How much voice do YOU have in the chorus of the voices that live in your head?
It’s Thursday morning, and I am starting a new experiment.
Yesterday I discovered that I have no idea what it is like to eat when you have an appetite. I observed myself, and I solely eat, have been eating, for taste. Texture. The mouthfeel.
But my physiology wants me to eat for appetite. 1 Bummer, I don’t know the first thing about appetite… 🙁
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I look at different languages to get a clue… In Hungarian appetite, the word, says “the desire to eat”. Hm. In other languages there are appetizers… that grow that desire to eat, or maybe to wake up the dormant desire?
When I was a kid, I used to be sick. A lot. I remember feeling hunger, but I had no desire to eat. Even now, hunger and no desire to eat come coupled together… So I don’t want to be hungry, understandably.
For the past 50 years I have been suppressing hunger and dousing appetite, the desire to eat real food by being a grazer: using any hot beverage, coffee, and tea.
I don’t remember ever having an appetite. A healthy appetite.
Why is appetite so important? Because it signals to you that your body is ready and able to accept food and process it. 2
I have been running experiments for a few years now. The overall goal of the experiments is to become a person who enjoys living in my body. Tall order, but a good experiment. Worth doing it.
Yesterday I decided to stop destroying my appetite with coffee and tea.
This morning I got up and went to make my coffee… and realized: no coffee for me. Not today, not tomorrow.
I felt my whole body go rigid, and I promptly went back to bed.
For many many many years the only reason for me to get up in the morning was the promise of hot coffee or hot tea. The promise.
The actuality, drinking the coffee, wasn’t as meaningful as the promise of it.
Addicted… that is the word that comes to mind.
Kicking a 50 year old habit is going to take something. And this is what this article is about: what does it take to kick a habit?
In the Amish horse training method I talk about the voices. The voices of the “not-self” or the “not-you”.
- The shrill voice of the yeast that always reminds me of the Gremlins, chanting: feed me, feed me.
- The accusing voice that says: you are stupid and you’ll never amount to much.
- and so on, and so forth. A whole army of voices.
- One of them wants to have something in my mouth… or it will make me cry. Some kind of despair. Very young. Non-verbal, so young.
The voices are the voices. And then, hopefully, there is you.
And that is what the TLB talks about: is there a you and how much voice it has, how much it can counter the chorus of the many many voices that pretend to be you.
Most of you have one little voice in 99 not-self voices.
I have a TLB of 70, and the tears are still rolling down my face.
The only way to grow your Self (your TLB) is to challenge the many voices, maybe even discover some new ones.
I’ve never seen the behavior of drinking tea, coffee, as a voice… I just fed it. Like you feed your cat, your dog. It wants to eat, so you feed it.
And when you look at your life, you don’t have much of a life you can call your own.
Feeding your dog, walking your dog, cleaning up after your dog, the child that never grows up. Some use gardening as their slave master. Others use owning a house: home repairs, car repairs. Yet others use the desire for riches as their slave master: making more and more money. Some use their children whom they don’t allow to grow up. Grandchildren…
My slave master: This urge to have something in my mouth… much like a pacifier… so I can hold back that crying, that despair, that hopelessness, that aloneness. To keep it at bay.
Two days ago someone yelled at me. It stirred up something old and something I’ve never “healed”, my childhood with the unpredictable and never understood beatings. Yellings. Name calling.
The timing to break the “pacifier” habit is perfect: the old pain has just been stirred up. It is on the surface and it can breathe, and heal whether it wants to heal or not.
Having no “pacifier” will test me and my 70 TLB… I am certain of it.
I have tried to kick the caffeine habit before, as I thought it was a caffeine habit… but this is the first time I see it for what it is: something totally functional and totally destructive to my Self: aimed to separate me from me and my pain.
Your slave driver aims to separate you from you and your pain.
When you consume all those beverages or candy or snacks, you kill your appetite while you hold the pain of living at bay.
The Blood Type Diet book says that the destroyer of a blood type B person is being a grazer, to eat like a cow, all the time. I am blood type B, and the short periods in my life when I was relatively well were periods when I had no opportunity to eat between meals. And there was also no coffee to be had.
Why would Blood Type B’s be grazers? I have a hunch that because Blood Type B’s can see that the only way to make it in life is to deal with people, and deal with them well.
People are nasty, and dealing with them is no fun. So blood type B’s externalize their internal misgivings with grazing. Using grazing like a pacifier.
It’s a hypothesis… but I feel quite certain about it.
Here is a little statistics for you: Only 10% of humanity is blood type B, but 35% of self-made millionaires are blood type B.
A blood type B can handle frustration better than other blood types, and maybe that is their secret to rising to the top?
Frustration is the most frequent not-self.3
A higher TLB… The ability to Handle frustration well is the sign of a higher TLB and a stronger Self. Handling frustration well means: not allow it to fester, not allow it to go into hate, or other destructive emotions or behaviors… just keep it frustration. 4
When you have a low-low TLB, you don’t even mount any resistance to the “not-self”, and you do not call the shot… you obey the voices as if they were your Self…
A higher TLB means: you mount resistance, and therefore you grow, you achieve. But you have to deal with the internal battle.
It is hard work. It is potentially nerve racking. No wonder you avoid it.
The secret of high TLB and how you can get it
I have found that hearing the voices, getting intimately familiar with them by not resisting them, not trying to fix them, or change them, or suppress them (suppressing them like the positive thinkers who have the lowest vibration of all), you strengthen your Self… your sense of Self, by distinguishing it from what it isn’t: from what is trying to displace it.
Once you know, in the moment, which voice is you, who you are, your Self, that inner power struggle diminishes. This is my theory, and this is the experiment.
All my experiments are about much more than just what they seem to be on the surface: this time I am activating my ability to hear the needy part, the infant that cannot deal with life unless it can suck on a pacifier… and allow it to do what it does…
On the surface I stop drinking tea and coffee… I have stopped eating hard candy about two years ago.
I have a student who will, hopefully, also change the way she eats… a grazer herself. We’ll see how she does. I’ll monitor her… she is part of this experiment in a way. Her TLB is 1.
I have a hunch that I’ll need
- the Coherence Activator Audio more than anything…
- or maybe the Heaven on Earth… the liquid remedy
- and the diligent observation of the needy infant…
- and probably a context that is bigger than just feeling good in my body
This will be the hardest experiment I have ever done. And like any experiment, it can fail. But the learning from it won’t be any less than if it succeeds.
But because I personally benefit if it succeeds: I will get acquainted with appetite, and therefore start digesting food fully. I have a personal stake in it succeeding.
What experiments are YOU conducting? Oh, none? Business as usual?
Then why are you on my site?
You see, all the knowledge that is in your head won’t change your life. Only action will. Experiments.
PS: In yesterday’s Playground session I saw what people do to avoid being themselves… The woman who helps obsessively. The man who gives away his work and expertise. The woman who gets angry. The man who hides. The man who pretends that he is a nobody. The woman who pretends that she is powerless.
All strategies to avoid being a Self, having to deal with frustration effectively.
Frustration is a good thing. It shows that you are up to something. And you have a choice: pursue or no.
When you use the strategy typical to you to avoid dealing with the frustration, you avoided living life to the fullest, being a person, having a Self.
For me it is coffee… what is it for you? Comment below or send me an email. I prefer comments… they make the site more enjoyable.
- This is one of the aspects of your physiology I am able to test: how your body wants you to eat. For taste, for appetite, for smell, whether you need meat, fat, or sugar to be well…
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find out what is your eating style
.Often you are eating the right things and yet you are not getting well… you don’t have energy… This test will tell you.
- The number one experience I have had people when I was still dealing with people personally, was their bad breath. The bad breath signaled indigestion. They were also fat. The people I meet nowadays are old and thin. You don’t get really old if you have indigestion because you eat when your body isn’t ready to eat.
- Other blood types get angry, hateful, envious, jealous, stingy, lazy, blaming, vengeful, etc…
- Frustration means that you know that you intend something and you find a barrier between what you want and you… but you intend to break it through… Which means you don’t give up your want… you can keep at it until you succeed.
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Not handling frustration well is
–Giving up
–Redirecting the energy
–Allowing the energy to become destructive
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Frustration is a tension… You not handling frustration well shows that you don’t handle any tension, any challenge, any resistance well… thus your low TLB
Sandra, also widen your cone of vision and notice that what you have declared important for your life isn’t getting done… none of it, while the “slavemasters” get more and more air time. This even includes the work in the Playground…
Oh wow – I haven’t looked at drinking coffee in this way. For me it also brings a “a warm and fuzzy” feeling, because in Germany coffe time is more like a social event with friends and family. But I did notice recently that the desire to make coffee just for myself is pulling me away from difficult or unpleasant tasks.
I have other “slave masters” like household, yard, child, needy friends and pets. Fortunately I already started downsizing (obviously not the child, but he gets more independent) and I will look at that from the “pacifier” background.