Emotional intelligence, emotional maturity… the end of suffering, the end of life in hell is all a result of the misbuttoned shirt life
Fiction, good fiction, allows you to have intimacy with people you never knew. And what we miss most in life is intimacy. Knowing the other, being known and accepted.
It’s hard to be intimate in real life, it takes two people, two people who were hurt, maybe abused as children, so it is nearly impossible.
I listen to the partner call (from the Playground) and wish they read fiction. Reading fiction, especially children’s books, is very healing.
At least for myself.
You cry, and you don’t even know why, but you are healing.
I have watched the movie: Saving Mr. Banks… and sobbed through… some movies are also good for healing. Then I bought Mary Poppins, the book. Then I watched the movie with the famous Olsen twins It Takes Two (1995).
I loved it… Then I watched the 101 Dalmatians, then I got all the books, including the original by Erich Kästner and Mark Twain… because when I do something I drink deeply from the cup… not just a sip here and there.
“A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely sobers us again.” ~ Alexander Pope
If you are someone with troubled childhood, do yourself a favor and start reading, maybe even binge on children’s books that will talk about feelings that you haven’t felt, have no words for or have been afraid to access, express, remember… because they are too confusing and too painful.
Why is it important that in some form you revisit your incidents that have more to do with who you have become than your genes?
Puzzling question, isn’t it?
For me it took, essentially, two sessions, two healing sessions.
The incidents, interestingly two incidents feeling like one: First I was raped by a drunk stranger and left to die at age three and a half. And then, not much later, my father made me perform oral sex.
I have shared before, but I think it will teach you something if I repeat how I healed, one session after the other, even though, even though, in reality, about 15 years passed between the three healing sessions.
First: in 1987, I managed to look at the “oral” incident from the outside, and noted that “horrible” was just one possible vantage points… it looked different from the sideways view.
Second: in 1996, I was asked, by a healer, to recount the incident, backwards and forwards, many times, each time adding more details, colors, smells, sounds, touch perceptions, backwards and forwards.
Third: in 2008, I was asked, by a BEST chiropractor, if I knew anyone of the same age as I was then? I did. My oldest grandniece was about that age. Then the chiropractor asked to get present to my grandniece and look what I would say to my niece if she were in that same or similar incident.
I could feel her smooth skin, her soft body, even though I’ve never met her. But I knew she was innocent. And I felt deep love and compassion for her.
And… and then I turned that towards myself. I wept, but this time with love.
When who you are, for yourself, was defined from only one vantage point, others, you are condemned to not be able to love yourself.
When through the work of the Playground you can change your vantage point on command, at will, you can manage to see your innocence, and you can start loving yourself.
Being able to love yourself is what starts your path to human being. Nothing else you have ever done or can do before that.
But, as I just read in Rob Brezny’s weekly column,
“So much of what we learn about love is taught by people who never really loved us. So much of what we learn about love is taught by people who were too narcissistic or wounded to be able to love very well; and by people who didn’t have many listening skills and therefore didn’t know enough about us to love us for who we really are; and by people who love themselves poorly and so of course find it hard to love anyone else.
As long as you love yourself poorly, you cannot love anyone else.
You only experience love when it is YOU who loves, and when you love well.
Don’t expect to be loved. At the current evolutionary level humans are, they are unable to love, or love well.
But you can always love yourself… once you find the you who you can love.
I now can love myself.
- When you love, committing to something, and fulfilling on it becomes easy.
- It becomes who you are.
- It even becomes easy or easier to commit to integrity: being true to your Self.
I am, occasionally starting to hear that on the Playground partner calls. Occasionally.
It took me 15 years. It may take you a year, or more than a year, but if you do the Playground as the Playground needs to be done to be effective, then you’ll get there.
If you do the program as it needs to be done.
Step by step…
If you miss a step, especially if you miss the first step and try to do the higher steps, you will NEVER get to the stage where you can love.
Bummer, eh?
Everything in today’s world suggests, all the marketeers suggest that you can jump to a high level in anything… with what they are selling you.
Whether it is a spiritual or healing course, or about beauty (just put this cream on your face), or about health (just take this tablet, superfood, whatever), or abundance (let’s do away your negative beliefs)… they are all lying to you.
Unless you change your fundamentals to be aligned with self-love, unless they are aligned with growth, and then, when the foundation is done, build whatever you want on that foundation, you are going to be stuck in the unbridgeable gap of low living, high desires.
The desire trap. The misbuttoned shirt phenomena.
There is no desire trap for the person who can love themselves.
A person able to love themselves well will be able to see that life is a process of building up to big accomplishments, not a jump.
There is nothing as horrible as the desire trap. Or the resignation and regret when you don’t even have enough energy to desire. When you are a walking dead. Not dead yet but also not alive.
And you can be like that at ages 18, 24, 28…50-60-70, any age. I can see it on my students before and after they come alive.
It actually takes a lot of work, from them and from me.
No one teaches how to do it or how to teach it. Even though there is a science to it: just reverse what your parents, your teachers, your friends, your society packed on you.
What took 10-20-30-40-50-60 years to build, you cannot unbuild in a week… And even in a year, in the Playground, you can only unbuild it if you do it step by tedious step. In the partner calls.
Or if you get lucky, in an occasional one-on-one call with me.
I have never taken a course where most of the class was sent back to the beginners class. Instead, what teachers do, is let everyone pass, and then declare the course done, and successful.
B.S. This is one of the reasons courses have a success rate around 1%.
I promised one of my underachiever students that I was not going to leave her behind… The hardest promise I have ever made. Totally counter to my natural inclination. I used to be the Firing Queen after all… lol.
But my word is my word. And she isn’t doing well. She, and eight other students are back at the starting point. So they can attend to what they have forgotten to attend to… the first step.
Like they say in Hungary: if you mis-buttoned your vest, you need to start over again… or you’ll never succeed.
What is the first step, you ask?
It is the same as the first step I took back in 1987: seeing the incident from a sideways view. We call it the Martian’s view. If you don’t do that step, if you skip it with any incident, every story, everything you do afterwards won’t set you free.
Why? Because only the sideways view takes you to reality.
And only in reality you’ll see that there is never any drama, never any suffering, never anything wrong in reality.
There may be pain. There may be grieving. There may be beating. There may be being left on the street corner. There may be a busy mother, or an overpromising drunk father. But if you saw it in a movie, would you suffer? No. you wouldn’t.
Your incident was horrible only through your own eyes.
I knew I was out of the woods, when I could see the Holocaust, Hitler, Stalin, Donald Trump without feeling that OMG, it’s horrible. This is the result of a sideways view: taking yourself out of the picture… or better said: inside and outside of the picture… Bilocating, I call it.
It’s a skill, and it is difficult to learn.
I am not emotionless. I still grieve my niece’s passing a few years ago. I still grieve that my little brother doesn’t want to talk to me. I still grieve that some of my students are not doing the work.
It is happening, but it isn’t happening to me… I am happy much of the time able to experience fun, joy, aliveness most of the time.
And that is the most a human, or a human being can expect from life. Even though a lot of desires are unfulfilled, and will remain so.
The next Playground will start on Saturday, May 18. if you want to be in it, you can sign up, or request a brief call with me, where we can decide if it is the right thing for you.
Get into the Playground
