Podcast: Play in new window | Download
People are starting to recognize themselves in my articles.
I often struggle to say things in a way that matches the inside language of people… How they say it to themselves.
For example this whole idea of the swinging back and forth between the delusional and the devalued opinion of yourself…
It’s really like the seesaw, but not quite. You see, on a seesaw there is also another person, and whether you are up or down depends not so much on your value, ability, what have you, but on the comparison. That is good. You are better than some people and worse than other people.
No, I am talking about when you have no one to compare yourself with… you just feel that you are no good, and then at other times you feel like you are the best. And neither of these is true.
The happiest people are the people where there is no distance between the two extremes, who know, approximately, where they are on the continuum and work with what they have.
The gap between the two, by the way, is what is called ‘inauthenticity’.
I measure that in your Starting Point Measurements. It is one of the measures that tells me how ‘miserable’ and conflicted you are in life.
One of the fall-outs of being so hellbent on one aspect of your existence, value, attention, love, smarts, is that you don’t even know you are playing in a very narrow fashion in life… and therefore you cannot have a lot of fun and enjoyment.
You don’t even see values outside of the narrow confines of what you pay attention to.
I used to worry about being smart and being stupid. That was my two extremes. I didn’t know anything about honesty, and loyalty, and kindness, and courage, and even beauty, or fun, or anything outside of smart and stupid.
Once I managed to let go of the need to be smart, and the worry of being stupid, I could look around and started to see more of the world, and brother, the world is rich. I had lived in an impoverished sliver of the world.
I will write a whole article on inauthenticity… I am still struggling to FULLY comprehend it myself… but for now it seems that embracing, owning how you really are, and working with that is a close approximation. Neither a genius nor a dumbass. You can do things and not others. You can learn stuff and not others. You can do what you can do, and fancying yourself that you can do what you can’t do does no service to anyone, especially to yourself.
I teach this fully in the Playground, because this is not that easy… I probably would still be in this jailcell, hadn’t I had a major brain damage incident during a surgery… Where suddenly I started to operate on a moron level… I am not kidding you. I could not figure out how to put together 35 cents from the coins I had in my pocket… the toll on the highway. I had to ask the toll booth person to pick the coins out of my palm.
And that was what I needed… I landed on Earth… and started to do what I could do, and stopped worrying about all the things I could not do. It felt humiliating… meaning: get real Sophie… humble. Not FAKE humble, but real…
In the workshop this coming Saturday we’ll look for a new aspect of the world, BEINGNESS to aspire to… and you’ll find it hard, but if you understand what is holding you back. It can be incredibly rewarding and can turn your life around.
One of these beingness I struggled with was back in 2007, I think. I remember I was challenged to see, recognize, and be kind. Kindness. I sweated, I struggled, I cried in regret when I could see that I wasn’t kind… as in kind-hearted, I was actually quite cruel. I called it being ‘plain spoken’, but it was cruelty and unkindness.
It’s taken me a long long time, and I am still struggling with that, it’s not a way of being that comes easily to me. But today, I can be kind, at will, and sometimes I even am. lol.
So in the workshop we’ll find a perfect match but unfamiliar way of being for you, that from the confines of your seesawing up and down, self-castigating and self-inflating behavior will be unfamiliar and nearly impossible.
Kindness, for example, unless your issue was, originally, being unkind, will be totally off your radar: none of my students knows much about kindness, although they recognize unkind very readily.
Kindness still disorients me… But I now recognize it. It’s almost synonymous with being treated as a person, rather than a thing, or a role… The way most people treat themselves and everybody.
A thing in a world of things…
The workshop is work… but the real work starts when we say good bye… because you’ll be confronted by the question: so how do you be, I mean BE something you have never been?
If you are ready to get a taste of what kind of work it takes to ‘ascend’ and become a human BEING, I dare you to come to the workshop.
If your audio doesn’t work, if you don’t have a headphone, if you are slow, if you don’t hear well… please don’t come. I won’t have time to repeat everything just for you.
Oh, and if you have never had your Starting Point Measurements done… ditto…
OK, if these conditions still allow you to come, then here is the page where you can register
https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/7607645598659084801
Use the same email you bought your Starting Point Measurements with.
