Have You Reached a Verdict?

Have You Reached a Verdict?

What are the greatest ills in the world? Poverty? War? Horrible things. I find it very curious that those things come up when I think about “the world” but the world is made up of us, individuals with our own minds, our own choices.

Now, my opinion shifts and I find myself thinking, worry, fear, guilt, bitterness, misplaced shame, rage. Suddenly, it’s very personal.

Frank Herbert called fear “the mind-killer, the little death.” Worry drains our emotional resources, guilt drives us mercilessly, and misplaced shame will shred us from the inside out. Not a very supportive environment for following our passions, or sharing our gifts.

Why am I innocent?

As a person, it’s not unusual for me to encounter these things, and many more, that sap my joy, throw off my equilibrium, screw me up. They make me feel bad, so I make bad decisions, and I make them over and over. I feel stuck, I feel miserable, I feel helpless, and I will ventilate those feelings, lashing out at you, or me, or someone less powerful, and we can sustain horrible situations because we nurture our bad feelings. It’s sure how I turned me into a drunky dope person.

How do I know I am pure?

I decided to grow up. I decided I wanted to be happy from the inside out. I decided I wanted to live a life I liked, a life I approved of, a life I felt proud of. Nice decisions, but they meant I had a lot of emotional detritus to clear out.

What makes me feel clear?

Worry and guilt, anger and fear, and so on; these turn into habits so easily. Breaking these habits is a fascinating challenge. Creative Questions help so much. I wish I’d had access to them back in the day.

I used a rubber band on my wrist. The instant I noticed I had starting thinking “those” thoughts, I would snap the rubber band and think thoughts that made me feel good. In the very very beginning, I would also say, “Stop!” out loud while I snapped that band. Psychologists call it

extinguishing behavior, and I am so glad.

Worry always feels like I’m doing something. It’s insidious. Guilt often makes me feel like I can’t do enough, and fear, like I can’t do anything. Lies, all lies.

Now, I’m not saying that we should never feel fear or anger. They are hard-wired emotions. We have choices. I have to say that there are been times in my life when fear was the right response, and got me out of some dicey situations. On the other hand, I mislearned to go to fear in a lot of situations where it was not my best choice, likewise with anger. With practice, I learned to recognize the feelings in their infancy, and can often release them with just a good, deep breath and some awareness. How nice is that!

When I make feeling peace rather than worry a priority, when I treat it like learning to play the piano or speak a foreign language, and practice regularly, my life gets easier. I have more energy, more joy. I’d say that’s worth it.

How have I changed from feeling lies to knowing I’m innocent?

(c) 2014 Pam Guthrie all rights reserved 02012014

It’s All in Your Head

It’s All in Your Head

Ease! Peace! Enjoyment! Happiness! Contentment! Bliss! You, too, can experience these in the comfort of your own home!

It’s the Pamco EZ-LYF Joymaker! Just put your crappy life in at this end, turn the crank, and the crap is all clean off leaving you with a wonderful life you love!

Ok, so I made that up. On the other hand, we can turn our crappy lives into a life we love living.

Bottom line; we are the leader of our own life. Bottom line; we choose our attitude. Bottom line; we steer our own ship.

In the privacy of our own minds, we choose, or we stay stuck. We choose to keep things as they are going, no matter how bad they are, or we choose to change it.

In the privacy of our own hearts, we know that we can’t change each other. We know we have only so much of an impact on the outside stuff. We know that the place where we can really effect change is in our minds. It’s all in our head.

Oh, those doctors didn’t mean what I mean when they told me “it’s all in your head.” They may have been saying, “I don’t have a freakin’ clue why you are in pain, so I will blame you because I feel inadequate.” But the solution to my troubles is in my head. A huge portion of what I think of as my troubles have come about because of my choices.

Why could it be easy? Why would it be easy? Why is it just so easy?

When I focus on how hard my life is, my life is hard. When I look for all the ways it’s easy, it really and truly gets easier.

Do you believe me about that yet? Have you tried it on the little things? Why is my timing perfect? Why do things go my way? Why do I find what I want?

I use Creative Questions on my way to the bus. I use Creative Questions in the parking lot. I use Creative Questions when I go to the store, or check the mailbox. Really. Practicing on the small, the medium, so that when I need ‘em for the big stuff, I’ve got it. Then, I have already made the new grooves in my brain with my good Creative Questions.

I use Creative Questions before challenging phone calls, or before sending certain emails. I use them to help me imagine the best outcome. Mostly, then, I get those outcomes. The first few times I tried this, I was blown away. Now I mostly take it for granted. Why do I know the outcome?

When I set me up with good Creative Questions, my whole physical being shifts a little. That means my voice will shift a bit. Between my NLP stuff and voice over training, I can tell you, your emotions show in your voice. I know, it’s wacky, but you can hear people smiling over the phone. You really can. And if you have a smile in your voice when you call customer service, you will have waaay better results than if you call bent.

The more I remember to use these tools, the easier my life gets. It’s easy for me to feel relaxed. Why do I feel so relaxed? It’s easy to get to peaceful. Why am I peaceful? It’s easy to think that stuff is easy. Why is it all so easy ? I practice and then I have it when the really big stuff hits. I know I just said that, but it’s important.  Maybe the Pamco EZ-LYF Joymaker is just that easy.

How have I changed from “why is it so hard?” to “why is it all just so easy?”

(c) Pam Guthrie 2013 all rights reserved 12202013

The Universal Self

The Universal Self

This morning I pulled the “Why do I trust?” card. I have been thinking this question, and little variations on it, for the last few days. I love this Creative Question. Especially since the reverse was so familiar to me.

Why do I trust? Why can I trust? How do I know I can trust?

As I grow up, my life gets bigger. As my life gets bigger, I find myself from time to time wondering how I will manage. I can find myself creeping toward overwhelmed, or even toward scared, and then I remember to ask, “Why can I trust? Why can I trust my process? Why do I trust the Universe?”

When I trust, I relax. When I relax, I flow. My thoughts and emotions can flow through my mind. My qi and vitals can flow in my body. My life can flow.

When I trust, I can open my heart. When I open my heart, really nice stuff can come in; love, support, care, the healing of relationships.

When I trust, I can slow down. That means I have time to savor my life, relish my relationships. I have time for work, family, friends, hobbies, activities, spiritual life,  exercise, meals, and sleep. And when I trust, I sleep a whole lot better.

When I trust, I can easily remember to practice all this stuff. I can practice on little challenges, I can practice with somewhat difficult situations, I can practice with minorly difficult people.

And then the miracle happens.

When the big challenge shows up, when the really difficult situations arise, when the super challenging people appear, we can handle it.

We can handle it.

We will manage with grace and poise. We will operate from our perfect self, our core. We will feel peaceful and experience our stillness.We will find compassion, we will find solutions. We will accept help and other’s expertise.

How do I know the Universe provides? What makes me feel protected? How can I choose to feel safe?

The Twelve Steps programs teach us to let go, and to turn things over to our higher power. When we choose to trust, we do this automatically, effortlessly. When we choose to trust, we also choose to refrain from worry and fear. When we choose to trust, we find that, while anger may flare, it moves through quickly and without leaving destruction behind.

When I choose to trust, I no longer need to try to control stuff I can’t, like you, and I find that I take joy in controlling the things I can control, like my thoughts and feelings.

When I choose to trust, I choose freedom. When I choose to trust, I allow my divine and infinite self to emerge. I like that.

How have I changed from being small and mistrustful to opening to the vastness of my Universal self?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2013 all rights reserved 12172013

Spiritual Search and Destroy

Spiritual Search and Destroy

Free will. Freedom of choice. Free speech. What do you think about that? If you are like most of us, you talk about these freedoms as a right, but don’t much exercise them. It’s how our brains are wired. And if we do nothing to change it, there we sit.

Most of our thoughts are habit-thoughts. We think the same thought over and over and over for decades, like driving the same route home, like rain carving a runnel into stone.

In order that we might really have freedom of choice, free will, free speech, we have to practice every single day. And how do I do that?

Why do I choose? What else might be true? How could I do this differently?

Choosing to be aware is crucial and fundamental. When I start paying attention to where I am, what I’m doing, and what I’m thinking and feeling, my life will change. I totally mean it. For someone like me, who was always in my head, this change was earthshaking. For one thing, I stopped whacking into stuff, cutting my fingers in the kitchen, and bumping stuff with my car. For another thing, I started to notice that I really was thinking the same stuff over and over. That made me act the same way over and over. No wonder I was having such a hard time making changes in my life.

On the one hand, routines are super important. They make the tasks we want done easy to accomplish. Tacking a new behavior at the end of a routine makes adding that new habit pretty easy. It’s why I stuck my qigong practice onto my getting ready for bed routine.

On the other hand, making what we believe of others a habit, making our opinions habit without review, making arguments with our family or friends or coworkers a habit, making our political and religious beliefs a habit, does not serve us.

Sticking with our old habit-thoughts keeps us stuck. To paraphrase an old saw, “if you always think what you’ve always thunk, nothing ever changes.”

I don’t want to be an adolescent 40 year old person, and yet we see them all the time. Even sadder is seeing adults throwing temper tantrums, whining, pouting, being mean, stuck in little kid behavior for decades, and wondering why they aren’t happier, and blaming us because they are stuck in an antique rut.

There’s another old saw I like, “If if works, don’t fix it.” But here’s the caveat: It may have worked when I was 20, but maybe it’s not working all that well now that I’m 50. I need to slow down enough, become aware enough, to notice. And if it’s not working, I need to dump it.

At the bottom of it all, a lot of our ideas, our notions, and beliefs, were formed when we were really really little ones. I’ve started to think of them as “fixed delusions.” I used to believe that I was the center of the universe. I shed that fixed delusion, and came to believe that I am a divine and infinite being. Now, if that’s the case, I can afford to be kind and loving, I have compassion for everyone, I can be generous, I can also make sure that I take care of myself, and one way to do that is to look for, and shed, my fixed delusions. I like to exercise my brain and my body. Search and destroy missions for fixed delusions is a nice spiritual exercise that will bring me startlingly nice results.

How have I changed from operating from childish beliefs to living from a place of true free will?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2013 all rights reserved 121422013

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