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
The Ten Stages Study Course is perhaps the greatest human exploration and adventure about rebuilding autonomous self worth ever constructed.
Stagers who have healed their violated child within into maturity can approach conflict and an enemy in a nonreactive way
We need Recovery bypass surgery when our fear blocks us from feeling our feelings and recognising our child trapped within.
We need Recovery bypass surgery when our fear blocks us from feeling our feelings and recognising our child trapped within.
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?
In exile, far from their unconscious families, students of the ten stages have found their true home
Several sub-personalities are continually scuffing with each other; impulses, desires, principles, aspirations are engaged in an unceasing struggle
"We are not unified. We often feel that we are, because we do not have many bodies and many limbs, and because one hand does not fight with the other. But, metaphorically that is exactly what does happen within us. Several sub-personalities are continually scuffing with each other; impulses, desires, principles, aspirations are engaged in an unceasing struggle."
- Susan Bello
Our life activities can have a childlike undertone because our unintegrated negative emotionality
Our life activities can have a childlike undertone because our unintegrated negative emotionality the ghost appearance of our child within can so easily "take over" our functional state, especially when we feel fear. Many of us live in our child withins state of trauma much of the time.
As people grow up, they take on various identifications and copy what they conceive of as adult behaviours and styles; however, it is not the adult who is doing this but the child. Therefore, what we see in daily life are people acting out the programs and scenarios that they identify with as a child.
The young child already exhibits curiosity, self-pity, jealousy, envy, competitiveness, temper tantrums, emotional outbursts, resentments, hatreds, rivalry, seeking limelight and admiration, petulance, blaming others, disclaiming responsibility, making others wrong, looking for favor, collecting 'things', showing off and more. These are all attributes of a child.
As children we emotionally imprint upon our parents and we take on the heaviness of their emotional world.
Physical appearance is a great deceiver. Most people look like adults but are not really adults at all. Emotionally, most people are children. The emotions and attitudes that prevail in kindergarten and on the playground continue on into adult life. Within most people is a child who is merely imitating being an adult.
The simple reason why we stay at the emotional level of children is we rarely examine the childhood beliefs that we filter our perceptions of the world through. We most often stay patterned in the beliefs that we laid down as children, repeating the same kinds of feelings as we did when we were little.
Michael Brown explains this process of our child within inside our adult body so eloquently:
"Experientially it is in the first seven years, any and all uncomfortable experience arising from our entry into the conditional world are imprinted into and affect the condition of our emotional body. Our emotional body is therefore where the record of these occurrences is kept."
Children literally soak up the emotional soup around them. I remember an instance many years ago of sitting on the sofa and noticing the synchronicity of my emotionality with my child's. My four year old daughter was in the next room, in our old claw foot tub taking a bath. The house was silent and suddenly I felt a sharp loneliness strike my heart. Just at that moment, my daughter in the next room cried out, "Mommy! My heart feels like it is falling out of my chest with loneliness!"
In my study of family system therapy I have come to understand that whatever our parents and ancestors cannot deal with emotionally falls upon the next generation's shoulders to feel, process and integrate. This is how we evolve as family groups. We are all an integral part of a larger whole of healing. We do not suffer alone. Everyone suffers in some way. We are not crazy. We are sensitive human beings. We are all part of a larger family group evolving and healing.
I have often felt the pain of my mother and father as if it were my own. We can often feel the unhealed traumas, losses and disappointments of the previous generations in our family because we are all joined. So to try to pin our uncomfortable feelings on a specific trauma from childhood, or to always look for some kind of childhood story of abuse, is often much too simplistic. As human beings we suffer on a deep level for all of those who have come before us. We suffer for all those in our family who did not know how to handle their emotional pain.
The Search for Unconditional Love
On a deep level we are angry that we were not unconditionally loved as children, and this anger can saliently block our creativity and our forward creative movement. We can feel frustrated that we regularly compromised our truth and our authenticity. We became inauthentic in childhood to belong, but now it is our task and our purpose as mature adults to find out who we really are.
We move through our creative blocks by loving ourselves unconditionally. We do this by feeling everything deeply. And in that intensely loving fire of attention to all that we have denied inside of ourselves, we come to know ourselves and our purpose profoundly. Loving all that is repressed and rejected in our unconscious mind is evocative of the mother holding her child in the collage at right with such tender awareness. With unwavering attention and determination she vows to never abandon her crying child. We need to treat ourselves in this same reverent way.
It is all to easy when we feel uncomfortable feelings to become the opposite of loving towards ourselves. Usually we put ourselves down and start mentally punishing ourselves for not feeling happy. We wonder what is wrong with us. We tell ourselves that we are no good, or substandard as a human being for feeling the way that we do. We punish our shadow parts that are simply trying to come into the light to be seen and included and learned from.
Perhaps one of the most creative things life accomplishments that we can we can focus on is to learn how to love ourselves unconditionally. To love ourselves means loving what feels hard and painful inside - unconditionally - without thinking or reacting. It does not matter what comes up - we attend to it with tender and exquisite attention. Every feeling holds messages and gifts embedded within it no matter how difficult it feels.
Becoming Strongly Present to Your Emotional Pain
Often inner pain can take over our entire life for a time. It can become so big, we can barely think, function, work, or relate to other people. We think we have to get rid of our pain. But presence to our emotional pain is nothing more than learning to become more largely loving than the pain. Becoming larger and stronger than your pain does not heal your pain - it is still there - but because it is loved and accepted with such inner strength, it integrates into your larger being. This is how we grow up. This is how we mature ourselves into contributing, creative adults.
We do this presence work by touching our inner pain with awareness - tapping it lightly at first - taking breaks when it hurts too unbearably. We then effort to sustain loving attention to our emotional pain for longer periods of time until we learn how to become consistently larger than it. As we grow psychologically stronger, the pain passes through our being at a faster rate and we are no longer mired in emotional difficulty for such long periods of time.
Working spontaneously with found and self-created imagery bypasses your regular thinking mind, and reveals more of what your deeper child within wants you to express in your life.
Spontaneous collage, free-form writing, and intuitive doodling, and drawing, are modalities of creative self-mirroring that will help you connect with your child within. Working spontaneously with found and self-created imagery bypasses your regular thinking mind, and reveals more of what your deeper child within wants you to express in your life.
Expressive art employs the principle of synchronicity in that it can tell you exactly what you need to know for your growth in this moment. Creation without pre-planning often helps you to integrate repressed traumatic patterns that are holding your back. Spontaneous art is often wider than words, and it can invite growth stages that you might not have been able to conceive of in your everyday mind.
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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... -
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