What Are You Afraid Of?

If someone were to ask you, “What are you afraid of?”

What would you answer? Is it really that clear ... that you can say it in a few short words ... what you fear? For most no ... it is not that clear.

The oddity of the problem is most of our fear(s) are bound up in our imagination.

How We Think.

My fear is based on how I imagine things, people or situations to be. Not how they actually are. Those fears keep me frozen in my present, chained to my past and never free to move into my future.

Paraphrased from A Course in Miracles, A miracle releases the past in the present and gives us back our future. (The Text: #13 ... from the 50 Principles of Miracles) ... the oddity is that this is also the working definition of the therapeutic process and the function of Grief.

To be able to imagine is such a powerful ability. That power alone is the one that places us in a place where we are, in theory at least, the dominant species. If you look around you will see all the things that are here on the face of this planet that we have placed here ourselves. Then remember, that before any of them could be made manifest, someone had to imagine them.

But if our power to imagine is not coupled with wisdom, understanding and care ... the knowledge and experience gleaned from dealing with life on life’s terms and satisfying our own basic needs at the same time ... then our imagination can become a very cruel task master. It is the difference between Fire in the Hearth and Fire in the Wild.

It is how we project those fears, memories and feelings forward from our past into our future that skews how we imagine life to be. Then it becomes, what is up there that is the problem ... when in fact it is what is back there that simply needs to be resolved. It really boils down to, I am too afraid to go up there because IT might be waiting up there for me.

The Truth of the Matter Is

The unresolved issues of the past

Haunts and Blemishes

My appreciation

Of the possibility(s) of my future!

I can do this differently

But Only If I Choose

On Appreciating Deeper Processes: A Newfound Place

EXPERIENCE has taught us that in this process of simply standing back and looking again, and sometimes again and again, we've come to see the value of a relationship with a Higher Power.

With, We and Us
The premise that underlies understanding Spirit 

A Higher Power of our understanding, by the way.

For most, as this relationship matures from learning to trust at least one other living breathing person to appreciating the grandeur of God’s design, this newfound place of trust and appreciation in us becomes that stance in our consciousness behind which our experience is acknowledged for ‘what is’, without any thought of consequence or biased eye.

It just is . . . no hidden agenda!

This newfound place within us is simply fair witness to our own humanity.

A place for reality to be as it is and not to be how we need it to be.

Life on Life’s Terms.

On Appreciating Deeper Processes: The Process

EXPERIENCE has taught us that throughout this process of developing a healthy spiritual, mental, physical and emotional direction for ourselves (recovery), we have been involved with a quieter undercurrent of examin¬ing the value of stepping outside of ourselves and our beliefs and their related support systems and re-perceiving some of the problems we are facing or have faced.

Seeing things differently has the power to transform situations.

Simple fact:

Things change as they are seen differently,

Not necessarily because we are busy altering circumstance.

On Appreciating Deeper Processes Sadness

EXPERIENCE has taught us that our sadness is the key part of our grieving-healing process.

Life has only one constant and that is change. All change involves a giving up, a loss and that always requires grieving.
Experiencing our sadness is about our ability to move from the old to the new, from loss to gain, from relationships past to new intimacies and not drag along the emotional baggage.
All recovery is about grieving, because all recovery is about dealing with loss.

Grief fuels the forward movement in our lives.

On Seeing Simple Truths

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

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

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

Psychic shadow boxing

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

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

So it seems that life is something that happens to you

While you are busy thinking that you are doing something else.

What Can I Do Differently To Make My Life A Better Place To Be?

When an individual chooses independence over interdependence and relationship(s) that person becomes a danger or a threat to everyone around them. Especially to those who are within this individual’s range of affect.

Those that are close by ... within the range of affect ... will object at being manipulated or managed by the independent soul. Independence is a defensive posture one develops to protect them from a world they thought would destroy them. It is a given that Authority is the natural extrapolation of this independence posture and is just another way of saying Might Makes Right. Authority is the excuse used by those who think they are strong to control the weak. With the business of Interdependence comes the nature of Respect. They go hand in hand. It can’t work any other way. Interdependence cannot exist without Respect but Respect can exist without Interdependence: 1) Most of us Respect the system we all work within even if we all don’t acknowledge it. 2) In our system the value “of” the individual is weighed against the value “to” the system or better said, “what can he or she do ... what can they contribute” and not “who they are.” 3) Thus, many if not all of us, are in some way sacrificed in some form to the greater good of the system of all concerned. 4) When in fact it should be exactly the other way around.

This inversion/reversal of reality gives advantage to those who appear to be stronger and this is what lays behind every struggle humanity has had with itself since time began ... The Truth of the Matter is ... “Who I am,” is far more important than “what I can do ...” Hold on to that thought for a week or two ... repeat it to yourself several times a day ... pray about it if you like and if you are going to take the time to pray look for and expect an answer ... or meditate on it ... write about it ... Then notice just how you ... yourself ... are caught up in this inner subterfuge ... either as a willing or unwilling participant ... Here is the question you ask yourself and the universe.

What Can I Do Differently To Make My Life A Better Place To Be? A Place Where I am No Longer Slave To A System I Never Created But I Have Enabled?

Thought For The Week

Thought For The Week

Spirit Without Science is Blind

 

But

 

Science Without Spirit is Lame.

 

Taken and adapted from Albert Enstein

Willing To Be Free

If you are willing to be free, then the Pattern you are living and working in conjunction with a Higher Power, will reveal freedom to you.

IT may come in strange ways from places you would least expect it, but it will be shown to you.

IT will be yours to act on and you will know what to do and how to do IT, probably even where to do IT; when to do IT is always left up to you. You may not like what is revealed, but there IT will be, staring back at you, waiting for you to do something with IT.

An imprisoning idea is any idea that inhibits your enjoyment of your abundance and or the expression of your creativity or the full experience of God's joy.

Your abundance, or the expression of your creativity, or the full experience of God’s joy, may seem different, but their effect is the same.


taken from Into the Light

1 Control Is Bred In Fear

One must be in control of all interactions, feelings and personal behaviour at all times. This is the primary tenant for all systems that are managed by covert and dysfunctional rules.

Control is a defensive strategy. The Strategy has gone awry … it has missed the mark … but … if it is all that I have then I will use it … if I use it then it will become my habit … as it becomes my habit, I will call it normal … if it becomes the working definition of my normal then I will hope against hope that my way works because, and here is the important part, I am not about to try anyone else’s way or use anyone else’s rules.

This rule is supposed to protect me/us from the shame … the origin of this shame is actually from my deeper sense of a lost and ruptured self. But, here is why the strategy of control really can’t work …

My effort with control is to attempt to stop all the outside influences from being themselves and reminding or triggering me into my sense of self-rupture.

I want to sense being both feeling safe and secure.

There is a deep need from within me to feel that way. My attempts to do so tend to elude me no matter how hard I try or for that matter how often I try with the misbegotten tools I have acquired.

I want to both feel safe and feel better; but my very effort to do so defeats me every time I try.

The problem is that once you enter into the process of controlling your feelings, your actions, controlling what the family can and can’t do, how the office is going to be run etc … then all spontaneity is lost with the system.

Know this: It is a shame evoking process to attempt to protect you from shame via control.

It sort of follows the bumper sticker idea of planning your spontaneity Is Not A Fun Thing To Do, it can be an interesting pass-time to enter into but not fun!

Control really does not serve a practical function. The function it does serve really is an attempt to prevent from happening what cannot be prevented. It is all about the Ghosts of Christmas Past, and it comes from trying to find a way to interact with life without coming out of hiding and being real.

Control has an addictive quality to it.

In the application of the facility called control, it gives the beholder a sense of power; there seems to be a sort of surreal sense of predictability and security that wants to spin off from the situation as the control is applied. It gives the beholder a high. Not that it ever really works for extended periods of time, it doesn’t.

It is just there and seemingly wants to jump in to the ring and make us feel better ― temporarily. Did you hear just how close that one came to actually doing something for us and still missed the mark?

Again as mentioned before, temporarily, is the key word here ― only temporarily!

Controlling all … is in and of itself … a form of severe disability of the will.

It has some of the same qualities as a shark feeding proudly upon itself … in frenzy … Just Look What I Can Do it says taking another mouth full of self … not realizing that this is a form of a disease and if left to its own devices … over time … will consume the beholder.

This is pointed out in Lesley Farber’s book Ways of the Will… the disabled Will wants to will away what cannot be willed away … all life’s little twists and turns and its total unpredictabil¬ity (no matter who the guru is that says he or she can actually support you in making them go away).

It is a key and a clue to what it was really like to be a kid at your house …

Know this: Control is bred in fear … no other place … just fear. Once formed it drives us to avoid the fear like the plague … Control is our sword and shield … if it is all we think we have … then that is all we can do.