Three Steps to Conquering Upsets

Can you be upset-free no matter what the circumstances? That was my homework for two weeks during the Breakthrough Seminar I took at Landmark Education.

And there were circumstances...but since we seminarians committed to being conscious witnesses of our lives, we had to unravel the upsets rather than be stopped by them.

Probable cause of an upset (according to Landmark):  

Thwarted intention, unfulfilled expectation, or undelivered communication.

To further dismantle the issue, we also ask: Of what from my past does this remind me?
Generally, when you are angry or upset, you're not in present time.

Psychoanalyst Carl Jung said what we don't face within ourselves we end up meeting as fate. Ever know people who married their parents or reasonable facsimile? Perhaps that's you?

Reminds me of an old Mary Tyler Moore Show episode. Cloris Leachman's character is accused of some behavior which she flatly denies. "I'm not like that!" she says. "Mother was like that." And after a pause.
"You know, Mary, you don't know me at all, but it's amazing how well you know my mother."

Or to slightly paraphrase Emerson: What you are stands over you and shouts so loudly that I cannot hear what you are saying to the contrary.

Upsets give us the opportunity to see parts of ourselves that may shout loudly to others but to which we might be oblivious.  Better to unravel or observe the issue than to marry it or meet it as fate?

The Universe Speaks In Slippers

 I Figured Out the Code

Psychics are supposed to find things, lost keys, envelopes with missing money…but some of us are in a different situation. We lose things…that is, things disappear.  They’re absolutely present one minute and  disappeared the next. Sometimes before our eyes.

It’s my mother watching over me…deceased Dad and nephew still turning on the TV. Electrical appliances go on and off by themselves, the air purifier turns itself up just a notch.

Yes, we can tune into metal and find your lost keys, though it’s easier to light them up so you see them yourself.  But if it’s disappeared…that’s another story.

Disappeared objects aren't overlooked. They’re gone. How can that be? Can’t happen. Oh, it’s your mother or some other being on the other side looking out for you. Maybe just waving hello, telling you you’re not alone.  

I think I’d rather have more fortune than disappeared belongings. That is, a second pair of desired slippers, maybe ones I thought too expensive and impractical to buy…rather than just have one gone.

Is the universe communicating in code? What is the code of the disappeared slipper? Two of us have cleaned and searched this place where only one of us lives. No one else came in or out, if you don’t count the ethers in that equation.

You’re psychic. Why don’t you look and see everything for yourself? Because I don’t have my shoes, my slippers. I don’t have two of everything I think I need. Maybe that’s the universe communicating with me? You’re okay with 1, it says, okay alone. I'm a little too personally involved.

Or it’s a reminder to connect in twos. Get out of the house. You think you’re safe here? No one’s come in or out and still things are gone. What would you lose if you got out into the bigger world a bit more? Your slippers might be side-by-side the bed when you got home.  Or one would still be lost but you might be too busy to notice, too caught up in running around.  Maybe you’d have found better slippers and be ready to leave the past behind?

Is that the code? Leave the past behind? Don’t dwell on what’s been lost? Move on?  Is that what Mom is saying from her perch in the great beyond?

Transcript for my article: Talking to the Dead

(This is the full transcript of the reading. go to the article for shorter version)

4/4/12 Psychic Reading

During a reading, my client’s deceased father  began speaking to me:

“Don’t make it darker for yourself,” he told her.  “To Spare yourself despair you create  despair in the beginning.  Because you think negative things, you make the (scope?) spokes too small.”  What I get is “widen the scope.”

Your father is tapping you on the shoulder and he’s saying, “Wake up, Wake up!”

The life he’s showing me is big and bright and beautiful. It isn’t small and dark and rejecting.

Does that make sense? Yeah, she says through tears.

He’s showing me a sunrise, he’s showing me big. What he’s showing me as far as X (the man who recently broke her heart) is like…it’s small around him because he’s still so substance-addicted that it’s dark in his cave, and when you go into that cave, it’s dark in there.

But you’re making up, what I’m getting from your dad is tell you to stop making up stuff about rejection for you. If I’m quoting your dad…ooh it’s giving me a headache…if I’m quoting your dad, it’s like he’s pushing me to that sunrise he’s pushing me to seeing the world as huge and big and “I don’t want her in a cave, I don’t want her in those places. I don’t want her to think the temporary problems are the rest of her life. I don’t want her to think that way because that is not true.”

I’m getting from him the sense like there’s a history on this earth, like his history, your mom’s history…it feels little in comparison to what he keeps showing me which is the sunrise, which is huge, like a huge…you know, all the other is like little things, almost like the way we have websites, or facebook or pinterest that we pin these things on top of which is really a huge world, they’re little pieces that we think…what I’m getting from him is as if I thought facebook was the whole world, or if I thought pinterest was the whole world and he’s saying “no, no, no, those are just little things that are in the world that people create. But the world is really huge, it’s almost like he’s showing me sort of like the sunrise over Isreal, and you know…these big places where life is so much bigger and so much better. Don’t think that facebook or pinterest is your whole life. They’re just little portals into little portals.

What feels best with him is when I go back to that big big sunrise.  And it’s just like…He’s saying to me…tell you to focus there.  That’s your meditation.  He’s also saying he’ll meet you there.  “I’m there with you.  You’re not alone. You’re not alone.” 

(He refers to another issue with someone in her life) This is all temporary and not to mistake it for who you are or for your real life.  Don’t make those mistakes of confusing what the real world is because the real world is so much bigger and better and don’t assume  that you deserve the craziness of X.  He thinks X is like a joker, like a joker in the deck but don’t think that’s the whole deck. It’s an interesting card but it’s not the whole deck.  It’s part of the game but not the game itself.

If you know nothing else, you’re supposed to know that X is lucky to have a little spot in your life but that’s the best he can do is have spots in people’s lives but he’s not the whole…he’s not the play.  But he’s so intense that it’s really easy to mistake…get caught up, it’s like when your sweater gets caught against…it’s like if you had a mohair sweater and the mohair gets caught against something and it pulls you.. it’s a pull but it’s not enough of…it gets stuck on things but you have to disentangle.  And keep knowing that you’re moving forward to something bigger. It’s your play, you get to be the star.

He’s giving me the sense that you’ve been around since the dawn of time, and that’s a long time for a soul to be around, that’s a lot of lifetimes to soak up stuff.  And he’s saying to tell you not to forget who you are and how big your soul is.

 

Not to mistake the situation comedy, the tv show, the game, whatever it is, not to mistake that…to remember the sunrise that he’s showing me.  Like ancient Jerusalem, kind of thing, and what he’s saying to me is that its bigger than Jerusalem, it’s bigger than all of that. Those are all places in the bigger soul.

It makes him happy to think you understand that he’s right here with you, that he’s…the entertainment.  If you don’t like what X is doing, or not doing then change the channel.  That he’s just one little channel and he’s a telemundo (is that the word?) story. You can always turn on that channel but that doesn’t mean you forget…that you….

What I get from your dad is this big resonance to remember who you are, remember how big your soul is.  And that a lot of the day-to-day stuff is boring, and it’s tedious, remember there’s this whole world that you can sense… there’s this whole world that out there that’s so much bigger and so much grander and we’re on this precipice in our world of having to break through and it feels like crashing down a lot of times, it feels heavy and it feels crazy and it feels tiring and it feels…just something or other…disarming?..dis..something.  …Don’t, don’t, don’t…what? Don’t lose your footing, don’t lose your sense that I’m with you. Don’t lose your sense of humor.  The biggest thing is… Don’t mistake these little character studies for the whole play, for the whole process.

Your father is giving me the sense that he’s one of your soul mates. And of course I’m not going to leave you, of course I’m still with you, but you should see it on this side. It’s so big….the word big doesn’t even describe it, it’s so big and so grand and so beautiful.

It’s sort of like where do we get TV shows like Bewitched, where do we get the idea of facebook, where do we get these ideas…because they’re little tiny tiny portals reflecting…something, like something so much bigger but we can’t grasp. Be he’s saying you can grasp it. And he has been guiding you to people, he’s been guiding you, so don’t think you’re not guided. He’s telling me you have lots of guides in your life.

He also feel like X was not a mistake but where he gives me the mistake is if you think  you’re small or rejected or not enough, or any of that stuff, then you’re in the…detritius?...the..the  something…of X and what he creates, which is he spins a web and it’s dark because he has a lot of dark substance in his energy. That dark substance pulls people down. It doesn’t  make his parents happy. It’s dark. It’s not all he’s capable of but it’s the telemundo drama he’s invested himself in.

I also get…don’t wish to be in that drama. What I get from your dad is he keeps showing you that sunrise so it’s like so you’re not [stuck wondering] how do I be in this drama? How do I not be in this drama? it’s like…put your energy into the sunrise, remember who you are, remember who’s with you, remember that you’ve been around since the dawning of time and that’s a long time to be around, it’s a big stretch for the soul to deal with the darkness that we’re going through as a world right now and at the same time know what the dawning of life (light?) is and know it’s like holding up a monolith…it’s big it’s big it’s big. Don’t forget and think that you’re small and have to play small. You don’t hold everything up by yourself.

If you could see what he’s showing me…this vast vast sunrise, and not to doubt it.  Not to doubt it for me and not to doubt it for you. It’s like, listen you guys, step into this next state (space?) because it’s like the old world is crumbling and people are going every which way with it and you can’t do that. You signed on for something bigger. You signed on to remember who you are, and to remember who we are. And to remember there’s a bigger process and I don’t care if you believe it or you don’t believe it. You know the truth in your soul. And that’s what you have to keep going to.  Other people don’t necessarily access it as much as you do.

And that’s the craving you’re feeling.  That’s the craving that’s going to look like it’s X or it’s going to look like it’s A (another person in her life) it’s going to look like it’s this or it’s that.  But keep going back that you’ve been here since the dawn of time and there’s no substitute for that.  That’s the biggest…there’s no meal as filling or as rich as knowing who you are and that you’re here from the dawn of time. Because  people don’t know what that means…but apparently that really means something.

“Questions?” I ask her, kind of laughing…”That’s what I get.”  I’m laughing because it felt as if I were holding such a high state of being, as if a powerful light were shining through me.

“All right,” she says, sounding disappointed or deflated. “I mean, you know, of course you have to focus on the bigger picture. It’s hard being human sometimes.”  It sounds to me as if she thinks she has to apologize for the upset she’s feeling.  (This turns around for her later, as often happens once someone has sat with the reading.)

“Don’t break it down to focus on the bigger picture,” I tell her.  “I know that’s sounds like the logical step. But I’ll tell you what it feels like in me…it doesn’t feel like focusing…maybe I said that [word], I don’t even know what I said, to tell you the truth.

It feels like opening, opening to the bigger picture, opening to who you are. What you’re doing with X is like you’re closing..looking through a small…you know how we’re supposed to look at venus or the sun, or whatever it is, you cut a hole in something and you look at the reflection.

And what he’s saying to me is that’s how you’re seeing yourself if you’re trying to see through what you think X sees you as.  What I get from your father is …what you’re looking at when you look at X or your life, it’s like you’re looking through a little pinhole and you’re thinking that’s all of life. Your logical human mind is, okay well that means focus on the big picture

But what I get from him is that the big picture is in you.  So it’s literally like the soul has it and we keep shutting it down because that’s what  our logical mind thinks is life.  So it’s literally a breaking down inside yourself. You can’t make it happen but it’s breaking down into what is happening. 

And all the X stuff and all that. You don’t yet know when looking back what it’s going to be for you. Because your human mind is going to tell you it’s one thing but his otherworldly mind is telling me there’s a much bigger picture you’ll be given but you can’t figure out.

What Petraeus Teaches Us About Consciousness

If you don't do the inner work, you will meet your turmoils as fate.  Just ask C.I.A. Director David Petraeus or any of the others involved in the current scandal.  You too can live at the emotional level of a high school sophomore, despite having attained worldly success.

Their accomplishments were impressive on paper.  But everybody falls from the perch of their own innocence and it's seat mate, arrogance.  We came to this physical domain to wake up and realize we're more than our physical manifestations. 

Courage wears a thousand faces, or at least more than one.  Courage? Honor your agreements, do the right thing, don't cheat if you can avoid it. Understand that nothing is private, certainly not emails or cell phones.  Wake up to your own motivations before the house of cards you've built collapses and takes you down with it.

Either way, you get to wake up and make tough choices, the kind we might hate but can't avoid because to grapple with our issues is to create growth.  And I contend we're here to grow and develop, to realize greater God-consciousness, or whatever euphemism you care to call it: Oneness.  How do you achieve oneness with the divine without having achieved some level of it from inside?  Maybe it's all a game of facing ourselves and deciding, moment by moment, whom we will be?

What I Learned at the International Dream Conference

What I Learned at the 29^th Annual International Dream Conference by Lorrie Kazan

Friday evening opening ceremony was light and humorous.  Rita Dwyer, tiny behind the podium, joked about her hair and many others’ now being grey.  She was glad that younger people were joining the association and carrying the work forward.  Younger people could also mean anyone under 60.

This is the largest, most prestigious dream association in the world, open to anyone from anywhere.

Many first-time attendees this year.  450 attendees in all.

Founders: Patricia Garfield, Jeremy Taylor and Gayle Delaney were given Lifetime Achievement Awards.

Jeremy Taylor is known for the phrase: “In my imagined version of the dream,” initiating the “If it were my dream” template.

“I’m a Martian; describe a sword to me,” is a dream interpretation phrase associated with Gayle Delany.

Keynote Speaker: Fred Alan Wolf, Phd (physician, writer, lecturer, 17 bks & audio cds.  Featured in “What the Bleep” and “The Secret, National Book Award winner)

Notion is truer now that there is a god dreaming this universe.

What we call the dream is going on right now.  Reality is less real than the dream world.

Re-thinking the second wave function – even experts don’t know what it is.

Ontology means out there, epistemology means in there.  Quantum physics scrambles these – observer influenced.

“Why does electrically hydrogenated matter (your brain) dream?”

We dream to create a self.

What isn’t dream? Waking reality – we don’t know what’s going on.  Dreaming reality may be stronger: brings in imagery of what was, is and will be.

How do we dream? Superimposing images.

Self & non-self split.  All influenced by Freud – psychoanalytic mind.  Freud was first and made mistakes.  But Freud believed imagery was an ancient language.  Imagery lays down the crocodile and the angel in one vision.

Jung said dream is the small hidden door.

Early humans held dreams to be the voice of god.

For Jung dream was a teacher and guide to wholeness.

Overlap of realities can take place in the mind.  Energy is quantum, it goes one place or another. Both ways occur sometimes, confirmed by experiments.

Late version of photon interferes with earlier version of itself.  Self is being born from this processing (id). Time plays no role.  Creating the self – fetus has 15 hours/day REM.

Dream yoga – dream something into existence.  Buddhists (ulpas?) meditate on an image until clearly seen in the mind.  Then projected outward where others see it.

Aboriginals say we are the dreamer and the dream.

Matter forms out of an idea.

From my morning dream group:  What question is the dream asking?

Finding the dream theme.  Ex: What is the basic theme of being naked or well dressed in a dream? How I’m seen.

How can I apply the theme to my waking life?  Where in my waking life am I feeling this?

If you ignore an issue it will keep coming back, even as a nightmare.

Look up Bob Hoss and his 6 Magic Questions.  Sarah Weisman also mentioned.

Referenced Von Franz’s Lectures on Jung’s Typology.

Jung had a color code applied to dreams.  Ex: Red pen in a dream indicates introversion, green/brown indications sensation.

(To be cont'd)

Stories That Tell Us

"Stor

"Stories Told, Stories Untold, Stories that tell Us" - An Evening with James Hollis

 Jung Institute 5/18/12

We track the movement of the invisible through forms in the visible world. Dream images, for example. Story is a verb, not a noun, and is storying through us.

We each need to find our story.  One person who models this is the lone survivor of a European town where all other Jews were massacred.  He hid in the forest and returned after the war to find the Jewish cemetery had been intentionally shattered by tanks.  He  made it his life’s work to reassemble each fragmented headstone, like a vast series of complex jigsaw puzzles.

We are both carriers and products of stories.  These stories can particularly be seen in our relationship patterns.  Hollis offers the example of his friend, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Steven Dunn.  Dunn lived to mid-life believing that his father was a drunk who had gambled away the family savings.

Late in life his father confided that he had given their savings to his father-in-law who needed the money for his mistress.  He took the blame, kept the secret, and drank.  Now informed, Steven was then free to see how the family mythology was built on a lie.  His father had told the lie to protect the reputation of his father-in-law and in so doing had ruined his own, and then lived the story of a ruined man.

Avoidance of conflict means avoidance of growth.  It (the real issue) is not about what it’s about.  It’s linked to a deeper story.

When are we not willing to risk something for what’s truly important to us?  How do we get permission to be who we are? 

How do we confront that story?  What are the stories that are playing out in your life? 

Hollis uses the book (also turned into a movie) The Reader to illustrate the idea that almost everyone has a pathological secret around which we create our lives to conceal. 

In The Reader, some of the surprising and underlying plot twists eventually reveal why the female character consistently affirmed her signature on a Nazi prison camp authorization.  Her deepest shame, and what she will go to any lengths to hide, is that she is illiterate.  Learning to read while in prison, she then discovers the truth about the holocaust, and on the day of her prison release, hangs herself.

A complex, says Hollis, is simply a charged cluster of our history of story.  It’s a splinter story.  One’s own history is the embodiment of story.

“We believe ourselves to be conscious and every once in a while we are.”  Hollis

“How much of my life is my choice?” he asks.  “We do logical things based on the story we’re in service to.”

Would we say these stories are worthy of our lives?  Therapy is a re-storying (reframing) of events.  Symptoms are pictures that stand for us.

“Our task is to continuously be defeated by ever larger things.” Rilke 

Bigger stories can crush the small ones we’ve even unconsciously clung to.

Questions to ask ourselves:

What is the story that nature or divinity had in mind when it invested in me?

What stories bind me to repetitive behavior?

What story actually wants to come through me?

We’re a multiplicity of stories, so if you think your life is boring it’s simply a failure of imagination not to see otherwise.  Self is a verb.  Self is always selfing the story you’re in service to.

Hollis discovered his central story was:  “Don’t go out there; it’s too scary.”  He described the hard life of his parents and his experience in the depression to explain why this story made perfect sense.

His parents wanted a better life for him, which they saw as working for the phone company.  Somehow during his college years he had a breakthrough.  A philosophy instructor offered him an independent study course.

The instructor then explained that independent study meant that he could choose his subject and research it on his own.  Excited at the prospect, the young sophomore (which he noted combines the terms sophia and moron) walked through the campus bookstore actively searching for something compelling.  Suddenly his gaze fell upon a particular book and he realized that was it, that was what he wanted to write about.  He then held up that book, now after so many decades, rubber banded together, but still featuring Dr. Carl Jung’s face on the cover.

While we want to live with certainty (which many obsessive compulsive or addictive behaviors revolve around) reality presents ambiguity.  The more you are able to live with ambiguity, the more you are likely to live a more interesting life.

Don’t be too attached to your models.  You’ll have better questions as you grow.  The models are just metaphors.

Questions: 

What large story of the soul wants to be told through me?

Of what am I unconscious?

Remember, we track the invisible as it moves through the visible world, i.e., our history, our dreams.

“The window of consciousness is narrower than I would have thought,” says Hollis.  Invisible forces are continuously at work.  “If economic experts can’t plan a national economy, how can you or I plan our lives?  Yet you have to try.

Jung’s theory of how we change:  Three parts:  Insight, courage to face what we uncover, and endurance.  Psychology can only help with the first.

Hollis defines addiction as a reflexive anxiety-managing system.  On one level, he likens it to habit.  We get upset so easily over small provocations, traffic, for instance.  It’s anxiety at disorder.

If the water level were rising in the room, and we couldn’t see it, we would still be unconsciously reacting to the invisible.  If the level fell back to normal, our anxiety level would also lesson and we might remain unconscious as to why.

To break addiction requires one to become more skilled at bearing the unbearable, psychologically speaking.  This is why new habits are generated through recovery programs.

We tend to accept that our well being is about going along with existing stories, as in the case of Stephan Dunn. 

Five Dead Mentors

In Julia Cameron’s book: Finding Water: The Art of Persistence, she suggests you take a sheet of paper, number from one to five, and list five dead people you want to consult as mentors. These are people who excelled in the particular art you’re pursuing.

Without thinking, I chose whoever came to mind:

1.  Jane Austen

2.  Charles Dickens

3.  Dante

4.  Oscar Wilde

5.  Edna St. Vincent Millay

6. Dorothy Parker

I realize that’s six but I haven’t really read that much Dante or Wilde and I went with what appeared.

Next step: Ask one of them for advice for you at this present time.

Well, I asked all of them. Here’s what I got:

Dorothy Parker: “Don’t drink or date foolish men who waste your writing time.”

Dickens: “Just write. Critics will hate it now and love it later. But they’ll have nothing to fuss about if you don’t write it, and who will take dictation if you don’t?”

Jane Austen: “Wit is necessary for survival. I wrote to find a way to say things that made me laugh. I loved writing and hated it at the same time. I was different and there was no place for me in my own time. It looks like there was but there wasn’t. It looks better now than it felt at the time.”

Oscar Wilde: “Risk everything. What have you got to lose? Ris everything and then risk everything again. Otherwise, life is stale and predictable and you’re one more person who didn’t light up a darkened room.”

Millay: “Fall in love with words. Fall in love with ideas and let them play with you. Bargain with them, battle with them if you must. Each word has its own consciousness it wants to thrust into the piece. It doesn’t always know what’s best for the whole process but it has a point of view, and by all means, it means to share it.”

Dante: “Writing is a way out of darkness. I didn’t always know that until years later when I looked back and saw the lantern lighting my footsteps. Without the dark wood, I would have never found my place. You will find yours. Just keep up the process.”

Next step? “Don’t give up.”

How? “Ask for the light.”

After hearing this, I decide to break my process into small bites. I will write one page. That actually turned into many more pages, but the only goal was one. And those additional pages may ultimately reduce down to one completed page; time will tell.

I asked my inner perfectionist to take to heart a message Cameron's friend shares with her: “It’s a first draft. You’re not supposed to have any order. It doesn’t fit together yet. That’s for later.”

Now I ask you...what is your art?  Is there an action you feel stifled in taking?  Like me, it may be writing projects, but it may also be doing the laundry.  Until the laundry is done, it's hard to see what's under it, literally and figuratively.

Taoists say, “The journey of a 1000 miles starts with a single step.”  Writing to dead people is a step I like.  It doesn't even require getting dressed. 

I'm a little less productive at getting the laundry up and down stairs or the bathroom floor scrubbed, or completing one writing project at a time.  Some say it takes courage to take that first step; maybe it's innocence, self esteem, selflisness or who knows what?

Now it's your turn.  What calls to you?  Take a blank sheet of paper and select 5 deceased experts/mentors. I jotted down whoever came to mind and went with that.

Pick one mentor, or do as I did, ask everyone: What is your advice for me today?

Afterall, aren’t we all experts on other people’s lives? Ask and ye shall receive! Note: If you criticize what you get, lower your standards to those of the innocent and open.  It's just a first draft, first try, first attempt and nothing has to fully come together yet.  I think that's called living "life on life's terms," even when it includes the dead.