Ultimately, we are not dependent on anything external to us for feeling good and for our peace of mind and sense of well-being. Only we, and not the environment, have the final power and freedom to determine whether we will feel good or bad.
The realization that we can feel good in spite of our surroundings, no matter how horrible our circumstances, is dramatically illustrated by Nazi concentration camp survivor, Dr. Frankl and Vietnam prisoner of war survivor, Captain Coffee. Even though these two men had contrasting prison experiences, the results were similar. Frankl reported living in overcrowded conditions where prisoners were herded like cattle to their work sites. In contrast to Frankl, Coffee described his situation as being in solitary confinement with no contact with other prisoners and interrupted by random interrogations by the captors. The only communication between prisoners came after they eventually worked out a code by tapping on the walls of their cells.
Both of these men showed us how it is up to us and not the environment to determine what our mental focus will be and how we are going to feel. They also revealed to us how it is up to us to find peace and well-being within ourselves instead of in the external world. Their experience is truly a testimony to the triumph of the human spirit over adversity. Their experiences provide a glimpse of the power that resides in our heart. Only by discovering the power and freedom to choose their focus, were these prisoners of war able to transcend the horror around them and successfully survive their bleak circumstances. In order to survive, they were forced to uncover the treasure of love within their hearts and they realized that this is what makes life worth living.
They both discovered that you can strip a person of everything except the most fundamental of the human freedoms. In his beautiful book Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl defined the final freedom as “the freedom to choose your attitude in any given set of circumstances.”
As evidence for this, Dr. Frankl related the example of men who did not get caught up in the biological struggle for survival, but who accessed the love within them. He had this to say:
"Those men… who, even though starving like the rest of us, took it upon themselves to go from hut to hut comforting others and giving away their last piece of bread."
From this, Frankl concluded that humankind can retain some “vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress.” Frankl’s observation demonstrates the truth that who and what we are most essentially is love. It attests to the tremendous power of our capacity to love and care. Focusing on what they loved is what enabled them to survive in such hostile, deprived and bleak environments. I'll say more about how holding a love focus instead of a fear focus saved them in the next posting.
• Today, remember that, like these two men, you have the freedom to think about whatever you choose to focus on, instead of letting the environment dictate the focus. In this way, both men chose to heroically grapple with their extremely stressful circumstances. They maintained the freedom to direct their thoughts to whatever they wanted to think about, instead of remaining helpless victims. This way, they transcended the horrible conditions they were forced to live under in their powerless position as prisoners. [Portions of the above were taken from 8 Steps to Love. See www.drsrj.com].
Monday, May 3, 2010
Friday, April 30, 2010
The Starling Question: Alligator or Hawk?
Earlier this week, I received an email from a childhood friend, now a resident of the Sunshine State, following his morning run. He told me about seeing an alligator, a starling, and a hawk. As I’ve mentioned before and will mention again, the Maya say that God, or, to use the Native American term, Great Spirit, talks to us all the time through nature. With the brilliant insight of a Mayan shaman, he readily received an inspiring message for his current life circumstances. He watched the starling reclaim his territory by noisily flutter near the hawk until the majestic bird flew away.
My friend was reminded that he, as a small businessman, can still hold his own against huge corporations who are both predatory and proud (hawk). Moreover, my friend saw how he can maintain his integrity by not swimming with the alligators, those bottom feeders in business, who become cutthroat and unethical in seeking to survive. Reading his email, I was reminded of his courage and tenacity in overcoming bigger opponents all through his life from athletics to business. But, beyond this message, there was another, related message for me to share with you relevant to remembering who we are truly are.
Since ancient times, the core elements of our human beingness have been depicted as three-fold. Plato described the soul as a charioteer holding the reins of two horses as his chariot moves midway between heaven and earth; on the one hand, a dark horse pulls the chariot downward toward earthly delights while a white one strives upward toward the heavenly realm of ideals. Saint Paul described our being as three-fold: “your whole being—spirit, soul, and body” (1 Thessalonians 5:23). And, Freud referred to the ego, the "I" at the center of our consciousness. On the one hand the ego is pressured by the id, that cauldron of body-based, instinctual desires; while on the other, the ego is compelled by the superego, the socially-conditioned conscience, filled with the morals, taboos, and ideals.
Now, here was my childhood friend presenting a richly symbolic and substantial shamanic depiction of the structure of our being as well as the choices we face that define who we are. It is an apt picture for the current shift we are being called to make. It is a shift in identity, in how we define ourselves. The pesky starling in us (ego) is faced with the choice of aligning with the massive instinctuality of the alligator or with the majestic spirituality of the hawk. In Egyptian mythology, the hawk was the symbol of the god Horus, and in the Native American spirituality, hawk is referred to as the “messenger of Great Spirit” (God).
To identify with the alligator, we risk being swallowed up in a life driven by the reptile brain. In contrast, the starling (ego) could identify with the hawk. Will we identify with the ego (body-based sense of self), the little self, the noisy, pesky starling, and drive away the majestic hawk, the higher self, the spirit, the transcendent portion of the soul? As mentioned in earlier postings, e.g., The Iguana & the Hawk, the Maya depict our highest potential as being feathered serpents, kukulcans. The lower in us is integrated into and guided by the higher.
Saint Paul called us to make our bodies a “living sacrifice” and thereby be “transformed” by the renewing of our minds so that we can then be filled and guided by the spirit of God (Romans 12:1-2). And, since God is love, that essentially means being guided by love. In the next posting, we will see what being guided by love meant to a psychiatrist encarcerated in a concentration camp.
• Today, reflect for a moment on the starling, the hawk, and the alligator as elements of all of us as human beings. Which one are you aligned with in life? Pay attention to the creatures crossing your path. And, remember they may take the form of something in our technological society such as the stylish jaguar making a turn at the traffic light.
My friend was reminded that he, as a small businessman, can still hold his own against huge corporations who are both predatory and proud (hawk). Moreover, my friend saw how he can maintain his integrity by not swimming with the alligators, those bottom feeders in business, who become cutthroat and unethical in seeking to survive. Reading his email, I was reminded of his courage and tenacity in overcoming bigger opponents all through his life from athletics to business. But, beyond this message, there was another, related message for me to share with you relevant to remembering who we are truly are.
Since ancient times, the core elements of our human beingness have been depicted as three-fold. Plato described the soul as a charioteer holding the reins of two horses as his chariot moves midway between heaven and earth; on the one hand, a dark horse pulls the chariot downward toward earthly delights while a white one strives upward toward the heavenly realm of ideals. Saint Paul described our being as three-fold: “your whole being—spirit, soul, and body” (1 Thessalonians 5:23). And, Freud referred to the ego, the "I" at the center of our consciousness. On the one hand the ego is pressured by the id, that cauldron of body-based, instinctual desires; while on the other, the ego is compelled by the superego, the socially-conditioned conscience, filled with the morals, taboos, and ideals.
Now, here was my childhood friend presenting a richly symbolic and substantial shamanic depiction of the structure of our being as well as the choices we face that define who we are. It is an apt picture for the current shift we are being called to make. It is a shift in identity, in how we define ourselves. The pesky starling in us (ego) is faced with the choice of aligning with the massive instinctuality of the alligator or with the majestic spirituality of the hawk. In Egyptian mythology, the hawk was the symbol of the god Horus, and in the Native American spirituality, hawk is referred to as the “messenger of Great Spirit” (God).
To identify with the alligator, we risk being swallowed up in a life driven by the reptile brain. In contrast, the starling (ego) could identify with the hawk. Will we identify with the ego (body-based sense of self), the little self, the noisy, pesky starling, and drive away the majestic hawk, the higher self, the spirit, the transcendent portion of the soul? As mentioned in earlier postings, e.g., The Iguana & the Hawk, the Maya depict our highest potential as being feathered serpents, kukulcans. The lower in us is integrated into and guided by the higher.
Saint Paul called us to make our bodies a “living sacrifice” and thereby be “transformed” by the renewing of our minds so that we can then be filled and guided by the spirit of God (Romans 12:1-2). And, since God is love, that essentially means being guided by love. In the next posting, we will see what being guided by love meant to a psychiatrist encarcerated in a concentration camp.
• Today, reflect for a moment on the starling, the hawk, and the alligator as elements of all of us as human beings. Which one are you aligned with in life? Pay attention to the creatures crossing your path. And, remember they may take the form of something in our technological society such as the stylish jaguar making a turn at the traffic light.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Healing Early Heartbreak
Witnessing his or her parents in conflict breaks a child’s heart. But the tentacles of its effects reach far into the future of that child when he or she grows up. I saw this in my practice but it was brought home to me most poignantly when I recently revisited my memories of an icon of the 1960’s.
“Where Have You Gone Joe Namath?” I had just looked up at the magazine rack of the local coffee shop where I was enjoying an iced-coffee on a hot August day. There was the face of Joe Namath on the cover of Sports Illustrated. After all these years, there was the famous football star and notorious playboy: Broadway Joe.
Set against the dramatic backdrop of the football stadium at night, the cover photo forever freezes this moment in time. Wearing his white New York Jets’ jersey, Joe stands before us with dark, tousled hair and piercing blue eyes. He is the quarterback: the quintessential hero of our youth. Loved by all the girls. Envied by all the guys. Tall. Dark. And, despite his protruding proboscis, he is handsome in a rugged, unorthodox way. Just as Clark Gable, the early king of Hollywood had elephant ears that were dwarfed by his charm, so Namath’s nose is nullified by his magical presence.
The article was an excerpt from a biography of Broadway Joe entitled Namath written by Mark Kriegel. I found Kriegel’s comments very insightful. Kriegel suggested that he had more than broken bones: Joe had his heart broken early in life.
Kriegel described how Joe was open about all his physical injuries. “He’d talk about the broken bones. But never the broken heart,, the original wound.” Namath revealed to Kriegel one of his earliest and most vivid memories: “I can remember as a three- or four-year-old, to this day, hearing them [his mother and father] downstairs, talking or arguing about something? I was upstairs and I came to the top of the steps and I was crying because I was scared.”
Very astutely, Kriegel speculates on Joe’s personal emotional history: “Perhaps the fear was in his bones, something from his own father’s boyhood lodged in the marrow, the knowledge that separation is inevitable. Families fracture. You can get left behind.”
When Joe was in seventh grade his father left. Kriegel quoted one of Joe’s closest friends Jack (Hoot Owl) Hicks. Regarding the day Namath’s father left, Hicks said: “He [Joe] told me that was the saddest day of his life.”
As I read this, I could see the childhood origin of Broadway Joe’s highly publicized womanizing. I could also see the unconscious fear underlying his not marrying until he was forty. The child whose heart is broken may grow up to be a heartbreaker. Afraid of being abandoned, he or she abandons first. Such was the case with Robert until he came to therapy and finally confronted the pain of his personal emotional history.
Robert began, “After the breakup of my most recent relationship, I had a thought that I felt uncomfortable admitting. I imagined saying to all the women I had loved and left: ‘I’m glad I broke your heart the way mine was broken.’ Robert continued, "I was confused because I was not talking about any female I had loved as an adult or adolescent breaking my heart.” Robert didn’t realize it but he was talking about some distant childhood experience that was hidden in the hazy fog of memory. He was talking about something from his early life.
Robert then related how upset he was at dropping off his little boy, Chip. Chip was now seven years old. Chip was from Robert’s first marriage. Since leaving when Chip was a year old, Robert had gone through the next three marriages in less than six years. Robert described how hard it was every time he dropped off Chip and drove away. Dropping him off after this past weekend, Robert told me he just pulled over to the side of the road and sobbed.
I encouraged him to return in his memory to that moment and to picture the empty passenger seat where Chip had been sitting before Robert dropped him off. He began: “I hate it that I have to be apart from you. And that’s because I’d love it if we could be together. I hate it that I left you and your mother. And that’s because I’d have loved it if I would have stayed.” Robert was filled with regret.
Sensing Robert was identifying with Chip’s feelings of being left, I asked him to imagine himself in Chip’s place. I asked him to use the shift your focus and energy and look through techniques and speak as if he were Chip. Imagining himself in Chip’s place and speaking to himself as Chip’s father, Robert said: “I hate it that you left and I don’t get to see you as other kids get to see their dad. And that’s because I’d love it if you lived with Mommy and me. I hate it that I have to leave you at the end of our weekends together. And that’s because I love you and miss you so much.”
While he was feeling the words that he was saying as Chip, I asked Robert to imagine his little seven-year-old self sitting in the passenger seat of his car. Now repeat what you said as Chip only now do it as yourself speaking to your father. Robert’s eyes filled with tears. His father had left when he was three years old and he never saw him again. Leaving Chip after weekend visits was stirring up his early feelings of being abandoned by his father.
Similar to Joe Namath’s memory at the top of the stairs, Robert remembered witnessing his parents arguing. He remembered how terrified he felt. On the one hand, it broke Robert’s heart as it does so many children to see the two people they love and adore unable to handle the stress of conflict. On the other hand, it broke Robert’s heart that his father left. As so often happens, victim grows up to become victimizer.
• Today: Do you have a memory of your parents arguing? How did you feel? Visualize both your parents sitting in two separate empty chairs. Give voice to what the child you once were felt and would have loved instead. Write a letter to your parents expressing how it made you feel to see them fight. Be sure to express what you would have loved them to do instead of arguing. [Portions of above taken from Love Conquers Stress www.drsrj.com].
“Where Have You Gone Joe Namath?” I had just looked up at the magazine rack of the local coffee shop where I was enjoying an iced-coffee on a hot August day. There was the face of Joe Namath on the cover of Sports Illustrated. After all these years, there was the famous football star and notorious playboy: Broadway Joe.
Set against the dramatic backdrop of the football stadium at night, the cover photo forever freezes this moment in time. Wearing his white New York Jets’ jersey, Joe stands before us with dark, tousled hair and piercing blue eyes. He is the quarterback: the quintessential hero of our youth. Loved by all the girls. Envied by all the guys. Tall. Dark. And, despite his protruding proboscis, he is handsome in a rugged, unorthodox way. Just as Clark Gable, the early king of Hollywood had elephant ears that were dwarfed by his charm, so Namath’s nose is nullified by his magical presence.
The article was an excerpt from a biography of Broadway Joe entitled Namath written by Mark Kriegel. I found Kriegel’s comments very insightful. Kriegel suggested that he had more than broken bones: Joe had his heart broken early in life.
Kriegel described how Joe was open about all his physical injuries. “He’d talk about the broken bones. But never the broken heart,, the original wound.” Namath revealed to Kriegel one of his earliest and most vivid memories: “I can remember as a three- or four-year-old, to this day, hearing them [his mother and father] downstairs, talking or arguing about something? I was upstairs and I came to the top of the steps and I was crying because I was scared.”
Very astutely, Kriegel speculates on Joe’s personal emotional history: “Perhaps the fear was in his bones, something from his own father’s boyhood lodged in the marrow, the knowledge that separation is inevitable. Families fracture. You can get left behind.”
When Joe was in seventh grade his father left. Kriegel quoted one of Joe’s closest friends Jack (Hoot Owl) Hicks. Regarding the day Namath’s father left, Hicks said: “He [Joe] told me that was the saddest day of his life.”
As I read this, I could see the childhood origin of Broadway Joe’s highly publicized womanizing. I could also see the unconscious fear underlying his not marrying until he was forty. The child whose heart is broken may grow up to be a heartbreaker. Afraid of being abandoned, he or she abandons first. Such was the case with Robert until he came to therapy and finally confronted the pain of his personal emotional history.
Robert began, “After the breakup of my most recent relationship, I had a thought that I felt uncomfortable admitting. I imagined saying to all the women I had loved and left: ‘I’m glad I broke your heart the way mine was broken.’ Robert continued, "I was confused because I was not talking about any female I had loved as an adult or adolescent breaking my heart.” Robert didn’t realize it but he was talking about some distant childhood experience that was hidden in the hazy fog of memory. He was talking about something from his early life.
Robert then related how upset he was at dropping off his little boy, Chip. Chip was now seven years old. Chip was from Robert’s first marriage. Since leaving when Chip was a year old, Robert had gone through the next three marriages in less than six years. Robert described how hard it was every time he dropped off Chip and drove away. Dropping him off after this past weekend, Robert told me he just pulled over to the side of the road and sobbed.
I encouraged him to return in his memory to that moment and to picture the empty passenger seat where Chip had been sitting before Robert dropped him off. He began: “I hate it that I have to be apart from you. And that’s because I’d love it if we could be together. I hate it that I left you and your mother. And that’s because I’d have loved it if I would have stayed.” Robert was filled with regret.
Sensing Robert was identifying with Chip’s feelings of being left, I asked him to imagine himself in Chip’s place. I asked him to use the shift your focus and energy and look through techniques and speak as if he were Chip. Imagining himself in Chip’s place and speaking to himself as Chip’s father, Robert said: “I hate it that you left and I don’t get to see you as other kids get to see their dad. And that’s because I’d love it if you lived with Mommy and me. I hate it that I have to leave you at the end of our weekends together. And that’s because I love you and miss you so much.”
While he was feeling the words that he was saying as Chip, I asked Robert to imagine his little seven-year-old self sitting in the passenger seat of his car. Now repeat what you said as Chip only now do it as yourself speaking to your father. Robert’s eyes filled with tears. His father had left when he was three years old and he never saw him again. Leaving Chip after weekend visits was stirring up his early feelings of being abandoned by his father.
Similar to Joe Namath’s memory at the top of the stairs, Robert remembered witnessing his parents arguing. He remembered how terrified he felt. On the one hand, it broke Robert’s heart as it does so many children to see the two people they love and adore unable to handle the stress of conflict. On the other hand, it broke Robert’s heart that his father left. As so often happens, victim grows up to become victimizer.
• Today: Do you have a memory of your parents arguing? How did you feel? Visualize both your parents sitting in two separate empty chairs. Give voice to what the child you once were felt and would have loved instead. Write a letter to your parents expressing how it made you feel to see them fight. Be sure to express what you would have loved them to do instead of arguing. [Portions of above taken from Love Conquers Stress www.drsrj.com].
Monday, April 26, 2010
From Contempt to Compassion
Last night’s episode of Desperate Housewives touched my heart. It brought up a topic I deal with in all of my books. The episode beautifully portrayed what I found in my practice when I worked with adults who had grown up to commit crimes that hurt others. When I set aside the tendency to judge and condemn or feel contempt for the hurtful surface behavior, I was able to help these people feel and release the buried pain driving them. This episode beautifully portrayed how an innocent little boy can grow up to become a “monster”—a serial killer. In the next posting,
Wow! That network television is bringing up an opportunity for viewers to awaken their hearts is itself heartwarming. It is an example of what the Maya mean when they say that 2012 is about the awakening of humanity's heart after a 5000-year period of darkness.
One of the most heinous examples of how a monster can be created is the story of Adolph Hitler. In The Truth Will Set You Free, Alice Miller presents the key elements of Hitler’s early life that led to his hatred and contempt for the Jewish people. Hitler’s paternal grandmother left her village in Austria to work as a live-in housekeeper for a Jewish merchant and his son when she was in her late teens. She got pregnant and moved back home. For fourteen years, the Jewish merchant sent child-support payments to her.
Adolph Hitler’s father, Alois Hitler, grew up hating the fact that he was half-Jewish especially since the climate of the times in Austria and Germany was anti-semitic. Adolph became the target of his father's virulent hatred. Regarding the extent of Adolph's suffering, Miller's research revealed that Adolph's sister reported remembering Adolph being relentlessly and brutally beaten, mocked, humiliated, and tormented every day of his childhood.
A good German son honors his father and so Adolph repressed his rage at his father and idealized him as abused children often do. Hitler shifted his rage at his father onto the Jewish people. His relentless rage was insatiable: no amount of suffering on the part of innocent victims could ever appease his rage. Only confronting the true source of his rage and expressing it to that source could heal Hitler’s hurt. This means that Hitler would have had to express the repressed rage and hurt to the father within his memory.
We need to embrace the hurt child in us instead of holding the weak helpless child within us in contempt. This truth was brought home to me a few years ago when I saw a display on pearls at the Museum of Natural History in New York City. I learned that pearls are usually made from an invading parasite and not so much from the proverbial grain of sand. This was very interesting. In 8 Steps to Love, I had written about adult relationships fraught with childhood dependency patterns as being parasitic relationships. The message was more precise than I had imagined.
Up until this new discovery, I saw the message of the pearl as revealing that we can take the irritation of stress and use it to create the pearl of a richer, fuller, more rewarding life. Now I was discovering that the story of the pearl was revealing a deeper emotional truth.
The oyster wraps the parasite in layers of soft tissue and over time a pearl is created. Similarly, if we are to find the priceless pearl of the peace that resides in our true self, our innermost heart, we must embrace the repressed dependency longings of the hurt child in us in layers of love. We need to feel in order to heal the hurt child’s hope of finally finding someone in adulthood who can love him or her the way he or she longed to be loved.
The time when we needed the parental love that would have helped us develop a healthy self-love and self-esteem is long gone. It is not in the arms of another that we heal our wounded self-esteem, it is in our own arms. We must mourn the death of the hope of finally finding an all-loving parent in our love partner.
As the oyster contains the parasite that becomes a pearl so we must contain our tendency to form parasitic adult relationships. We can then transform the child’s immature and one-sided love into the ripened fruit of the ability to give and receive mature love.
• Today, if a feeling of contempt and a desire to hurt someone come up, then you need to stop yourself from acting on the urge. Take some slow, deep breaths. Think cool as you breathe in and calm as you breathe out. Go to a place to be alone and explore the desire to hurt the person whether it is physically, emotionally or both. There is a good chance that you are unconsciously reversing roles with the person you want to hurt. That is to say, you are exchanging the role of being a victim for the role of being a victimizer. Imagine what it would feel like to be the person hearing your words of criticism. Now initiate the inner quest and ask yourself: “When have I felt that way? Who was it that spoke to me that way? And when? How old was I?” Let’s say you see your father or mother. Now stand up to them and forcefully exclaim what upset you. For example, if your parent(s) were impatient, you might say something like the following: “I hated it when you were impatient with me and called me stupid. And that’s because I would have loved it if you had patiently explained what I was doing wrong and showed me how to do it right.”
Wow! That network television is bringing up an opportunity for viewers to awaken their hearts is itself heartwarming. It is an example of what the Maya mean when they say that 2012 is about the awakening of humanity's heart after a 5000-year period of darkness.
One of the most heinous examples of how a monster can be created is the story of Adolph Hitler. In The Truth Will Set You Free, Alice Miller presents the key elements of Hitler’s early life that led to his hatred and contempt for the Jewish people. Hitler’s paternal grandmother left her village in Austria to work as a live-in housekeeper for a Jewish merchant and his son when she was in her late teens. She got pregnant and moved back home. For fourteen years, the Jewish merchant sent child-support payments to her.
Adolph Hitler’s father, Alois Hitler, grew up hating the fact that he was half-Jewish especially since the climate of the times in Austria and Germany was anti-semitic. Adolph became the target of his father's virulent hatred. Regarding the extent of Adolph's suffering, Miller's research revealed that Adolph's sister reported remembering Adolph being relentlessly and brutally beaten, mocked, humiliated, and tormented every day of his childhood.
A good German son honors his father and so Adolph repressed his rage at his father and idealized him as abused children often do. Hitler shifted his rage at his father onto the Jewish people. His relentless rage was insatiable: no amount of suffering on the part of innocent victims could ever appease his rage. Only confronting the true source of his rage and expressing it to that source could heal Hitler’s hurt. This means that Hitler would have had to express the repressed rage and hurt to the father within his memory.
We need to embrace the hurt child in us instead of holding the weak helpless child within us in contempt. This truth was brought home to me a few years ago when I saw a display on pearls at the Museum of Natural History in New York City. I learned that pearls are usually made from an invading parasite and not so much from the proverbial grain of sand. This was very interesting. In 8 Steps to Love, I had written about adult relationships fraught with childhood dependency patterns as being parasitic relationships. The message was more precise than I had imagined.
Up until this new discovery, I saw the message of the pearl as revealing that we can take the irritation of stress and use it to create the pearl of a richer, fuller, more rewarding life. Now I was discovering that the story of the pearl was revealing a deeper emotional truth.
The oyster wraps the parasite in layers of soft tissue and over time a pearl is created. Similarly, if we are to find the priceless pearl of the peace that resides in our true self, our innermost heart, we must embrace the repressed dependency longings of the hurt child in us in layers of love. We need to feel in order to heal the hurt child’s hope of finally finding someone in adulthood who can love him or her the way he or she longed to be loved.
The time when we needed the parental love that would have helped us develop a healthy self-love and self-esteem is long gone. It is not in the arms of another that we heal our wounded self-esteem, it is in our own arms. We must mourn the death of the hope of finally finding an all-loving parent in our love partner.
As the oyster contains the parasite that becomes a pearl so we must contain our tendency to form parasitic adult relationships. We can then transform the child’s immature and one-sided love into the ripened fruit of the ability to give and receive mature love.
• Today, if a feeling of contempt and a desire to hurt someone come up, then you need to stop yourself from acting on the urge. Take some slow, deep breaths. Think cool as you breathe in and calm as you breathe out. Go to a place to be alone and explore the desire to hurt the person whether it is physically, emotionally or both. There is a good chance that you are unconsciously reversing roles with the person you want to hurt. That is to say, you are exchanging the role of being a victim for the role of being a victimizer. Imagine what it would feel like to be the person hearing your words of criticism. Now initiate the inner quest and ask yourself: “When have I felt that way? Who was it that spoke to me that way? And when? How old was I?” Let’s say you see your father or mother. Now stand up to them and forcefully exclaim what upset you. For example, if your parent(s) were impatient, you might say something like the following: “I hated it when you were impatient with me and called me stupid. And that’s because I would have loved it if you had patiently explained what I was doing wrong and showed me how to do it right.”
Friday, April 23, 2010
The "E" in Emotion
The letter "E" in the word emotion can be said to represent energy which sets us in motion to take some kind of action. To understand emotions, we need to realize that all of our negative emotions stem from love. The enduring energy of love animates us and all of life.
All our emotions, then, have value. They tell us something about what is important to us and set us in motion toward some kind of action. When stress begins, we feel the pain or discomfort of some negative emotional state. Our emotional state includes an evaluation of ourselves, the situation and an evaluation of our ability to handle the situation. Our negative emotions are danger signals. They tell us we believe that something undesirable is about to happen, is happening, or has happened to someone or something we love. They move us to some version of fight-or-flight.
Love is the central and primary positive emotion from which all others stem. It tells us something or someone is important to us. Love, then, tells us directly what gives us joy, what we enjoy and care about, what is important to us. Love moves us to take care of, or, to simply care for whom or what we love.
Fear tells us that something undesirable is about to happen, is happening, or has happened to something, or someone that is important to us. It includes our evaluation of ourselves as powerless and incapable in relation to the situation. Fear moves us to run away, to take flight.
Anger tells us that something undesirable is about to happen, is happening, or has happened to something or someone that is important to us. It includes our evaluation of ourselves as having some power and ability to do something in relation to the situation. Anger moves us to be aggressive and fight.
Sadness tells us that something undesirable is about to happen, is happening, or has happened to something or someone that is important to us. It includes our evaluation of ourselves as defeated, powerless and hopeless in relation to the situation. Sadness moves us to tears and then acceptance of whatever we have, or think we have lost.
Since our stress today is not so much a physical threat, but is primarily emotional and mental, it is important to understand the logic of emotions. I found this very helpful to the men who consulted me. This was especially helpful to the men who were either dragged in for marital therapy by their wives, or had been sent in by their wives to see me as an ultimatum: “Either go to therapy or I’m leaving.”'
Hopefully, by taking a look at the logic behind our feelings, we will be encouraged as men to recognize just what these emotions are that women want us to share. Perhaps, we can then break free and by embracing the logic of emotions, become more comfortable being expressive.
On the other hand, I encountered women whose husbands were upset that their wives were distant and had trouble expressing their feelings. These women seemed to be more identified with their male side. These women also found the logic of emotions helpful.
• Today, practice recognizing your negative feelings are telling you something improtant about what you value and love. When anger (irritation, resentment), fear (anxiety, worry), sadness (grief, feeling down) arise, just do the inner quest with a question: "What is my anger, fear, sadness or depression telling me about what I love?"
All our emotions, then, have value. They tell us something about what is important to us and set us in motion toward some kind of action. When stress begins, we feel the pain or discomfort of some negative emotional state. Our emotional state includes an evaluation of ourselves, the situation and an evaluation of our ability to handle the situation. Our negative emotions are danger signals. They tell us we believe that something undesirable is about to happen, is happening, or has happened to someone or something we love. They move us to some version of fight-or-flight.
Love is the central and primary positive emotion from which all others stem. It tells us something or someone is important to us. Love, then, tells us directly what gives us joy, what we enjoy and care about, what is important to us. Love moves us to take care of, or, to simply care for whom or what we love.
Fear tells us that something undesirable is about to happen, is happening, or has happened to something, or someone that is important to us. It includes our evaluation of ourselves as powerless and incapable in relation to the situation. Fear moves us to run away, to take flight.
Anger tells us that something undesirable is about to happen, is happening, or has happened to something or someone that is important to us. It includes our evaluation of ourselves as having some power and ability to do something in relation to the situation. Anger moves us to be aggressive and fight.
Sadness tells us that something undesirable is about to happen, is happening, or has happened to something or someone that is important to us. It includes our evaluation of ourselves as defeated, powerless and hopeless in relation to the situation. Sadness moves us to tears and then acceptance of whatever we have, or think we have lost.
Since our stress today is not so much a physical threat, but is primarily emotional and mental, it is important to understand the logic of emotions. I found this very helpful to the men who consulted me. This was especially helpful to the men who were either dragged in for marital therapy by their wives, or had been sent in by their wives to see me as an ultimatum: “Either go to therapy or I’m leaving.”'
Hopefully, by taking a look at the logic behind our feelings, we will be encouraged as men to recognize just what these emotions are that women want us to share. Perhaps, we can then break free and by embracing the logic of emotions, become more comfortable being expressive.
On the other hand, I encountered women whose husbands were upset that their wives were distant and had trouble expressing their feelings. These women seemed to be more identified with their male side. These women also found the logic of emotions helpful.
• Today, practice recognizing your negative feelings are telling you something improtant about what you value and love. When anger (irritation, resentment), fear (anxiety, worry), sadness (grief, feeling down) arise, just do the inner quest with a question: "What is my anger, fear, sadness or depression telling me about what I love?"
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Our Thoughts Really Matter
Our Thoughts Matter Because They Impact Matter: The Radical Implications of “We Are All One”
One cold, gray Sunday in March, two years after my trip to Tikal, I was to give a talk to the Philadelphia chapter of The Holistic Nurses Association. My talk was on how to use stress to heal ourselves. While I was driving in my car on my way to the meeting, I turned on the radio to hear Jackie Wilson singing, “Your love is taking me higher, higher than I’ve ever been taken before!” This song was followed by the group called Soul Survivor, singing the words, “I’m going to take an expressway to your heart.” These songs seemed to be messages to me from God as the Divine Beloved. I felt I was being guided regarding my talk.
That morning of the talk my car battery was dead and I had to get it recharged. I had come to associate the car battery with the heart. For just as our car is a lifeless mass of matter without the spark provided by the battery, so our body is a lifeless mass of matter without the spark provided by our innermost heart, the core of our being. It is this spark that makes our physical heart beat.
I took the battery being dead as a sign that I needed to emphasize the connection between love and stress. I thought it meant that I needed to emphasize that to truly master stress we need to access the peaceful power of love in our heart as the core of who we are. For a moment, I had a sense of how each one of us looking out of our eyes is the center of his or her universe. And yet I am part of your inner world of meaning and you are part of my inner world of meaning. I began to see how for each one of us everything that happens out there in the outer world is part of our inner world. And all that happens is to help us evolve spiritually.
As I sat with don Serillo after being in Tulum, I was introduced to the idea that we are evolving. He stressed that we were on our way to a major shift to a higher more loving and peaceful state of consciousness and perspective. In bringing about this change, don Serillo emphasized “Let not one of us be left behind.” It is our responsibility to help each other. And since we are all one, helping another is helping ourselves and vice versa. It is a matter of enlightened self-interest.
As we realize that all of us are part of a collective consciousness, we need to start taking responsibility for our thoughts. For example, so often I hear people complain about the government. They express contempt for the red tape and for taxes. The Department of Motor Vehicles and the people who work there are often the brunt of the jokes of many comedians. All these thoughts become more significant if we consider the idea that we are all one.
Right before going on MSNBC to discuss the issue of teenage runaways, I watched a news segment on Timothy McVeigh. He was awaiting his sentencing for blowing up a government building in Oklahoma City and killing so many innocent people.
Considering that we are all one can make us see the importance of facing and releasing the negative feelings we harbor in our heart. Could Timothy McVeigh be one of those impulse-ridden people who act out our collective disdain for and anger at the government? Sure he has his own emotional dynamics and agenda. But think of it, we know that there is truth to the psychoanalytic observation that children tend to express what their parents repress.
An anthropology professor told me of two instances of how his four-year-old son picked up on his hidden negative feelings. The professor and his wife and son were staying in an inn in a small village in Mexico. One day the professor was walking with his son along the street when the professor spotted a man walking his dog in the distance. Thinking he was successfully hiding his fear, the professor started to show his son the flowers on the side of the street. In just seconds, the little boy looked up and said, “Daddy, why are you afraid of the dog?”
On another occasion the little boy picked up on the professor’s hidden irritation about the housekeeper of the inn. After returning to the inn from his field study for the day, the professor was surprised by what his wife had to say about their little boy. She told him that the little boy had gone up to the housekeeper and asked, “Why doesn’t my daddy like you?”
• Today, consider the ethical implications that our thoughts matter, i.e., they impact matter in terms of the material world of people, places, and things. Just as children express what parents hold back, so immature impulse-ridden people may act out the collective feelings being held in the privacy of the minds of the rest of us. If, as the Maya and quantum physics claim, we are indeed all one and connected in some way in our consciousness, then, is it not our responsibility to monitor our negative thoughts and feelings? We can do our part not to contribute to the collective hate of one race or culture against another race or culture. Thoughts driven by strong feeling have a way of becoming manifested in concrete material reality. How we think and feel eventually become action. Our thoughts are like pebbles tossed into a pond causing ripples that travel across the face of the still waters. [Some of the above comes from A Matter of Love. See www.drsrj.com.]
One cold, gray Sunday in March, two years after my trip to Tikal, I was to give a talk to the Philadelphia chapter of The Holistic Nurses Association. My talk was on how to use stress to heal ourselves. While I was driving in my car on my way to the meeting, I turned on the radio to hear Jackie Wilson singing, “Your love is taking me higher, higher than I’ve ever been taken before!” This song was followed by the group called Soul Survivor, singing the words, “I’m going to take an expressway to your heart.” These songs seemed to be messages to me from God as the Divine Beloved. I felt I was being guided regarding my talk.
That morning of the talk my car battery was dead and I had to get it recharged. I had come to associate the car battery with the heart. For just as our car is a lifeless mass of matter without the spark provided by the battery, so our body is a lifeless mass of matter without the spark provided by our innermost heart, the core of our being. It is this spark that makes our physical heart beat.
I took the battery being dead as a sign that I needed to emphasize the connection between love and stress. I thought it meant that I needed to emphasize that to truly master stress we need to access the peaceful power of love in our heart as the core of who we are. For a moment, I had a sense of how each one of us looking out of our eyes is the center of his or her universe. And yet I am part of your inner world of meaning and you are part of my inner world of meaning. I began to see how for each one of us everything that happens out there in the outer world is part of our inner world. And all that happens is to help us evolve spiritually.
As I sat with don Serillo after being in Tulum, I was introduced to the idea that we are evolving. He stressed that we were on our way to a major shift to a higher more loving and peaceful state of consciousness and perspective. In bringing about this change, don Serillo emphasized “Let not one of us be left behind.” It is our responsibility to help each other. And since we are all one, helping another is helping ourselves and vice versa. It is a matter of enlightened self-interest.
As we realize that all of us are part of a collective consciousness, we need to start taking responsibility for our thoughts. For example, so often I hear people complain about the government. They express contempt for the red tape and for taxes. The Department of Motor Vehicles and the people who work there are often the brunt of the jokes of many comedians. All these thoughts become more significant if we consider the idea that we are all one.
Right before going on MSNBC to discuss the issue of teenage runaways, I watched a news segment on Timothy McVeigh. He was awaiting his sentencing for blowing up a government building in Oklahoma City and killing so many innocent people.
Considering that we are all one can make us see the importance of facing and releasing the negative feelings we harbor in our heart. Could Timothy McVeigh be one of those impulse-ridden people who act out our collective disdain for and anger at the government? Sure he has his own emotional dynamics and agenda. But think of it, we know that there is truth to the psychoanalytic observation that children tend to express what their parents repress.
An anthropology professor told me of two instances of how his four-year-old son picked up on his hidden negative feelings. The professor and his wife and son were staying in an inn in a small village in Mexico. One day the professor was walking with his son along the street when the professor spotted a man walking his dog in the distance. Thinking he was successfully hiding his fear, the professor started to show his son the flowers on the side of the street. In just seconds, the little boy looked up and said, “Daddy, why are you afraid of the dog?”
On another occasion the little boy picked up on the professor’s hidden irritation about the housekeeper of the inn. After returning to the inn from his field study for the day, the professor was surprised by what his wife had to say about their little boy. She told him that the little boy had gone up to the housekeeper and asked, “Why doesn’t my daddy like you?”
• Today, consider the ethical implications that our thoughts matter, i.e., they impact matter in terms of the material world of people, places, and things. Just as children express what parents hold back, so immature impulse-ridden people may act out the collective feelings being held in the privacy of the minds of the rest of us. If, as the Maya and quantum physics claim, we are indeed all one and connected in some way in our consciousness, then, is it not our responsibility to monitor our negative thoughts and feelings? We can do our part not to contribute to the collective hate of one race or culture against another race or culture. Thoughts driven by strong feeling have a way of becoming manifested in concrete material reality. How we think and feel eventually become action. Our thoughts are like pebbles tossed into a pond causing ripples that travel across the face of the still waters. [Some of the above comes from A Matter of Love. See www.drsrj.com.]
Monday, April 19, 2010
"You Are Everything . . ."
The Problem and the Solution: “It’s All About Me”
One particular teaching of the Maya that I heard again and again from different shamans was “We are all one.” God is in everything and so we are all one in God. It was a few years after I had been to the land of the Maya that this teaching came back to me in an interesting way. I was at a little café where I was talking with a friend of mine, another Reiki Master.
We discussed the spiritual understanding that we are all one and not disconnected as it appears. And we also talked about how God’s energy is in everything. We finished our talk and went to our cars. I turned on my car radio as I drove out of the parking lot and onto the street. The very first words I heard were from a song by the Stylistics, a group from the 1970s. The words I heard captured the essence of what we had discussed: “You are everything and everything is you.” It was the refrain of the song and it was repeated four times.
In the weeks to follow, this happened three more times at the precise moment that I turned on my car radio and once in the post office. I was mailing my book, 8 Steps to Love to a radio show host so she could read it before I was to be a guest on her show. Out of nowhere, I heard the Stylistics singing: “You are everything and everything is you.” It seemed that the Divine was making sure that I got the message loud and clear: we are all interconnected.
Ellen, a woman who works at a facility for assisting cancer patients, was telling me a funny story. Her boss was complaining and in her complaints she was sounding very self-centered. She was good-natured and so the staff put on her desk a sign that read, “It’s all about me!” As I heard this story, I thought to myself this is the problem of our narcissistic self-centeredness and it is the solution if we extend the definition of who this me is when we say “It’s all about me.”
When we consider that we are all one then we extend the boundaries of me to include the world. We can do this by changing the song words of the Stylistics, “You are everything and everything is you” to the following:
“I AM everything and everything is me!”
When you go to the coffee shop, the man or woman taking your order is you. As you drive along in your car, the other drivers are you even the driver who cuts you off. Consider this during the course of your day. As you look at anything, people, trees, animals, road, sidewalks, sky, clouds, sun and so forth, you can think to yourself, “It is all me!”
For in the depth of our heart, we discover that indeed we are all one. This being the case, we can begin to identify with all of humanity. If we extend our sense of me, we realize that we are the waiter at the restaurant. We are the taxi driver. We are the barking dog in our neighborhood. We are the screaming baby in the movie theater. As we see a plane overhead, we are the pilot and the passengers on that plane. We are also the blue sky and the clouds.
• Today, extend your sense of yourself. Consider how we are the world and the world is us. Me is extended beyond a cherished separate self-image to include all of life. Laboratory experiments done by quantum physicists have demonstrated that everything is "entangled" at the suatomic level of the all-pervaisve quantum field. Walt Whitman intuited this. He attempted to extend his sense of himself in his Song of Myself found in his famous volume, Leaves of Grass.
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume
For every atom belonging to me
As good belongs to you.
One particular teaching of the Maya that I heard again and again from different shamans was “We are all one.” God is in everything and so we are all one in God. It was a few years after I had been to the land of the Maya that this teaching came back to me in an interesting way. I was at a little café where I was talking with a friend of mine, another Reiki Master.
We discussed the spiritual understanding that we are all one and not disconnected as it appears. And we also talked about how God’s energy is in everything. We finished our talk and went to our cars. I turned on my car radio as I drove out of the parking lot and onto the street. The very first words I heard were from a song by the Stylistics, a group from the 1970s. The words I heard captured the essence of what we had discussed: “You are everything and everything is you.” It was the refrain of the song and it was repeated four times.
In the weeks to follow, this happened three more times at the precise moment that I turned on my car radio and once in the post office. I was mailing my book, 8 Steps to Love to a radio show host so she could read it before I was to be a guest on her show. Out of nowhere, I heard the Stylistics singing: “You are everything and everything is you.” It seemed that the Divine was making sure that I got the message loud and clear: we are all interconnected.
Ellen, a woman who works at a facility for assisting cancer patients, was telling me a funny story. Her boss was complaining and in her complaints she was sounding very self-centered. She was good-natured and so the staff put on her desk a sign that read, “It’s all about me!” As I heard this story, I thought to myself this is the problem of our narcissistic self-centeredness and it is the solution if we extend the definition of who this me is when we say “It’s all about me.”
When we consider that we are all one then we extend the boundaries of me to include the world. We can do this by changing the song words of the Stylistics, “You are everything and everything is you” to the following:
“I AM everything and everything is me!”
When you go to the coffee shop, the man or woman taking your order is you. As you drive along in your car, the other drivers are you even the driver who cuts you off. Consider this during the course of your day. As you look at anything, people, trees, animals, road, sidewalks, sky, clouds, sun and so forth, you can think to yourself, “It is all me!”
For in the depth of our heart, we discover that indeed we are all one. This being the case, we can begin to identify with all of humanity. If we extend our sense of me, we realize that we are the waiter at the restaurant. We are the taxi driver. We are the barking dog in our neighborhood. We are the screaming baby in the movie theater. As we see a plane overhead, we are the pilot and the passengers on that plane. We are also the blue sky and the clouds.
• Today, extend your sense of yourself. Consider how we are the world and the world is us. Me is extended beyond a cherished separate self-image to include all of life. Laboratory experiments done by quantum physicists have demonstrated that everything is "entangled" at the suatomic level of the all-pervaisve quantum field. Walt Whitman intuited this. He attempted to extend his sense of himself in his Song of Myself found in his famous volume, Leaves of Grass.
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume
For every atom belonging to me
As good belongs to you.
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