I Change My Reality
I remember feeling betrayed by someone, that I didn’t really care that much about and I remember the intensity of negative feeling I had about the person. The person I was upset with, triggered something in me and I knew the way I felt was irrational.
I worked to “release” the irrational and uncomfortable feeling that had been triggered, from my soul and body and I did what was to become the exercise we are going to do today.
Doing this exercise I recognized the very powerful feeling was from no experience of my own but from a feeling I picked up from my father.
My father’s feeling of fear of caring about people came from caring about people and then being put in a concentration camp.
It was difficult to understand (before doing this exercise many years ago) that my father’s feelings from a concentration camp had become mine.
My father lost his family to the Nazi’s, it was a real event for him.
Each time my father told me about his feelings I empathized with them deeply and felt the change come over me as if it became night.
My father would also become cold and distant, or suddenly angry.
I remember my father driving away if I did not get in the car fast enough, leaving me in dangerous places when I was a very young child.
I also remember my father often telling me he hoped that someday I would look less like a monster and more human.
My father had horrible feelings and would tell me it was because of me.
When my father would push me away or become abusive to me, I would feel my father’s feeling,…just as if it were my own feeling inside me and feel how he felt about me while he had a toxic feeling….I felt the feeling my father had about me so deeply, it was at times the way I felt about myself.
The feeling my father had came into me and instead of feeling upset with my father, I felt ugly and bad in my body.
I was uncomfortable caring about myself because paying attention to myself brought up my father’s feelings about me, so I avoided thinking about myself.
When I had feelings of love because someone loved me, I would feel happy and then… I would suddenly feel strong emotions that were uncomfortable to feel. I would pretend not to have upsetting emotions but I could not stop feeling weird feelings that made no sense. I would end up pushing someone away to stop feeling uncomfortable, because I had no control of how bad I felt.
I did not realize it at the time but I was more comfortable with someone that did not pay attention to me, even though I wanted very much to feel loved.
Because I loved and needed my father and I was just a small child, I had no idea that my father was pushing me away for the same reason I would later push others away….because we felt uncomfortable when we felt our own emotions and feelings about ourselves.
My father was projecting feelings on me, that the years of abuse from Nazi guards created, feelings he tried to hide.
My father’s feelings, that came into me made me feel horrible, I was not able to look in the mirror without feeling a stomach ache, I was insecure and I imagined if I felt attractive, I would be happier.
I did all kinds of things to feel better. I did bodybuilding and got a standing ovation at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium but would not take off my shirt afterward for pictures because it made me feel weird. I learned A Course in Miracles and even taught the class but it did nothing to help me, after twelve years of therapy I had lots of sessions of crying but still felt the same about myself, I won dance contests all over L.A. and was told I was attractive but I never felt I was attractive.
I did the following exercise out of desperation and it was a miracle how quickly and easily it worked. I instantly felt as though the feeling had been”taken off of me.” I felt better than someone telling me, “sorry that was not about you, I was in a bad mood and I was still upset from a fight I had before you got here,” but it was one million times more powerful.
The exercise works because the feeling inside us, is not something we should even have, it is like a big turd in us.
When we feel the feeling as a huge toxic feeling that belonged to someone else, that was put in us without our consent, we can also let the feeling go.
While we have the file open that the toxic feeling was in, we can also add information to the same file about the value and meaning of the toxic feeling that was not ours. We can add an understanding that the feeling was erroneous and harmful to us and not appropriate to our life. What we are doing is similar to editing a video tape about us and removing the other person we didn’t want in the video.
At the time we got the feeling it was something we picked up and used, to help us navigate in the real world. Now that we know this toxic feeling is not from our own experience but from a parents experience and makes our lives worse not better, we can reduce the significance of the feeling for us, so it does not alter our brain, autonomic nervous system, smooth muscles, blood pressure or perceptions.
When I let go of my father’s feelings in me, I also let go of what kept me from opening my heart. I am able to care about myself and I am able to feel someone’s love and feel safe too.
That is why I named this website “I change reality,” because I changed my reality when I worked on what was inside me and I know you are reading this because you will change your reality for the better too.
To be our authentic selves we want to remove feelings of sadness, insecurity, fear and anger that someone put in us, that are their feelings about themselves.
We are going to look at the deep feelings that other’s may call our “unconscious” but in reality, may just be someone”s feelings about themselves that we have operating in us. The feelings of someone else that have come into us, may be much more powerful than our own feelings and because they are so strong, they can change how we feel and behave.
The feelings that came into us from someone else, will not be “unconscious” for us after the exercise. We will be conscious of the feeling and aware of it as not our own, so we can stop reacting to it and ignore it. We will not react to the feeling after the exercise.
Normally an emotionally healthy parent or person that we depend on, would protect us from their toxic feelings.
The parent that hurts us emotionally, may feel insecure or angry but they should not have made us feel the same way they felt.
We were not insecure or afraid of being loved before someone’s toxic feelings about themselves came into us.
We took in feelings that we do not understand because they do not fit us.
Today we will remove these toxic feelings and experience our own authentic life.
How did we get conditioned to have the same feelings about ourselves our parents had about themselves?
Some cats are taught by their mother to be afraid of people even if they are being fed and cared for by people and it may be because their mother got hurt or abandoned by a person.
If a kitten goes to a person to be loved and the mother cat fears people, she will get upset with the kitten and hurt the kitten so the kitten becomes conditioned to feel fear when it goes to a person.
A kitten does not need to actually have an experience of a person that hurts the kitten for a kitten to be afraid if the parent cat puts their feelings in the kitten, they just identify with their parents feelings and become conditioned by them.
Most people that feel insecure, have no experience other than perhaps not being comforted by a parent, to feel fear of love.
If a parent or someone we trusted was upset about being hurt by someone they loved, their toxic feelings about themselves could easily be passed to us, particularly if they wanted us to empathize with them. Many people grow up to be just like their parents because of this, no matter what they do to be different.
When or if we feel a sudden overwhelming impulse of fear, insecurity, anger or any reaction that does not fit with who we are, it is usually because of someone’s powerful old toxic feelings, not our own.
If a reaction we had was because of an old experience it would not be as powerful as an old toxic feeling we adopted. If we had an old experience that created a reaction, we would remember the experience and understand where the feeling came from.
I am holding a feral cat I took in two weeks ago while I am writing this. The cat loves batting at things that move on the screen. I know the cat likes being held too because it purrs like crazy. We all deserve to experience how lovable we are.
Emotional and physical release exercise:
A) Emotional preparation:
If we feel some feeling that we believe, SOMEONE MADE US FEEL! and the feeling was not a conscious decision but it was a powerful reaction that HAPPENED TO US! This is a feeling we want to work on because we do not have “a conscious connection to an experience that created the feeling” or “an experience of it as our own from our memories of experiences.”
This powerful feeling that belonged to someone else and reactions that it creates in us can take control of our lives.
Because someone put the feeling in us, when we experience the feeling again it will feel as though someone else is making us feel this way!
This feeling that was someone’s toxic feeling and is now a part of us, is what we want to experience in this exercise so we are going to bring it up.
This feeling can be jealousy, anger, pushing love away, self destructiveness…we will do one today and we can do the exercise again for each one of these.
We are going to connect to the feeling that creates our reaction or sadness or depression and understand it on a gut level as not being ours! We are going to experience the feeling strongly and just as strongly we are going to understand and experience the feeling as something that belongs to someone else, that we regret feeling and do not ever again want to feel inside of us because it is not about us….and as we understand the feeling is making us sick, we are going to puke it out.
B) Preparation of area to do the exercise:
Get towels, a plastic bat, a mat to kneel on, something you can hit with the bat, a bucket and Kleenex.
C) Doing the exercise:
Step One:
We are going to scream, yell and hit something to get to both the toxic feeling we have as well as a feeling we are powerful up. We want the feeling of anger and power so we do not feel overwhelmed by the toxic feeling but have the strength to push it off and out of us.
Step Two:
We will hit something and get upset about the feeling being put in us and as we do we will feel the feeling more deeply. We can cry or scream as well at this time but keep it short it is not our feeling we are just bringing it up….
Step Three:
Start screaming “Get the fuck out of me! or Get the fuck off of me! or Fuck you take this back asshole! or This is not me it is not my fucking feeling!” and as you yell experience the feeling as something separate from you, something like feces or puke…
Now just make a noise and no words, focus on the feeling and push it up and out from your guts. Moan or make the sound you need to make as loud and long as you need to get the toxic feeling that belongs to someone else, out of you.
Step Four:
Get on your hands and knees over the bucket, yell and push the feeling that is sickening and not part of you out by squeezing deep in your guts and moving the feeling out towards your mouth while spitting into the bucket.
Continue pushing the feeling out of you until clear liquid comes out when spit and keep spitting and pushing until you puke a little into the bucket, if you can.
The entire exercise should take about 20 minutes, so this part of the exercise where you spit into a bucket and get the poison that was put into you back out, should take no more than 5 minutes.
Step Five:
When the feeling is completely out of you, relax and let go of it. Take a few deep breathes and feel your body lighten. Now go out and have a wonderful time.
You will experience nature or anything with a vibrancy and beauty that you could only experience being on drugs before.
Try not to have any negative experiences for the next eight hours, because on the microscopic level the new memory is hardening into a lasting memory….a memory of this feeling not being about you.
Step Six:
If the feeling comes up again do the exercise again.
Experiencing Our Real Life
Are we loving to ourselves and open to others loving us?
I believe we all understand what real love is, from the moment we are born.
Why would we cry when we needed someone or smile to see a smile in return, if we did not have an understanding of what real love was?
I believe we still have an understanding of what real love is. I also know that most of us were conditioned to believe that what someone was giving us was real love, when we were not loved.
Would we know if we were conditioned (or tricked) to believe we were getting what we wanted?
We want to be able to give ourselves everything we need and want because we want to be a better parent to ourselves.
Are we continuing to believe the abandonment, betrayal of trust or abuse we were conditioned to accept instead of love, is what we really want?
The exercises for the next six weeks are below.
Doing these exercises over the next six weeks will help us understand if we have repressed our own needs, wants and desires. They will also put us in touch with our true understanding of what we want to have being loving to ourselves.
As a great parent to ourselves we want to give ourselves everything we need and want, with love.
Please watch the video and see how easily we could have lost connection to what mattered most in our heart.
Someone asked me, “If I feel that abuse is love what is wrong with it?”
In neurologic tests on the brain, women that had been abused saw photos of men that were angry or violent and saw them smiling and happy. The same abused women saw photos of men smiling and calm… but they did not see happy men.
There are at least two things wrong with desire to see abuse as love. If we see abuse as love we no longer can see abuse. If we see abuse as love, we are now blind to real love as well.
During the next six weeks we will be restoring our own feelings.
As we become whole and connected to our emotions, we will be tearing down the barriers to loving ourselves. When we feel lovable and love ourselves, we will begin to be comfortable having someone really love us.
Exercise Set 2:
Please do the previous exercise, exercise 1 first before doing these. After you have done exercise 1 three different times, proceed to the next exercises.
Each exercise is to be done in the same manner we did the first exercise. We need a mat, plastic bat and something like a footstool to hit.
We get in position with bat in hand kneeling on the mat in front of the footstool and then follow the suggestions for each separate exercise below.
Please allow a full day of happiness after each exercise.
Please do not in any way engage a person you are upset with during this time, because of feelings brought up by the exercises.
We are awakening our own connection to self and rewriting conditioning. We want to rewrite our conditioning by “feeling comfortable experiencing our emotions and happy afterward” so we open our heart.
We can always argue with someone later, right now we are giving ourselves the ability to feel our emotions deeply, there is nothing more important we can do until that has been accomplished.
Each exercise should not last more than five minutes. Please be sure to remember to do something that feels wonderful for your body, something that is good for your well being as well, such as exercise or receiving a massage.
We are empowering ourselves to be good to ourselves and have a different feeling about our emotions, one where we can have them and enjoy our life, not be afraid of them.
I am going to leave it up to you to decide what memory you will be upset about but only think about the memory and call up the feeling for a few seconds, do not allow the feeling to overwhelm you or shut you down.
After feeling the emotion, let go of all thought and feel deep anger in your body, then take the bat and attack the footstool yelling the words of each exercise.
After you hit the footstool and yell in anger a few times, please go sit down and feel as good as you can all over your body. When you have calmed down and feel good, please go do something wonderful for yourself.
We are just rewriting the conditioning that blocked our real feelings.
If you want later you can feel sadness and cry or yell but remember to just do a little and keep in mind that it was the past. Immediately after feeling emotions do something to be good to yourself and be happy or watch some comedy.
We want to set up a new pattern of allowing ourselves to feel all of our emotions but we want to be gentle with ourselves and not bring old feelings into our life now.
The exercises should be done one step at a time and only one a day. It may seem like we are doing very little but we are doing a great deal and will experience great results.
Exercise 1)
“Want me!”
This is the emotion and what we will yell when we hit the footstool, we want to be angry that we were not wanted as much as we should have been by someone.
Exercise 2)
“Love me!”
We want to be angry and tell someone “Love me!” Ultimately these are also for us to hear ourselves but we need to allow ourselves to be comfortable being angry at someone that could have loved us more, before we will feel comfortable loving ourselves.
Exercise 3)
“Hear me!”
We want to be angry at someone for not hearing us and doing what we needed them to do.
Exercise 4)
“See me!”
We want to be appreciated and enjoyed for who we really are, we want to be angry at someone that did not do that when we were told they loved us.
Exercise 5)
“Hold me!”
We want to feel angry at someone that we hoped would enjoy holding us.
Exercise 6)
“I am special!”
We want to be angry with someone that did not do what made us happy when we were little. We wanted to be supported in finding what made us happy and hoped it would make them happy to see us happy.
Please love yourself. Please forgive anything that was not loving to yourself that you did, we did our best at the time.
Namaste. I love you. <3
You pushed love down the stairs…
I grew up in San Francisco and when I was a kid, I would walk my wagon up a steep hill by my house and ride it down the middle of the street. I remember flying in the air when my wagon would hit bumps. There were moments I achieved weightlessness. Floating or flying, whatever it was, it was wonderful.
I remember flying far out of my wagon on some bumps. Sometimes I would leave the wagon completely and land on the road.
As children, we all got hurt playing. We got up if we fell down, wiped the dirt out of our hands and kept playing.
I got hurt learning to ride my bike too. I bet you got hurt learning to ride your bike. We get hurt many times growing up but getting hurt playing never changed how we felt about ourselves.
When the people that we trusted to love us, hurt us, it did change the way we felt about ourselves. Most people do not stop playing because they got hurt playing, they stopped playing because they were hurt emotionally.
If we became numb during the time someone hurt us, we may not remember why we stopped playing. Come with me and I will show you how we can find a connection to the playful part of us, once again.
When we are infants, we are unable to take care of ourselves and need our parents to take care of us. We focus on our parent’s emotions and happiness more than our own, because we need them for our care.
Betrayal, trauma or neglect hurt us emotionally, we get upset…and when we experience our emotions of sadness or upset, if our emotions make the person that is hurting our feelings more upset and they hurt us more…it is natural for us to stop having emotions, in order to be less abused… Denying our emotions is how we quickly lose our connection to “self” and soon, we stop playing fearlessly.
Connected to our own feelings about ourselves is where we are strongest.
The feelings of someone we bond with become a part of how we feel about ourselves. It is sad, but becoming numb actually makes the feelings of insecurity we have, hard to experience and understand as not our own feelings but the feelings someone else had that was in my opinion a jerk.
These are feelings someone conditioned us to have about ourselves. We were conditioned to become numb when they got emotionally upset about being hurt by someone. When we were numb, it was easy to condition us to accept their feelings about us, instead of our own.
Each time they lied to us and promised us love and took love instead, we had a dissonance occur in our brain that was created by our caring more about them than they did for us. This dissonance in our brain made us infatuated with the pursuit of their attention and love. This pursuit, of the admiration and attention of someone that does not love us, is the foundation for narcissism. The feelings of insecurity we have from someone that hurt us, is more about them and less about us. Each minute we get back up and fight to get our life and emotions back, the insecurities we have, just like realizing a nightmare was just a bad dream…disappear forever.
We were happy playful kids. We took on the feelings of the person that hurt us and bonded with them because we did not have our own feelings and emotions.
Understanding our insecurities are not about us is important. Our insecurities are like weeds that someone else planted and have nothing to do with us.
The insecurity weeds grow larger each time we listen to someone that tells us to abandon our emotions. Our emotions are the beautiful flowers that grow in our garden, when we care about them.
Re- connecting to our true self is like finding our garden, we have to hear and experience all of our emotions. We were not comfortable having the emotions that created our aliveness but we need to reconnect to them now. When we have compassion for our heart, we open the well that waters the garden and we bloom again.
When we love someone that loves us, we see who we are. We stop being worried about what others think and we enjoy what we are doing.
Narcissists are everywhere now, it is important for our ability to re-connect with our self, that we avoid them.
Humans are not able to be introspective without emotions. As a narcissist, a person is not able to realize they do not have much empathy for others they want in their lives.
Narcissists can speak of love and tell you they love you. Narcissists have dramatic swings of feelings about themselves because “feeling admired” is far from connecting to the real child/person within.
If we bond with a narcissist and we become numb, we risk losing the ability to connect to our emotions and become our authentic selves.
(Here is where we push love down the stairs…)
I was emotionally hurt a long time ago and because of that I began studying A Course in Miracles and Neuro Linguistic Programming. After doing N.L.P. for a while, I became a narcissist. It was great not to feel sad but I did not notice I was not feeling many emotions at all.
I did a lot of work to feel my emotions again and I am proud to say I understand how much better life is feeling all my emotions. I am no longer a narcissist and would be glad to help anyone that wants help re-connecting to their authentic self.
Yesterday on a new age radio network, I was listening to a very popular author. She was taking calls from listeners and helping them with the problems they had.
The woman that called in wanted to know, “Why do I keep chasing after people that hurt me?”
The author told the person, “You need to stop caring so much about people in your life and become selfish. You deserve to be happy.”
We do not need to become selfish, or narcissists to be happy.
When we are whole and connected to our emotions, we are able to be happy and love others.
I am sad to hear so many people telling others to do something that would only bring symptomatic relief and then bring the caller back needing more.
To remove the cause of a problem, I would ask more questions of the caller. If I understood more, I could empower the caller to remove the cause of their problems themselves.
There are maps that allow people to return to the connection they once had with themselves. Each map is unique because our path is our life. It is wonderful to show someone how he or she can create a wonderful re-bonding experience himself or herself.
It is only through love that we can heal our broken heart.
In loving our children, we see our own beauty. The person that runs into our arms with love is the mirror we want to have.
The love we have for the person that loves us, will allow us to see how much we are like the person we love and we will bond to the feeling they have about us.
When we have bonding experiences with souls that reflect how lovable and wanted we are, we will once again play with abandon.
Emotions Add Color to the World
After asking people for many years when they first started using self-help, I realized that most people started using self help after being hurt emotionally.
From my own experience, the first time I used self help was to numb my emotions.
When I was doing self help a long time ago I saw that many used self help to have a cool image as well.
There are so many people concerned with image that I declare “Style to have officially won over substance.” Someone cool seems preferable to a warm heart.
The emotional work I have done the last 20 years, is very different from other types of self help. My work is about allowing people to open their heart and experience all of their emotions so they can be themselves and grow.
Is love something we hold as sacred? Is love an idea or a feeling in our heart? Is just loving anyone special for us or is loving someone that loves us in return, that is sacred to us? Do we experience the joy of love for someone even when we are not with them and does this shape our being?
When we open our heart to another, we feel how they genuinely feel about us. If the person we love becomes numb, we no longer have our playmate to have fun with. It is easy to close our heart and hard to open it again.
If we hold love sacred, we must be able to experience the emotion of real love.
If we are not helping people open their hearts, how are we helping the world?
Self help is commonly used to mask emotional pain. This way of dealing with emotions only brings symptomatic relief.
Self help should make us more capable of experiencing all of our feelings, perceptions, reactions and emotions so we can find what the cause of our problems is. We need to learn to love ourselves. Love is an emotion.
We can not stop just a few emotions, we stop all emotions including the experience of love when we try to stop feeling any emotions.
I find people are less interested in removing the real cause of their problems, when they have symptomatic relief. Some of the same techniques that are used to make people stop feeling emotions that are used in mind control, are commonly used in self help. These only assist people in disconnecting from their lives.
To be our authentic selves and use our entire brain, we need to feel emotions. Emotions are essential to being who we are. We understand others through their emotions, as they understand us through our emotions or numbness as well.
Most of us experience more of what is important for our growth while we are feeling love than at any other time. Love gives us the incentive to grow.
People that have stopped feeling because they have been hurt, experience the addition of depth and color when they are able to feel emotions again.
Step 3- Emotions Add Color to the World, is about us allowing ourselves to have all of our emotions and be comfortable and not afraid of them.
We do not go back to the past to dredge up emotions. We try to become comfortable feeling any emotions we have not allowed ourselves to feel.
The more we allow ourselves to feel comfortable and safe with the emotions we have, the less fear we have of feeling emotions. People that feel their sadness or hurt in a gentle and compassionate way are able to feel love again because they are not too afraid of pain to open their heart.
In group 3 we do not discuss personal information. We do allow people to have the emotions or feelings that seem to them to be too much for them to experience alone. We give support and love to those brave enough to experience the fear and emotion that has stopped them from having the love we all want to enjoy.
The Seven Step Program
The 7 step program:
1) It’s my life
2) My soul is beautiful
3) Emotions add color to the world
4) Teaching my brain to reward me
5) Creating feelings in others
6) Opening my heart to create what I want
7) Relationships
Each step and peer support group will enhance our experience of life.
Step 1 – “It’s my life”
A person entering the group accepts that they are now “their own parent” and have the responsibility of giving themselves the love and happiness, they always wanted to have.
We take responsibility for hearing and seeing who we are. This means that we honor our feelings.When we cry inside, we hear it and do something about it. When we are our own parent and hear our inner child, we feel heard. When we listen we become more alive.
When we laugh and are happy, we reward ourselves by being proud we were good to our inner child. In this way we feel seen for who we are. We become more confident and whole each time we reward what makes us happy.
By being there all the time for our inner child, we re-pattern our early bonding experience. Because of this we have an enhanced experience of ourselves in the world.
As we feel ourselves as a caring and loving parent that is always there, we develop object permanence. Object permanence is the grounded feeling people want. We feel safe, at home and wanted no matter where we are.
The group allows members to talk about the new relationship they have with themselves and how they are parenting their inner child. We support each other as loving and compassionate parents that are learning more all the time.
This first step in opening our heart, is wonderful when we have support for the work we do.
Confident IV the first exercise
In a previous blog titled “Who Am I” I said, “The good news is we can change anything we want and become who we want, without having to go into the past. Because our brain is designed to grow and be whole, what we do in the present is the best vehicle for developing and enhancing our brain.”
Today we are going to learn a beginning exercise that will help us to be the confident, present and compassionate person we hope to be. This exercise will also give us the ability to start changing our reality.
The first thing a person needs to be able to open their heart, is a feeling of safety within themselves.
This feeling of safety will give someone a feeling of well being and presence as well. This feeling will also allow someone to feel pleasure opening their heart without being stressed.
What gives an infant the feeling of confidence are a few things, 1) object permanence (parents that are always there when needed), 2) touch (feeling wanted), 3) having someone hear us when we cry, responding to our feelings (feeling heard) and 4) having someone smile when we smile (feeling seen).
To have those feelings….of feeling taken care of, of being wanted, of feeling heard and being seen for who we are, we want to do the following exercise:
If we are not living with our parents and they are not taking care of us, we are our own parents and we have control of what happens to us.
1) The first part of the exercise is for us to accept and understand that we are now our own parents. We make the decisions about what we have in our life.
The most important part of the first step is for us to willingly take responsibility for the most important things for our life, in a loving caring way.
Object permanence comes from someone being responsible for taking care of us…our needs and wants. As we take the responsibility for giving ourselves the things that matter most and make sure all of our dreams are heard more seriously, we give ourselves more object permanence (this makes us feel deep safety and well being).
2) The second part of the exercise is to treat ourselves as a sweet child that has real needs that are physical, emotional and creative. We want to listen to and hear all the needs we have. We must not ignore any of our feelings. We also want to see ourselves as capable and lovable. Feeling heard and seen in this way also gives us a feeling of object permanence and well being.
3) The third part of the exercise pulls the first and second parts together into action. For our health and well being, we are going to get massaged several times in the next couple weeks.
We give the child within the touch we need for survival. The “non-verbal” understanding of touch is important. Our limbic system (the place in our brain that is the lens we use to see ourselves as safe) understands this non-verbal language. We can use this new experience to rewrite unresolved feelings we may have. How it feels in our body to be wanted and loved is powerful.
If we take responsibility for “getting a massage”, we are in essence giving the child within the caring loving touch so many people do not receive from other things. The more wonderful loving feelings we take responsibility for giving ourselves, the better we will feel.
As we take responsibility for the care of our needs, the need to be touched, heard, seen, wanted and loved, we develop a sense of safety, trust, presence and well being that allows us to feel a deep safety and confidence that nothing else can give us.
As we feel more safety and well being, we soon feel joy opening our heart.
There are many more things we can do to grow and have a wonderful life.
If you have any questions please feel free to write me Bob@ichangereality.com or call me at 360-953-7408
Opening Our Heart to Become Enlightened
What knowledge have we ever learned that is more important than what we have felt in our heart to be true?
In the past science taught that the human brain was larger because we used it to think. The last few years of research have shown that the structure and function of the brain are most highly optimized during social competence; our brain is more of a social organ than a thinking one. Our brain is optimized when we open our heart.
Most of this research has gone unnoticed by those that would be users of this information and it will be many years before this new research will be taught in schools.
How we use our brain changes it, physically. Use dependent plasticity of the brain determines that intensive use of a particular area of the brain will make it have more neuronal networks, over time these networks or freeways of energy, become more complex, denser and thicker.
From a lack of use over time… a loss of neuronal activity, there is a loss of the networks or freeways that move the information. The brain changes physically and from lack of use the area of the brain then becomes less and less complex. In time we have difficulty because we have impaired functioning in that area of our brain.
In essence, the brain takes the form of how it is used. Optimally we want to have all of our senses and abilities available to use in our brain.
What is clear because the brain is primarily a psychosocial organ is that to become more “conscious” we need to use all of our brain, the thinking part as well as the emotional feeling part.
When these two parts of our brain work together, thoughts and emotions, we are able to use our brain at its highest and most remarkable levels.
Because of patterns of use, thinking about our thoughts, feeling pleasure but not developing the emotional part of our brain, many people are missing a great part of life. We want to be able to see and feel, listen to music and dance and think rationally as well as understand things intuitively.
There is an ancient Chinese proverb, “Not where you have mastery, should you exert yourself further but there where mastery has still yet to appear.”
What is the difference between a person with funny bones and a person that says funny lines? The person with funny bones is able to understand and feel their emotions. The person with funny bones is also able to understand when others have a common experience of these emotions as well. The comic with funny bones is able to relate non-verbal information about the experience that adds much more than words could add.
Children laugh 400 times a day, an average adult laughs 15 times a day, how did we lose 385 laughs a day? When we are young, the road of information from our emotional centers to our verbal mind is like an 8 lane freeway…we are feeling and happy.
As we learn over time to be in our “thinking brain” the canalization (term for neural highway of information) of information coming from our emotional centers to our “verbal brain” is diminished. When we learn to suppress our emotions, the freeway of emotion becomes a small road and some people even lose touch with their emotions.
When we have suppressed feelings long enough, we still have reactions and emotions; we are just not as conscious, of what our emotions and feelings are. What was once an area that brought us so much laughter and love, now primarily only alerts us to fear.
Many people try to find a spiritual path where they do not have to face themselves but where they can still liberate themselves. In truth, that is impossible. We have to be honest with ourselves. We have to see our gut, our real shit, our most undesirable parts ~ Chogyam Trungpa Rinoche
Our brain is able to change and we are able to regain the connection to our emotions with hard work and determination, over time. When we are capable of compassion, we are able to understand real creativity.
The person with a great connection to their feelings and others feelings as well, can have an understanding of a common truth. Creativity is born of a psychosocial understanding and when we are using our brain at full capacity, we are most capable of creating something that resonates with all of us.
Those that develop an understanding of what effect their emotions, reactions, perceptions and creations have on others, discover they are able to laugh a lot more too.
Consciousness and Love
To simplify things for discussion, let us say there are four levels of consciousness that humans possess.
The first level is “I do this and this happens.” It gives a person an understanding of how to get things. Many people grow up in homes where people are masters at playing with their own feelings or the feelings of others to get what they want. People in this situation often hide their own feelings. They may become masters at reading or manipulating the feelings of others but they lack the ability to put themselves in the place of others, so they do not have the abilities to read others using empathy.
People that have excessive canalization ( in psychology, formation in the central nervous system of new pathways by repeated passage of nerve impulses.), of their brain towards thinking the world is just about cause and effect relationships may become unscrupulous.
The second level of consciousness is when we realize there are long-term effects of our actions. People become self-examining in this phase of consciousness. When we realize that getting what we wanted now, has made it hard to get what we wanted most of all, we are able to see more than just, “I do this and I get that.”
The third level of consciousness is where we develop empathy. Empathy requires a great deal of us caring about someone that cares about us, to be able to perceive subtle non-verbally expressed feelings. When we love another and put ourselves in the other’s place, we develop the feeling part of our brain. The more we care about another person’s feelings the more we develop this non-verbal part of our brain, through empathy.
When we have developed this non-verbal part of our brain and have the third level of consciousness, we are able to enter our own feelings to discover the inner world of not only one other person but of all others. The more we care, the more we develop this extra sense.
In the fourth level of consciousness we understand that how we experience ourselves, will alter our experience. We understand that when we develop an appreciation for “who we are” we are able to relax, welcome love, welcome attention and be much more connected to another person.
When we experience this level of connection, we are able to feel how our subtle feelings automatically influence others that are not even aware we are changing reality.
When we have this level of consciousness, we are able to feel our own blocks to healing, having love or creating beauty and release them. We are also able to enter our own feelings to discover the inner world of another person to help them understand what their own blocks to healing, creating love or creating beauty in their life are and help them discover their path to releasing them as well.
When someone asks me, “What is real growth”, I tell him or her that doing our own work to develop empathy is the beginning. Understanding and developing the non-verbal part of our brain will open up a richness and depth of understandings that makes us so much more ourselves and complete.
There is no way we should do without all of our senses and both having empathy for others as well as ourselves is a sense we only benefit from. The enlightened experience of working with our thoughts and emotions can open a beautiful new world, once we get used to the idea.
I worked hard to grow and it took conscious effort to do it. I had to understand what feelings I had about myself were doing to alter my reality. I understood that the automatic non-verbal feelings I had were what created the theme to my story. In order to create with intent, I had to understand how to rewrite these themes.
“To love and be loved in return” real love is the best resource for growth.
Only Love …Healing With Our Heart…Empathic Healing
Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own pain and have worked to heal ourselves, can we be present with the pain of others and help them discover how they may allow healing and love for themselves. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity and have a way of opening our heart so that we can open another.
Exercise 1 Empathic Healing.
What am I perceiving? The next time you are upset, sad, worried, irritable or annoyed go to a room by yourself and take some deep breaths and notice how you feel in your body. If there is pain, do whatever it takes to relieve it. Breathe deeply and let go of tension let your body feel light, relaxed and happy. When you feel good go back to the situation and if your perception has improved.
Exercise 2 Empathic Healing.
What is my energy creating? When you are having a wonderful time with someone, say nothing to whom you are with but put a small rock in your shoe and walk around with it till your foot hurts. Sit back down with the rock in your shoe. Watch how quickly the other person becomes upset when you talk. Our energy comes through our voice, our face, our body language and more. Others prepare for us in their old pattern of how they deal with someone with our energy and are not aware they do it….its automatic. Go take the rock out and apologize to the person you are with. This happens to us even when we think we are happy but are not aware of our real feelings.
Exercise 3 Empathic Healing.
Changing someone’s energy. If you understand what your own energy is and you also understand how to change your energy, so you can feel wonderful, do the following. Have empathy and feel the way the way the other person is feeling. Now try to emulate how they were feeling by having the same feeling yourself. Now we can understand how the feeling they have is altering their perception. Breathe deeply and let the tightness and heaviness go. With each breathe feel relaxed and light as if you were floating. In a caring and loving way, touch the other person. Continue to have an energy that is relaxing. Notice how much they are relaxing without your saying anything to them.
Exercise 4 Empathic Healing.
Finding what changes our energy in a negative way that we are not aware of. Our energy is altered when we prepare for something. This happens automatically and is controlled by the non-verbal limbic system in our brain. We change our energy all the time as we automatically prepare for a relationship we have with anything or anyone. How we feel about ourselves in any relationship is something we can change. First we must be able to notice the change. If we want to heal others we have to be able to notice this in ourselves to help others do this as well. Call someone you love and before you pick up the phone, feel how you feel all over your body. Call someone you hate and before you pick up the phone, feel how you feel all over your body. Notice the difference not in how you felt about them, but how you felt about yourself.
Exercise 5 Empathic Healing.
Empathic discussions must be authentic and feeling. We must be able to have a clarity that allows us to feel what our feelings are so well, we are aware of them as separate from another persons. We need to be aware of when we are influenced by another person and what our energy or influence is doing to the person we are with. We must remove any colored lenses we use to alter the way we feel so we may have the clarity to experience feelings deeply. We do this exercise with someone. Be with your own feelings for a while and then tell the other person all that you are feeling inside. The object of this is to become comfortable with feelings we may not want to acknowledge but need to be compassionate about if we are going to help someone with similar feelings.
Exercise 6 Empathic Healing.
Being responsible for my energy all the time. Taking responsibility for my feelings and energy means, I tell someone I love as I first see them, that I… have a headache, have had a hard day, have a stomach ache, am feeling grumpy, am tired, am irritable, am annoyed, am worried, am upset, have been arguing with someone, need to relax, am overloaded etc. In this way, the person I love is prepared for me and how I feel is not “put on them” which means they will not be upset by how I feel but will want to help. It also means that if someone says: Are you upset, are you angry, you look confused, you sound irritated etc…. before I say “No I am not”, I need to look inside and check to see if I do. If I am upset I may think how I am feeling is appropriate for the situation. Saying “I am not upset” before I check my feelings is not being honest. If I am not aware of my feelings or what my feelings bring, I may not realize how much I am responsible for what is happening. When we are able to admit when we are upset, it takes the “feelings of blame off the other person” and they feel better and are able to hear us and we both grow.
These are the first six exercises. There will be more. You have my respect and love.
Body Language
In a recent experiment, men were asked to rank how attractive they found photographs of different women’s faces. The photos were eight by ten inches, and showed women facing the camera or turned in three-quarter profile. Unbeknownst to the men, in half the photos the eyes of the women were dilated, and in the other half, they were not.The men were consistently more attracted to the women with dilated eyes. Remarkable, the men had no insight into their decision making. None of them said, “I noticed her pupils were two millimeters larger in this photo than in this other one.” Instead, they simply felt more drawn toward some women than other, for reasons they couldn’t quite put a finger on.
So who was doing the choosing? In the largely inaccessible workings of the brain, something knew that a woman’s dilated eyes correlates with sexual excitement and readiness. Their brains knew this, but the men in the study didn’t — at least not explicitly.
We are not all mind readers but we are all brain readers. We are influenced by how others feel, this happens automatically and it is not necessary to be conscious of this. When we are talking to a loved one and they see something they like, their pupils dilate. When a loved one’s pupils dilate, we experience the excitement they feel because of empathy. Empathy developed before language in a part of our brain that controls the many automatic processes within us such as attraction or fear. Even mice feel empathy.
What happens inside of us automatically changes what is happening in the brains of those around us. I have heard 60% of what people communicate is non-verbal. How we feel, has a great influence over others. People get how we feel. They feel it too.
A woman looked at my lips and then into my eyes, I noticed her pupils dilate. She did not have to say a word. I silently gasped. My brain had released neurotransmitters, dopamine and nor epinephrine, these gave a feeling of excitement and heightened perception.
Even when we do not touch, we feel each other. I continued to talk with the lovely woman and noticed she had more pupil dilation because her brain noticed my pupils, even though she was listening to what I was saying and thinking of a response. Now her brain was producing the same chemistry and response, I was having automatically. This is natural.
We continued to talk and as we felt each other more, we released endorphins and enkephalins, these powerful natural narcotics gave us a sense of comfort, safety and well-being.
The process of facial recognition and body language is something that speaks many volumes. We understand how a person is feeling by observing where circulation is in their face and by many other things we get, many are beyond what I can explain in this short blog. In experiments it has been shown that our heart rate and skin conductance change seconds “before” we are presented with a stimuli.
We may want to improve how we feel about ourselves in relationships with others. How can we separate which feelings are our own and which feelings belong to others, if we are not able to feel good ourselves? Do we understand how much we are affected by the feelings of others? If we are uncomfortable with ourselves, if we are insecure about the way we feel about ourselves because we have some shame or we do not feel beautiful, we may be with others that feel this way themselves and we may think it is our feeling.
I have been in a room full of Hollywood stars and celebrities that looked incredible because of how much attention they gave to their appearance. I thought my insecurities were heightened being with them. It was not my insecurities I was feeling but their insecurities. My insecurity made it hard for me to recognize who the feeling belonged to.
When I removed my insecurities, I could feel comfortable and feel others that felt insecure and be helpful to them.
It is important for us to feel good about ourselves if we are empathic and caring. There are many narcissists that do not want to feel their feelings, yet we are able to feel their feelings inside us no matter.
We can change how we feel about ourselves and when we do, we will have the ability to distinguish between someone else’s feelings and our own.
When we have clarity about how we see ourselves, it is like learning to float, we are not struggling with the energy of others because it does not need to worry us, we can choose what feelings we want to immerse ourselves in. I choose love and respect.
