Deporting the Demons

Deporting the Demons

How do you wake up in the morning? Do you drag yourself out of bed, feeling duty bound to get the day going, to get to work or to do your routine? Do you feel overwhelmed before it has even started?

Or do you wake up with a smile, excited to see what the day will bring, eager to engage with your life, feeling light-hearted and joyful?

Sometimes we have a problem, an issue, a topic that comes up in our lives and it seems overwhelming. Our inclination may be to try to push it away, to avoid it, to deny it. We start asking, often in our unconscious mind, How can I avoid my problem? And we start answering with answers like I can leave, I can shut down, I can be sick, I can die.

Wow.

These aren’t little topics. These are great big hairy topics. Sometimes we know what that topic is, but sometimes it is deep in our subconscious mind. Sometimes we are willing to address our topic, but often we step into denial about it, preferring to expend our life-force holding it down rather than deal with it and live fully and joyfully.

Ouch.

Why am I alive? How do I feel my life-force? What makes me enjoy living?

We know we have a topic like this when we are sick, or emotionally shut down, when we are depressed, when we want to leave. When we want to die.

We all have stuff. It is our birthright. I believe that part of our job of living, part of the meaning of life, is to address our stuff, to work through it, to clean out our emo basements so that we can be our best selves.

There are things in our way. We may be afraid to look at our topics, afraid of what that examination might do to our relationships, to our beliefs, to our daily lives. Sometimes we are angry and resentful and we want to stay there, seething in our own sense of self-righteousness. Sometimes we are sad and get locked into the habit of grief.

What do I want? Do I want to live my own life, clean and full of joy, a sense of accomplishment, a feeling of purpose? Or do I want to nurture and provide safe harbor for old hurts and traumas, using my precious life-force and spirit to keep me back, to hold me fast to old traumas, old hurts, bad beliefs, and mislearnings?

Why would I choose to live fully?

This choice is one of the most powerful we can make. Choosing to let go of the past, to complete our painful experiences so that we can release them, choosing to face our darkest topics will only bring us more life, more room to experience joy and peace. Taking this leap of faith may be the only way to achieve true peace at our very core.

How have I changed from protecting my demons to exorcising them in favor of being fully alive?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2015 all rights reserved 08172015

I Feel so ALIVE!!!!

I Feel so ALIVE!!!!

So here’s a curious little thing you might not know about me, cuz it seems like I tell you everything. This summer I was a couple hours away from death by colon cancer and surgery saved me.

That’s kind of a dramatic thing, and if you know me, and I think you do, you know I don’t much go in for drama. In the olden days, I loved drama. I thought it was exciting. I liked getting attention, even though it was mostly negative attention. I was such an adrenaline junkie, always looking for something to get cranked up about. I thought I felt alive, but mostly what I felt was jangled.

What I do like is feeling alive. For me, that means feeling present in my natural life; engaged, fresh, aware, joyful, contented, surfing the flow of life. Oh, yeah!

What a lot of us do is avoid feeling alive. We go to miserable. We go to worry. We go to stress. We say things like, “I can’t, I always, that’s just the way I am.” We feel hollow and wonder what is missing, so we have another whatever we go to for that kind of comfort, a drink, a toke, a candy bar, sex, TV; we each have our favorite go-tos.

Why am I alive? How do I feel vibrant? What makes me relish my existence?

Until we decide that we want to feel our aliveness, we pretty much won’t. Sometimes we may get a taste of it when we have great sex, or enjoy some other high-energy activity that gets our blood moving, but unlike choosing aliveness, this sort of thing fades pretty quickly.

When I choose aliveness, I choose to open to what life will bring me. I become aware of the myriad opportunities around me for so much. On my way into work this morning, I started thinking about all the people I love, all the people I like, and how much I get back from them. Next thing I knew, I felt loved by the world, the environment I was driving through, the cosmos. Pretty trippy for a normal commute, but not untypical for me these days.

When I choose aliveness, it is challenging for me to be disappointed. Things are perfect in this moment. I appreciate this moment. I open my heart to the possibilities of the moment.

When I choose aliveness, it is challenging for me to be scared or angry or full of grief. These are feelings out of the present time for the most part, imagining bad stuff about the future, or dwelling on stuff from the past. Sometimes we have to go there to clean up our emotional responses, to work through an old issue, but just going there to hang out keeps us from living in the present.

I think there is a difference between living in the moment, and living for the moment. When I am present, in the moment, I am aware of my choices. I am aware of their consequences, I am aware of my goals. I may not have them at the front of my mind, but they are close. When I am living for the moment, I am usually ignoring my choices, ignoring their consequences, and ignoring my goals. I am frequently disrespectful of myself, and of you. It might be fun at the time, but I rarely love the payback.

Why would I choose alive? How does aliveness support me? How do I feel when I feel alive?

How have I changed from feeling numb or worse to enjoying feeling alive?

© Pam Guthrie 2014 all rights reserved 11132014

Looking at the Onion

Looking at the Onion

I talk about unconscious material here fairly often. You know, the stuff that is buried deep in our minds. We react to it. It directs a lot of our behavior. It makes decisions for us. They are often not very good decisions because they are born from our mislearning. And then we wonder what the heck happened.

Part of coming to know ourselves is being willing to look at our unconscious stuff. Many of us try to avoid it. We are afraid that we will uncover stuff that might wreck our relationships. We are afraid that we find things we don’t like about ourselves. We are afraid that we will unearth terrible secrets. Or that we will find out that we have to make a change we think is too scary.

One way to tell what is going on in our unconscious minds is to look at our circumstances. Our situations can let us know what creative questions we are asking unconsciously.

Do my days feel effortful or effortless? Do my days feel easy or challenging? Do I feel peaceful? Do I relax?

Why am I alive? What makes me choose? How do I feel when I feel alive?

Sometimes, we have a situation that feels overwhelming. We feel like we can’t solve the problem, so we push it deep down into our unconscious and start asking bad creative questions, like, How can I avoid dealing with this problem?

Uh, oh.

We are wildly, wonderfully creative beings, and we will come up with amazing ideas for avoiding stuff. We get busy, we get pregnant, we have affairs, we get in trouble at school or work, or with the law, we have a bad accident, we get sick, and if it feels really big, we might just die.

Maybe we get obsessive about work, or housekeeping, or exercising, shopping, or glamorizing. running errands, taking on commitments, volunteering, extra jobs, well, you get the idea.

If we discover that we are doing some of these big avoidance things, we can start to look for our big topic. We may get caught up in details, the trivia of the situation. I can usually tell that I am doing this if I am feeling like there is a lot of drama going on around me, that I am all caught up in it. And this may well brings my buried situation to a head, so I have to take a look at it.

Why would I let go? How am I peaceful? What makes me notice?

When I let go of the drama, when I choose to breathe softly into the situation, I can often see what is going on under the frothy excitement. Frequently, it will have to do with my personal doubt, that first piece of mislearning I took on when I was very little. In fact, the more I deal with my stuff, the more I will need to look at this piece, to integrate the experiences that support that mislearning.

It’s like the onion analogy, where we peel away a bit, and peel away some more, and some more. It may be a process, but it is often the best way to clean up our stuff. When I choose to look at my unconscious stuff, and for me, getting help makes this much easier, I am way more efficient. I am choosing to be alive, to live as fully as I can, and enjoy my life effortlessly.

How have I changed from hiding from my own mislearnings to choosing to live fully?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2014 all rights reserved 07102014

The Colors of Fear

The Colors of Fear

One of my dearest friends has a very simple motto that she lives by: Fear or Faith. It reminds her to choose the sunny side of the street. When she first told me that I loved it. And I realized I had a  version that was just slightly different: Fear or Curiosity.

The point is simple, fear sucks the life from us, faith and curiosity fill us with spirit. I live a life of adventure. One of my heroes is Indiana Jones, master adventurer. My journey of self discovery feels like an Indiana Jones type adventure full of danger, and scary times, and priceless discoveries. the best of which is love and respect for my very own self.

My teacher pointed out that I had already survived the danger, that I was looking at the left-over shadows of it. That let me feel curious about what I would find. Sometimes I discovered things that changed the way I felt about someone, but it also gave me the opportunity to bring up a lot of unpleasantness to the surface where I could address it, and let it go, and forgive. Can’t do that when it’s all unconscious.

Why am I curious? What makes me interested? Why do I want to know?

When I choose to let fear run the show, I am saying no to life.

Life is fearless, life is curious, engaged, interested. Life wonders what is next, and accepts what comes, no fear. No matter what, my circumstances are interesting because they are tailored to me. They provide me with information about what I can learn, about where I can go, about what I can accomplish.

Worry is a kind of fear. When we fret about our loved ones, or ourselves, we are sluicing our lives with a negative energy, and then we have to slog through that negativity. We feel heavy and sad, and often don’t know why. Worry is a Coyote emotion, a trickster. It makes us feel like we are doing something useful, while it feeds on our spirit. Ew.

Guilt is another kind of fear. When we feel guilty, we fear that we will get caught. We fear being found out. We fear reprisals. We fear losing the little thrill we get from the behavior we feel guilty about. Dang.

Strangely, procrastination is often another kind of fear. The two biggies of procrastination are fear that we won’t do X perfectly and fear that something big will change if we X. It’s not that it will change for the worse, it’s just that it will change. We fear the loss of our status quo, even though it is always shifting around.

Negative moral judgments are yet another kind of fear, fear of the different.

When I decide to go with curiosity, with interest, with faith and trust, my life blossoms. Events have significance because they happen to me, for me. I seek out the nuances, I seek out the value. I seek out the benefit to me.

When I get that little thrill of anxious feeling, I choose to ask myself, “Why would I be excited? How is this fascinating? Why do I engage?” The feeling of excited and the feeling of anxiety are so close that asking my good Creative Questions can flip my experience in a wink.

How have I changed from choosing fear to feeling curious?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2014 all rights reserved 06212014

How to Slow Time

How to Slow Time

How do you feel when you feel alive? Where in your life do you feel most alive?

Have you ever heard people talk about surviving a dangerous situation, and talking about how alive they felt? Have you ever wondered why they would feel like that?

When we are in a situation of sudden danger, we are suddenly really paying attention to what is happening in the moment. We open wide to our experience, and take it all in, all at once, full sensory. That opening is one of the reasons we have the sense of time slowing down.

Thing is, that’s available to us all the time. All we have to do is choose it.

Awareness, presence, being in the moment. Experiencing now.

How strange that we should have to learn how to do that, but how wonderful when we do.

Becoming present in our own lives can bring about amazing changes, more intimacy, more bliss and joy, more opportunities. And, remarkably, a sense of time slowing down to a nice, stately pace.

Why am I present? What makes me aware? Why am I alive?

When I become present in your company, I can listen completely, with all my faculties. That means, I hear what you are saying, I recognize the significance of the words you are using, but I also hear your body language, I hear your micro-expressions, I hear your unconscious gestures. I hear your whole self.

We engage. We connect. I like that.

When I am present, all my experiences are richer because I am actually experiencing them. A nice side benefit is that I have far fewer accidents when I am present, when I am experiencing my experience. I tend to walk with a surer step, I see where I am going and what I’m doing. I notice what is coming up, both literally and more so about potential. Time ceased to fly.

When I am present and aware, I can choose more freely, with less attachment to my habits. I like that.

As a living sensory organism, we are meant to experience sensory stuff. We are meant to use our senses as a means of understanding our environment, ourselves. When I am all in my head, or all in my emotions and feelings, I am not aware of the present moment. When I am worrying, or plotting revenge, I am not in the now. When I am stressed about stuff, even if it’s all unconscious, I am not present.

When I choose to step into the now, I let all that stuff go. I feel my feet connect with the ground, I am aware of breathing, I see my environment, I hear, I smell. I am in my world, and, even more profoundly, when I take a mental step back, I experience all those things as a whole, including my own self, and feel some of the mystery of the universe, being a part of it, recognizing that my part is, at least in the now, crucial.

How have I changed from living in my head to stepping into my own aliveness?

(c) Pam Guthrie all rights reserved 03022014

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Vacating the Drudge-Rut

Vacating the Drudge-Rut

How do you feel when you feel alive? Light? Engaged? Aware? Rosy? Vibrant?

For many of us, feeling alive is something we remember from the past. We have gotten ourselves mired down in crud, in bad thinking, dull routines, and stuff we don’t like. We have friends we don’t like, work jobs we don’t like, activities we don’t like. We eat food that’s supposed to be good for us, drink health drinks, and still have no energy.

Makes me tired just thinking about that life.

What makes me feel alive? How am I energized? Why do I feel engaged?

Every so often, when I am feeling stuck in that drab ol’ drudge-rut, I will make a list. I like to make lists. If you like to make lists, you might like this list. And do notice that this question is very much not good Creative Questions.

The answers come from the question: What am I doing that makes my life harder?

It takes some looking sometimes to see how we make things rough on ourselves. For example, we may have a habit of getting up at the last minute, and then have to race through our morning. We end up getting side-tracked, and next thing you know, we are late. And feel rushed, and guilty or even ashamed. So now we may act out our crappy feelings on our community.

Or maybe we get up extra early, and spend that time doing for everyone else, feel taken for granted and then resentful, and then guilty or angry for feeling bad. And what makes it even more so is that it’s often not even in our awareness, so then we can also feel crazy. Oy.

Maybe we made some resolutions that we’ve been blowing off. Maybe we have some good intentions we’ve stopped tending. Maybe we have a bad habit we’ve been meaning to phase out. And we don’t do whatever, and we feel bad, and guilty, or even ashamed.

What can we do? How do we turn it around? Why do I choose to unchoose?

Oh, yeah. We can change it in an instant. How do I feel when I feel alive? Focus on that question, ask it again, maybe try shifting it a bit to, “How else do I feel when I feel alive?” Notice the shifts in your physical experience. Pay attention to how your body feels.

When I remember that my feelings, my attitudes, my moods, and my emotional states are of my making, that I have the power to make me feel like a drudge or a dream, I am taking responsibility for my well being. I empower myself, or officially give myself the power to effect change in my own life.

When I remember that I didn’t get to this ickly place overnight, but by making thousands of tiny choices, over and over, and I can start unchoosing right this very second. Ooh, I like that feeling. I can choose to slow down inside, and treat my morning like a walking meditation on the blessings in my life. I can choose to pause for a moment and make my bed, or spend 10 minutes in the evening preparing for the day ahead. Maybe I choose to walk past my favorite don’t-wanna-eat-that aisle, maybe I choose to go to bed a little earlier. Maybe I choose to refrain from harsh words. Tiny choices, I get to choose ‘em, I get to reshape my day. I get to feel vibrant and luminous and alive.

How have I changed from feeling full of gray to feeling radiant with life?

(c) Pam Guthrie all rights reserved 02202014

Controversial Topic Ahead -- Open Mind Requested

Controversial Topic Ahead -- Open Mind Requested

Alive. Feeling the blood coursing through your veins. Feeling that lift of curiosity and interest. Feeling that tinge of excitement, that thrill of adventure.

Alive. Feeling your senses sharpen. Finding beauty in unlikely places. Appreciating your environment, your people, your activities.

How do I feel when I feel alive? What makes my spirit soar? Why am I engaged?

Like so many aspects of our growing up, feeling alive isn’t something that we just occasionally happen on, but is something we can cultivate.

So how do I practice feeling alive? Well, the fact of the matter is I don’t. Feeling alive is effortless, automatic, when I am relaxed, peaceful, present and aware.

Sometimes, we have situations in our lives that feel overwhelming. We may feel like the situation dooms us, that there is no solution, or it is just too much to contend with, and so we ask ourselves bad creative questions like, “how can I avoid dealing with this?” or “how can I escape my problem?” And we come up with answers like, “I can be sick,” or “I can die.” The tricky part is that it’s often all unconscious; we are completely unaware that we are having those thoughts.

And then we get stuff. I remember backs going out on moving day. I remember horrible colds or stomach flu showing up on test days. I even remember falling asleep at my desk just moments before I was supposed to take an exam I didn’t feel prepared for. Seriously. Talk about avoidance.

Why do I choose to address my topics? How have I changed from having problems to coping with my situations?

I understand that this is a delicate topic for many of us. As I was coming to terms with it, I had a lot of feelings. I felt angry and ashamed at the thought that I might be the one making me sick. Never mind that it isn’t “me” but rather unconscious thoughts and beliefs that don’t support me, it felt like blaming the victim.

As I learned to speak “body” language, it got easier for me to accept. Backs are all about feeling supported. Shoulders are about carrying burdens. Necks are about emotional flexibility. Back when I was diagnosed with that acute chronic nervous tension, it looks like I was feeling over-burdened, like I was carrying the weight of the world. Uh, check. I was feeling emotionally rigid, my way or the highway. Um, check that one, too. And I felt like I had no support. Okay, double check.

Lately, I’ve been having stomach stuff. My body is telling me that I “can’t stomach” what’s going on, that I’m holding onto old crap, uh, so to speak, and maybe letting go of old crap, again, so to speak. These symptoms tell me that I need to slow down inside, and let stuff process a bit more. I know I can cope, but maybe I need to make some changes, shift things around a bit. Have I taken on more responsibility than my system likes right now? Do I need to be taking care of me differently? What are the things I “can’t stomach?”

By slowing down enough to consider these questions, I will be able to calm my GI system. By addressing the topics I discover, my body will not need to send me these very specific messages, and I can go back to being symptom free. And to feeling alive.

How have I changed from feeling sick to feeling alive?

(c) 2014 Pam Guthrie all rights reserved 02052014