Assignment Higher Power: We become aware of the suffering caused by our unm...
Assignment Higher Power: We become aware of the suffering caused by our unm...: We become aware of the suffering caused by our unmindful consumption, We vow to cultivate good health, both physical and mental, for ourse...
Tenstage+ it can be particularly helpful to keep in mind from moment to moment that it is not so much the stressors in our lives
Dissociation Identity Disorder: Many of us are co-dependent and Dissociated
Dissociation Identity Disorder: Many of us are co-dependent and Dissociated: Many of us are co-dependent and Dissociated. What's important to remember though is that you're a human BEING, not a human DOING w...
Weaponising Mindfulness: No, but I understand something about this not know...
Weaponising Mindfulness: No, but I understand something about this not know...: Socrates was famous in Athens for saying, “Know thyself.” It is said that one of his students said to him: “Socrates, you go around saying ‘...
Weaponising Mindfulness: If this is a selfless act, why are we focusing on ...
Weaponising Mindfulness: If this is a selfless act, why are we focusing on ...: If this is a selfless act, why are we focusing on ourself? On our own feelings of safety and well-being? On our own happiness? But, you mi...
How Cruel I am to myself living with deeply ingrained feelings of unworthiness has become the norm
Feeling unworthy is behaviour based. We have the capacity to change our behaviour. But first, we have to see clearly that the behavior patterns that cause us so much pain are based on misperceptions and coping mechanisms that sustain rather than dissolve our of unworthiness.
The primary trance-inducing veil is fear-based thinking. When we’re stuck in fear-based thinking we are driven by a need to succeed or dominate in order to feel that we have value in the world. We act out in inappropriate and destructive ways. The more we do this, the deeper our trance of unworthiness becomes.
It’s important to recognize that fear-based thinking is evolutionary. It’s called the negativity bias and as a survival mechanism it makes sense. Imagine that one of our early ancestors saw rustling in tall grasses. If his instincts consistently told him it was a tiger rather than a rabbit his risk of extinction decreases.
Today, in first world countries we do not live in life-threatening situations. But the fight/flight/freeze response still gets activated, mostly through the movies inside our head. When our mental movies are fear-based we tend to be either overtly or passively aggressive, conflict-avoidant, or frozen through indecisiveness.
We enjoy scary movies where we willingly suspend our disbelief and allow our emotions to flow with the content of the movie, like being on an emotional rollercoaster.
But we don’t realize that we also suspend our disbelief in the movies inside our head. common theme: I’m not good enough to calm my mind. I’m not disciplined enough. My mind is too chaotic and my emotions are too sticky.
What is going on when people think they can’t meditate?
Well, for one thing, in meditation we are alone with our patterns. When discomfort arises in the form of physical or emotional pain, our tendency is usually to fight it, becoming agitated and irritable; but we have no distractions, so we’re stuck with it. Or we try to escape the discomfort through fantasy and then feel guilty or shameful. Or we freeze up like a stone, holding our mind in a state of rigid, unfeeling blankness. In meditation we see that fight/flight/freeze is still our knee-jerk reaction, even to ordinary life situations and within our relationships.
The second veil is emotional reactivity, which is also fear-based. We often use people, food, or activities like shopping or gambling or even worshipping to help us to avoid our reactive emotions. Maybe we use spiritual objects like altars. You may have an altar in every corner of your house. Well, that’s fine if it’s meant to remind you that your entire house is an altar and that everyday life is the place of enlightenment.
If you think that religious life is separate from ordinary life, that a spiritual calm is separate from the unruly surf of life’s great ocean, then you are caught in a mental movie about living a spiritual life. In real life, it is the nature of the ocean to create surf.
Emotions are powerful. They tend to drive our lives. Drive sounds negative, but it can also be positive. Look at Barack Obama. He’s smart. He can run different narratives simultaneously—philosophical ones, psychological ones—but it’s the depth of his hope, courage, joy and love that sustains him.
Adolf Hitler was also smart. But he was driven by anger and the painful emotions of betrayal. Look at how far these unwholesome emotions took him because he kept them revved up with rhetoric and compulsive thinking. He almost ruled the world.
The key is to bring our strong emotions into our awareness without fueling them with our stories. In meditation we learn to see a strong emotion as it arises. We feel its intensity and notice where in our body it is held. Eventually, we begin to see our reactive patterns. We notice how we magnify and generalize. How we weave a web around the emotion that constrains, dominates, and hypnotizes us. When we cling to our stories we are caught.
Yes, fear-based thinking is instinctual; but human beings are not limited by instinct. We have the capacity to choose, to change our behavior, and to cultivate skillful ways of responding to the world.
It begins with an acknowledgement that unworthiness is behavior based. Living skillfully means noticing (in a non-judgmental way) our thought patterns, their associated emotions, and our reactivity to those emotions. Buddha said, “All that we are is based on our thoughts.” I would add that our thoughts emanate from our understanding of the world and our place in it. From a Buddhist perspective our world is thoroughly interconnected and your place in it is right where you are.
Through a regular meditation practice our heart and mind open up to an experiential understanding of interconnection. Gradually, our thoughts change, our behaviours change, and the trance of unworthiness begins to dissolve. It is a very natural and organic process.
The Origins of God: Life's building blocks observed in space environment
'via Blog this'
Dark side of the moon: Bikers 'more likely to suffer a fatal crash when there's a full moon' - Mirror Online
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PLEASE DO NOT FORGIVE
Forgiveness is not a tool in our ten stage
The solutions to our ten stage recovery are all within us, if we take care to look for them. | www.thetenstages.com
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The Ten Stages is a studied recovery course. It is a source of reconnection a method of unlearning and a reintroduction to our child within which leads us back to our one true intuitive voice.We start to learn and come out of our protective dysfunctional shell and reclaim our lives. www.thetenstages.com
12 Stage Working Document
Stage 1: We admit that the traumas buried in our unconscious rule our lives, makes us powerless to embody the truth, and drives us to act out in ways destructive to ourselves, to others.
Stage 2: We come to believe that the child within at our core is more powerful than the lies imposed upon us, and that this truth can lead us to our recovery.
Stage 3: We make a decision to align with the child within, despite the pressure to submit to the distortions of family, society, and the historical voices we carry within.
Stage 4: We make a searching and fearless assessment of our traumatic history: personal, familial and ancestral.
Stage 5: We admit to ourselves and to a stages guide the full details of our traumas.Identifying the triggers to our dissociations.
Stage 6: We become entirely ready to grieve this past and to let go of our false self.
Stage 7: We align with our child within and do the deep and transforming work of grieving.
Stage 8: We study the ways we have hurt ourselves, others through replication of our traumas, and we become willing to make amends to them all.
Stage 9: We change our inappropriate dissociated behaviour.
Stage 10: We continue to monitor our attitudes and behaviour, and when we make a mistake we promptly admit it, trace its traumatic origin, and take steps to not repeat it.
Stage 11: We seek through self-reflection an ever deepening connection to our child within, desiring only to be guided to our intuitive voice.
Stage 12: Having awakened to our child within, we dedicate our lives to its full manifestation and to nurturing the healing paths of ourselves and others.
Maggots in the Brain:We need Recovery bypass surgery when our fear blocks us from feeling our feelings
You see – our child within doesn't need any personal growth work.
our child within doesn't need therapy. our child within doesn't need yoga, green juice or an alkaline, gluten free diet – our body does.
Fear is not the opposite of Love.
Fear is a biological response to uncertainty that comes from the amygdala that causes our body to be filled with cortisol (stress hormone) and adrenaline.
We can spend so much time trying to hang out in the “spiritual realm” that we don’t allow ourselves to feel the fullness of our human emotion.
We tend to carry so much shame with us when it comes to feeling our feelings because we believe that feeling our fear or negativity are “unspiritual.”
The only thing unspiritual is the judgment of our feelings, which is actually keeping us blocked from happiness.
de-pression comes from re-pression.
If we don’t allow ourselves to feel and be honest about what’s inside the child within without judgment – we can never really change.
We can change our clothes, we can change our diet and we can start to move our body, but none of that will do any good without going into the depths of the feelings we have suppressed for so long in our child within.
What feelings are you afraid to feel?
What feelings do you try to escape?
What feelings are you holding back because you think you are a bad person if you feel them?
You see – these places are the places we need to go if we are to liberate ourselves.
This is what Carl Jung meant when he said, “Enlightenment is not imaging figures of light, but making the dark conscious.”
We can’t make our child within conscious if we are too self-judgmental to allow it to come forward – this is a recovery bypass and it’s as deadly as a blocked artery.
What feelings can you feel today?
our child within doesn't need therapy. our child within doesn't need yoga, green juice or an alkaline, gluten free diet – our body does.
Fear is not the opposite of Love.
Fear is a biological response to uncertainty that comes from the amygdala that causes our body to be filled with cortisol (stress hormone) and adrenaline.
We can spend so much time trying to hang out in the “spiritual realm” that we don’t allow ourselves to feel the fullness of our human emotion.
We tend to carry so much shame with us when it comes to feeling our feelings because we believe that feeling our fear or negativity are “unspiritual.”
The only thing unspiritual is the judgment of our feelings, which is actually keeping us blocked from happiness.
de-pression comes from re-pression.
If we don’t allow ourselves to feel and be honest about what’s inside the child within without judgment – we can never really change.
We can change our clothes, we can change our diet and we can start to move our body, but none of that will do any good without going into the depths of the feelings we have suppressed for so long in our child within.
What feelings are you afraid to feel?
What feelings do you try to escape?
What feelings are you holding back because you think you are a bad person if you feel them?
You see – these places are the places we need to go if we are to liberate ourselves.
This is what Carl Jung meant when he said, “Enlightenment is not imaging figures of light, but making the dark conscious.”
We can’t make our child within conscious if we are too self-judgmental to allow it to come forward – this is a recovery bypass and it’s as deadly as a blocked artery.
What feelings can you feel today?
Admitting that the traumas buried in our childhood unconscious rule our lives
Maggot in the Brain:Dissociation (being split-off from one’s deepest truth)
People who are dissociated do not suffer. But this is only because they have abandoned their healing process and numbed their pain. Awakening grows from the fertilised soil of suffering.
People who are dissociated call themselves enlightened. But this is only because they have they have no conception of what awakening is. Awakening is the polar opposite of dissociation.
People who are dissociated are not easily emotionally ruffled. But this is only because there lies a thick wall buffering their hidden, vulnerable self from the sharp and often honest edges of the world. The enlightened are much less protected, but have such a deep core of self-love that they can defend themselves gently.
People who are dissociated feel they have mastered forgiveness. But this is only because they completely deny the harm done to them – and the damage remaining. The enlightened forgive spontaneously and without effort because they have fully embraced their damaged parts and grieved every honest ounce of their misery.
People who are dissociated are extremely self-confident. But this is only because their self-deceptive armour is impenetrable to self-reflection. The self-confidence of awakening is fed by the universal spring of life.
People who are dissociated gravitate naturally toward leadership roles. But this is only because they are experts at leading themselves away from their heart’s true course. The enlightened person leads right to the heart of the matter.
People who are dissociated have gone through hell to get to where they’re at. But they fail to realise that they’re still stuck right in hell. Enlightenment is the freedom of emotional integration.
People who are dissociated feel they have found their true self. But this is only because they equate their true self with no self at all – or at best a false self or ego based on a distorted sense of consciousness. Awakening is the true self linked with the conscious mind.
People who are dissociated consider themselves paragons of spirituality. But this is only because their spirits are so buried behind walls of denial that they have no conception of what spirit is. Awakening is the passionate spirit of the child held by the consciousness of the adult.
People who are dissociated are quite motivated, sophisticated, and convincing. But this is only because they perennially risk returning to suffering if they do not convince everyone of their lie. Awakened to the Ten Stages brings a motivation to spread the truth that is everyone’s birthright.
People who are dissociated act decisively. But this is only because they cannot see or question their unconscious motivation. The enlightened person is also decisive, but only because he has no unconscious, because in his healing process it, like a now-useless appendage, has dissolved.
Dissociation is contrary to our awakening. Behind dissociation lies unresolved trauma, and only once trauma is resolved can the light of consciousness enter the core of our being.
As we attempt to move forward on our path toward full recovery, different parts of ourselves live at different stages of healing Recovery on our journey.
The first primitive stage on the courses healing journey is the contest. This is the stage of grandiosity, acceptance by the norm, dissociated happiness, and approval by the group. The parts of us that are winning the contest, getting our hidden agendas met stop our course before it has even begun. Here we deny our deepest traumas so intensely that we fool even ourselves into believing they never happened – and that we are already healed. It is for this reason that dissociation mimics our recovery. Here we idealize the parents, which allows us full unconscious liberty to replicate the worst of our past in our present. Here we do not look beneath our surface, and if fate goes our way, we will never have to. We remain happily distant from the misery lurking in our guts.
Yet where parts of us lose the contest we evolve into the second stage: suffering. This is the stage of depression, failure, misery, and inertia. Here we wallow in seemingly purposeless pain. The silver lining around our cloud of parental idealization has been stripped away, but the cloud remains intact. We still wish to be rescued by our parents and their replicated stand-ins, but we lack the requisite pain tolerance to be able to acknowledge the impossibility of this. Here we live in tortured ambivalence, and we spend out hours and days trying to get others to love us in the way our parents never could. Part of us wishes to devolve back into the seeming pleasure of grandiosity, but the healthier part recalls how cruelly that route already failed us.
Those parts of us with the capacity to face our terrors enter the third stage: grieving. This is the stage of purposeful struggling. Here we unearth the truth of our past, which allows the eruption of the stinking cesspool of our buried traumas. Here we witness the horror lurking behind idealization of the parents and we work to disassemble their lies. Our honest confidence leads us into the face of the hurricane, because our soul and its allies tell us that blue skies lie on the other side. Here we are humble, here we confront the truth of the worst of our parents, either in interaction with them or through whatever means will best help us integrate the truth, and through this our journey rages forward.
With each demon we conquer we take a further step into the fourth stage: enlightenment. This is the stage of emotional integration, psychic balance, and inner peace. Here lie the deepest goals of mankind. All want to know truth, and the enlightened person achieves it – in all parts of himself that arrive in the final stage. Here we grow able to distinguish light from shadow and water from mirage. Here we nurture the evolution of our primitive sides instead of expressing them destructively. Here we devote the best of ourselves to healing. Here we no longer traumatise others in the very patterns in which we were traumatised, but instead replicate the best of ourselves – and generate beauty in the world around us. Here, having healed our wounds, we share freely of our gifts, because now our gifts are accessible.
Self-absorption is far less common in eastern cultures where the focus is on the community.
Recovered Stagers have a natural instinct to make healthy decisions
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Dissociation (being split-off from one’s deepest truth) mimics being awakened – but it isn't being awakened. People who are dissociate... -
Assignment Higher Power: We become aware of the suffering caused by our unm... : We become aware of the suffering caused by our unmindful co...
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Expressive Art Therapy Journal Exercises I offer you this list of 100 therapeutic art activities that I have developed to encourage ...
