Ideas to Process and Integrate. You must change more than your thinking. You must open your heart.
You are the one you have been waiting for.
What new “aha” moment have you experienced, and what changes are you willing to make? You will never move forward by repeating what is in back of you. The people in your huddle are comfortable with you staying the same. When you change, the whole game plan can change.
In today’s guest blog, my dear friend and holy woman, Sadhviji, simply and elegantly explains a simple way to change your destiny.
A Stanford graduate who was raised in Los Angeles and moved to India 25 years ago, Sadhviji is recognized as one of the world’s leading female spiritual leaders.
If you find yourself often focused on healing others or hoping you can get others to change, it is likely that you don't think of this as an addiction. I define an addiction as anything we do to avoid taking responsibility for our own feelings. When you are focused on getting others to change, or hoping others will change, is this a way for you to avoid taking loving care of yourself? Are you trying to fix others and get them to change so that you don't have to learn to take responsibility for your own feelings?
Judy finds herself caught in this addiction:
What is behind the fear of unwanted change? The uninvestigated mind says that I’m going to sustain a loss: "he's going away," "the business is slipping," etc. The fear of loss is connected in our mind with the image of what had previously given us the feeling of succeeding. So now here’s reality, and it's pretty different than our image of what should be, and we’d rather live with the image than look at reality. But the fact of the matter is, we can see clearly now that something "bad" has happened to us and there is this sense of loss.
Why is that loss so traumatic to us? Because that loss, if it's real, means that we’re going to have to literally reorient ourselves to life. That's why we don't want the loss. It’s because the present relationship that we have imagined defines us in our world. We are defined by our relationships, and if a relationship starts to change, the way we’re defined in life and the way we know ourselves starts to change. And we don't want that. We don't want anything we have imagined to be real to show us that it's not, because the super-structure of our self as it stands is rooted in this imagined life from which we derive these feelings of security as we imagine ourselves in it.
Now that I’d been vaccinated, I was back at my favorite bar. With disinterest, I glanced up at the game that was playing on the large TV suspended above the bar’s mirror. Through the long mirror I saw that there were a few people scattered around at the tables, but the bar was empty.
My phone buzzed. I looked down at the message that had just arrived. It was a quotation from David Suzuki, the Canadian scientist, television commentator, and author who’s famous for his skills at helping audiences understand scientific and environmental issues.
"The way we see the world shapes the way we treat it. If a mountain is a deity, not a pile of ore; if a river is one of the veins of the land, not potential irrigation water; if a forest is a sacred grove, not timber; if other species are biological kin, not resources. . . we will treat each other with greater respect. Thus, is the challenge, to look at the world from a different perspective."
I glanced back up, meeting my gaze in the mirror. The image that stared back at me raised his mug. “Here’s to looking at the world with new eyes, new perceptions.” He smiled. It was my oldest friend— Juan.
I’ve found myself thinking quite a bit lately about the idea of “enough.” What is enough? When do you know you’ve had enough? When do you finally feel that you are enough? When is enough enough?
I’ve thought to myself, have we as a country finally seen enough gun violence to actually do something about it, or does more have to happen? Have we seen enough about mental health to declare it a national emergency? What about climate change? Have we experienced enough racism, sexism, and ageism to say we’ve had enough, or do we need to experience more for things to finally change?
Is a man seen kneeling on another man's neck for nine minutes and 29 seconds enough to enrage you and push you to want deep, systemic change? Is it enough to push you to become active and fight for that change in our society and in our world? If so, will you now vote differently? Talk differently? Spend your money differently? See the world through different eyes? How will your actions signal that you’ve had enough?
You are free when you realize that you don’t have the power to MAKE another person change.
You suffer when you spend your time trying to control the lives of those around you to be what you want them to be.
People don’t change unless they really want to change. You only have the power to share your perspective, wisdom, and invite them to consider a different way of doing things.
When someone changes simply to make you happy, rest assured, it doesn’t last.
They must not only want to change but must be committed to it. They also must be open to your help. We sometimes try to change people that are not asking for help and end up trying to control them to fit our ideal.
Welcome, 2021!
We have so many hopes pinned on this new year. It will take us a while to process and implement the vast need for social change and healing illuminated in 2020. Maybe in the past we’d say “that’s it” for last year and be quite glad to see it in our rear-view mirror. But this paradigm shift will require us to pause and take a deep respectful breath of hope knowing there is still a lot of patience and work still ahead as we traverse the in between time from what was to what will be.
The old way is being dismantled and being cleared away, and even if we’re not 100% where we hoped we’d be, we are still making room for more love, creativity, courage, compassion, hope…and joy. This and that will be true!
And, if there is one thing I know for sure.
How we consider and integrate the past has a huge impact on how we experience our future. “If we do what we did we’re gonna get what we got!”
Tell me if you can relate… Are you feeling stuck in a job that isn’t satisfying, perhaps one that’s not taking you anywhere you truly want to go? Maybe you don’t know what to do about it or how to change? Do you find yourself hating your work and feeling stuck there?
I encounter this a lot in my own work, and believe it or not, it’s not only people who are financially strapped with stories similar to these. No matter the amount of money in a 401k and other savings, any one of us can look up one day to find ourselves decades-deep in a less-than-desirable job situation without a clue for how to escape.
The job landscape is transforming before our eyes, forcing a lot of people to take jobs they don’t love simply to get by financially. Others of us are staying in jobs we don’t like to maintain a lifestyle we were once convinced we wanted, but now all this “just getting by” is making us feel like another drone in the system.
It can be so hard when you see someone you love and care for stuck in patterns that aren’t working or are not healthy.
From the outside, it’s easy to clearly see what they are doing wrong or need to change. It can be even more frustrating especially if they are someone you are very close to like a family member.
Realize this: You don’t have the power to make another person change. People don’t change unless they really want to change. You only have the power to share your perspective, wisdom, and invite them to consider a different way of doing things.
When someone changes simply to make you happy, rest assured, it doesn’t last.
The comedian George Carlin once said, “The caterpillar does all the work and the butterfly gets all the publicity.” I am fan of caterpillars, those who are dissolving their own skins to become who they are meant to be. We who continue to grow, perpetually enter the goop of change, or butterfly soup. It’s incomplete. It wouldn’t look good on a photo shoot.
As you move along your path, you may feel angry, held back, sad, unseen, or empty. It takes so much courage to be developing or undoing or daring. Yet please don’t let the in-between space convince you that you lack anything. Being in transition doesn’t mean you’re broken. It means you’re breaking away from the old, an identity, maybe a set of assumptions or an understanding or a world that no longer fits you.
It’s easy to sit on the sidelines in the lounge chair of life and be a spectator, or a critic of those who are facing their lives head-on. But I’m a sucker for those of us who are daring to make something of this time on earth. Real life is always taking place in the middle of things, not just in the polished perfection of an illusion of the end goal. How you live in the middle really is the quality of your life.
If you are feeling the fear, the sadness, the pain, not knowing what to do, how to show up, what to say or not say … I hear you.
When I went within and asked Spirit to guide me … when I asked Love what it would say, this is what I received. This is my message to me … and I thought it might be of service to you too.
Ask yourself this question: “What Would LOVE Say/Do?”
“To bring about change, you must not be afraid to take the first step. We will fail when we fail to try." – Rosa Parks
It was just a few short weeks ago that I wrote that I didn’t think we were going back to “normal.
At the time, it had dawned on me that the pandemic had uprooted us in ways big and small and that those yearning to go back to the way things used to be were in for a surprise. I had no idea how uprooted we were about to get.
This past week, millions watched as America’s streets and cities erupted across the nation. Huge peaceful protests called for an end to police brutality and for overdue systemic change. For a moment, the message seemed to get drowned out by images of violence and looting, which left people deeply shocked and shaken. Elected officials called in the National Guard and imposed mandatory curfews. Meanwhile, citizens in these cities stepped in to clean up the mess. More importantly, though, citizens stepped up to show us the opportunity and the importance of this historic moment.
That is the question that people are asking me? Well, for most people, they are doing what they’ve always done … and that is why the fear, anger, judgment, and pain just continues to manifest in our lives, in our world.
If nothing changes, nothing changes.
In this time of unprecedented fear, the way we have learned to manage or “deal” with our feelings is obviously not working. We MUST do something different. This is my response to how we do it differently.
I hope you will take a few minutes to look within and listen to what Spirit has to say to you after you watch this short video.
I love you my friend
Click Here for the Video
I have worked with many people who sought me out after years and years of talk therapy without finding the healing they sought. I’ve also worked with people who have spent years in various forms of emotional release therapy, such as Primal Therapy, without finding the healing they seek. I myself had years of both forms of therapy without finding the inner peace and joy I was looking for – until Inner Bonding.
Peter A. Levine, in his excellent book, “In An Unspoken Voice,” states that
“…feelings accessed through body awareness, rather than emotional release, bring us the kind of lasting change that we so desire.” p. 345
“Life will always bring you the circumstances you need in order to move into your highest expression. Your job is to run toward the experience.”
If you’ve attempted to effect change by trying to control your mind, only to wind up tired and frustrated, you are not alone. Creating change solely through mental techniques is impossible. It is like treating only the surface of an open wound when the infection is deep inside. It’s only when you address the underlying energy holding these thoughts and beliefs in place that you can effectively create transformation.
Vibrational transformation is a powerful internal process that addresses embedded, unresolved vibrations—dense emotional content and conditioning—and changes them from a dissonant vibration into a harmonious vibration through the conscious acceptance of the root cause of the unconscious dissonance.
You are free when you realize that you don’t have the power to MAKE another person change.
You suffer when you spend your time trying to control the lives of those around you to be what you want them to be.
People don’t change unless they really want to change. You only have the power to share your perspective, wisdom, and invite them to consider a different way of doing things.
When someone changes simply to make you happy, rest assured, it doesn’t last.
They must not only want to change but must be committed to it. They also must be open to your help. We sometimes try to change people that are not asking for help and end up trying to control them to fit our ideal.
