Your “vibe” emerges from 3 things: knowing what you want, believing you will get it, and being open to however and whenever that happens.
How about…
Less needless pain, MORE POSTIVE EMOTION, MORE KNOWLEDGE OF STRENGTHS; less need for pain and suffering as a motivator?
What you don’t like in another person that bothers you emotionally is what exists on the inside of you in some fashion or another. It is a key to your greater inner freedom.
Your ego is hard at work keeping you just exactly where you are. It doesn’t like to attach to new things. Your ego holds you to your associations with your old strengths. Our Certification Class members are learning that the other side of their strengths is their weaknesses. You play to your strengths or you play to your weaknesses. Judging is a way of playing to your old strengths to keep yourself fixed where you are and so that you do not have to face change in your life. It creates a stagnant, fixed life given to DownSpiral movement. This is the kind of judging that has a negative emotional content to it. It’s about the people you react to, don’t like, bother you, irritate and rub you the wrong way.
What you spot, you got! In other words, the negative that you see in another person, that also produces with it a negative reaction in yourself, is judgment. It is also projection. What you project is something within yourself that you have not come to accept and grow through. Judging causes you to play to your weaknesses because you have to be coming from a weakness in order to get this “judging” thing going.
Get a hold on those you judge and ask yourself the five questions that constitute “The Work” from the wonderful work of Byron Katie. Go to her website, thework.com, to learn more and to see the examples there.
In class, you were given 2 “Judge Your Neighbor Worksheets.” From these sheets, those in the VisioNavigator Certification Class are learning to ask 5 questions:
Tell us what you are learning and give some examples of the new freedom you are beginning to find!
And I am not angry at one thing. I am angry at two and three and four things that have been happening for a while over time and it has just gotten to me. I want to lash out, I want to scream at someone, or at least talk loudly. I’m angry.
Here I am on this UpSpiral journey of positive emotion and I’m angry. Or at least I was on this UpSpiral of love, peace, gratitude, and joy and now I’m angry. Obama was just elected last week and I was delirious with joy and hope. Now one week later, to the day, I am angry. Why?
Why? No one really cares about your “why” and neither do you. Anger is a learned response. It’s a habitual reaction to frustration. It usually occurs, not over a single thing, but over a series of cumulative, one after the other annoyances that are in and of themselves not so significant. Even that is a part of the frustration. Usually, we are angry because we’ve gotten angry and it just builds from there and it feels like something is controlling us rather than us controlling our own emotions. That’s the big rub.
What is the strength that you have that most addresses the anger? (Have you been through our testing process so that you even know what your strengths are? It will be an enormous, huge, unbelievably relieving help). Have a chat with the strength as though it were another person or another voice and see what it tells you to do. It will not tell you why you are angry, but it will tell you what to do to break the cycle.
The whole world gets caught up in this cycle of anger, individually and collectively. Do your part and make a choice. Stay in anger or go to a strength. Create more hostility in the world or bring yourself to peace.
Hint: Do something lovely- it doesn’t have to be a great thing- for yourself and something thoughtful and lovely for someone else -just a little thing. And then give yourself a little time and space. Kiss yourself in the mirror and say, “I love you.” Go on, kiss yourself in the mirror, leave a mark on the mirror and actually have to wipe it off (or leave it there for a while as a reminder.)
Anger is a learned habit and can become an addiction without the exercise of good choices to manage it. You have the perfect strength to deal with it.
If you “attach” easily in healthy ways based upon knowing and using your strengths and staying in an UpSpiral, transition usually appears as a new light over on the horizon of a new potential adventure of learning and experience. If you “hold on” a little too much to where you are, the light appears as a little bit of “itch” where you are- the itch of some low-level discontent From there the contrast of either way just gets greater. You feel more drawn or feel more of an itch. And then it just grows a little more and more and more.
Our capacity to notice a new light on the horizon depends upon on our aliveness. “Aliveness” is the peculiar trait which describes humans when they are at their best.
Aliveness is noticing this and that, like a giraffe which has a tall reach and notices what is in the distance. The antennae of personal aliveness pick up the signals of what is pulling us forward toward more aliveness and more satisfaction.
We prize being finally getting “settled.” Good luck! You get it for awhile, but if you’re alive, being “settled” becomes “settling” because there is this thing in you which always wants to express and experience novelty. It’s hard for a youth-oriented culture to believe what happens at 80 when the only models of aliveness on television are all under 30. It’s also hard when those who are 80 have sold out and also act like the only reality in aging is decline.
But it actually happens more at 80, if you let it, because you have more experienced neurons in your brain propping up your consciousness. Have you noticed how people under 30 just really keep doing the same crazy things over and over? Monet was painting his greatest paintings after he was 80 with specially designed glasses because he could no longer see the whole spectrum of light without them. Imagine that! Painting the “light” at 80! That is what made him great. He painted the effect of the light on an object and not the object itself.
Where is the light appearing on the horizon for you, the faint light that you have to be alive to see?
Why do you think it is that those who bother us most are those who thwart the growth of their strengths?
How you regard your strengths and what you are willing to do with them is like the decision to eat or not eat good food. You can get by on the junk food of your weaknesses, but what builds your sense of self and very directly, the happiness you experience is your decision to flex the muscles of your strengths, to use them more and more and to put yourself in situations where they are used. At work you start by looking at them and finding a few places during the day or each week where you can use them.
Consider this. Your strengths are Spirit manifesting through you. From quantum physics, they represent the Zeno Effect in your personality. They are fixing the elements of the molecular structure of your brain so you move, by the nature of your focus on them, in the direction of strengths or in the directions of weakness and deterioration. You can’t get any more clear than that. Strengths move you toward life and aliveness; playing to weaknesses moves you toward deterioration. It starts with feeling disconnected and moves to feeling disengaged, disenchanted, unappreciated, unseen, unnoticed. Feeling unappreciated appears as the State of Mind of loneliness. That’s usually the place where we start looking for someone else to fill the absence of ourselves that we have created.
Wouldn’t it be just a lot easier to look at these strengths that are you? Flex them, use them, learn more about them. Use every cue of boredom or frustration as a cue that is a gift to go to a strength and learn more about it. One of the most interesting things about strengths is that they usually mean reaching out to the world around us.
You were using these same strengths when you were four years old and they have just continued on trying to develop within you, flowering or thwarted. Where they flower we know more happiness. Where we thwart them, we know more uneasiness and lack of satisfaction.
From the time we are first out of the womb till the time we die, attachment is basic to our healthy existence. In a world full of the talk of “letting go and letting God,” we are most godlike when we are “attaching”. In fact, the letting go always brings another healthier, better attachment, unless we are fighting our own desire. Finding our desire is a process of attaching and letting each attachment teach us about the next and the next.
The smoke detector in your home is very sensitive. It lets off a loud squawking alarm at even the faintest detection of the odors that signal a fire. A little smoke from a meal, burnt toast, or a fireplace with a whiff of wandering smoke can set off an alarm that is startling. So it often is with the Ego. The Ego, as it is used here, is the person you are when you are playing to your weaknesses rather than your strengths. Play to your weaknesses and your Ego goes off; play to your strengths and your “real self” moves into play.
The more positive you become, the greater you grow into an UpSpiral, using your strengths, the more sensitive is your detector, the Ego, that you’re moving in the wrong direction –one of weakness that is the opposite of your strengths. The more you come from your Inner Being, the real strengths that you have, the harder it is for the Ego not to give itself away. It does so through anxiety, fear, the feeling of being out of sync with yourself, and just plain discord.
You would never want to get rid of a smoke detector or disconnect it. So it is with the Ego. It is a part of a whole- a warning system that lets you know that you are not coming from your strengths. And the more you come from your strengths, the more you get used to playing to them, the more your Ego will make noise because you will be more sensitive to its sounds and warnings.
Shame is an ingrained reality in all of us. We have all been embarrassed into shame or shamed at some point in our lives and it exists in us as a very raw, dark place. We very seldom ever see or confront our shame for very long. And it isn’t necessary that we do.
We do, however, experience shame in its leakage into an underlying, almost abiding state of guilt. We touch these dynamics when we are in a DownSpiral. The further down you get in a DownSpiral the greater the vacuum that is created. This vacuum gets filled by some kind of guilt, anxiety and doubt.
There is not a situation in your life that your strengths can’t address. You have a perfect set of them. Some of you who are reading this know what they are. You’ve been through our testing process and you can name your strengths and you have grown by using them. Instead of concentrating on your weaknesses and trying to change them and getting nowhere, you have learned that by growing your strengths, your weaknesses fall into your ability to manage them effectively.
Weaknesses are merely the other end of our strengths. In fact, they point to the directions of what our strengths really are. But from the first red check marks on our school papers, or even before, we have learned what is wrong with us much better than we have learned what is good about us. Whenever I test a group of people and ask them to write down their strengths, they can usually only list one or two that are actually accurate; they are much better at listing their weaknesses.
Going to a strength, playing to a strength, thinking from a strength is foreign behavior for most people. When we are troubled, stressed and worried or frustrated for very long, it is easy to go to our weaknesses and to play from the opposite end of our strengths. Read the testimonials on our website about people who have learned to play to their strengths.
And then tell us your stories about your encounter with your strengths and how you use them.
You never become a well-balanced or a “whole” person, whatever in the world that might be, by trying to correct your weaknesses. You become more of who you authentically are by playing to your strengths and letting them guide you to your own inner brilliance.
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