchallenged, will invisibly run on autopilot and shape our future thinking.
To step into the process of creating our lives through conscious intention, unencumbered by all of this is to simply be – free and authentic, with a sense of personal accountability and responsibility for our own creations. When our consciousness is present in the moment, we live in our authenticity, encountering and integrating our new experiences, open to change and alteration as appropriate. There becomes a fluidity and aliveness to our experiences rather than a rote repetition of the past. Even our deepest, most treasured beliefs no longer define who we are. We let go of our story, as we awaken to the magnificence of living more consciously in each moment. However, the price of admission is to let go of the need to be ‘right’ in a fixed point of view and to move fluidly through life, open to change and evolving one’s point of view.
Photo Credit: Creative Commons
Love: Lighting Each Other Up Inside
Years ago, I remember being disturbed by my spiritual teacher, John-Roger, describing love as activating or stimulating that place inside of each other where love resides. It seemed so unromantic. I had been raised to believe in the Valentine’s Day romantic version of love where you find love outside of yourself in that one special person who lights up your world and then, as the fairy tale goes, you live happily ever after.
What if love serves a different purpose in our lives than that? What if love is a kind of awakening of something that lives inside each of us? What if others who rouse that place of loving inside of us are simply serving us by reflecting to us the best that is within us? What if the point is not to find and grab ahold of one special person, but rather to figure out how to shine our own inner light of loving on as many people as possible to do our part to heal this world?
This is by no means a prescription for either sexual promiscuity or exclusivity. Sexual expression is a separate matter entirely. However, whether you are two friends, family members, or romantic partners, there is a fine line between a healthy relationship of love where two people are choosing to serve as awakeners and reminders of the power of love for each other and a dysfunctional bond where two people try to isolate, possess, and control each other.
If indeed love is something that already exists inside of us then perhaps the best way to celebrate Valentine’s Day is to use the light of love that exists inside of you to awaken and lift others to what is the best within them. Love is not out there. It is in here – inside each of us.
Let’s reclaim a higher purpose to Valentine’s Day than trying to seduce one another with gifts and romantic gestures that fuel a $22 billion industry. Consider taking the time to write love letters to the people in your life who serve to remind you of the best that is within you. Who are those people? How do they make you feel inside yourself? How do they inspire you? What are you most grateful for about having them in your life? Tell them. What greater gift could there possibly be?
How to Maintain Your Inner Well-Being – Part 2
Did you know that your brain gives preference to visual information?
Researchers L.D. Rosenblum, Harold Stolovitch, and Erica Keeps refer to our senses as learning portals and offer the following statistics regarding the percentage of data processed by each of our five senses:
Why is this significant? By design, our eyes focus our attention outward. The fact that the vast majority of our sensory data is visual therefore predisposes us to an external frame of reference that focuses on the physical world.
Unaware that we are “seeing” the projection of an internally-filtered reality, we misinterpret our perceptions of reality to be reality itself. Consider the heated arguments between individuals of opposing political points of view. Each sees a different reality and believes that they are “right” and those on the other side of the aisle are “wrong.”
For most of us, our socialization includes indoctrination into a binary model of consciousness. In other words, we are taught to sort people and experiences into right/wrong, good/bad, beautiful/ugly, desirable/undesirable and so on. In fact, life is far more complex and messy than that. Learned biases and preferences short-circuit the process of developing curiosity about those differences that we are taught to reject. There is a built-in bias against diversity in this way of encountering unfamiliar people and experiences. Therefore, diversity requires a new way of perceiving beyond our autopilot right/wrong sorting process. In a binary approach, there are only two choices. That means if we encounter someone who is different, we can’t both be “right” or “OK.” As a result, we develop very narrow tolerances for differences, rather than nurturing our curiosity and openness to all kinds of people and experiences.
By about the age of five or six, we have the foundation of our self-image in place and we begin to unconsciously protect, conceal, or improve our image of ourselves and to become competitive with the self-images of others. We spend most of our time focused outwards through our self-image as we negotiate and navigate our way through the world and relate to the imagined self-images being projected by others.
We selectively see things that support our existing beliefs and filter out things that do not agree with our way of seeing things.
Yet another paradox of our visual orientation is that it makes it very difficult for us to verify and trust the existence of non-physical reality. This is the territory of self-knowledge, intuition, and spiritual awareness.
Paying attention to non-physical reality is a bit like being a salmon swimming upstream against the current. It requires an intentional redirection of our focus. To turn inward, to engage in a more intimate relationship with ourselves, and to awaken ourselves spiritually require a different state of mind. A future blog entitled Being of Two Minds will explore this matter in greater detail.
Learning how to become more conscious of our own unique data sorting process is essential to mastering the art of being who we authentically are.
Spiritual awakening involves consciously and intentionally developing our ability to override our usual way of being and perceiving. It requires looking within rather than being drawn to an external focus by the dominance of visual sensory input we are receiving. It means cultivating a non-judgmental perspective towards differences and an awareness of a level upon which we are all the same. This requires cultivation of a childlike curiosity rather than a defensive and competitive stance regarding our perceptions versus those of others. It requires an entirely different kind of awareness – not based on sensory data, but rather the attunement to something greater than our physical form that is shared by all. Language and empirical science fail us in speaking clearly about such matters, but do not negate their existence.
Each of us has our own unique life to lead. As we learn about the power of the Reticular Activating System (RAS) it becomes clear that the quality of our consciousness determines how we experience our lives.
How to Maintain Your Inner Well-Being – Part 1
Are you truly committed to mastering the art of maintaining your inner well-being? Do you regularly keep watch for such signs of imbalance as:
If any of these sound familiar, you will be delighted to know you can eliminate them all! Each and every one of these is the direct result of specific beliefs, fears, or misconceptions through which you are filtering incoming data in your Reticular Activating System.
The Reticular Activating System (RAS) is truly a marvel of human design. Here’s what it does:
Do you have any idea how much new information your brain is constantly processing? In his book, Strangers to Ourselves, Timothy Wilson quantifies the human brain’s unfathomable ability to process information as follows:
Without our RAS, this barrage would quite literally blow our minds! We live in a constant state of data bombardment. The fact that the vast majority of our data processing is unconscious is a great kindness in human design. However, this unconscious filtration system runs on autopilot while determining what incoming information we value, devalue, or fear based on our accumulated past reactions.
Mosby’s Medical Dictionary, 9th edition © 2009, Elsevier
Located in the brainstem, the RAS consists of a network of nerve pathways that form a link between the brain stem, which controls most of the body’s involuntary functions and reflexes, and the cerebral cortex, which is the seat of consciousness and our thinking ability. By connecting these two regions of the brain, the RAS functions as a filtering system for the mind and controls our attention, awareness, thinking, and emotions. The RAS quite literally causes us to construct our own internal worldview.
The good news: you have the power to change the settings on your filtration system. Through increased awareness of how this system works and by paying attention to all forms of imbalance you experience, you have the power to change your inner and outer experiences.
We are biased to the status quo of how we already see things. Believing that this internally-generated version of the truth is the empirical truth blinds us from reality. One of the consequences of this misconception is that we believe that anyone whose perspective or way of being is different than ours is ‘wrong.’ What we imagine to be our perception of empirical truth is merely a reflection of an aggregated inner point of view.
Within the privacy of our own consciousness – in the theater of our minds – we create our own sense of reality, which we inhabit and relate to as if it is REALITY. It is important to remember that no one else on this planet has an identical inner world to the one you live in. The assumption that others see the world as we do is the source of an enormous amount of our misunderstanding about ourselves and each other.
The majority of our perceptions and thoughts are merely the product of our primarily unconscious sensory data filtration system. They exist only in our private inner world.
Another way of saying this is we need to clean our data processing filters. In doing so, we can update our default settings. Our freedom lies in recognizing that our RAS makes our lives a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is simply doing what we tell it to do. When we update our default settings, we are redirecting the perspective of our RAS so that it will now validate our new point of view.
Consider this simple example. Let’s say you are intentionally losing weight and get to within one pound of what you view as a major threshold. You plateau there for six weeks. You’re doing everything “right” in terms of complying with your program. What’s going on? Upon evaluation of your RAS filters, you notice that you hold a belief that crossing this particular one-pound threshold will put you into a level of success that you have not previously experienced. Underneath that you discover that you are fearful and do not trust yourself to maintain this success. In this context, your weight loss plateau makes perfect sense. Once you have identified the source of resistance to further progress, you are able to bring more of this pattern into conscious awareness and to challenge yourself to see your situation through new eyes. You see exactly what beliefs and fears have been preventing you from moving forward and choose to replace them with a new, affirming beliefs and assumptions. In time, you break through the plateau and begin to lose more weight.
Watch for Part 2 of this blog to learn more keys to unlocking your inner well-being.
Preparing Your Inner Manger
When thinking about the questions, “What are we really doing here?” and “What is the purpose of life?” I always come up with the same answer. We are preparing our inner manger – a place within ourselves in which the divine can dwell and nourish us. The biblical story of the baby, Jesus, being placed in a manger symbolizes this. While the structure of a manger is intended to hold food to feed animals, this humble place is sanctified by the reception of the baby, Jesus, as a source of nourishment for our souls. But, in order to receive this great gift of light, love, and wisdom, there is a precondition required. While the gifts of the divine are ever-present and overflowing, we must open ourselves to receive them or face spiritual starvation.
There is an image of Jesus as a grown man knocking on a door in a garden. There is no handle on his side of the door because it is up to us to open that door to receive the divine consciousness. But, how do we do that? First, by becoming aware of the spiritual dimension of our lives. Whether it is Jesus knocking, or Buddha, Hinduism, Islam, Taoism or some other language of spirit, invitations to spiritual inquiry and nourishment abound in our lives. Many find spiritual inspiration from nature, or babies, or rituals, meditation, deep friendships, or simply entering into the solitude of self. Opportunities abound!
However, it is easy to live a life of spiritual starvation, never knowing what you are missing. The pull of the outer world of phenomena, seeking to do, be, or have something that you believe will complete you, will, in time, leave you hungry. Many spend their lives endlessly seeking for fulfillment through romantic relationships, professional success, approval seeking from others, stimulating experiences, and material abundance only to find an inner hunger that none of these can satisfy.
I am reminded of Shel Silverstein’s book The Missing Piece. How many of us spend our lifetime seeking to fill an insatiable inner void? The manna of this world never sates our spiritual hunger.
If you feel that inner hunger, reach into it. Don’t run away from it in search of the temporary fixes of the material world which only bring fleeting satisfaction to our egos. Spiritual hunger is much deeper than that. It is a knowing that something immaterial, pure, everlasting, and good is ever-present and non-inflictive within us and all around us – patiently awaiting our choice to activate our engagement with it. Once we become aware of the spiritual dimension, we spend the rest of our lives preparing our inner manger. No matter how humble a life we might seemingly lead, we are all spiritual royalty once we awaken to the presence of the divine in our lives.
Preparing our inner manger involves two types of activity. First, we extend the invitation, open the door, and welcome the spiritual dimension into our lives. We spend time getting acquainted with this part of ourselves and our life’s journey. We make time to turn inward and upward within ourselves. We learn to choose the high road when given a choice. We seek and gain a perspective of altitude that allows us to perceive what is going on within our lives as an observer as well as a participant. We become more sensitive and caring about the impact of our words and actions on others as well as on ourselves. We become more consciously aware, paying attention to the experiences we have and the wisdom teachings they present to us. Secondly, we enter into a state of willingness to let go of those things that block our relationship with spirit – things like addictions, compulsions, fears, and patterns of anger, judgment, and separation. In time, we come to know ourselves as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin describes – not as human beings having a spiritual experience, but as spiritual beings having a human experience.
Preparing your inner manger is the most important work you can do. It’s a 24/7 job that pays us in the currency of inner peace. Happy holidays, everyone.
To read more blogs by Judith Johnson or to learn more about her work, please go to www.judithjohnson.com .
What is Your Deeper Calling and Are You Answering the Call?
It took me until my 60’s to deconstruct the persistent patterns of worries, fears and self-doubt that were preventing me from being the best version of myself I knew I could be. Along the way, I realized that I wasn’t the only woman doing this particular dance. As one who has always been compelled to help others, I recognized this was a key area where I wanted to serve others as well as myself once I figured out what was going on.
My journey taught me to study and practice new ways of seeing myself and the world. The perennial wisdom teachings at the root of most spiritual traditions nourished me with an understanding of the necessity of love, kindness and compassion in our relationships with ourselves and others. Participating in a multitude of personal growth trainings and working one-on-one with master practitioners of various healing modalities taught me to inhabit my own body, mind, heart, soul and life journey bearing responsibility for myself and my choices. Finally, studying the field of human consciousness taught me exactly how we go about creating, promoting and allowing ourselves to be as we are and how we can change our experience of ourselves and the world by simply changing our perceptions and attitudes.
In 2016 this all coalesced into what has become my latest book, The 11 Keys to Consciously Thriving – a book to read until you live it by heart. While my writings, mentoring and speaking serve both men and women, I have chosen to work primarily with smart, talented women with inner callings who find themselves held back by worries, fears and self-doubt. I believe that women today have a very important role to play in shifting our cultural consciousness and our life priorities.
Later this year, I will be launching free, monthly, live on-line conversations focusing on women raising consciousness in the 21st century. Most of us have too little time to nurture our friendships and be together with other women. It is my hope that these on-line conversations will remind us to spend more time together – loving, caring, and supporting each other as we find our way forward.
Along these lines, I am enamored with the work of Tara Mohr and her concept of women being called to be on “The Transition Team” . In Playing Big, Mohr says:
And so, my own work now focuses on helping other women to deconstruct persistent patterns of self-doubt, worries and concerns so they can raise their voices as they are called to do so in their own unique way. To find out more about how I might help you to step forward in your calling, please explore my website, especially my Mentoring page and The Thriving Studio.
It’s so exciting to see other women stepping forward with more guts than fear to add their contributions to the quality of our individual and collective lives. Here are some questions to ask yourself:
Women Who Doubt Themselves
I’ve never met a woman who didn’t doubt herself in some way. Our doubts and fears can either paralyze us or we can learn to hold steady in their presence, assess their content, diminish their power and move forward in spite of them. It all boils down to how much power we give our doubts and fears.
It helps to know what doubts and fears are and that they really have a positive side to them. Imagine being a little girl who is just learning to walk and those moments when you maybe took a few steps farther away from your mom than you were comfortable with and ran back and threw your arms around her thigh. Safety! That’s the feeling of our comfort zone. It’s largely an unconscious pull to stay where we feel safe and able to manage the options of what is familiar. But, stepping outside into the unknown territory of what might happen if you move too far away from the familiar can be disorienting, unsettling and scary. Crossing that line is when doubts and fears can either send you running for the safety of the familiar or present you with the opportunity to expand your comfort zone.
Think of doubts and fears as simply red flags that alert you to the fact that you are entering your uncomfortable zone. “Get back! Get back!” they scream. Imagine that instead of impulsively running back to safety you simply said, “Oh, thank you. It’s OK. I’ll take a look and decide what to do.” What if you developed sufficient confidence and trust in your own ability to effectively evaluate whatever possible challenge comes your way and no longer felt the need to run for safety? What if you began to feel safe even in the presence of doubts and fears?
Consider the fact that doubts and fears are nothing but figments of your own imagination. They are the creation of thoughts and pictures in your mind that represent what you are most afraid will happen if you don’t run back to safety. Perhaps you have heard the acronyms for the word Fear:
Fantasy Expectations Appearing Real
False Evidence Appearing Real
The sense of reality that fears carry is solely fueled by emotional investment in these possibilities. Indeed, we can talk ourselves into or out of just about anything.
Most of us have autopilot responses to our fears – a set point of how much uncertainty and fearful possibilities we can tolerate. But guess what? You can change the setting! Just start creating and investing in some positive figments of your imagination and start investing in them emotionally. Dialogue with your fears.
There is also the fine art of pretending to not be afraid – feeling the fear and doing whatever it is you are afraid of anyway. That’s something I learned to do as a young child as the youngest of three siblings. My mother used to tell stories of how she would take us to the doctors to get a shot and the other two would run and hide from the doctor and I would step forward in front of him, puff out my chest, put my hands on my hips and declare, “I’m not afraid!” But the truth was I was just as fearful as they were – it was my way of pretending to be more grown up than I was in hopes that they would accept and include me more.
Other great techniques to stabilize yourself in the presence of fear include such things as breathing into the fear, acknowledging the fear and consciously choosing to override it by creating more favorable imaginings and choosing to maintain your sense of well-being in the presence of doubts and fears. Remember, fears and doubts are just doing their job to help you feel safe inside so they throw up scary images whenever you are overstepping your comfort zone. But here’s the deal – we never know until we try. Look at your life and ask yourself are there things I really want to experience that I am forfeiting for the sake of feeling comfortable? What do I need to do to reassure myself when I get afraid or start second-guessing myself? It’s your choice – keep running for safety or explore and expand and find out what you are capable of doing, having and being. Playing it safe costs you a world of possibilities.
Where Do We Go From Here?
For 8 years now, the Democrats have accused the Republicans of foul play for their obstructionist behavior and lack of support of Obama as president of our land. Tomorrow, the 45th president of the United States will be inaugurated and I confess to being among those who cannot say his name and the title ‘President’ in the same sentence. At least 60 Democratic Senators and Representatives are boycotting the event and huge numbers of Americans plan to protest on Friday.
Even many Republicans are stunned and concerned about having a hot-tempered, loose cannon president who tweets insults to anyone who disagrees with him and wants to move the press out of the White House. Many of us fear a new kind of Mccarthyism or echoes of Hitler in a man who appears to be driven by such an enormous ego that perhaps he loses sight of his responsibility to serve the needs of ALL Americans rather than simply proving his wheeling and dealing prowess boasting that he is the only one who could successfully run his personal empire and the US simultaneously.
Surely, many Republicans are delighted to have ‘control’ of the White House, Senate, House, and Judicial branch of our government. But, there is something more at stake here than ‘winning.’
Who is genuinely listening to the people – to the heart of our concerns? Who is listening to our call for an end to institutionalized racism and sexism and a minimum wage that ensures remaining in poverty? Who genuinely cares enough about these issues that they are willing to fight to fix what is broken in our country even if it means risking being re-elected?
How do we get from where we are to a place where we can truly work together for the highest good of ALL concerned. How do we elevate our consciousness above ‘I’m right and you’re wrong’ to where we are able to see the importance of celebrating our oneness while honoring our differences? When we simply fight against each other because of our differences, we lose all sight of the humanity that joins us together as one. We also fail to see the situation in a much bigger perspective that entertains such thoughts as:
Do You Know the 6 People in Your Marriage?
Have you ever noticed that you and your partner keep having essentially the same fight over and over again? No matter what the topic, whenever you get into an argument, does it always seems to follow the same trajectory and turn out the same way? That’s usually because you are shadowboxing with the wrong person.
Let me introduce you to the six people in your relationship.
#1: You, when things are going along fine between you.
#2: Your partner when things are going along fine between you.
#3: How you see your partner when he/she has pushed one of your emotional buttons.
#4: How your partner sees you when you have pushed one of his/her emotional buttons.
#5: How you see yourself when your partner has pushed one of your emotional buttons.
#6: How your partner sees him/herself when you have pushed one of his/her buttons.
You might have noticed this all boils down to button pushing and how we react to one another when our buttons get pushed. The tricky part of this is most of us are unaware of our internal emotional wiring and how and why we are getting triggered. We prefer to think the problem is always our partner’s fault. So, we end up trying to get our partner to change his/her behavior, rather than working within ourselves to understand what is going on inside of us that is making us angry, defensive, feeling misunderstood, etc. I know, in your case it really IS your partner’s fault! Right?
Here’s the good news – once you change the game from blaming each other because you don’t like what is going on to lovingly using the current discord to decode what is really going on – you are on the road to significantly improving the health and well-being of your relationship. Plus, you get to know yourself much better and to heal some of your own leftover hurts from the past that have been getting in your way. Remember, it’s much easier to righteously blame your partner for every problem that arises, but eventually all that will do is drive you apart seeking seemingly greener pastures. What I am suggesting here instead is embracing the opportunity to transform your relationship into a safe emotional haven for you both.
The following example might help you to recognize the six people in your marriage or partnership in action. Remember, most arguments seem really stupid when you replay them. Meet Robin (#1) and Jack (#2). They are in love, have been dating about a year and are becoming disillusioned by their habitual fights. To make it easier to follow, I’m just going to present explanations of Robin’s behavior and leave Jack’s perspective (#4 and #6) to your imagination. Robin is a graphic designer and marketing expert for one of the big music companies and this is her first serious relationship.
A recent argument went as follows. Everything was just fine between them. Then, Jack was telling Robin that he was planning to develop a new website. His plan was to lay out his vision of what he wanted and then to turn it over to his friend Chip to do the graphic design work that would bring his vision to his website. Robin, incensed that Jack did not even consult her for her graphic design expertise in the development of his plan or invite/ask her to do the graphic design work for him, began spinning reasons in her head about all the things that are “wrong” with Jack, fueling her upset. At this point, he could have been reciting the phone book and she wouldn’t have noticed because she was too busy convincing herself of how “right” she was and how “wrong” Jack was. Her response to him was to condescendingly correct him saying it would be Chip who created the vision – not Jack. Jack objected to Robin’s inference that he was not creative and would have no creative input in the design of his own website. And it escalated from there until Jack, running late for work, headed for the door and Robin was left in disbelief that he could just walk out like that.
Well, here’s the decoded version of what was really happening in the above scene. All was fine between them until Robin (#1) got triggered by several things that she misinterpreted about what Jack way saying. She took offense that here she is a graphic designer and loving partner (#5) and it didn’t occur to Jack to ask for her input. For Robin, this perspective reinforced her belief/fear that Jack didn’t value or respect her professional competence (#3) and that’s the person she was fighting with.
When I asked Robin to focus on the feeling she had when Jack first pushed her button and to trace it backward in her life to where else she felt that way, she immediately recognized this feeling being associated with her relationship with her older sister. A specific image came to mind of how, when playing with their Power Rangers, her sister always took the pink one and never even noticed or cared that Robin would have liked the pink one too. This had become a pattern in her life. So, standing there with Jack, her sensitivity to being left out of consideration by another was skewing and fueling the intensity of her reaction to Jack’s plans. Angry, she asserted her authority (#3) by correcting Jack’s description of turning over his designs to a graphic designer to execute. Jack, with his own sensitivity to believing that Robin didn’t think of him as having any creativity (#4), got angry and disgusted with her, feeling that, as usual, she was making an issue where none existed and headed for the door, wanting to get away from her and this craziness. Robin, outraged at his choice to leave at that moment, feared that he was leaving her forever – another childhood fear triggered by the memory of how her father used to storm out in disgust on her mother and the fear she remembered that he would never return and that it was all her mother’s fault. With Jack gone, she began turning her anger on herself and blaming herself for pushing him away and fearing he would never return. Got the picture? Each one was having an entirely different experience and conversation – doing battle with figments of their imagination.
This is common behavior between all seemingly “normal” people who have not done the decoding work to identify and work through their past baggage that gets triggered in their present relationships. So, what do you do? If you can afford it, I suggest getting a marriage counselor or life coach with a good sense of humor to work with you to approach the situation in a constructive, exploratory, and non-blaming way. Alternatively, try to do this decoding on your own. The place to begin is always to turn your attention inward instead of outward to help you shift from the blame game to truly healing and transforming the quality of your communication. It is important to realize that we each need to man the dashboard of our consciousness and become intimately aware of how we are wired based on past experiences or else it all runs on autopilot and runs amuck as in the example above.
If your partner is not willing to do this together, don’t let that stop you from pursuing your own inner work. He or she simply might not be as convinced or ready as you are. Take the lead. Do your part to take ownership of your own baggage and discover how past hurts are creating current sensitivities. Once you start behaving differently – as in doing a different dance step – your partner will follow along eventually. When six people are fighting, no one is being heard.
If you would like to know more about me and my work, please explore my website here.
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When Critical Illness or Death Catches You By Surprise
An email I received from a reader provoked this article. She wrote “I’m 50 years old, sitting in a hospital room with my 43 year old husband, who is trying to recover from surgery for esophageal cancer. His diagnosis in early March sent me into a tailspin, triggering many unresolved fears that I have around the concept of mortality.” Like so many of us, this woman was thrown into the chaos of dealing with matters of life and death. Unfortunately, we do not do serious illness and death well in this country. Most of us don’t know what to say, what to do, or how to comfort one another. We never learned how because we live in a society that treats death like an invisible elephant in the room. Like a soldier having his first experience under fire in battle, nothing prepares you for the thoughts, feelings, and devouring experience of facing your own brink of death or that of a loved one.
Here are four sanity-saving and powerful keys to coping well when critical illness or death catches you by surprise.
Acknowledge and accept what is happening. Trying to pretend things are other than how they are only postpones dealing with reality. And, the only moment of our lives when we have any choices is the present one. So, it is important to do whatever is necessary to face the truth head on and settle into it so you can decide how to proceed. Pay attention not only to the news you are receiving, but to how you are reacting. Bear witness to what is happening inside yourself. Are you shocked? Angry? Unable to listen? In denial? Wanting to believe this is a lab error? These are all perfectly normal responses, but they do not serve as a solid foundation from which to respond to the situation.
As stated in a previous post:
(For more about acceptance see my previous article on the topic.)
Love yourself. It is not uncommon to be critical of your own ability or lack thereof to face the rigors of critical illness and death — your own or that of a loved one. Don’t hold your behavior up against some fantasy standard of how you “should” be thinking, feeling, and behaving. Stay present in the truth of how it IS for you and love yourself through it. That means not “shoulding” on yourself. Give yourself permission to be a mess mentally, physically, and/or emotionally. It means recognizing that you are in new territory and don’t have a reference point for what is “normal.” Choose to be kind and compassionate towards yourself and others in the situation, and allow yourself to experience your negative thoughts and feelings. When you deny or bottle them up, they build up pressure within you that will inevitably result in either an unattractive outburst or an implosion of negativity into your physical being. Let yourself be however you are. If you are the caregiver, it is easy to feel guilty or selfish for caring about your own comfort and well-being when your loved one is facing a life or death challenge. Remember that you must only give to others from your overflow. When your giving depletes your own needed resources, it is natural to feel resentment, anger, and self-pity. It is not bad to feel these things – they are perfectly normal reflections back to you that you are not taking care of yourself and need to do so. If you find yourself unable to cope – reach out for professional help – someone who can bear witness to your authentic experience and can teach you how to support yourself through it. Seek help from someone with seasoned experience dealing with dying, death, and bereavement.
Don’t attempt to protect others from the truth. When you tell yourself you are protecting another from a devastating truth, actually you are preventing them from having their own experience. This attempt to put a lid on or deny reality, is a choice to try to control the situation rather than allowing it to be as raw and real as it is. This is a decision based on fear. Alternatively, when we are authentic and tell the truth – no matter how unpleasant, we are respecting the other person’s right and ability to cope and are keeping the door of honest, intimate exchange open rather than playing the game of pretending the stakes aren’t as high as they are. Go against everything you have been taught about the great death taboo. Our society has trained us to avoid the “D” word. I say, “Say it outloud! Death is as essential to the human experience as life is – be vulnerable to it. Tell your loved ones what you are thinking and feeling. Talk about your beliefs – what matters to you and what you believe to be true. Give voice to your fears so others can love you through the experience.
Maintain mindfulness. Matters of life and death have a timeless quality, yet involve an endless bombardment of new thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Hold the intention of staying current with what is happening in the moment. We have all kinds of defense mechanisms for dealing with bad news – denial, shock, anger, isolation to name a few. Know that these are normal. Use some good questions to move yourself back into a functional awareness of what is happening. For example, ask yourself “What is the most loving thing I can do for myself in this moment?” or “How do I really feel about this?” “What are my options?” If you are the partner or loved one of the patient, consider asking these questions both of yourself and the patient. If a complicated hospitalization or prolonged illness is involved, keep a daily journal of what is happening for the patient medically, physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. These notations often hold essential keys for better understanding the situation.
We may not have any control over the fact that we are all a phone call away from tragic news. However, we do have the ability to affect how we handle that news. Just do your best – that’s all any of us can really expect of ourselves.
Are You in Charge of What You Think?
In the theater of one’s mind is a multi-dimensional consciousness in which our thoughts point our attention in a particular direction. Neuroscientists have discovered that repetitive thoughts form neural pathways as neurons that fire together get wired together. Thus, the more a particular thought or belief is activated and reinforced, the stronger these neural pathways become and the more automatically they become our “go to” pattern of perceiving. Ever feel like you were in a rut or maybe a little insane for doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results? Maybe there is something to be said for it being “all in your mind” – or at least to some significant degree. The power of human thought is also worth considering in terms of the ongoing influence that society and family beliefs have in molding our point of view as individuals – for better and for worse.
Here’s some good news about this. Neuroscientists use the term “neuroplasticity” to refer to the fact that our brains have the ability to change our synaptic wiring, which is reflected in our point of view. Thus, we have the opportunity to intentionally change our thinking by forming new neural pathways that in turn will change our experiences. Indeed, we have the opportunity to be powerful creators of our own consciousness or to be passive heirs to the autopilot programming of our own history and external authorities.
When we are operating unconsciously on autopilot, we are selectively perceiving our experiences by interpreting them in a way that is in alignment with our existing beliefs, fears, hopes, and dreams. Quite literally, it’s almost impossible for a different point of view to get through to us when we are on autopilot.
Our expressions and behaviors are quite literally self-fulfilling prophesies of our mindset. Over time, when we are running on autopilot, new experiences simply serve to validate our existing way of being in the world – our autopilot responses to future experiences. Thus, when we are not consciously encountering our lives, our experiences simply validate and reinforce our existing beliefs and fail to inform us of new possibilities.
When our perceptions of ourselves, others, and the world we live in are based on little or no conscious awareness and intention to create greater health and well-being, our lives are defined by the autopilot recycling of our attitudes, judgments, illusions, delusions, memories and memory patterns, thoughts, feelings, fears, hopes, and dreams. We exist in a veiled state unable to see what is right in front of us.
Autopilot is not all bad. For example, when we establish healthy habits like eating right, exercising, getting enough sleep, and having a healthy sense of self, we can put them on autopilot and not think about them unless and until we have the need to change them. However, autopilot can get us in trouble if we have negative patterns of thoughts or emotions running us and we aren’t even aware of it. The degree to which we allow our negativity to run on autopilot (without conscious awareness) is the degree to which we are powerless over it.
In contrast to autopilot, when we create through conscious intention, we bring our awareness fresh and new to each present moment and allow our beliefs, fears, hopes, and dreams to change based on new input. This updating process allows new and different thoughts and feelings to emerge, which in turn can result in new behaviors and ways of being and experiencing our lives. We have the ability to consciously direct our thoughts and feelings through the power of intention, thus taking a far more active role in creating, promoting, and allowing more of what we want in our lives. The state of our consciousness forms the bedrock upon which the dramas of our lives unfold. Within the privacy of our own consciousness – in the theater of our mind – we create our own sense of reality, which we inhabit as our role in the great drama of life. It is a complex structure, like a skeletal system for our consciousness.
An old Chinese proverb captures the power of our thinking in shaping our lives:
Sow a thought and reap an act;
Sow an act and reap a habit;
Sow a habit and reap a character;
Sow a character and reap a destiny.
This is true for us as individuals as well as for groups and societies at large. Thoughts persisted in become taken for granted and are often misidentified as the truth because of their familiarity. They become the building blocks and assumptions that serve as the foundation for a point of view that, unchallenged, will invisibly run on autopilot and shape our future thinking.
To step into the process of creating our lives through conscious intention, unencumbered by all of this is to simply be – free and authentic, with a sense of personal accountability and responsibility for our own creations. When our consciousness is present in the moment, we live in our authenticity, encountering and integrating our new experiences, open to change and alteration as appropriate. There becomes a fluidity and aliveness to our experiences rather than a rote repetition of the past. Even our deepest, most treasured beliefs no longer define who we are. We let go of our story, as we awaken to the magnificence of living more consciously in each moment. However, the price of admission is to let go of the need to be ‘right’ in a fixed point of view and to move fluidly through life, open to change and evolving one’s point of view.
Photo Credit: Creative Commons