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You may think that you want… That you really really want something. But the truth is: you really really NEED it… because you feel that without it you are… what? dead? a loser? what are you really afraid of?
Real want is energizer, real want is nurturing. You have no real wants. You have needs…and you are pitiful.
What happens if your ‘needs’ are dominating your life? If you are the 8-billion?
You play to win, you play to not lose, you play to be right, you play to make others wrong…
If you play to win, always, you can’t get good at anything. You can’t play well.
Also, if you do to get it done… you cannot do it well.
If you read to have read it… if you drive to get there…
Yeah. So what do these activities have in common?
Anyone?
It is not easy to see… but they are all goal-driven.
Your attention, your energy is divided between what you are doing and what you plan to accomplish.
So what?
Yeah, really….
But what happens is that what you are doing, where you are is ‘not there yet’… Nothing happy about it. It is the wrong place. Not there yet.
And your heart isn’t where your hand is… and what you do is dutiful, and heartless. Not where you should be. Not where joy, not where results are.
No energy either… Most of the energy, often as much as 70% goes longingly to the goal… and isn’t where it’s needed: where you are doing whatever you are doing.
You can’t get good at the activity. You can’t pay attention to what you might be learning. Your eyes are only there so you don’t fall on your face… but not to see anything.
Things take longer than they could if you were present… Things done at best shabbily… And you never learn anything, never get better. And to boot: you don’t enjoy the doing.
About 70% of life is doing. So if this is how you do what you do, at the minimum 70% of your life you don’t enjoy.
It’s the ‘living for the weekend’ phenomenon… Stingy too. You give as little as you can get away with.
But what you never consider is that you live in bread of shame… And you hate yourself.
Self-love is the most important component of a life you love. If you can’t love yourself because you don’t deserve to be loved then of course you can’t love your life.
The original soul, the Vessel refused to receive the Light, because it wanted to earn its light… instead of just being given.
Every single human is endowed with that soul… and no matter what you think: if you don’t earn your light, what you want, you cannot love yourself and cannot love your life.
And you don’t.
Maybe because you think you are entitled.
Maybe because you think that other people don’t earn it either…
Whichever you think, you are S.C.R.E.W.E.D.
And to boot, you are not only hooked by the visible goals, you are also hooked by the invisible NEEDS.
In the racket model we call them the payoffs… Being right, making the other wrong, looking good, avoiding looking bad, dominate, avoid domination, win, avoid losing, justify, invalidate another, and avoid responsibility…
When you look at these as the motivators of action, attitudes, behaviors, and you see that they are goals, and they are strong powerful needs that will never allow you to do what you do wholeheartedly, will never allow you to love, to enjoy, to participate, you belong, to be prosperous, healthy, and to love yourself, you may want to manage them so they don’t use, they don’t eat up all your life. All your activities.
Sometimes it is hard to see what you want to be right about.
Let me show you just one thing. Ready?
Most often you want to be right about, and you are ‘right’ about yourself. That you can’t. That it is too hard. And that you are not smart enough, not nimble enough, you don’t have enough time, that it will never work, that you’ll never do good work, that you can’t get what you want. That the world is a horrible place. That it would be best for everyone if you killed yourself. That you are too old, you are too fat, you are too this or that.
And then you hate yourself and you hate your life.
Let’s look at things without the need to be right about anything. How do we do that?
My method is to say ‘it ain’t necessarily so’. I am not saying it’s not true. Instead I am just saying: not necessarily. I am sneaking in some malleability.
Because your need to be right is not 90%… it is 100%. Unforgiving, and complete.
One of my students now manages to hold onto this ‘it ain’t necessarily so’ that she cannot do what she is paid to do. Five minutes at a time.
Five minutes is long enough to actually get some work done. Is she able to hold her attention fully on what she is doing? No. Only 10%. But it is vastly better than what it was before, when the ‘I can’t do this, because I don’t know how to do this’ was 100%.
The biggest issue with these need-based states, the biggest issue with needs is this: they are an all-or-nothing kind of need. They don’t allow for partial truth.
No scale, no shades of gray, no. It is all-or-nothing. Not even the famous half full or half empty cup. The cup is either full or empty. Nothing in between.
Black or white. The systemic judgment hell. You see nothing outside of black and white. You are either right or you are wrong. And you say that you either can or you can’t.
No scale, no process, no chance for growth, no chance for learning, no chance for joy, no chance for anything worth having.
An interesting phenomenon: two of my students recently managed to adhere to black and white… Their measure is at 90%. And that almost insignificant sounding gain raised their vibration 100 points.
90% is still a lot. But if I translate those numbers to something more tangible than black and white…
Imagine you are in a dark room. You don’t know whether it is day or night. It is pitch black. Now I light a candle. Its light may not even reach every corner of the room, and yet. You see where you are, you see around you. And you can start living.
In pitch dark life was full of obstacles that you didn’t see, didn’t expect, so either you didn’t even move around, or you bumped up against them all the time.
But now with the candle lit, you can do a lot of things. You can even read if you bring the book close to the candle.
And that is what the 90% of these two students is like: they lit a candle in their darkness.
And if the first signs are not a fluke, a third student is on her way.
My number is 7%… meaning: 7% of the time I give in to some need to my own detriment.
My latest was this: a client ordered eight bottles of energy remedies. ‘It is too much!’ screamed the inner entitled child. ‘I don’t want to do it!’
So, I didn’t… Until this morning when I heard another voice, the adult: ‘The spirit is only interested that there be flying. Who is doing the flying is not of much interest to the spirit. But if I don’t manage to fly, someone else will…‘ By the same token, if I don’t fill those eight bottles, energize them, infuse them, label them package them, ship them, no one else will. So I did.
The package is waiting for the mailman to pick it up. Finally. Now I can love myself again.
What did I do in this exercise? I faced the TIGER. The tiger is the part of your self that doesn’t care if you are happy, if you can love yourself, the part that is selfish, stingy, and doesn’t care.
When you finally face it, you can see that you are probably stronger than the TIGER, or if not yet, you can get stronger with practice.
And then you can be your higher, generous, lovable self more often, so you can love yourself more of the time.
Will you love yourself always? Probably not. But who cares? Judging from the joy of my 10-percenters, even the puny-sounding ten percent is great.
Let’s become stronger than the TIGERThe Face The Tiger workshop…
….has two parts: a recorded and a live part. The live session hasn’t been scheduled yet, because I don’t know who is coming… So far everyone is from the Western part of the United States.
If the time I’ll finally schedule doesn’t work for you, I’ll find a way to take care of you. Promise.
Oh, and if you sign up before August 29, use coupon code TIGGER
After August 29 but before my birthday, September 4, use coupon code TIGGER2 to get a discount.
This is my birthday gift to you.
