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Everyone has an Achilles Heel. Mine is deceit…
On the surface it looks like I make that behavior wrong… but what is underneath it is a concern.
A concern is what keeps your foot nailed to the floor so you cannot do much more than dance around that nail.
The concern is feelings stupid when I fall for the deceit… when I can be duped, when I am too stupid to be able to tell.
Of course I could say: I love people, I see the best in them, blah blah blah, but that is not the point.
I have an impossible standard for myself to never miss the sign of deceit, to never be found out that I am too stupid to see it a mile away.
Standards and concerns almost always come together. You are concerned about, or for… both act like a nail in your foot. If you are concerned to be considered smart… you’ll dance around that, like a ‘moron’ and forget about the whole big wide world… where it doesn’t matter how smart you are, you are you, and that is enough.
Standard, in that same situation, is that you should be someone who is considered smart… a straitjacket if I have ever seen one.
And even though falling for someone’s deceptive moves, being duped is painful, can cost a lot, being on guard, being concerned is much more expensive. You are actually paying with your aliveness, kindness, ability to trust and love.
Whether this is part of being human, or caused by your upbringing: I don’t know.
I can ask some questions of Source… like 100 years ago, were people dealing with the same thing? being wounded, debilitated, and struggling against it all their lives? Source’s answer is yes. How about 200 years ago? not that much… and 1000 years ago? the answer is no. How about 2000 years ago? no.
So people, parenting changed, and the unrealistic expectations of parenthood, unrealistic expectations towards the child, abuse, etc. makes it harder today to be all you can be… and let go of the ‘beliefs’ you entertain that hold you back.
I listened to a podcast, a conversation between Vishen Lakhiani of Mindvalley fame, and Shelly Lefkoe… about disappearing beliefs.
She generously spells out her entire methodology… I can see that it could work, and yet I have never quite seen it work… so I’d like to experiment with it.
The 3-wishes workshop/exercise drives up some beliefs that could be a starting point.
If you have done the 3-wishes workshop, you can come to a call where I will work with as many of the people who show up as I can… and we shall see if in fact her methodology works. I doubt… even thought everything she says is true… but my hunch is that what she doesn’t say because she doesn’t see it? is very important.
Why do the 3-wishes workshop first?
The exercise in the workshop drives up your deepest and earliest ‘belief’ about yourself and about the world.
Most other methods I use are less reliable in this regard.
Why? Because most other methods ask you to remember an incident, and most don’t, or misremember, or shower me with their fixed interpretation, which is not useful in the process to find out what was your meaning, the first one, about yourself.
You see, it is not what happened to you. It is the meaning you gave it. And you have been massaged that meaning for the past 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years…
But the 3-wishes workshop drives up the ‘real’ meaning…
Here is an example: one of my students was locked in a car on a hot summer day. He was yelling, banged on the window, and then he passed out.
He has been telling me, that he decided that he was nothing… But the 3-wishes exercise dared to disagree… There we found out that the meaning he gave is that he was a thing… something it’s OK to forget in the car. It’s OK to not take home. That he was a thing.
In my original incident I was also treated like a thing… but the meaning I gave was trapped. Not free.
Very different feeling, very different life path…
Here is how this plays out today… literally today, for me
I am sitting here, stomach lurching, in anxiety.
Not my favorite state… but unavoidable.
What’s going on?
I have a dentist appointment. I have procrastinated 10 years (almost) to make this appointment. I muscletested all dentists in my community and settled on a Ukrainian woman… but now I am having second thoughts.
Muscletest says that she is decent. But her office, her staff are not. And my experience with dentists is that they want to tell me what to do… taking away my free will. This is how I ended up with missing teeth, in spite of the tens of thousands of dollars I spent on my dental care.
In the dentist’s chair I turn into a sheep. A ‘you tell me’ kind of person. I have no idea why… but afterwards it feels like I was raped. And in some figurative sense I was.
It feels that I was there to give them what they want, not get what I want. That is like rape… isn’t it?
So today’s appointment is going to be a test if I have, in fact, become the person who I think I am, who my students and clients think I am: and adult, in possession of my adult capacities. Having the power to call the shot.
Now, that I have redefined what this appointment is about, I feel less anxiety.
It’s not about my teeth, really… It’s about me being able to be myself, in any circumstance, even those that in the past i was weak, and pitiful.
I decide to set the grounds for the ‘relationship’ with the dentist and her office: I am the customer, and I am there to get what I want to buy… Their job is to give it to me, the way I want it, or no deal.
I am a business too… and I want things my way. But I am at the same time here to serve my customers… and if our way of doing business don’t work together, we say good bye. No harm done.
Yeah, that’s a good principle.
What am I going to do if this doesn’t work out?
I’ll look for another dentist… no hurry on the creative plane…
I used my intellect to set myself free… Why did I have to set myself free? Because my fundamental ‘belief’ is that I am not.
By the way: the visit, without any work done, will cost me $250.
It is, I think, is a sales pitch I have to pay for.
No wonder people often choose me to get ‘diagnosed’ for a puny $25… and although I do make suggestions, your free will is never violated.
One more insight I gleaned from this experience: the source of my anxiety was really a fear that in this situation I won’t be allowed to drive my own life, to sit in the driving seat of my own life.
Doctors, lawyers, police, parents, politicians tend to claim the right to drive YOUR LIFE…
People, maybe you, don’t know where this political situation is heading nowadays in the USA, or in the world.
I can feel the collective breath held.
Sit down with yourself, and have a conversation where you start to see that no matter the situation, you always drive your life yourself, even when it doesn’t look like that…
And resolve to take your life into your own hands.
You can start by finding out how you are doing, healthwise. Everything is easier when you are well. And it starts with finding out where you, maybe, aren’t as well as you hoped you’d be.
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