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

Meh

Meh.

Whatever.

I don’t care.

Except that I do.

It seemed like the more I meh-ed, the more I hurt way deep down, and the awful-er I felt. I pushed myself to volunteer because I was supposed to, I was kind because I was supposed to be, I tried to be there for everyone because that’s what good people do, and I felt beat and beaten, and wondered what was wrong with me.

The thing is that I was in so much denial, I was in so much avoidance, I was pretending so hard that everything was okay that I hardly had any juice left over for anything else.

It’s challenging to care when I feel exhausted, when everything is effortful, when it seems like some horrible thing is happening every time I turn around. So I stop turning, and then I get stagnant, and then my life really starts to stink.

It was my choice. It’s also your choice.

Ow ow ow! Stop throwing stuff at me!

It’s also our choice. Sometimes I have to hit bottom before I choose to stop acting like I’m living a life, and really start living. Sometimes, it has to get so bad that, looking back, I can hardly believe it. Why do I choose to live?

When I choose denial, avoidance, and pretending, I make my life harder. I have to remember on some level that I’m lying about how I feel, so I don’t mess up, but I also have to forget, and forget I forgot. I often choose denial because I am scared that my life will fall apart if I look at how stuff really is, or really was.

I gotta say that, once the dust settled, my life falling apart was truly a wonderful thing.

When I gave up denial and avoidance and pretending, my fake life did crumble, but it was replaced with a real life. This real life, my real life. I have so much more energy to spend on having fun, addressing stuff as it happens, enjoying all sorts of stuff I couldn’t even notice in the before time because I had to remember to smile, I had to remember to say cheerful things, I had to remember to act positive. . Why am I happy from my core?

When I began to choose to live my real life, I found lovely people to help me. And I found that I cared again, for real,  from my core. I didn’t feel like I was just going through the motions, I wanted to help. Being kind became automatic, and I no longer felt like I had to be there for everyone.

Now, my smile shows up spontaneously, I say how I feel without pretense, I am cheery from deep in my core most of the time, and I don’t have to act positive any more because I feel light. Stuff is mostly effortless. Stuff is mostly easy.I feel free most of the time.

How have I changed from pretending to care to knowing I make a difference?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2013 all rights reserved 10162013

It’s Alive!

It’s Alive!

Alive! How much fun is being alive! Engaged, present, aware, connected, happy, satisfied. Being alive is so full of great adjectives. It’s so much nicer than when what I thought I wanted was oblivion.

Sometimes we have a topic in our lives that seems overwhelming. We can’t come up with a solution. We get really scared, and so what we decide to do is escape, or get sick, or die.

I haven’t seen the last one often, but from time to time I have seen it happen. It’s more common that we will get sick, and most common that we escape. How sad. We all have our favorite ways of escaping; TV, glamorizing, fighting, drug and alcohol and food binges, the news, watching sports, gambling, shopping, and so on. I have my favorites, too, but they don’t really help, it just puts off what we need to do.

We talk about the getting sick phenomenon when we say that XYZ makes us sick. I don’t make this stuff up. The more research we do, the more we find out how literal is the connection between our minds and bodies. And the more we clear out our old emotional traumas, the healthier our bodies get.

And so we spend our days feeling sick or miserable, or distracting the heck out of ourselves, and the troubles grow and grow until they fall on our heads.

Meanwhile, we are asking horrible creative questions. Why am I so stuck? Why do I feel so bad? Why do I have such terrible problems? How do I know I can’t handle this? What makes me fail?

And you see what happens. We answer those horrible creative questions, and those answers make us feel horribler and horribler. And we do more and more stuff to avoid.

I drank for oblivion. Gross. Blackouts are awful. Why am I such a loser? Why am I so messed up? Oh, yeah, bad questions.

So then, we have to break those patterns and habits, and shift ourselves into a new, higher frequency. We are worth so much more. Even if we have learned to ask bad creative questions. Even if we do think the answers we get to those bad questions are true.

We are worth a happy life. We are worth learning to ask good Creative Questions. We are worth more than we can imagine.

Why am I so alive? What makes me feel so lively? Why do I enjoy living? Why do I find solutions?

What makes me feel excited? Why do I feel so engaged? What makes it so fun?

As I practice asking these questions, I start finding more fun. I start finding more exciting things to do. I enjoy more spontaneity. They make subtle shifts deep inside, and those shifts make it easier for me to feel more; more joy, more excitement, more engaged with life. As I stop asking horrible questions, it is way easier for me to relax. And when I relax, I feel more peaceful, even when I am having an exciting time. What a fun and goofy contradiction!

How have I changed from trying to hide to loving being alive?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2013 all rights reserved 09082013