December 28, 2008

The Transformational Effects Of Remorse

Posted by Amyra under Addictions, Ego, Gratitude, Healing, Inner Peace, Internal Conflicts, Remorse, Responsibility, Self-Judgements, Shame
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In my work as an addiction counsellor, I often encounter issues of shame behind substance abuse.  The influence of shame on self-destructive habits looks something like this:

A person grew up with a belief that he is unworthy, damaged or a bad person.  He struggles with the pain and fear generated by this underlying belief and attempts to invalidate the belief through his actions and behaviours.  At the same time, because he has not reconciled his fear of this belief, he tends to perpetuate acts that substantiate the belief.

In other words, he is driven to prove this belief wrong (he does not want to believe it is true), and yet he does hold the belief to be true which makes him create opportunities to behave as if he is unworthy or a bad person – each action reinforcing in him that he is indeed unworthy or a bad person and widening the gap between what he wants to belief about himself and what the evidence is showing him.  This internal conflict creates a great deal of pain.  Drugs and alcohol usually come in as a coping strategy to take away this pain.

In recovery, the process begins with facing the truth of what a person’s life has become, taking responsibility for her role in creating the painful situations she now faces as she takes stock of her past actions, and linking certain patterns to her behaviours.  Without the effects of drugs and alcohol, she now feels the true intensity of her emotional pains.  The job of a counsellor is to help the client heal these pains and reconcile her relationship with herself.

How do you reconcile the fear that you are a bad person when the evidence is stacking up against you?

First of all, you need to stop the behaviours that reinforce that you are a bad person; you must stop acting as if you are a bad person.  Having the awareness of your patterns and tendencies, it is now in your power to clean up your actions.  As you clean up your actions and heal the effects of your past actions, you begin to redeem yourself in your own eyes and move away from believing that you are a bad person.

But merely changing your behaviours isn’t enough.  If you haven’t reconciled the pains in you, in time you will return to behaving in your old ways.  You must feel the remorse of your actions and move through a process of reconciling it within yourself.

What does this reconciliation look like?

A pain starts with a judgement we hold about ourselves as a result of something we have done or failed to do.  Feel the remorse – the shame, guilt and regret – until the energy moves and changes to an openness where you’re able to see the pain in a new light.  In this new energy, you’re able to move into forgiveness and eventually into gratitude as you gain an appreciation of the higher purpose of your pain.

This is a simplified description of the process of reconciliation as there is no formula for everyone and everytime – it simply describes the general movement of the process.  It is not a process that can be forced or rushed.  The remorse needs to be felt and understood emotionally before we can reconcile with it.

There is tremendous power in remorse.  If we allow ourselves to experience it properly, it cleanses us of who we’ve thought we were and enable us to move forward in our lives with a renewed sense of self.  Remorse breaks down the resistance we hold inside us which prevents us from growing.  It relaxes our ego’s hold on us and fills us with a sense of humbleness which grows into a spiritual awareness as we begin to realise that our actions have a domino effect on the entire world.  As we follow the effects of the power of our actions we find that it comes back to us in a complete circle of cause and effect, and this realisation can put the power back into our hands – the power to change and affect our world positively.

Waterfall Union

 

October 18, 2008

Boredom: A Golden Door Or Block?

Posted by Amyra under Addictions, Boredom, Fear of Success, Full Immersion, Passion, Presence, Unworthiness
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In my work to help people get off drugs and alcohol, I keep hearing “boredom” cited as a reason for substance abuse.  A lot of self-destructive behaviours are motivated by boredom – when life seems meaningless and no longer interesting, we seek out ways to inject more fun, danger, madness into our lives. 

Why do our lives become so boring?  The question we need to ask first is, why do we become bored with life? 

Human beings by nature seek stimulation, because we seek to grow.  Without stimulation, there can be no growth.  Stimulation implies movement, and growth is a movement.  Our deepest core is made up of a vibrant and creative energy that is alive all the time.  This is the core of who we really are.  Stagnation of any kind dampens our spirit and kills the passion in us.  We feel bored so we seek new experiences and in the process we enrich our lives and grow through the experiences. 

Life does not always become interesting for you, you have to look for the interesting bits.  And when you do look, you will likely discover an abundance of those bits.  One of the marvels of life is that we can make it the way we choose – if we look at it as boring, we will find evidence of it being boring; if we look at it as a treasure map and look enthusiastically for the treasures, we will find them. 

Life has the potential to be interesting, stimulating, exciting, enriching and fun.  Since our deepest being is also all of those, we only need to open our hearts and bridge to that potential.  When life seems boring, we are to push past that boredom and get to joy and beauty.  Boredom is often an illusion. 

A lot of people give up too quickly when faced with boredom.  They resign to the idea that life cannot be any more interesting, so they turn to using drugs.  Drugs is a quick fix.  But when the drugs wear off, the boredom is still there.  So it drives them to take more drugs to get more excitement, but that excitement is an illusion.  We can only trick ourselves momentarily and we quickly realise this, so we also quickly become addicted to drugs to maintain that illusion. 

People in recovery from drug addiction often start discovering that life can be exciting without drugs.  One of the most rewarding aspects of my work is to facilitate that process and witness someone’s discovery of joy when they peel the layers of their existence.  Often, that discovery comes when they allow themselves to slow down and deepen into the moment – which means becoming more present in the experience. 

Sometimes, after we’ve deepened into an experience, we realise that it really isn’t for us and then we opt for something else.  But if we don’t give ourselves the chance to find out, we might miss out on what might be an enriching experience.  Seek to deepen rather than to constantly move laterally.  Doing the latter tends to leave a trail of unfinished projects and a less-than-fulfilling life.  When we give ourselves the chance to find out more about an experience we are already in, we’re more likely to create more joy in our lives.  Even if an experience isn’t good for us, we’d only find the clarity to make changes after we’ve deepened into it. 

The word “flat” is sometimes used to imply boredom.  It’s an apt description because boredom makes our existence feel like a flat sheet that lies in front of us.  It is not that our existence has become flat, it’s that we have been cruising along life with a flat attitude – just passing time and not deepening into our experience.  If we gave ourselves the chance to find out by participating fully in life, looking beyond the apparent boredom, we would open a door which opens to more doors exponentially. 

Boredom a resistance to feeling

Sometimes boredom is a resistance to feeling uncomfortable feelings.  In terms of resistance, boredom falls into the same category as numbness (when we cannot feel), detachment and laziness.  If we feel bored, we’d want to stop what it is we’re doing and do something else, so we don’t stay in one place long enough to experience what is going to come.  Fear of experiencing discomfort should we stayed long enough can motivate us to manufacture boredom to get us to escape from feeling that discomfort.  Boredom can gives us the excuse to not participate in life. 

We may also manufacture boredom as a defence against feeling good feelings.  If we have a fear of success or grapple with feelings of unworthiness, the onset of opening up to a space of expansiveness where positive feelings and outcomes are possible can be a scary prospect.  So we put a block to it to stop ourselves from going into that space, and we manifest among other things boredom.  When we feel boredom, we can then tell ourselves that we’ve hit a wall and so we need to change our route. 

People who are addicted to drugs are prone to feeling bored easily (or people who get bored easily often become addicted to drugs).  In recovery, the responsible approach is to be honest about the emotions we feel and raise our awareness around our behaviours.  We stay with what is happening inside of us, address our conflicts and grieve our losses.  Drugs and alcohol allow us to escape from all these processes which are very scary to a lot of people, so instead of confronting what is happening, they create boredom to get out of it.  (This, of course, is often done without their conscious awareness – our fears often play out from the depths of our psyche.)          

In this case, we would stop feeling bored easily once the real issues are dealt with, our inner conflicts reconciled and our pains healed.  Boredom would no longer have a place in our lives, and suddenly, life becomes a whole lot more interesting – in a more stable, calmer way. 

Ultimately, passion and excitement are found within us.  We may seek something outside of us to feel stimulated but we can feel stimulated whether or not we encounter anything new in our external world.  When we are able to feel inspired and joyful without any external stimulus, our behaviours change to become more loving and self-loving.  Our external world instantly transforms into a playground full of fun and vibrancy.  But we’ve got to give ourselves that chance of finding this out.

 

September 4, 2008

Celebrating The Spirit Of Humanity

Posted by Amyra under Healing, Inspiration, Spiritual Self
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Every now and then, I am reminded of the richness and depth that is found in the human spirit.  In the materialistic world in which we live, we tend to relate to one another on a superficial level, and the human spirit is often concealed from our perception.  Since the materialistic world thrives on power struggles, our motivation has been lowered to “how do I get more?”.  In our drive to rise above others as the biggest, strongest, richest, best, we dampen the spirits of those with whom we interact. 

In such a world where we’re often caught in a web of low-level struggles – petty fights, judgements, jealousy, control, one-upmanship, greed, grandiosity – the beauty of the human spirit is hidden from us most of the time.  We simply do not see the spirit behind a person, we see only the person’s physical appearance and persona.  Consequently, we lose respect for humanity as we see our fellow human beings either as flawed or as candidates for competition. 

Occasionally, we’re able to sense something greater in a person other than their body and persona.  The pursuit of a dream, the courageous healing of long-held pain, an altruistic act, a great surrender, a creative expression, an uninhibited expression of joy and freedom …. they reveal the greater truth about the spirit of humanity. 

The spirit of humanity is capable of a great many things.  Yet we’ve been conditioned to express ourselves as small, weak, ugly and powerless beings – devoid of the spirit that gives us depth in our existence.  We act as if our spirits do not exist.  Our spirit has an intelligence that surpasses logic – one that includes but not limited to our deductive reasoning.  When we express ourselves from the level of our spirit, unfettered by our self-made fears, we tap into a vast potential within ourselves.  We begin to show ourselves and others that who we thought we were is just the tip of the iceberg, or not even real. 

The way into our spirit is through our emotional self.  We feel it first as a stirring in our emotional self.  That emotional connection is a bridge to our spiritual self.  For a lot of people, however, their emotional self has been hardened from a long time of keeping unprocessed pain, and their sensitivity is deadened against any spiritually-moving experiences.  As such, they cannot be touched nor inspired by the spirit of humanity.  In protecting their pain, they remain bitter, hard, critical and controlling – they miss out on seeing humans in their full potential and the world seems unfair to them.  The great spirit of humanity is lost to them. 

I often see or hear of people who’ve gone through an emotional healing to experience a spiritual opening.  As the heart heals, the door to our spirit opens.  We experience ourselves, or others, as more than just flesh and mind.  As we experience ourselves as spirits, we automatically open up to a world where so much more is in store for us. 

In ending, I would like to share this poem written by a friend.  She shared it as a song, sung to a beautiful tune she’d composed on her guitar.  Listening to her had inspired this post. 

Her name was Mary
Her dreams took her soul and it travelled the world
She saw veins, lies, truths
Everything conceivable, existable,
She saw the rings on every bark
She saw the specks of sand on their feet
She soared
The millions of galaxies, stars, suns,
She looked over herself, this being exists
She saw heaven before this body died
“I’m finally free”
She saw her lover weeping by her side
Waiting for her to come back – mind and soul
love over freedom
She thought about this flesh – this gift, this life
It’s time, she thought
It’s time to live this dream

 

September 1, 2008

The Power Of Eland

Posted by Amyra under Spirits, Visions
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Recently, I’ve been getting strong visions of an eland.  I am brought back to the first time I saw one in Kenya last December.  While driving around a friend’s plot of land, I noticed an eland from afar, and was strangely touched by the way it seemed to be looking straight at me.  Although it stood too far for me to see, I felt the strange power in its eyes – sweet, gentle, kind but imbued with a grounded strength and the wisdom of an old soul. 

Something in that encounter captured my soul, as if the magnificent and almost mythological creature had something to communicate to me.  Yet it had remained unexplored until now when I’m called to listen intently to it.  In my dreams, it shows itself – an elegant, self-assured being with words of wisdom to impart.  Its eyes speak volumes and depths, such that no verbal sounds are necessary.  In my waking moments, I see the eland in my mind, again looking straight at me. 

The eland seems to have a humorous take on life.  Its face looks as if it’s about to break into a smile, as if it’s saying, “Why do you take life so seriously?”  I think this is what gives the eland such a clear energy – the ability to detach from the harshness of life and see the greater connectedness in everything.  This gives me a warm feeling and makes me trust the eland for what it has to relay to me.     

In getting closer to the eland spirit, I’ve felt its strange powers.  In my vision, it presented me with a gift in the form of a golden egg which it regurgitated after ingesting a rock of clear crystal picked from the roof of a natural tunnel.  Upon receiving the gift, I felt a huge healing in my heart and felt connected to the souls of the people whom the eland looks after and guides.  My sense of abandonment was soothed with the realisation that the spirits take on the work to care for those who are connected to them – that our work to care for another is shared and supported by the natural kingdom. 

Someone once told me that the eland has a unique sweet smell.  In one of my visions, I entered the body of the eland and buried myself among its flesh.  I could feel the warmth of its living flesh pressed on every surface of my body.  Suddenly, I became over-powered by a sweet aroma which entered my senses of smell as well as taste.  I realised that the power of the eland is transferred (at least partially) through the sweet scent it emits. What an other-worldly sensation to embody the eland.      

I took a shot of the eland in Kenya but had lost my camera during the trip.  I woke up this morning from a strong dream about the eland and felt guided to post about it.  When I thought about posting a picture along with it, I went straight to my computer and found the photo.  Rather mysterious as I’ve been using a new computer for only several weeks.  Check out the power of the eland below. 

 

September 1, 2008

Adjusting To Light

Posted by Amyra under Awareness, Self-Healing
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I have just come to an end of a relationship and it’s been a test of my own connectivity to come out of it healed.  I’m reminded of how stresses can trigger old, destructive tendencies and in times of great stress it’s imperative that we watch ourselves vigilantly so that we don’t slide back to a well-trodden but useless path. 

Time seems to slow down when we’re in deep emotional pain.  Not in a pleasant way, but in a way that seems to just drag on and prolong our pain.  I’m reminding myself that this is a good thing – there are simply too many easily-available ways for us to numb our pain, and the temptation to bury pain is the evil which all addictive persons must fight.  Pain can only be healed if pain was present in our awareness.

The sense of time slowing down allows us to reflect on our behaviours and the choices we’ve made thus far in life, as any transitional period in our lives is a crossroad where lots of potential growth can take place.  The wholesome approach to dealing with pain is to allow the pain to heal and to look towards uncovering the gift beneath it, however hopeless it may seem to be right now.  

This may seem like an impossible task, to stay calm and balanced enough to see anything other than madness, when we’re experiencing a great loss.  I’m sitting in that dark hole and telling you that it is not all bleak.  In the apparent bleakness, I can see specks of light which I can focus on until they grow, expand and dominate the shade of my outlook now.  But I’m afraid.  I’m afraid of light.  So I choose to stay in darkness. 

This is an interesting revelation which perhaps many can relate to.  If we had a choice of staying in the dark or moving out into the light, what would be our likely choice?  Rationally, we would choose to move into the light, but our first instinct is likely to stay in the dark.  It is far easier to stay in pain, darkness, imprisonment and fear than to embrace light, freedom, goodness and delight.  What that means is, sometimes, making the choices that are good for us takes effort. 

Sometimes, the dazzle of light is too much to take in when we’ve been in intense darkness, making us cautious about opening the doors to reveal more light into our existence.  But like our eyes taking time to adjust to sudden bright light, the discomfort is temporary.  Just as we would open our eyes fully eventually, so too can we open the doors to light shining into our lives fully if we knew that the transition from darkness to brightness yields only temporary discomfort. 

I am choosing light.  I stay put, not retreating from the promise of light.  I inch forward, prying open a few doors just slightly to let in a comfortable amount of light.  I see my whole being as the proverbial eye, adjusting to the goodness of life bit by bit from my dark imprisonment of pain.  I discover that where the light hits my pain, I cringe in fear, but then that pain heals, freeing me one bit more.  One day soon, I will find that the eye of my entire being opens fully against the light – and I am again filled with laughter, creativity, inspiration. 

 

August 25, 2008

The Roadmap To Inner Peace

Posted by Amyra under Awareness, Inner Peace, Internal Conflicts, Self-Judgements
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I am currently revising the Body Renew manual.  In the Introduction, I’d started by saying, “Most people seek to come to a place of inner peace, no matter what forms their struggles present themselves in their lives.”  I wrote that three years ago, and today I still find that to be true. 

Since the time I first wrote the manual, I have battled more life challenges and grown, seeing and learning more about life in the process.  Yet I still maintain that most people, if you boil down their desires, are seeking to find peace within themselves. 

Inner peace can only mean one thing: to have all our internal conflicts resolved, so that the critical and self-berating noises in our heads would stop, along with the pains that result from the noises.  

Let me qualify by saying that inner peace is achieved in small measures rather than a constant, permanent state.  It would be great if we were in a state of inner peace all the time, but how would we continue to grow if we didn’t have our inner conflicts to guide us to where we need to develop ourselves?  It’s the work which we do to return to a state of inner peace that makes us grow.  For we crave inner peace whenever we become overwhelmed by the tangles of desires within ourselves – some pulling us this way and some that way.  We are then guided to reconcile those conflicts to come to a place of inner peace. 

A conflicted state which gives rise to a desire for inner peace may look like this: 

Mentally, you are tormented by self-judgements.  Emotionally, you have yucky feelings about yourself – hugely uncomfortable feelings that stem from hatred for yourself.  Physically, you have done things or acquired habits that make you feel bad about yourself, which preserves those thoughts and feelings about yourself.  Spiritually, you’ve kept yourself limited, small and disconnected from your inner guidance. 

To achieve inner peace, clean the space within you.  Imagine entering the four levels of your being armed with figurative brooms, vacuum cleaner, scrubbers, detergents, etc.  If inner peace resembles a sparklingly clean room, then the state you’re in which prompted you to seek inner peace would need a lot of cleaning up – cluttered, messy, things misplaced, etc. 

In your mental room, clear away all cobwebs of obsessive thoughts caught in a loop, going nowhere but spinning around in the same circle until a brutal swipe breaks it apart, freeing the thoughts to move in new directions.  Throw away expired items – old thoughts, beliefs, attitudes that keep you stuck. 

In your emotional room, clean up the wounds in your pride and dignity.  Scrub off the stains in your heart.  Gather and put back together the broken pieces of your self-belief scattered all over the place. 

In your physical room, line up the actions you’re taking on the top tier of a display shelf.  These are actions which reinforce or add to your inner conflicts.  They are usually actions that go against your values – for instance, making money from a morally unsound or questionable business.  Examine them.  Replace, change or discard those actions. 

In your spiritual room, clear the air with a purifier and open the windows to let in the sun.  Lift the glass case off the brilliant rock in the center of the room and polish it to a shine.  See the rays of light from the rock of your core dazzle and mingle with the sunlight coming in through the windows. 

With your thoughts untangled, emotions smoothed, habits renewed and spiritual space expanded, you’ll find yourself in a state of inner peace. 

Inner peace is not something that is given to you from outside, it is something that appears from inside of you when you’ve taken actions to clean up the conflicts you have with yourself.  The actions may involve freeing up or letting go of energy where it is overly-concentrated, or adding to the energy where it’s scanty.  Re-read the previous five paragraphs with this in mind and you may get a new level of awareness. 

 

August 22, 2008

Relaxing The Ego To Make Empowered Choices

Posted by Amyra under Awareness, Choice, Ego
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In my previous posting, I stated that change is an ongoing process.  The acceptance that life is meant to be a voyage of discovering more authentic parts of ourselves, rather than a pursuit of a state of perfection we expect to achieve overnight, will make us much happier.  As long as we remain present in life, we would be able to take on the signs that are shown to us to keep us moving forward in our growth.  The quickest way to accelerate our growth is to observe how we respond from our ego and then make more empowered choices from a higher perspective. 

Observing how we respond and how much hold our ego has on us which determines our response can point us to where work needs to be done.  It’s one of those sticky paradoxes though: our ego prevents us from admitting to our weaknesses, yet to get to know that part of us requires us to pay attention to it. 

The function of our ego is to protect us from being hurt.  Unfortunately, it operates from a primal fear of how we can be hurt that what it perceives as threats to us is over-extended, outside of the appropriate context.  Hence, we tend to react to what others do or don’t do, say or don’t say, from a place of fear that we’d be damaged in some way or deprived of something we hold as valuable to us.  This fear is not real, in the sense that it is misplaced.  When we protect ourselves from this level of fear, we act in ways that cause us more hurt.  This is distinct from protecting our personal values and against true violations of what we stand for at our core. 

Problems in relationships arise when two people react from their egos.  Rather than act in ways that further the relationships and that allow them to grow as individuals, they trap themselves in a low level struggle of pettiness and one-upmanship.  When we work on freeing ourselves from the hold of our ego, a lot of our tensions would dissipate. 

How do we free ourselves from our ego? 

Step 1:  Notice your feelings

Begin by taking notice when your ego is pulling you to act in ways which perpetuate your struggles.  Observe your internal reactions to a situation.  You will feel a tightening – an uncomfortable feeling – as if your inner space is contracting to put up a defensive wall around you in response to feeling angry, resentful, jealous or short-changed.  You will recognise this as a defensive feeling. 

Mentally, your mind will construct thoughts that are tantrum-like, such as “Who does she think she is?” or “I’m going to show that bastard!”  or “He’s going to be sorry!”  It speaks in themes of hoarding, revenge and braggadocio.  Our automatic response is to impress, lie, manipulate, rob or cause suffering to another – because we feel we’re about to lose out on something.  Such response, should we act on it, can be subtle and insidious, with an agenda behind it. 

Step 2:  Delay taking action

Once you recognise that you’re driven to respond to a particular situation from your ego, refrain from acting on it.  This momentary pause in acting on your automatic impulse will give you the space to consider options that don’t result in instant gratifications but in advancing you in your personal growth. 

See, we grow by taking risks.  Ego-free responses carry a bigger risk than ego-driven actions.  The risk I am talking about is the risk of our getting hurt (actually, it’s our ego that is at risk of getting hurt).  We take that risk, holding an intention that is higher than the mere protection of our egos – the intention to conserve some core part of us.  We take that risk by fully accepting and being willing to put up with temporary discomfort, and in the process our ego heals from our having moved through the false pain it carries. 

Step 3:  Clear your inner space

When our ego has a strong hold on us, however, it can be quite difficult for us to choose a more loving option.  Let’s look at freeing ourselves from our ego from an energetic view. 

When you know you’re reacting from your ego, get a sense of where the tightness is located in your body.  Next, get a sense of the energetic strands that hold this tightness to your body.  You may be able to visualise or perceive in some other way these strands. 

Now relax the hold of your ego by mentally dissolving those strands until you feel freed from the strong hold that pulls you to act towards preserving your ego.  Once freed, your inner space will expand, allowing more options to appear.  In this calmer space, you’ll be more able to choose and take more loving steps that make you grow. 

Step 4:  Give it away

As you relax your ego’s hold on you and your inner space expands, the energy that is freed from the tension produced by the fear of your ego goes back to you and you’re reconnected to your resources within.  You gain a new perspective – rather than perceiving the situation as desperate which drives you to act desperately, you’re able to see other possibilities and consider new options. 

At this point, you may choose any action that counters the direction your ego wants you to go.  But you can go one step further by giving away some of the energy that’s been returned to you – a loving, altruistic action that may not have anything to do with the situation. 

The way to counter ego-pulled actions is to go the opposite way and act as if you are abundant and thus cannot be diminished.  The effect of acting big is it leaves you feeling big-hearted – you derive fulfilment from knowing that you’ve contributed to another and not from scoring petty points which leaves a trace of bitterness in your heart.  Thus, you turn what had been uncomfortable into an empowering experience.   

 

Often, we fail to grow because we don’t give ourselves that chance.  The little actions that we take in response to other people’s actions, when we choose to act contrary to what our ego dictates, we break out of being stuck with a set of patterns that cause us and others pain.  As you practise countering your ego’s pull and act in ways that further your growth, you’ll find that a lot of your tensions in life will lessen.  

 

August 13, 2008

The Perfection Of Imperfection

Posted by Amyra under Addictions, All-Or-Nothing, Beauty, Focus, Perfectionism
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One of the reasons why we fail to create lasting changes in our lives is we tend to focus on what is not-yet ‘perfect’ and using that as an excuse to sabotage our progress.  We tend to begin a process of change expecting to wake up one day with all our internal conflicts gone overnight.  It’s called a “process” because it is an ongoing journey of healing parts of ourselves.  But most of us expect our issues to disappear within a short time, and when we see that we’re still struggling, we consider ourselves to have failed.  So we go back to our old habits or old structure – full on – because “it’s all or nothing”. 

In our strive for perfection, we will never win.  That destination we call ‘perfection’ is an illusion – as we move closer to our concept of what is perfect, our standard for the thing we strive for will change, again and again, making it increasingly more difficult to be achieved.  As we strive for perfection, the distance to that which we consider perfect keeps increasing and our hope of becoming happier shrinks.   

In our strive for perfection, we miss out on the gifts of the moment.  We refuse to see that anything short of ‘perfection’ is worthy of us living it.  And because what we consider to be ‘perfect’ is impossible to achieve, we’re stuck in a limbo of unhappiness. 

The way out is to start by relaxing that childish refusal to consider a different option.  It is not all-or-nothing.  That space between “all” and “nothing” is where the greatest beauty and gifts can be found.  All we need to do is to give ourselves a chance to discover those gifts. 

People in recovery from addiction and other destructive habits often find the idea of abstinence a dreaded prospect.  That period following some changes that have been put into place usually means no alcohol, drugs or other sources of dependency as they create a clean space in which they’re able to find their self-sufficiency.  If you’ve been dependent on quick-albeit-destructive habits to cope with bad feelings, it can be difficult to see how you can possibly live a life of abstinence, even if it’s fairly short-term.  You would tend to see it as a big sacrifice, an unfair compromise, something that would leave you with very little to go on. 

Once you relax your refusal to accept that there might be something really worthwhile in the change, you’ll open up to the beauty of an alternative outcome.  It is very much a matter of focus – if you focus on what you’re giving up, you’ll feel the deprivation; if, on the other hand, you focus on what positive things your new way of life may bring you, you’ll find the gifts. 

Instead of striving for perfection to warrant a new lifestyle, see the perfection in the ‘imperfection’ of things.  If you adopt this mentality every step of the way, your period of abstinence or apparent lack-of will become a rich experience for you.  When you feel despondent as you focus on the negative, keep your attention on it until you see the beauty in it surface.  Everything is a source of beauty; if you focus on something long enough, you will see beautiful aspects emerge from it. 

Our mind is quick to judge, based on our previous experiences and the way we’ve learnt to categorise things under ‘good’ or ‘bad’.  But when we give something a chance, by simply looking at it longer than usual, we’ll see aspects we never saw before. 

 

Look at the picture above.  A sloppily-constructed stair that replaced a broken one.  Depending on the context, it may be ugly or beautiful.  In the context of someone’s home, we’d normally label it as ugly, but in the context of an art gallery, we may label it as something quite beautiful.  So the potential of both exists.  This stair, in the context of someone’s home, can be seen as beautiful if we focus on it long enough.  As we keep our focus on it, we move past our automatic judgements and see a myriad other possibilities out of it, until we find perfection in it.  This is the only way we can reach perfection, and what an enriching way that is.

 

August 10, 2008

The Need To Rebel

Posted by Amyra under Addictions, All-Or-Nothing, Rebelliousness, Self-Expression
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In the rehab centre where I work, it’s been pointed out to me that I tend to leave my coffee cups all over the place instead of putting them from where I’d taken them.  I started putting them back to their appropriate places, but then found myself wanting to leave cups at the pool, common bathrooms, etc.  I caught myself thinking it a few times, which prompted me to look closer behind it.

Clearly, it comes from a rebellious streak to do something that is considered a breach of what is acceptable to the authority or within an institution.  A minor thing to leave my cup where it doesn’t belong, perhaps, but it comes from the same place as someone who expresses their rebelliousness through substance abuse.  I believe that everyone has a rebellious tendency in them; it’s a self-balancing mechanism to correct any imbalance arising from suppressing our expression in some area of our life.

In working with clients, we often find that there’s an element of rebelliousness behind their addiction – how might their behaviours be an expression of some message they strongly want expressed?  Usually, I would isolate the aspect of the client that is driven to rebel, help the client understand its motivations, and work to reconcile the differences between this and other aspects in that person.  For a person in addiction, telling them off or threatening them with punishments or any other forms of assertion of authority is not likely to get them off the habit.  Instead, this would feed right into the part of the person that wants to rebel, fueling its intent.  If a part of you wants to rebel, it is not enough to tell this part to “shut up, sit down and be quiet”.

When we engage in addiction or other “fuck you” behaviours, we often end up hurting ourselves.  For instance, if the issues behind our need to rebel aren’t dealt with, we may neglect a physical illness in ourselves just to say “fuck you”, with detrimental consequences to our health.

We rebel because there’s some area of our life in which we’ve held back in our expression.  Our natural state is one of balance, and when something in us is off-balanced, we are driven to correct that imbalance.  If we don’t have a clear awareness of that imbalance, something in us would drive us to achieve balance haphazardly.  This can easily lead to an explosion of expression elsewhere as we naturally seek to even out the energies within ourselves.

In this article, I am dealing with the rebellious tendency which is in all of us rather than the pent-up energy from unprocessed emotions.  Rather than trying to kill off this aspect in us, we need to find non-destructive ways to satisfy our rebelliousness.  Behind rebelliousness is a desire to assert our identity – what we like and dislike, what we value and condemn, what we want to create and no longer tolerate.  Therefore, it is not necessarily a destructive mechanism, only when we let it run itself, without our awareness.

The way to get a handle on our rebelliousness is by remembering that it is acting out because our self-expression has been stifled in some way or other.  Habits such as using illegal substances, engaging in dangerous activities and run-in’s with the law are extreme ways in which we’ve allowed our rebellious aspect to operate.  We can replace these habits with those that do not hurt ourselves or other people.

Since we tend to operate from an “all or nothing” mentality, we may not see that there are non-destructive ways of allowing our rebellious nature to express itself.  How might you express yourself, in less dramatic ways, that won’t harm yourself or others?  What do you want to be more of, in the eyes of others and yourself?  What small ways can you find to express this feeling, belief or idea?

Most importantly, how are you going to channel it to express your creativity?  Rebelliousness is a passionate force that can be used either to create havoc and destruction, or to push ourselves out of our shell where we allow our true selves to see the light of day.  Since healthy self-expression involves some amount of our taking risk to step into unfamiliar territory, we can use the force of rebelliousness to bring out more authentic parts of ourselves.

This is also to say that when we become aware of wanting to rebel in ways that don’t really serve us, it’s indicative of an area of our life where our expression has been stifled.  We need to examine ourselves calmly, take steps to find expression in the appropriate area while indulging our rebellious tendency in ways that move us forward in lovingly expressing ourselves.

 

August 10, 2008

The Joy Of Doing Meaningful Work

Posted by Amyra under Gratitude, Self-Actualisation
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I sent two clients who had completed our four-week programme to the airport yesterday.  As I said goodbye to them, I felt a surge of emotions well up inside me.  I walked away from the departure hall blinking back tears, overcome by a poignancy that moved me on a deep level.  When you’ve had four weeks of caring and watching the personal battles of a client who’d been residential with you, you can’t help but feel a little sad when they leave.  But it was sadness tinged with an admiration for their courage in pushing through some issues that are quite painful to deal with and coming out more whole that moved me.

I was reminded of my fortunate position to help facilitate personal shifts in people and by extension, of my place in life where opportunities abound for every individual to make meaningful contributions to one another.  Just as I’ve contributed to our clients by virtue of my job, they have made unplanned contributions to my life.  Such moments of recognising the abundance of life and the greatness of our spiritual role often infuse me with a deep sense of gratitude for being simply alive, being participant in the universal cosmos.

More and more, I believe that to find work that enables us to make meaningful contributions in a way that fulfills us is what makes living in this world joyful.  The road to recovery from our painful habits is paved with signs that guide us to our real place in life.  Our journey on the road to recovery must be taken to lead us closer to that place, where the gifts of our healing, the “what’s behind the door” of our pains, are transferred to help others get more happiness, inspiration, hope, peace and joy.

If your journey seems all too overwhelming to you right now, you could perhaps be consoled by the idea that every painful moment you move through courageously now will help shape a strong, positive future.  Nothing will go to waste unless we make it so.  Behind every pain, there is a gift that will make itself apparent to you as long as you move ahead with a sense of adventure, openness and discovery.  We need not force ourselves to love our pain but to approach our pain with a certain expectancy in discovering something positive which we cannot yet see will give you the drive to move forward in your journey.

Not that the journey will ever end.  Our ego-based personas may not recognise this but on the soul level we are constantly seeking out more situations that push us to recover yet another piece of who we are beyond our identity.  To strive for that point of an ultimate victory over life is to defeat the whole purpose of life.  We win the game when we’ve looked at ourselves at every challenge we faced and as such the game is never over until we cease to exist.

True fulfilment, then, is when we grow out of pleasing our ego through thoughts and actions that come out of a desperate need to be liked/loved/admired and of hurting our enemies, to feeling profoundly grateful from observing the growth of those around us.  This is not to say that we must kill our ego but to find ways to transcend our ego at times to get to a place of seeing the bigger picture which can be a very beautiful thing for us.

 

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