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woensdag 25 oktober 2006 |
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Declaring Your Own Personal Cease - Fire to Really Be Free The Council of 12 through Selacia http://www.Selacia.com It's the end of your workday. You look at the clock and ask yourself where the time went. Perhaps you acknowledge feeling exhausted, either physically or mentally. On some of your more challenging days, you may feel emotionally drained too, and a depressed or angry mood might begin coloring your afterwork hours. You become distracted by the negative mood. Without realizing it, you give your power over to this mood, allowing it to dictate how you express your energy. When this happens, you forget your earlier intentions to center yourself after work with some quiet reflection time. You do understand the value of meditation, stopping the world long enough to go within. Even if your spiritual practice is sometimes simply closing the office door, turning off the electronic gadgetry and sitting for twenty minutes to clear your mind, you know how much better your life works when you allow for this down time. But on this stress-filled day, although you may briefly remember your earlier intentions, you decide you feel too disturbed or tired to sit still in contemplation. You convince yourself that you need something else to help you move back into balance. Perhaps a phone call to a friend or loved one would make you feel better, you reason. Sometimes the easiest thing to do is to switch on the TV to be entertained. At other times, you opt for other diversions, like shopping or rechecking your email. "After all," you think, "perhaps there's something out there I don't have." If you use food or other substances to numb your pain, you may seek out a tasty treat or a mood-altering drug. In general, you seek out experiences that you think will comfort you or at the very least help you to forget your troubles. It's a normal human response. You learn through ordinary experiences to deny, resist or hide from life's pain. Your parents and caretakers showed you how. NEGATIVE CONDITIONING AT THE DINNER TABLE As a child, you observed your father, for example, coming home after working hard all day. Perhaps it was his habit to reach for a beer, put his feet up and watch a TV program before dinner. You noticed - without realizing you were noticing - that he was unable to be present with you at dinner. Instead, he monopolized the conversation most of the time, sharing his experiences of the day, stopping only to mechanically ingest the food on his plate. The family seemed almost invisible as his "talking head" chattered away. The situations he talked about had a similar thread week after week, even if some of the characters changed. You didn't know why, but as a young child, you were bored by these stories. After all, you had heard similar stories many times, and each of them had happened many times already. These stories from the past got replayed regularly, as though talking about them over and over would change them. As a child, you got used to hearing these kinds of stories, just like you got used to hearing repetitive criticism of your behavior. If you interrupted the conversation or asked to talk about your school day, you might have been ordered to keep quiet until later. You took in these early life experiences and made decisions about what they "meant," forming beliefs about life and how to adapt to situations that seem beyond your control. For example, if your father regularly ignored you at dinnertime, you might have decided that there was something wrong with you. Perhaps you thought that you were lacking in some way or that you didn't deserve to be heard. If you were yelled at or criticized for interrupting the dinner conversation, you may have decided that this meant it was safer to be silent. Read more
Posted: 1:04:12 PM
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