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We are working to uproot you from misery… and helping you to grow some legs.. so you can dance, move, joyfully.
One more thing to mention that unless you truly get this, nothing else will help, nothing else will matter:
The most important fact about reality is this: there is nothing that is missing in reality.
there is no ‘no’ in reality. So if you want to live in reality, then suddenly we won’t hear the word, inside and out, no, don’t, haven’t, shouldn’t, etc.
I have a young couple living downstairs in this two family house.
I always check if they are at home, and I always opinionate about how they live their lives, at least the part I can see.
So this evening I did what I always do, just after I sent an email to my faithful ‘flexibility capacity’ clients.
I said: it’s a weird way to live… and then I saw that I was judgmental. So I said: they live the way they live, and that is how they should live. And then I saw that if that is the case, I should judge, opinionate and do whatever I do, because that is what I do.
Now, normally I grumble about them for a few minutes… but the moment I allowed myself to judge (instead of saying I should not judge) I was free. And it was heavenly.
I have been teaching, writing, talking about finding all the things you consider truth, you consider wrong or right, good or bad, and re-evaluate these truths, wrongs, rights, goods and bads.
These are the nails in your foot, these are the trapping devices that keep you stuck in unhappy, miserable, dissatisfied, not able to grow, enjoy life the way life is.
Humans, homo sapiens, uses their words to approximate reality, and then these same humans honor these words as if it had come from a higher power, as if these words were the word of a god, i.e. it would be a desecration of this god to change their minds about it, sacrilegious.
All the while forgetting that they themselves said that… at an early age, to boot, and upset to make it even more ridiculous to honor those statements as the divine truth.
They were words of an upset 3-year old, reaching, maybe as high as the tabletop, seeing the world from their unique and self-centered way. Everything was right or wrong, good or bad, and everything was about them.
The best example I have seen, ever, is a Japanese movie, Departures, in the paid subscribers’ area of my site. You need to be a member to watch the movie. I bring this movie up a lot… here is a list of articles I talk about it
In that movie the main character lives out of the decision that his father never loved him, that he left him and never thought of him again.
And obviously he was bitter about that, and lived his life determinedly to both prove and disprove his father’s abandonment of him, some 30 years later.
As part of a new job he comes across with his father and his whole life is proven to have been on the top of a misunderstanding… like everyone’s life who lives out of the imminent wisdom of a 3-year old.
Beautiful movie, I think of it at least once a month, sometimes more often… and every time my eyes are filled with tears.
The movie is a fabulous illustration of one of my favorite self-defining sentences: ‘it ain’t necessarily so’
This, saying: ‘it ain’t necessarily so’ is one of the jobs of a person who wants to be ‘enlightened’. To invent sentences that effectively keep them out of the trap they fell into with their own words at age 3.
The sentences are counter-intuitive.
Yesterday I got an email from a client who has never done a course with me… so she is a perfect example of how the world tries to solve self-imposed misery.
The ‘natural’, logical way to turn something around is to ‘turn it around’
Here is a part of her email. Try to recognize yourself in what she is going through, even if you are a male, you have some part of you that you don’t think is OK.
“I decided to start with changing my mindset about my body, specifically my chest.. I decided to no longer buy into the harsh one I was holding onto and replace it with the possibility of ‘beautiful, sexy, normal, and lovable’ (normal as in not defected or disgusting and no need to be fixed…).
I’ve been taking the time to really look at my body in the mirror, purposefully jiggling and wiggling to bring playfulness to the process, and to become more comfortable with (and even enjoy) the natural motions..
Dissecting what my interpretation of beauty is, the standards/ideals I’ve been hoping to attain, and why I chose to buy into that bullshit.. what’s real and what’s not — the truth and the lies… I’m deciding to accept my body, to see as beautiful and worthy of love as is, whether others agree or not.. because my body is MY body. I still have work, but moving in a good direction.”
Although her solution sounds very seductive, it is brainy and totally ineffective. Nothing will change as a result. In essence she brings positive thinking to this work… positive thinking which is a horrible mistake. ALWAYS.
What would I do in her situation? Well, it is a better question to ask: what do I do in MY situation?
Example: When I look in the mirror I see an old woman looking back. Thinning hair, wrinkles, extra padding here and there. And if I am not careful, I see my mother looking back at me from the mirror: I look frighteningly like her.
My mother was nasty, abusive with me all my life… so I didn’t like her. The idea of becoming my mother scares the bejesus out of me.
So what do I do?
I say: I look the way I look, and that is how I am supposed to look. Why? because that is how I look.
What is underneath is that in reality, I repeat: in reality, things are exactly the way they are, not the way they aren’t… not as they should be, not as they ought to be, not as one would wish they were… No. things are the way they are.
And I am the way I am, inside and out. Always, 24/7. And I am OK with that. Tomorrow I will be, maybe, different, and then I’ll be OK with that.
Nowadays I work twice as hard as before, so I am tired in the evenings. And I am exactly as tired as I should be… so no complaining. I get done exactly as much as I get done. I make the mistakes I make, and those are the mistakes I was supposed to make. How do I know? I made them, didn’t I?
In reality you never do anything you were not supposed to do. In reality you did what you did, and that is what you were supposed to do, because that is what you did.
Preferences are real… but they have nothing to do with reality.
I can say: I made mistakes, and my preference is that I don’t.
I look the way I look, and my preference is that I look like Raquel Welch, or the way I looked when I was young.
Now, here is a warning: if you repeat my words… truth repeated is a lie.
Unless my words disappear the wrong, they were lies in your mouth.
I’ll end this article with a cautionary tale: the tale of the Himalayan meditating monks.
These monks moved back to civilization after 10-20-30 years of meditating in monasteries in the Himalayas…
One would expect that meditation disappeared all the ills, that meditation trained them to keep their attention to themselves, but the results were strikingly different. All the gains, all the calmness, all the centeredness disappeared… They were just as reactive as a person who never meditated, because their calmness was not an inner calmness, it was an outer calmness.
What is the difference between those meditating monks and the graduates of my programs who did the work?
- In my programs you go through hell, you need to see all the grief you have gone through, preferably none of those left out.
- In my programs you start to see that it is always you who is at cause in your misery… not others.
- In my programs you take full responsibility for that… and, gasp, take accountability, i.e. effective actions to prevent yourself from causing your own misery in the future. This is the point we are in the Growth course… by the way.
- And when you successfully graduated, nothing can pull you out of your calm for longer than a few minutes, because your CORE, who you are, is now solid and you become like the Daruma Doll… unflappable.
Not like the monks who did none of the work… who just sat cross legged for years.
How long does it take? Years. Really.
If you were still a child, it would take days… but I don’t take children as students. It took me decades, because I had to invent the methodology… There was the skeleton of one, but not a full blown methodology…
Here is another thing: you cannot teach this in big groups… you need to be able to talk to every person, at least once a week, for this to be effective.
My Growth course group is seven people. We meet weekly, and they, if they are smart, not all of them are, lol, send me reports in between the session.
Is it worth it?
Is finally living a joyful, productive life worth it for you? As yourself the question… I can’t answer it for you.
If you are interested in doing the Growth Course, you are out of luck: I don’t take on new students. But you can learn through the session recordings, and if you are smart, add the email part too… so you can get some personal attention.
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