In your life you live as if you had no authority over your life.
Authority means: the power to call the shot. The power to make decisions, the power to have them carried out. The power to evaluate, accept or reject.
You have been instructed by family, schools, government, medical establishment, legal establishment, and gurus to hand over your authority to everyone and their brother.
You’ve been an idle mouthpiece to all these authorities. Not a single independent thought, not a single argument.
What do I mean? I mean the practice of looking who is speaking.
The practice of looking who is speaking
Example 1: My downstairs neighbor came back from school depressed, wounded, hurt. I am sitting here, being with her… without her knowing it. She lives in the downstairs apartment.
Why do I do it? Because if I don’t do it, if I don’t see what caused the distress, I will carry it into my own life, and create some reason for it. That is the only way an empath can be well. Time consuming? Maybe. But it takes much less time to do this, than to do all the things that come from, in this case, depression, and salvage the wreck that my life becomes. (Depressed people do horrible things to their lives… destructive…)
So, I am sitting, and feel that someone said something, to her, about her, and although she spent a fun-filled weekend with friends, her self-confidence plummeted to an all-time low.
“Look who is talking! Look and see that their intention is to make you miserable! don’t listen!” I suggest psychically, and lo and behold she calms down, and the depression-like wavy despair now only comes up every once in a while.
Or in the second example, I am having a conversation with myself to get to the bottom of an emotion or a behavior.
Example 2: I am sitting by my computer, avoiding writing the book. I am looking at that curiously.
Witness: What’s going on? What are you avoiding?
Me: I am avoiding failing.
Witness: OK… failing in what?
Me: I am avoiding finding out that in spite of all the knowledge I am a poor marketer.
Witness: Aha, is that what you are avoiding?
Me: Oh… I am avoiding finding out that my stuff is worthless.Witness: Now we are cooking! What makes you think that your stuff is worthless?
Me: People are not producing the kinds of results I say they could if they used my stuff!
Witness: Is that your stuff’s fault? Or are they supposed to do something to get the results?
Me: They are supposed to do things that get them the results. My stuff is just guidance, my stuff is just helping them.
Witness: Aha… and you are saying that because they are not doing the things they are supposed to do, AND they are not getting the results, your stuff may be worthless?
Me: Hm… let me muscletest is I could or should make the stuff work on their own… (muscletest says: no and no. Not a different delivery method, not doing for them… keep it the same!)
Witness: Make the barrier to entry hard. Difficult!
Me: Hm, that is a very daring idea… after all how am I going to make money?
Witness: Are you making much money now?
Me: you are right… nothing to write home about.
Witness: So what do you know about “barrier to entry?”
Me: When I applied to architecture school, there were 100 spots and there were 2,000 applicants. They had to pick the ones that had the most promise to succeed. We didn’t just have tests in pysics, math, but also freehand drawing and a wicked difficult aptitude test for memory, spatial seeing (English?) and other hard stuff!
Witness: And in your business? Anyone who plops down some money can get your “stuff” and then badmouth it?
Me: That has been the reality, mostly, yes.
You have never had a conversation to gain a deep understanding of the things that decided the most important “facts” about you. You never questioned your decisions. You never looked at your invented habits with a critical eye: Does this really serve me and what I am up to? Perfectionism. being nice, being a know-it-all… and such.
In this exercise I want you to look at the other people in the events that surrounded your decisions.
Would you want to give the other participants the job of CEO in your life? Your mother, your father, your boy friend, your school teacher, me?
I hope you’ll say NO. But you have been. Take the job back, and go back and re-evaluate the things you decided because they said something… and you reacted.
You can re-write history at any point. It is work, but it’s worth it
In my first ever workshop: “Playground: It is never too late to have a happy childhood” the participants rewrote their personal history and had a future discontinuous with their past. Disease symptoms disappeared, lack of success disappeared, extra weight disappeared, relationship troubles disappeared.
The new history created a new person who was living life differently, with more power, with more energy, with more joy.
I write these articles, each and every one of them, as an exercise. Sometimes I don’t word them that way, but I always mean them to be an exercise.
If you love yourself, even just a little bit, you’ll do the exercises.
And if you are here because you are an incurable gossip, following links about Teal Scott who is now just Teal the artist… Let me throw up! Ough! Go away. This blog is not for you.
