Missing Old Habits

Whenever we make the effort to free ourselves of an addiction or a habit we no longer need, we are often surprised to find ourselves missing the old pattern as we would a familiar friend.

This sounds counterintuitive, because we think we should instinctively gravitate toward that which is good for us. And yet, it makes a lot of sense when you consider that we humans are creatures of habit. This is why we gravitate to people and places—and patterns of behavior--that make us feel comfortable. Therefore, many of the habits we form are not conscious and are based instead on learned behavior from role models who were not always making the healthiest decisions.

Most addictions begin as a way of avoiding feelings that are extremely uncomfortable, so it makes sense that stopping the addiction means, for a time, a fair amount of discomfort. The same, of course, is true of habits that we have developed over time that we are ready to release.

Just knowing that this is hard, and having compassion for ourselves as we work through this process, can help us to stay the course when we feel the urge to backtrack. It’s also helpful to remember that in time we will establish new, healthier patterns, and the yearning for the old ones will disappear. Eventually, we will instinctively reach for things that are good for us, and the longing for positive change may form the basis of a new habit.

The only way to get to this new place is to endure a time of difficulty, which is a challenge we can confidently handle, if we remember that it will lead to the change we seek in our lives. Our bodies, hearts, and minds always need time to adjust to a new way of doing things, but they will adapt, and even become our allies, if we remain true to our vision of a new way. (The Daily OM)

Telling the Truth

The truth heals. Telling the truth is about freedom. It is about joy and peace and health and living a life that is meaningful, powerful, connected, and loving.

Ultimately, it is about feeling good in your skin, unencumbered, free, and having the life that you want to live.

The truth is often uncomfortable because it has been suppressed so long, because there is such shame and guilt attached to it, because it has not been spoken for years, if ever.

The truth is an energy force of such magnitude that it pushes itself to the surface one way or another. Its denial or suppression will manifest as ill health, dysfunctional relationships, or financial problems.

Everything that happens to us is stored in our energy field and in our body. Ultimately, healing and health happen to a body/mind/soul that wants to know the truth. Even after a life-time of suppression, a body/mind/soul that wants to know and is willing to let go of painful secrets can heal itself, a family, or even a nation. What ultimately saves us is what we were certain would kill us....the truth.
(excerpted from Truth Heals by Deborah King)

Radical Honesty

Believe it or not, Radical Honesty simply means telling the truth. It's radical because hardly anyone does. Even the most honest among us usually have some things that they hide. Telling the truth hides nothing. Because hiding anything at all is not telling the truth. And so Radical Honesty means all of the worst things you might imagine it means. It means telling the truth about everything you have hidden that you have done in the past to the very people who you think would be most hurt or angry or surprised or embarrassed by the revelations.

Telling the truth means telling all your secrets and your secret feelings to whomever you don't want to tell. Worse yet, it means being expressive of feeling -- being mad when you express resentment and, warm and moved when you express appreciation, and silent when you don't yet know what you feel.

Telling the truth has to do with being expressive of feeling and using descriptive language regardless of ideas about tact or propriety. The first thing you have to get over to tell the truth is politeness modification of your report of your experience out of "consideration" of the other person's feelings. Honest people speak simply, using language more to describe than to evaluate.

When a person chooses to make the transition from habitually bending the telling the truth, the passage is scary and difficult. We have learned to assign value dishonestly and pitch our point of view with everything we say. We have been trained by scores of moralistic authorities, like Nurse Ratchet in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, to keep our mouths shut and behave as we should instead of speaking the truth. We have been blackmailed into a common interpretation of reality by hundreds of male and female Nurse Ratchets.

Learning to describe, to speak what is simply true, requires an unlearning of hard-earned preconceptions and a relearning of how to perceive with as little preconception as possible.

Knowing the difference between perception and conception and getting good, through practice, at distinguishing between the two can save your life. Both the quality and length of your life can be increased through learning to focus on making the distinction over and over again between value laden words and descriptive words.

Descriptive words make pictures happen in the minds of the speaker and the hearer, pictures of anger, righteous indignation, embarrassment, sympathy, sadness, joyfulness, or laughter. An honest person is one who is creating vivid pictures, feelings, sounds, and smells in the singular attempt to portray what has occurred or is occurring within her or around her. An honest person is concerned foremost with accuracy.

Being honest is not just for the sake of feeling good about being a virtuous person; it is a vital necessity. Learning how to be honest and being willing to do so is the cure for all non-environmental stress disorders. It is the key to managing the disease of normalism.

It is the most worthwhile focus of our attention as humans of this time and the only thing with half a chance to save us from ourselves. This is vital to our life and to the survival of life for all of us. Our problems do not arise from not thinking enough before we speak. Just the opposite is true. The way we learn to think and modify what we have to say before we speak kills millions of us unnecessarily and lays waste most of the cripples left injured but still alive.

In a Centers for Disease Control study, the list of causes of deaths in individuals under age 65 goes like this: environment is responsible for 21 percent of deaths; the health care system for nine percent; and human biology for 17 percent. Think about that. Twenty-one percent of the people who die before age 65 are killed by war, traffic, accidents, acts of God, and crime. Nine percent get killed by doctors, nurses, hospitals, and medicine. In 17 percent of the cases, the human biological machine breaks in some way that is not blamable on the way the people took care of themselves. That means the remaining 53 percent of the deaths prior to age 65 come about as a result of the way people choose to live their lives.

I believe the ways we take care of ourselves so poorly arise out of the starvation we experience from being cut off from the nourishment of commonplace experience, including the experience of intimacy.

We are responsible for cutting ourselves off from experience by substituting our interpretations of reality for reality. We invent some fundamental lies about how life should be and shouldn't be, how life is or isn't according to what we have taught ourselves to ignore or deny and what can or cannot be talked about. We compensate for our sense of something missing and our boredom with a kind of frenetic, compulsive use of food, alcohol, and drugs to try to get temporary relief from imprisonment in our own minds.

We are all terrible liars. People with notable stress disorders like ulcers, insomnia, spastic colitis, etc., are worse liars than normal people, although normal people are generally unhappy from lying, withholding, hiding, and avoiding and evading as well.

Unfortunately in this society it is normal to be unhappy; most people are. It is normal to discover that life doesn't live up to its billing. It is normal to be disappointed but getting along and doing the best you can. It's not normal to be honest. What is normal is to be concerned foremost with having a good cover story. Normal people are concerned with figuring out the right thing to say that puts them in the best light. They want to live up to their own best guess about what the people they are talking to want to hear.

An honest person, in contrast, focuses on saying what is so. Getting back to honesty rescues people from being normal. Sanity is getting back to basic, funky, hometown reality, down from the clouds of good cover stories.

What passes for sanity is an agreed-on form of insanity, which is an attempt to make life work out by legislating ideals and imposing values in our own minds and selling them to other minds. It is normal to be insane. Being sane is abnormal. Abnormal, sane, honest people are less worried and more free than normal people.

The most real truth is the immediate and ever-changing truth of direct experience. Evaluations are never the truth. We all tend to get lost in the swamp of our evaluative minds trying to make decisions and figure out how to behave and what to do next while constantly considering what we imagine others might imagine about us as a result of any action we anticipate taking. This concern about controlling the opinions of others and keeping control of ourselves kills more people than any form of environmental stress. Even worse, most of those who don't die would scarcely know the difference if they did.

The main thing that can free a person from his or her own mind is telling the truth. Telling the truth is always interpreted by the mind as a threat to its security. When people think that who they are is their mind, they feel like they are committing suicide when they start telling the truth. What dies in telling the truth is the false self, the image projection we have presented to the world. All real suicides, where people really died, were the result of a battle between being and mind. In those cases the mind won. But the person who learns to tell the truth is the most free, most alive kind of adult human being you'll ever see.

Copyright © 2008 by Brad Blanton.
The above is an excerpt from the book Radical Honesty by Brad Blanton.

Loss as Gain

When we lose anything that we cherish, the sense of emptiness we are left behind with can be overwhelming. A space that was filled, whether in our lives or our hearts, is now a void, and the feelings of pain, loss, and separation can sometimes be difficult to bear. While it is always important to honor what we’ve lost, sometimes a loss can also represent a chance for a new beginning. When we are ready, the void left by a relationship, a job, or a dream can then be viewed as open space that can be filled with something new: new experiences, new knowledge, new job opportunities, new dreams, new people, and new ways to grow.

There are many ways to weave the threads of loss into a blessing. If you’ve lost a job or ended a relationship, your first thoughts may revolve around filling the void with a similar job or the same kind of relationship. Try not to rush into anything just to fill up the emptiness. The loss of a job can free you up to explore new opportunities, especially if you’ve outgrown the old one. Likewise, the loss of a relationship can give you a chance to rediscover your own interests, explore new passions, and meet different people.

If seeking the good in what seems like a bad situation makes you feel uncomfortable, then try to remember that you are not devaluing what you’ve lost or replacing it cold-heartedly. You are surrendering to the fact that, in life, we sometimes have to let go and allow for what is new to enter into the open spaces created by our losses. In doing so, you are honoring what has left you and welcoming the new into your life with open space, an open mind, and an open heart. (The Daily OM)

Giving Up Control

We grow when we have the freedom to decide our own paths and determine what makes us happy. Sometimes, we think we have difficulty granting that freedom to others. Most often we are driven by fear, insecurity, or our ego's need for power.

We have no right to impose our will on others, and it doesn't work, anyway. We are met with resistance and resentment. No surprise here. When we try to control the behavior of others, we are sending the message that they are not o.k. as they are, that they need to do more, be more, and that we are the expert on what is right for them. Your good intentions do not change this.

I think that the issue of control is a spiritual matter. Required is the willingness to "turn it over", and trust that everything and everyone will be not only o.k., but just as they should be. We need to trust that our "help" is not needed!

Quotes of Wisdom

Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice; it is not a thing to be waited for,

it is a thing to be achieved.

(William Jennings Bryan)

The surest sign of spiritual progress is a total lack of concern about progress. There is an utter absence of anxiety about anything like liberation and a sort of hollowness in one's being,

a kind of looseness and involuntary surrender to whatever might happen.

(Balsekar)

Courage and perseverance have a magical talisman, before which difficulties disappear

and obstacles vanish into air.

(John Quincy Adams)

Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always

throw stones at those who are showing a new road.

(Voltaire)

Whatever we perceive in the world around us tends to reflect who we are and what we care about most deeply, as in the old saying, "When a thief sees a saint, all he sees are his pockets.

(Robert Frager)

Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice;

it is not a thing to be waited for,it is a thing to be achieved.

(William Jennings Bryan)

Beautify the World

It's so easy to complain. We all do it at times, some of us more than others. We all have various and sometimes numerous reasons to complain. We complain about our job, our health, the weather, our neighbors, our kids, our families, our government, the environment, the state of the world…

However, the question is, does complaining help? And, of course, we all know the answer… complaining does not really help.

We've all heard that "what we focus on expands" (if you hadn't heard it before, now you have). The more we focus on something, the more it seems bigger, even if just in our minds. Just think about it. If the weather is not to your liking and you keep focusing on it (complaining about it), it doesn't help at all -- it just makes you more upset or depressed about the state of the weather. However, if you choose to go on about your life and make the best of it (rain or no rain, sunshine or not), you can create a great experience for yourself, which you would not have had if you had just sat there and complained about the weather.

Complaining about something in the state of the world (whether we're talking about our small world or the world at large) is not a constructive solution. It is rather destructive. The more we complain, the more we feel negative, and the more the people we are complaining to feel negative (either about the situation in general, or about having to listen to us complain).

We do have a choice. We can choose to complain about our life, about events in it, about the situation in world politics, about the environment, or we can "get off the pot" and do something about it. We are not helpless. We have the power to make decisions, to take action, to make changes. Our life is as we make it.

Yes, things happen "to us", but how we react, and what we choose to do about it is entirely up to us. We can focus on personal growth and healing our lives. Yet, we need to remember that healing our lives involves the healing of the planet which is our home. We are not separate from the world. We are not in an alternate reality. This is our reality, here and now. However small your effort may seem to you, do your part.

Excerpted from Marie T. Russell

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