One of the transformational moves I use with my students is “flipping the context.”
Context is decisive, and the context inside which you live your life is what makes your life great or horrible… not what happens to you.
Here is an example of flipping the context from my favorite horoscope writer, Rob Brezsny:
Most articles just flow out of me… this one just didn’t want to flow.
Why?
My guess is that this article may be the most damaging to the current status quo, current success myths that keeps people that follow the common knowledge stuck in their misery.
My second guess is that it’s because I myself am just now going through the process of liberating myself fully from this common knowledge.
With transformation, with success, with raising your vibration, there is no way around hard stuff, only through it. The shortcut leads through the stuff… Said in another way: the shortcut is not an easy way, it is the hardest, emotionally, existentially, because there is no easy way… so if you were looking for an easy way, please leave now.
We are living in the matrix. We eat make-believe food, have make-believe relationships, fight for make-believe causes.
The main weapon of the illusion that it convinces you that it doesn’t exist. They used to say that about the devil… but the real devil is the creators, the pushers, the promoters of the illusion.
25 years ago I participated, briefly, in a 12-step program: Adult Children of Alcoholics. As you may know, the first step of joining a group like that is to pick a higher power. Why? I am not sure, I have done no research. I am going to share my own way of using “higher power” because it is relevant to this topic.
I am an atheist. I do not believe that there is a higher power, per se. I do feel that there is a certain order in the Universe, that it is even intelligent, but Higher Power?
And yet, what makes AA and other 12-step programs work, is this higher power thing…
Hey, when you are BEING a knucklehead… does it mean you ARE a knucklehead?
Or you are just doing the only exercise most people do: jumping into conclusions.
Listen if you can recognize yourself in this story:
A lot of my clients find themselves in a trap…
For example, they make a mistake. They are frustrated. Or they are scared. Or they are angry. Or they are devastated. Even suicidal.
They say to themselves: Here I go again!…
…I am never going to get it right! I am never going to learn this… I better give up while I am ahead! I am stupid! I am a loser! and on and on and on I could go with the examples how people abuse themselves.
The biggest price Positive Thinking junkies pay is this:
You can only have power in any situation if you are looking at what is so!
Why do I call positive thinkers junkies? Simple: they are, just like heroin addicts, unable to deal with the momentary feeling bad about anything, they need an escape from reality, at the expense of their life, their health, their relationships, their money.
When you are a positive thinker, your default context is that reality is just plain should not be the way it is.
For you it’s wrong, for me it is just what’s so… you are powerless, I am powerful.
Finding the silver lining is not available to you, until you see the reality of the situation. For example, yesterday I screwed up something and lost a lot of money. I saw what I did, I appreciated that this wasn’t a good time to lose money, and then I looked for a silver lining: it was a learning experience.
I always return to this two moments in my life. Seemingly insignificant moments, but turning points nevertheless.
The first one was when I saw a poster in a chiropractor’s office saying something like this: “In order to get to the next level, you need to give up who you have become.”
And the second was a poster with a dark sky with a tiny sliver of light showing through. The words said: turn your face to the light…
The first one is the principle of transformation: everything you are, everything you know is in your way of having what you want, what you are striving for. You need to give it up. Painful, frightening, but it’s so.
The second one is the idea of escape. Clinging to hope, clinging to “there is help”, clinging to being an effect, never a cause. The opposite of power, the opposite of transformation, the essence of positive thinking: the biggest enemy you have ever nurtured on your chest.
Yesterday I spent about four hours listening to Jordan Peterson. The material I listened to was a truth value of 30%… not bad.
In some ways Jordan Peterson, the teacher, and I, the teacher, deal with the same things: people don’t see why they should learn.
Many reasons, I see, but one of them is fundamental, and also invisible, meaning it is an invisible part of reality, the part that is below the sea level of the iceberg. It’s not hidden, as one of my students says… although Werner calls the process that makes it visible “unconcealing” suggesting that it is concealed, which is another word for hidden.
According to Kabbalah, 90% of reality is also hidden, so maybe I should call it hidden… but I prefer invisible… sue me if you don’t like it.
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I could say “I am depleted” as I have always said: I am running on empty. I could also say: I feel emotionally and intellectually empty. But like you, I can benefit from adding to my vocabulary of state-expressing words, and feeling-indicating words.
When I don’t feel energized, when I am not full of creativity and when I don’t have three new articles almost ready to write, when I don’t feel like I have new programs to launch, then eventually I start to wonder, maybe even worry.
It’s not like me to have nothing to say.
Why? What happened? Where did my energy go?
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Get a big enough reason WHY, so you can be in action and achieve results
Most people that sit on the fence, or sit on the sidelines wishing they could be somewhere else, enjoying the fruits of their labor, have a few characteristics to share, in addition to sharing the attitude: “this isn’t it”. Whatever that “this” is, it isn’t it. Neither is how they feel about themselves, nor is the weather. The whole gamut.
The question I set out for myself to answer: what is it that makes these people not successful, not acting, not accomplishing much of anything, not attaining the fruits of their labor even when they do act?
If they don’t act, they beat themselves up for not acting, for being indecisive, fearful, overly cautious. They call what stops them fear of failure, but they are wrong: that is not what stops them. We’ll see later what it is.
They don’t have a vision, neither short term, nor long term. When I ask them what they want, they don’t know. They know what they want, what they want to get done. They may have a vague direction, but there is nothing more to it.
I was on technical support for three hours this morning. Two delightful tech support people… and no results. The software that wasn’t working, kept on not working.
At some point after 3 hours, my virus protection software requested a machine startup. I restarted the PC, and guess what: the software started to work.
This used to be the case when I was still using Macintosh until some 14 years ago. Anything wrong repaired itself with a reboot.
Now, how is this connected to anything spiritual? Let me count the ways…
If you look at your life, or someone else’s life, life has been an almost uninterrupted story of… Continue reading Rebooting your life
Or what weight you carry so that you can’t climb the Tree of Life, until you put it down?
Have you noticed that making permanent changes, doing new things, doing things in a new way, going to places unfamiliar is difficult for you, near impossible?
Consider that you are dragging a persona with you. That persona is what makes the going so difficult, so encumbered… Continue reading Steal back your future
