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Heather: Yes. And I feel sad. And angry here.
Chana: Because you’ve left yourself. You’ve left your Business.
Heather: I can feel that.
Chana: And you’re over there in Greg’s Business.
Heather: But not really. I can’t change him or anything.
Chana: Exactly. It’s just wishful thinking except for the part about your loss of energy.
Heather: Yes. That feels very real.
Chana: Because it is. Now shake it up and clear the air. Take another deep breath and feel your energy again. Good. Now, notice what happens when you believe that you’re lazy.
Heather: Uch. Yuck. Same thing. I’m drained.
Chana: You’ve left your Business.
Heather: But where could I go? This isn’t about Greg; it’s about me.
Chana: You’ve left yourself to jump into The Courtroom. You’re not only playing the prosecuting attorney, claiming that you’re lazy. You’re also in the judge’s seat and the jury box deciding the verdict!
Heather: Why?
Chana: Because to judge something, we have to stand outside of it and, clipboard in hand, make all sorts of assessments about it. We leave ourselves in order to judge ourselves.
Heather: Ok. I get it. I’m no longer present in the moment. It’s like I’m watching myself.
Chana: Exactly.
We score ourselves against a Platonic standard of what is an ideal amount of intelligence or beauty or strength, not just for ourselves, but for the situation. This judgement requires a level of knowledge that’s beyond human. It’s pure arrogance to think we can know such things. When Heather describes herself as lazy, she assumes she knows precisely how much effort the universe is demanding of her at any given moment and of how much she’s capable. She’s simply invented the standard to which she compares himself. It’s not real. Every human’s capacity is unique, so there is no accurate metric.
Chana: Now, the question is: According to what standard are you assessing yourself ?
Heather: I never thought about that. Well, in school, they told us how much homework we were supposed to do and how hard we had to work to get an A. So I guess that?
Chana: Did every teacher have the same standards?
Heather: No.
Chana: So whose standard did you bring into The Courtroom?
Heather: That’s a good question. I guess my dad’s. He’s crazy industrious. And my favorite teacher in high school. My biology teacher, Mr. Adams. He gave us a test every Monday, and I loved doing well on them. I usually made the curve. The other kids made fun of me and threw spitballs at me because they wanted the curve to be lower. But inside, I was so proud of myself.
Chana: And who decided to put those standards into The Courtroom?
Heather: Oh! Me!
Chana: So whose standards are they?
Heather: Mine.
Chana: Can you absolutely know you are capable of meeting those standards at all times and in all circumstances?
Heather: No. I can’t.
Chana: And can you know whether that standard of work is exactly what you or the universe needs?
Heather: No. Not at all.
Chana: How does the standard of industriousness that you’ve created make you feel?
Heather: Horrible. It’s so much pressure; I can’t think straight. I want to run away.
Chana: So it makes you less industrious.
Heather: Exactly. That’s so sad.
Chana: Can you think of a peaceful reason to keep this standard?
Heather: No. It’s stressful.
Chana: Let’s try turning the thought around. In dealing with these type of beliefs, we benefit greatly from switching the subject of the statement from “I” to “my thinking.”
Heather: My thinking is lazy.
Chana: Yes. Give me three reasons that’s true.
Heather: My thinking doesn’t work to show me all the ways that I’ve pushed myself to achieve my goals. My thinking focuses on the same tiny collection of thoughts all day. It’s such a waste of time, and it’s exhausting.
Chana: Good. One more.
Heather: It’s busy judging me, rather than trying to find solutions to problems. And my thinking wastes a lot of time whining over things I can’t change.
Chana: It pushes you into The Courtroom.
Heather: Which is a fantasy. It would be much more useful to complete the task in front of me. Like my resume. Without the thought, it actually feels like a much smaller task.
Helping ourselves feel empowered to effect real change in our lives is the most powerful thing we can do as facilitators of our growth. Coming back into our Business and focusing on staying there is a key tool for inspiring that empowerment.
Use The Courtroom image to better understand how, in judging yourself, you’ve left your Business. By trying to attain some ultimate ideal for your life, you lead yourself down a path to suffering.
Patterns of destructive thought and behavior that repeatedly fuel each other.
All action results from thought, so it is thoughts that matter.
—Sai Baba
Do you ever leave the news running in the background because you “need to keep your thumb on the pulse of what’s happening?” or eat just one more bite of the chocolate cake even though your stomach is about to burst?
Perhaps someone cuts you off on the highway, and you blow your top or your favorite piece of china breaks, and you kick the wall in a fury, stubbing your toe in the process.
In this chapter, we’re going to dig into the spinning wheels of Addiction and Aggression. When I say Addiction, I don’t just mean drugs or alcohol. I’m talking about the array of behaviors we ALL do to escape, like unhealthy eating, binging on social media, or working long hours. Similarly, Aggression is any mood that takes over your entire being and leaves you and others wallowing in regret.
Most of us take comfort in the fact that our Addictions and Aggressions are socially acceptable enough that no one pushes us to jump into rehab, but these behaviors wreak havoc on our lives every day, and not just because they keep us from living healthy lifestyles. It’s because they keep us from facing one of our greatest teachers: pain.
You may be thinking: Pain - A teacher? How could that be? Karla learned exactly how after a session that began with her calling me in a huff.
Chana: What’s wrong?
Karla: I’ve been working on a blog post for hours. I spent the past few days on it, and yesterday my computer crashed and erased the whole thing!
Notice that Karla has simply stated a collection of facts: She was working, and the computer did crash. But our brain doesn’t just process facts; it colors the experience through the lens of our beliefs, which is why Karla’s voice is charged with frustration.
Chana: And why are you upset?
Karla: What do you mean? Of course I’m upset! Wouldn’t you be upset if your work was erased?
Chana: If I were upset, I would have my reasons. What is more important here are what your reasons are. What does it mean to you that your work got erased? (ATM)
Karla: I… I don’t know.
Chana: Take a moment to breathe and think about it. Your computer crashed, and your blog post was erased. And that means…
Karla: It means that, as usual, things just don’t work out for me.
Bingo! Here’s why Karla’s frustrated. It’s not the computer crash, but rather the grand symbolism of it.
Chana: How do you react when you believe that things don’t work out for you?
Karla: Ugh. My body sinks. I feel weak.
Chana: Any emotions come up?
Karla: Yeah… I feel sad. And frustrated. I want to give up.
Chana: What are you unable to do when you believe that things don’t work out for you?
Karla: I can’t remember what I wrote. I can’t sit at the computer and try again. And… Oh yeah… I don’t even think of asking one of my computer savvy friends to try and help me recover the file. It just feels hopeless.
Chana: Any movies playing in your mind?
Karla: Yes. Of all the times that things went bust. My middle school science project… Now I see the big fat F at the top of my college history paper and the nasty haircut I got when I was 8. It’s such a miserable movie. That’s why I couldn’t sleep last night. It was the “Karla’s a Loser” rerun special.
Any motivation to move forward has drained out of Karla. In a nutshell, she’s in mental and physical pain. For most of us, pain is tremendously uncomfortable. Our culture pushes us to avoid it at all costs. So what do we do to combat it? We muster up our two best friends: fight and flight.
Fight manifests as rebellion, anger, and blame. In other words, Aggression:
Chana: What did you do while you couldn’t sleep?
Karla: This is so embarrassing. I recorded a very obnoxious message to my friend Allison. She’s the one who encouraged me to start the blog in the first place. I fumed at her for like five minutes. I’m so humiliated.
Chana: Why?
Karla: Because now she probably hates me.
The Aggression Tailspin has begun. Karla’s believing a thought that causes her pain, and to fight it, she’s gets aggressive, but the aggression leads her either back to her original belief or a similarly destructive one.
Chana: And how do you react when you believe that she probably hates you?
Karla: Believe it or not, this morning, when I looked in the mirror, I actually slapped myself.
Chana: You didn’t like the upset you experienced when you believed that nothing works out for you, so you tried to get it out on Allison.
Karla: Yeah.
Chana: But what did that lead to?
Karla: More pain. Oh… and more aggression. I could be running in this loop forever if I don’t stop.
Flight seems more demure than fight, because we’re just running away. Flight manifests itself as Addiction, which includes screen time and drugs, but also behaviors we often label as “psychotic,” like dark or obsessive thinking. Hard though it may be to believe, thoughts of self-harm are an addiction that allows us to escape the excruciating story we might be telling ourselves about our lives. It can keep us so busy that we don’t have to face our rotting pile of pain.
Karla’s sleepless night has me wondering whether this situation is an addiction trigger. Only one way to find out:
Chana: Did any addictions come up for you when you believed that things don’t work out for you?
Karla: Yeah. Last night, after my hideous message to Allison, I went straight for my favorite comforts: chocolate chunk ice cream and a trashy novel. I know it’s bad for me and so fattening, but last night, I didn’t care.
We already see that Karla judges her addictive behavior as bad, fattening, and trashy, and I’m guessing there’s more judgment on the way:
Chana: How do you feel about the ice cream and novel now?
Karla: Lousy. It just further proves that nothing ever works out for me.
Chana: Why?
Karla: Because for one, I broke my resolution to stop eating sweets; two, I didn’t keep my commitment to finish my blog on time; and three, I wasted hours doing nothing.
Karla has added three new neural pathways to this belief, so it’s become stronger inside her brain. On top of that, renewing it makes her feel even worse. She now has a heftier
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