My perspective is basically this. You are fine. There is nothing wrong with who you are. You may not feel that way about your self and that’s usually due to lots of beliefs we have about our self. It’s these false beliefs that are the problem. They are stories about what is wrong with us. But it is the beliefs that are false. When those clear up we will feel fine about our self again.
The key is having the awareness to perceive the difference between what you are, and what the beliefs in your mind “say” you are.
Practical steps to developing this awareness can be found in my Self Mastery course.
The challenge is not just to love. We’ve all done that quite successfully and easily as children. The greater challenge is to love with awareness that the world is a difficult place, where people are not always kind, or what we want them to be. The challenge is not to love people when they are beautiful, but to love them when they are not.
The challenge is also to love and accept your self, even when don’t measure up to your beliefs about what you should be. This is a spiritual warrior’s challenge.
Boredom is a problem. Emotional drama is not a very good solution but it is the one we may have learned. At times in the past we may have just gone into drama in order to avoid boredom. Creativity, action, and expressing love is a better solution to boredom. We may not be very practiced at it, but that’s okay, we can learn.
If someone doesn’t love you. There is nothing that you can do to make them love you.
If you love someone… Really love someone unconditionally… there’s nothing THEY can do to get you to stop loving them.
They might leave you, but you will still love them. They might get caught up with drugs or alcohol and you may have to put boundaries in place with them so you are not abused or mistreated, but you will love them. Unconditional love is like that.
My friend studied political science. He said politics was basically a scramble for power. But power is a need to control,,,, and a need to control is only necessary if you are afraid. So the scramble for power is really just a reaction to fear. If we really want to study political science we need to understand fear. Power is just the tail being wagged by the dog.
The irony here is that those that seek power often do so because they are powerless over their fear.
As a spiritual warrior,,, you will not develop real personal power until you develop awareness and win over your mind from fear.
People are not in love with their suffering. Rather I’d say that either it saddens them, or they hate it. In either case their emotional reaction of hate and sadness to their suffering causes them to suffer more.
What is important to breaking this cycle is the awareness that our emotional reactions are not something that we control. But this very idea that we are not in control,,, this frightens people more. So to avoid their fear they cling to the idea that it is reasonable or justified to hate or feel sad about their condition. In effect they close themselves off to the truth out of fear of acknowledging something that is already happening.
A question from a subscriber to my on line course in Self Mastery,,,
Hello Gary,
I started reading The Four Agreements Companion Book yesterday and noticed that it had exercises like your Self Mastery program. The first exercise in the book was dealing with image of perfection but I’m still about ten sessions away from your Image of Perfection session.
I am aware that the sessions in your program are in an order for a purpose, so I wasn’t sure if it would be okay to continue reading the book or not.
Should I… continue reading the book and do the book exercises with your program? or stop reading the book until I finish your program?
Thanks for your time,
Curious
Hi Curious,
The Four Agreements Companion book is great and I recommend that you read it. However most people I’ve talked to that have attempted the exercises have gotten overwhelmed. They see so much of their belief system so fast without first having control over their attention that they slip into a victim point of view. That induces a feeling of overwhelm, powerlessness, and then hopelessness. Then their inner judge kicks in and berates them for failing. They lose motivation and close the book,,, stop the exercises… defeated. They end up feeling worse than when they started.
So that’s one of the reasons why I don’t start with the Image of Perfection beliefs. It’s also why I have people develop some other skills over their attention and beliefs before trying to change their whole belief system. It’s like eating beef. It’s much easier to do one bite at a time so you don’t get crushed by the whole animal.
By all means read the Four Agreements Companion Book. But, I’d suggest doing the exercises in the Self Mastery before starting the exercises in the book. And if you want to challenge and dissolve your Image of Perfection beliefs, (which is a necessary step to eliminating self judgments) then I suggest the using the steps in the Advanced Series of the Self Mastery program instead of the Four Agreements Companion book approach. In the Advanced Series I not only walk you through changing the Image of Perfection beliefs, but also walk you through the different issues of resistance that come up to letting these go.
After that, you’ll be better prepared to do the exercises suggested in the Four Agreements Companion book.
The human being is a pod. It is essentially a cocoon,,, for a seed of consciousness to mature and become self realized. Most human beings live their lives in varying degrees of unconsciousness, never giving birth to a fully mature consciousness.