Archive for category: Consciousness/Thriving

We all have sensitivities to the behaviors of others and it can be helpful to look below the surface of that dynamic. Our automatic response is generally to blame and judge the other person and then to attempt to get them to change their behavior. Why? Because we perceive their behavior to be the source of our irritation or upset. We want to decrease or eliminate our distress and the obvious solution seems to be to get them to stop doing what irritates us.

But wait – while this might be an effective short-term solution, it doesn’t deal with the fact that we have the hot button in the first place. Usually these sensitivities point to something much deeper in our psyche that has little to do with the situation at hand.

Here’s an example. I tend to get extremely irritated by the “customer service” and/or technical support telephone experience. I find myself talking back at the mechanical voice that tells me how important my call is to the company and I get increasingly irritated by the call routing process of “press 1 for this and 2 for that.” There never seems to be an option for what I am calling about and I just want to talk to a human being who cares about my concern and can help me. By the time I finally reach someone, I’m often so upset that I feel the need to tell them so before getting down to business which simply starts us off on the wrong foot. Granted, in my perfect world, customer service and technical support would be efficient and effective in responding to the customer’s needs in a timely fashion. But, in reality they seldom are. So, of what use is it for me to get upset? Why don’t I just take a deep breath when I need to call for help, accept the reality that it will take more time than I would like, and be grateful that someone will eventually help me? Can you even begin to imagine how hard I am on myself when I am inefficient or ineffective? Inside of me, there is this mini-kingdom of inner torment that generates great billowing clouds of negativity when I encounter inefficiency and ineffectiveness in myself and others. When someone honks on that button, guess what? It’s not their fault! It’s simply a reminder to me that I need to get to work desensitizing myself in that particular area.

So, what are your buttons? Ask yourself – are you a completely mellow-mannered person or do you have hot spots that spew anger when provoked? Does it happen when you are impatient? When someone cuts you off driving? When someone repeatedly interrupts or talks over you? When someone is unkind, inconsiderate, mean, petty, or small-minded? What sets you off?

Next time someone pushes your button, look inward instead of outward for the key to restoring your inner peace. Even if you can’t stop yourself from reacting in the moment, take the time after the fact to explore your inner territory. What assumptions are you making about how people or the world should be?

When I explored my issues with customer service experiences, I discovered that I really did believe that customer service systems and representatives should always be efficient and effective. So, the problem I experienced was not that they lacked these characteristics, but that I was unwilling to accept this reality. We live in a very imperfect world where human behavior is concerned. When we rage against the imperfections, we add more negativity to the mix. I am not suggesting that we simply play victim to the injustices and imperfections we experience with each other. Rather, we need to first and foremost be responsible and accountable for our own contribution – to our own reactions. If we are not inclined to raise public awareness about the issue at hand by proposing solutions and seeking momentum to bring about change, then our job is to tend our own garden. For my little drama this means reminding myself that the experience is likely to be more time-consuming than I would like and choosing to be as efficient and courteous as I can be to improve my chances of having a better experience. I also, put the phone on speaker and play computer solitaire while I wait – that helps a lot.

So, next time someone pushes your button, consider trying the following techniques to restore your inner peace:

• Count to ten before you react.

• If you must react, make sure your response is productive and does not add fuel to the fire.

• Choose to focus inwardly on your own consciousness rather than outwardly on the other person and their behavior.

• Ask yourself what beliefs or assumptions you hold that are in conflict with your experience and seek a more reality-based perspective.

• Remind yourself that you are an active participant/contributor to the quality of experience you are having.

• Seek to master skills in dealing with those parts of your experience that aren’t to your liking in a way that serves the highest good of all concerned.

Imagine how much nicer this world would be if we each did our part to desensitize our anger buttons!

Many of us hold in our hearts the desire for, or perhaps even the memory of, a Thanksgiving gathering joyfully sharing a feast of plenty with family and friends where everyone is happy like in the Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving image entitled, “Freedom from Want.” Unfortunately, reality often fails to measure up to this ideal. Some of us find ourselves dreading a family holiday gathering where we anticipate being miserably caught in a reenactment of the dysfunctions of our childhood family gatherings. Others, yearning to be with familiar faces and traditions, find themselves adrift far from home either alone or as a guest, perhaps feelings like an outsider, at someone else’s table with unfamiliar traditions.

If you anticipate a Thanksgiving that will fall short of your desires, you are sure to have that experience. This is especially true if your imaginings are focused on the menu and who will or will not be there. If, on the other hand, you focus on the spirit of thanksgiving, which is about being grateful then your focus turns inward to where you have a choice about how you experience whatever your holiday circumstances might be.

What I am suggesting here isn’t a Pollyanna approach, but rather a radical form of gratitude that just might give you a whole new and delightful experience as a powerful creator of your own experience and not the victim of circumstances or the behaviors of others. Be patient. This is a process not a one time fix it solution.

Here’s an example. Let’s say you are spending Thanksgiving with your family and dreading all their questions and judgments about what you are doing with your life because you know your truth will never garner their approval. How have you handled this in the past? Perhaps by creating your best spin on what’s going on with you in advance, or maybe by drinking too much, or physically and/or emotionally isolating yourself, or getting angry, or some other creative attempt to protect yourself from having to feel the pain of their disapproval. What if, instead of dreading their disapproval, you welcomed it as an opportunity to heal the part of you that somehow buys into their disapproval? Think of it as a tug of war that you have the power to dissolve by releasing the tension on your end of the rope.

The key to this approach is to change your own point of view on the situation. Instead of thinking they are wrong and you are being picked on, consider the possibility that this experience is absolutely perfect for you to learn some importantly needed lesson in your life. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to let them have their disapproval of you while being emotionally free of their opinions? How sweet would that be!

What I am proposing here is not easy, but it works. Here are 6 keys to how you can use radical transformational gratitude to be at the cause rather than at the effect of your own experience in any situation.

1. Accept the situation as it is without trying to change it. Imagine that you are establishing a brand new neural pattern in your brain (which you are) so that you can view the situation in an entirely new way, which in turn will give you a different way of experiencing it. So, before gathering with your family, pay attention to your self-talk. Play a game with yourself to identify all the ways that you experience your resistance and dread.

2. Listen to your self-talk and pay attention to your feelings. Notice your expectations (thoughts, and feelings) that are based on the belief that it’s going to be the same old awful experience as in the past.

3. Make a list of all the ways you identify in Step 2. For each one, create a forgiveness statement such as the three following examples:
• I forgive myself for judging myself as the black sheep of the family.
• I forgive myself for judging myself for hating my father for being so critical of me.
• I forgive myself for judging myself for judging my family for rejecting me.
Be as specific as possible in capturing the nature of the disconnect between you and your family. Notice that what you are forgiving is any judgment that you have been creating towards yourself or others. Keep this list handy during your family visit and run these forgiveness statements through your brain whenever you get caught in the old pattern.

4. Play detective with yourself to identify your emotional hook. Ask yourself some of the following questions and create and probe some of your own questions until you find a deeply resonant ‘aha’ within you indicating that you have identified your deeper truth in this situation:
• What’s my emotional payoff in the way I have been experiencing this situation?
• What is the nature of my pain and suffering in this situation?
• What do I really want to be true here and what might I do to create, promote, and allow more of what I want without making others wrong?
With each answer you get, go deeper by asking ‘what’s underneath that?’

5. Close your eyes and do the following gratitude process. One by one, call forward each person you have held responsible for your unhappiness – including yourself. Breathe deeply into your heart and imagine that you are intentionally sending love from your heart to this other person. Looking into their eyes, say ‘My happiness is not dependent upon your approval. I love you. God bless you. Peace, be still.’

6. Assume that this situation is for you and not against you and be grateful that it has presented you with the opportunity to deepen your friendship with yourself.

Notice that the unpleasant situation that you were facing was not something ‘bad’ but rather a perfect opportunity and steppingstone for you to improve your mental and emotional health and wellbeing. Now that’s something to be grateful for!

Happy holidays, everyone.

Divorce and what leads up to it are not tidy and polite affairs.  The children who bear witness to the demise of their parents’ marriage inevitably get wounded – some very deeply and invisibly at first.   No matter how old a child is when his/her parents’ divorce occurs, the child learns a life lesson about the shadow side of love and its potential impermanence.  Learning this lesson through the end of your parents’ marriage and perhaps the subsequent re-partnering of either or both parents, is confusing at best and life-threatening for young children who are dependent upon their parents for their very survival.

When we fall in love and marry, many of us have stars in our eyes and fantasize about living happily ever after.  Then reality sets in and tests our ability to fulfill our vows to love, honor and cherish each other through the trials and triumphs of life.  If we lived in a perfect world, love would last and be stronger than all the challenges that tear us apart.   In reality, maintaining a loving relationship takes a lot of commitment, honesty, and vulnerability.  It’s not for the faint of heart.

As a child of divorce, a life coach, and an interfaith minister who officiates at many weddings, I do not think that divorce, in and of itself, is a bad thing.  In fact, I wish my own parents had divorced much earlier than they did which would have spared us from living in a cold war of mixed messages at home that wore a public mask of a perfect family.

When a parent leaves, so does a part of the child – we often hide the vulnerable and innocent parts of ourself to avoid dealing with our feelings and needs.  We lack the personal resources to cope and our parents are too busy fighting, so most of us are left with the options of either expressing or repressing our emotions and fears.  Hiding them is usually a safer bet.

These days most parents are too busy to be as attentive as their child(ren) need them to be when the family is falling apart and the kids are too often left to fend for themselves.  However, this is a crucial time for a child.  No matter how young or grown a child of divorce is, he or she has probably internalized some deep lessons that may remain as an unconscious filter through which he or she experience the rest of their life unless and until becoming aware of those messages and developing a realistic and healthy understanding of  the matter.  The two most dominant messages that kids of divorce internalize are believing that their parents’ divorce is somehow their fault and that love is conditional and might not last.  Let’s take a closer look at both of these messages.

Younger children tend to be more susceptible to thinking the divorce is their fault.  “If only I hadn’t … then Mommy and Daddy would still be together” is what many kids tell themselves.  Some try to “fix” the situation by being on good behavior, imagining that doing so will be all that is needed to bring the parents back together so they can live happily ever after as a family.  Even after the parents are officially divorced and are living separately, many children fantasize about what they can do to get their family back together again. For a child who thinks his or her bad behavior is responsible for the parents splitting up, it makes sense that they think their good behavior might reunite them and that their bad behavior might stave off a new suitor.

The second dark message many children of divorce hear is that love is conditional and does not last.   ‘You loved my Mommy or Daddy, then he/she did something you didn’t like and now you are divorced.  I better be careful or you’ll divorce me too.” We want our children to believe that our love for them is unconditional, but divorcing their other parent gives them a mixed message.

When we internalize the message that love doesn’t last, we learn to protect ourselves from getting hurt by not getting too close to anyone.  We may evolve a survival strategy of avoiding intimacy – especially emotional intimacy as a way to avoid the vulnerability of ever feeling so powerless and devastated again.  We may keep to ourselves or choose to use other people without actually bonding with them.

What can parents do to help their children thrive rather than hide when the family is breaking apart?

• First, don’t assume that reassuring your child that you love him/her is enough.

• Know that no matter how careful you might have been not to fight in front of the children, they saw and heard and felt their family falling apart and had no personal resources to do anything about it.

• Know that no matter whether they act out or put a smile on their face, their world is falling apart too.

• Take lots of time with them to help them draw out their deeper feelings and needs. Talk to them. Listen deeply. Use forms of creative expression to draw out their deeper truth. Go for counseling together. Reach out to their teachers and guidance counselors to help you watch for signs of distress. Check out books and websites on the topic.

• Keep the lines of communication with each child strong and open on a daily basis and keep a loving connection with them throughout their adulthood. Make a commitment with your X to both do this for each child and to not interfere with each other doing so.

• If the child acts out, make sure that your reaction communicates that your love is not conditional based on their behavior – i.e. “I love you and will always love you, but I will not accept that behavior.”

• Never complain to the child about the other parent.

• Never let them see or hear your judgment of the other parent. For the sake of the children, please play nice with your X when coordinating care and decisions regarding the children.

These days most parents are too busy to be as attentive as their child(ren) need them to be when the family is falling apart and the kids are too often left to fend for themselves.  The health and well-being of your children is your responsibility until they are able to take care of themselves.  Pay attention and be sure they feel your love no matter what.

Trust is an interesting concept — and far more exciting as an action. Trusting yourself involves the willingness and confidence to rely on your own integrity, abilities, and character to meet the challenges of a particular experience, or all of life for that matter. For me, trust is not only a psychological factor, but has a spiritual component as well because God is very much a part of my worldview.

I believe that the ultimate gamble with the greatest potential gain in life is to trust yourself and that in so doing, you gain a level of freedom, authenticity, and peace that is unreachable any other way. Trust requires living in your own skin, recognizing your own authority as the very best arbiter of what is for you and what is not. We may have learned as children to trust and rely upon the authority of others to tell us what to do and when to do it. But there is a profound and authentic inner voice that lies dormant within us all until we start to listen to it and recognize its ability to express our deepest truth and to guide us with the most precise discernment of what will serve our highest good — whether we like it or not. Some call this their “inner” or “true” self, and some suggest this is the spark of the divine that resides in each of us. Either way, just as with physical exercise we are trained to strengthen our core muscles, we must strengthen this core self as well by exercising its voice. That’s how we learn to trust ourselves. Otherwise, we remain at the effect of external sources of authority and simply react to them, usually with the intention of getting their approval or affecting their perception of us in some way.

In my second doctoral dissertation, I focused on the topic of trust because I had become profoundly aware of the fact that whenever I felt out of balance, the bottom line was that I wasn’t trusting myself. As I explored the internal wiring of my consciousness, I discovered something remarkable — my lack of self-trust was so fundamental to my way of being that I was living my life built upon the intention of avoiding pain and suffering. I knew that it was fairly normal to minimize our distress, but my behavior was an all-encompassing way of being whereby I sought to anticipate and avoid perceived sources of suffering.

There was an ironic and fundamental flaw in my approach. In my effort to achieve greater happiness by avoiding pain and suffering, I was actually attracting them to me by focusing upon them rather than on the happiness I sought. I was equating happiness with an absence of pain. In fact, our minds act like great magnets attracting to us what we focus upon, which in turn makes our intentions and focal points self-fulfilling prophecies.

Inherent in my approach was the fact that I neither trusted myself nor God, and so I played God by attempting to write the script of my life. I recognized this as the most pivotal shift I needed to make in my consciousness to improve my physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being, and I wanted the joy, ease, grace, and abundance that it would bring forth in my life.

So, what about you?

Do you trust yourself?

Do you tend to live at the effect of people and events outside yourself?

Or, alternatively, do you experience yourself as capable of living your life with all its unanticipated twists and turns?

Here are three keys that really helped me make this wonderful transformation of my inner experience. First, I practiced keeping my consciousness focused in the present moment until that became a good habit. This replaced my previous habit of worrying so much about the future. It empowered me to take appropriate action in the only time frame that affords us that opportunity — the present.

Secondly, I observed myself and developed a list of my physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual experiences and expressions during the presence or absence of trust in my consciousness. Creating this list helped me to recognize what it looks like and feels like to be trusting — to put flesh on the bones of the concept of trust. For example, I noticed that when I was experiencing trust, I was physically relaxed, comfortable, open, with fluid and graceful movements. In contrast, when lacking trust, I became rigid, tense, stressed, and pushed others away. Mentally, I was not feeling attached to my point of view, worrying, judging others, or avoiding anything. Instead, I was paying attention to what was present and cooperating with it. Emotionally, trust allowed me to go with the flow, confident that I could meet whatever came my way. This was an enormous contrast to my previous experience of anger, fear, agitation, resistance to whatever I did not like, and doubting my ability to be happy in life. Spiritually, trust brought an attunement to the highest good of all concerned and the desire to surrender to “God’s way” rather than demanding “my way.” Rather than playing God, I learned to recognize God’s wisdom and presence in my life.

Finally, I practiced, practiced, and practiced doing more of the things that brought greater trust, and breaking the habit of doing those that did not. I came to believe that there is nothing “wrong” that I have to try to fix. I discovered that trusting is about letting go of “should”s, “have to”s, demands, expectations, fears, illusions, and delusions. The more I surrendered into trust, the more it became my automatic response. Rather than closing down and retreating in response to pain and suffering, I built skills in experiencing them and learning from them. This built my openness and trust that God’s infinite wisdom is present at all times — not just in the experiences that I like.

Each February, we are bombarded by commercial proddings to prove our love to our sweetheart with the obligatory greeting card, roses, and candy.  For some, the ante is far more expensive and raises year after year.  I think the really lucky sweethearts are those who don’t buy into this external pressure, but rather find little ways to express the love they feel inside for their sweetheart and other loved ones as a way of life.

I’m the kind of person who loves spontaneous gestures of affection – a phone call from a friend who is missing me, or a beautiful bouquet of flowers on a random day from my partner just because he knows I will be delighted.  Don’t give me an obligatory diamond bracelet.  I’d much rather you make it a priority to share quality time together on a regular basis.  Stoke the flame of our love and friendship – invest in our relationship by being a caring and thoughtful partner and communicating your love and needs.  No amount of money spent can do a better job of warming the cockles of my heart.

It is so easy to be consumed by to do lists, work, and other activities and not have much left for those you claim to love the most.  It takes intentional effort in such a complex and busy world to make the expression of your love a priority.

Rather than trying to follow the commercial prescription of how to be a good Valentine, try something new this year.  Make a list of the people you love and treasure most in your life and take the time to think about what gift of love would be most meaningful to each of them.  Do you have an aging parent or dying friend who might treasure some time with you?  Perhaps you have a boss who has been a wonderful mentor and you would like to say “thank you.”  Who has given you your most treasured gifts of friendship and love?  Do they know how much they mean to you?  Don’t make this a one time project, but rather set the intention to improve the quality of your relationships by injecting more of your love into them on an ongoing basis.

There are many ways to say I love you.  The best ones rise out of simply paying attention and allowing creative expressions to emerge from your heart.  The very best ones touch the other person’s heart – the gift is authentically received.  Here’s one of my favorite expressions of “I love you” that I ever experienced.

Hide The Lizard

I don’t recall how the game began.  But, I do remember finding the lizard.  For several of my mother’s final years, we indulged in a few weeks of beachfront July living on the Jersey shore where we had both vacationed as children.  One late afternoon, walking up the beach to the cottage, my feet kicked up a tiny rainbow colored plastic lizard in the sand.  With no visible potential child owner in sight, the inner child in me delighted in my newfound treasure and I accelerated my pace up to the house to show my mother.

After returning to our year round home in a renovated barn in the Hudson Valley of New York, the lizard found its first home with us on a small wooden ledge on the first floor.  At the time, my mother’s mobility was in a period of marked decline and I took on more and more simple daily activities to compensate as seamlessly as possible.  I didn’t want her to do without anything that mattered to her that she could no longer do for herself.  But, she was a proud woman, and as with many of us facing physical decline, it was important to her not to be any more of a burden than necessary.  While, in my snarkiest of moods, I did feel burdened and impatient, mostly, it was a privilege to care for her.  Reluctance to let me know her needs and desires actually made things a bit more challenging for me – not only did I have the new activities to do but, I had to first figure out what they were through careful observation.

There are many ways to show someone your love.  Helping my mom with her daily activities was one, but far more important, was tending to her emotions and sense of self-worth and dignity.  Little things matter a lot for someone who is facing a loss of autonomy.  Hide the Lizard was a spontaneous response to being aware of this with my mom.  It was a game that came into existence and survived simply to say, “I love you very, very much.”

And so, Hide the Lizard was born.  One of us would hide it somewhere in plain sight on the first floor of our home and notify the other that it was her turn to find it.  Sometimes it would be uncanny how something inside you would guide you right to the lizard.  Other times, it might take days at feeling increasingly inept at this invented game while being ever more determined to find the damn lizard, knowing it was right out in plain sight.  Finding it always brought triumphant delight, shortly followed by the challenge of finding a cleaver new home for the lizard.  We giggled, we felt smug when we stumped each other, and thus we comingled our hearts.

There are many ways to say I love you.

I wish you the joy of abundantly expressing your love this Valentine’s Day and every day.