Learning To Observe Our Own Mind

The greatest tragedy of man is fear.

Fear is nothing more than an idea we have been programmed to create in our minds. Most fear is silly, irrational and dis empowering. We fear catching colds, failing exams, illness, and death. We fear rain, snow, wind and the sun. We tell ourselves we cannot get sick, fail tests, die, go out in the rain, drive in the snow, walk in the wind or play in the sun. We fear what people think of the way we look, speak, talk or walk. We fear fear.

To fear catching a cold, is silly. What is there to fear; a headache? If we failed an exam, would our left leg fall off? If we got cancer, would we die the following moment we discovered the disease? If we died, would be around the moment after we ceased to breath to experience the fear of that that had already taken place? If it rained heavily, would we shrivel up into a crinkled ball of flesh? If it began to snow, would our cars turn to solid stone? If it was windy during our walk, would we float away into the sky like a feather caught being tugged by the clouds? If people did say horrendous, hurtful things about us, would heaven fall?

We fear because we attach ourselves to people and to things. We fear because we foolishly believe we have the power to get situations and people to do what we want them to do. We want to be healthy, so we fear being sick. We think we should never catch a cold or develop a disease. We think we can control all that touches us, but we cannot.

Humans fear change, yet all that is must continually flow with the harmony that regulates life.

We silly ego based humans assume we can control it all; our jobs, our kids, our husbands, our friends, our weight, what people do, what people think and what people feel. Ha!!!

One day we wake up and we are forced to deal with the harsh reality that is our truth. We have spent a lifetime trying to convince others we are good enough, thin enough, sexy enough, smart enough, rich enough and perfect enough for them to approve of us, only to come to the realization that we have lost our true self all while trying to control what others think.

The only thing man has control over is his mind. The conscious mind; the mind that possesses the divine ability to observe his own thoughts and behaviors, is all that man can ever hope to be blessed enough to control.

Feelings are not enough. Man can hold anger in his heart for his neighbor, but need not act on that feeling. The consciousness of this man that is able to observe his anger, so not to allow his behavior to follow the road anger has lit up, is the holy part of him he can learn to control.

A man can lust after a woman other than his wife, but he need not act on that lust. The consciousness of this man can speak inside his own mind. He can hear the divine voice within telling him it is not necessary to act on every feeling he feels. Once contact with consciousness has been made, true thinking can be born.

Without the ability to observe ones own mind, man can never hope to conquer his greatest enemy; his own ego.

Gratitude

In order to be truly happy in this world, it is essential to carry with you always a sense of gratitude.  

To recover the meaning of life, is to let go of the ego.  Letting go of the ego however, requires the conscious choice to stop playing the victim...

When in conversation with ones own mind, it is of the noblest intent to think consciously and to discern well thoughts from thoughts of your silly  ego.

When you move through your moments in time rooted in a sense of gratitude, you create your own heaven.  When you decide to step out of gratitude, and instead entertain thoughts of fear, anger, jealousy, greed or deception, you consciously choose to create your own hell.

Chaos is created in the mind, by wrong thinking.  Peace however, is created by choosing to refuse to step into thoughts of fear, anger, jealousy, greed, or deception.

Heaven is not above us.  It is in us.  Hell is not below us.  It is in us.  

The glory in life, is coming to a point in life, where our minds begin to understand we have the ability to choose.

How Do You Know You Are Alive?

'When you know who you are; when your mission is clear and you burn with the inner fire of unbreakable will; no cold heart can touch your heart; no deluge can dampen your purpose.  You know that you are alive."  Chief Seattle.

If you wake up every day and do exactly what you did yesterday, is that really living?  If you react to situations in the same manner you always have, without every policing your own mind, is that living?  If today you do not question why you do what you do, or think what you do, are you even conscious?

It is true that the passive and quiet among us rarely make history.  Glory belongs to the heros who dare to use their divine God giving ability to "THINK".  Behaving according to the programming of our past does not require us to think.  We simply have to possess a beating heart.  It is possible to be in a sleep state while awake.  When we do not use our ability to question, to discern and to do things we have never done before, we choose to exist in an unconscious state.

To know what passions fuel us, and to create the feeling of joy in our life, is to appreciate our life and all that our creator has tried to bless us with.  It is our birthright to know a healthy body, a strong mind, and a full heart.  Our passions are as individual to us, as we are to each other.  To take the time to commune in quiet with the workings of our own mind, is to invest in the outcome of our lives.  By knowing who you  are, by connecting to the holy within you, you enrich me, an extension of your own humanity.

The great thinkers of our time did just that; they thought.  Darwin, Aristotle, Buddha and Christ, were masters of their own minds.  They were the men of our time that spent time alone, in conversation with their own thoughts.  They craved aloneness, and feared it not.  Perhaps that is where we need to start, at the beginning, within the crevices of our own unique mind.

Forgiving Our Selves

Being raised a good Catholic girl, the idea that I was born ba impacted the way I viewed my self.  As a Catholic I was taught to believe in original sin.  I was conditioned to think of myself as a sinners, rather than a holy and divine expression of source.

I used to wonder how it was that I could be held accountable for the sins of Adam and Eve. Something never sat quite right with me. The programming I received while attending Catholic school made it difficult to connect to the idea that I had a right to question what I was being conditioned to believe, not only about god, but about my self, as well as my relation to all that is.

Feeling like I was flawed never left me.  I was damaged good from the moment I entered this physical space.

 I now understand that most of what I had been taught about my faith was  the result of others interpretations.  Rather than being taught to  believe in my own goodness, I was taught to identify with the notion that I was born wrong.  Goodness was not something that existed in me.  It was something instead, I needed to achieve.

The wisdom that only pain can teach has taught me to question everything.

 I now know that much of what I had learned as a child was sadly misconstrued.  The truth is, I was always good, divine, and holy. And in fact, so it is also for you.

If we ever believed we were flawed, it was because the minds that raises us did  not think correctly.

We believed what we did because of how our caretakers taught us to think.

We interpret our environment much the way we do, because we have been conditioned to believe in others perceptions.

Healing the body cannot take place without first healing the mind.

Healing requires much forgiveness, and it should start with forgiving those who taught you to believe you were born with original sin, and thus somehow infected you with the notion that you were not 'good enough'.

If you ever felt less 'than' because you believed you entered this world flawed, forgive that feeling and then let it go. You were created out of perfection.  Original sin has more to do with mans self alienation as the result of faulty childhood programming and tainted perceptions than it does with precious newborn babies.

At your core, you my friend are perfect, divine and holy.  You are connected to the divinity that is responsible for every creation, including every star, every moon, and every planet in the cosmos.

Love your 'self' regardless of who and what you think you are.  Instead consume your mind with the idea that your true inner self is divine in spite of who and what others have mislead you to believe you are.

Milk this idea until your heart space opens up and fills you with feelings of contentment, acceptance, surrender and joy.

Namaste....

Your Mirror

One of the most interesting things you can do in your life is pass a mirror.  

Sounds simple enough right?  I mean how many times have you done just that, pass a mirror?

The next time you do so I would like you try something different.  The next time you pass a mirror, look.  Look into the complete reflection staring back at you.  Look at the colors in your eyes, the shape of your face, the line of your jaw.  Look at your neck, your chest, and absorb what the world sees.  

Then I want you to listen.  Listen to what your mind says to you when you first catch that glimpse.  What does it say?  Can you hear it?  Does your mind compliment you, or does it criticize you?  Do you hear language that encourages you or minimizes you?  Are you hearing your mind be kind or are you hearing an abusive form of language?

We don't often take the time to hear our own thoughts, and that is the problem.  Most of us are listening to faulty negative programming all day long, yet we are unaware of it.  We hear ourselves tell us we are stupid, ugly, fat, disgusting, or old.  Our thoughts, gone unchecked reinforce old thought patterns perhaps we adopted in childhood.  Because we were never taught to listen to our thoughts, over and over negative thoughts get laid down like roads in our minds.

It is time to unlearn.  If you are reading this, you probably already know what I mean.  Thought processes are simply learned.  You can change your mind, and the language in your head, but first you must hear it.

Don't Blame God

So often when misfortune comes our way, we humans tend to ask that one question; "Why did God do this to me?"

The fact is, God didn't DO anything to you.  God isn't some guy standing up inside the clouds looking down on you with some huge indexed notebook jotting notes about how good a human you are or not.  God doesn't have time for that stuff.

When I was a little girl, I was raised to believe God would punish me if I lied or missed mass on Sunday.  I was terrified of God.  I was conditioned to think that God was watching every move I made.  I felt followed and uneasy most of the time.  When I got a little older I began using my mind, the mind God gave me to question what I had been programmed to believe. 

I grew up hearing people say things like, "See, you fell.  God is punishing you", or " Her baby is sick? Oh that is because she had that affair two years ago with the mailman".  These comments were common, and they truly effected me.  I was taught that God was someone to fear, who could not understand what it was to be human.  How cruel God was then, to create me to be human, then to judge me so harshly.  I did not like God.

Disconnected from the image that God had been taught to be, I rummaged through life aimlessly, although I believed I had direction.  After about 3 decades my life began unraveling at the seams.  I found myself lost and without hope.  That was until I began to discover on my own, who God really was.

As my marriage began crumbling, so did every aspect of my life.  As word of my divorce began to spread, neighbors turned their backs when they saw me and even my own family refused to understand.  In addition, my in laws began a smear campaign against me and my husband full of anger set out to destroy me mentally and financially.  My children were simply caught in the crossfire.  I however, felt as if I had a huge red cross on my forehead that screamed to be shot at.  I felt raw.

When people began walking away from me, I found myself oddly comforted by their absence.  It seemed as if when they turned from me, they also took their toxic emotions with them.  Without their negative energy in my life, I found myself hearing my own voice for the very first time.

Obsessive Compulsions My Only Friends

I was a loner. I don't believe that I was born to be a loner. I adore others today. I thrive through connections. I don't even know you, but I am so happy and literally covered in thrill bumps anticipating my words floating through your creative mind.

I know now I was created, or at least the behaviors I manifested were created by those who cared for me. My caretakers molded my ideas of the world and sadly my ideas of my own Self.

My parents were not very faithful people. They were strongly bound to ideas like small rocks are caught up in large clumps of concrete. If my father couldn't see it, it wasn't real.

My mother spoke of God often, but I wondered if her beliefs stemmed from faith or the absoluteness of the words she found in ink on the pages of the bible. In my opinion, believing only in what is written in ink, and lacking the ability to have faith in ideas alone, has nothing to do with faith at all.

I believe I was cheated as a little girl. I believe that I was supposed to be held, nurtured, babied, cooed at, kissed, and looked at fondly. I believe my eyes were supposed to meet the eyes of validation, and connectedness. I believe I was supposed to be encouraged to play, and to get dirty, and to laugh until my belly hurt, unconcerned with how others would judge me for my free spirit. I believe that my natural curiosity was supposed to be encouraged, and that when I made a mistake, I was supposed to be gently motivated to be better.

But in my world, instead I was taught to be small, to be invisible and to go away.

Human connection was as prickly as sleeping in a bed of bees.

The only aspect of my existence that felt remotely comfortable was making myself small, feeling invisible, and getting out of the way.

In those moments, when life become too painful to tolerate, I would count numbers in my mind, pull hairs from my head, and fantasize about being loved.

I shutter to think what might have happened to me, if I had not found the rocking arms of OCD.

The Unspoken Rules That Created My Beliefs

It is uncomfortable for me to write sometimes. I feel myself recoiling from wanting to write my truth. I can feel guilt wanting to make me stop, and go make another cup of coffee, because I know that much of what I write about my childhood is so negative, and sometimes hard to believe.

Much of what I experienced with my mother was in private. The dysfunction played out like a secret production. She and I were the only performers. Through my third eye, or what most would refer to the eyes of self awareness, I see now that I was simply a manifestation of all the nervous, disappointed, frustrated, angry, disillusioned, self loathing energy that was truly her own.

My mother was an abandoned, neglected, emotionally and psychologically starved child. How could she have ever been able to mirror back to me, what her 19 year old child Self did not possess? It would have defied law.

These truths of mine are not about revenge. In fact, they are about forgiveness, understanding, compassion, and empathy. But I realize that many unaware others may not be able to see the forest through the battered limbs of so many trees.

My mother and father infected me with rules that did little more than help me disown my Self.

When my father took his frustration out on my mother, and as she took it, and swallowed up her own disappointment and sadness so not to upset him any further, and when my father refused to apologize for hurting my mother, the rules that were getting ingrained in me, would be the groundwork for the belief systems that governed my very existence.

In my house I learned that the only persons feelings that mattered were the ones in charge. I learned that it was of the utmost importance to swallow feelings, especially ones that might make someone else angry. I learned that it was acceptable to be called names when no one was looking. I learned that talking about feelings was unacceptable. I learned that crying was a form of weakness. I learned that my truth was unimportant. I learned that men come first. I learned that pleasing a man was more important than a man pleasing a woman. I learned that a woman should not expect to be understood. I learned that women clean, cook, and take care of others. I learned that women do not take care of themselves. I learned that what a man thought of me, was more important than what I thought of me.

My Emotional Triggers

It is said that it is not what we hear ourselves thinking, but what we don't hear ourselves thinking is what is at the root of all of our behaviors and reactions.

When I think of a tsunami, I am reminded that a shift at the bottom of the ocean is the cause of the massive destruction that manifests at the waters surface. I can imagine quite clearly the disconnectedness somewhere at the bottom of the ocean, being what is causing all the destruction on land. Truer, the actual disturbance we see manifest through the enormous waves of water, has nothing to do with water at all. Tsunami's are the result of a disturbance in the earths plates. The rushing water is simply what shows up after the earth has cracked a bit.

When I liken a tsunami to areas of my life that have been explosive, I can see how often it was that while reacting in the moment to a certain event, the truth was that I was reacting to something much deeper inside of me that had very little to do with any moment at hand.

Triggers are those places in us that draw us back to painful times in our lives when specific psychological woundings actual took place. They are the points of negative creation within us, that unless we assimilate and somehow make peace with, will draw us back emotionally as if the initial wounding is reoccurring in our present time.

When I was a little girl, my fathers sister suffered a nervous breakdown. She was ultimately diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. It was a difficult time to navigate through as a child. I was only about 10 or 11 at the time.

My aunt had always been someone I admired. She was attractive, and quite successful for a woman back in the 70's. She lived with a man I believed was my uncle Mike. 10 years into my aunts relationship with this man she discovered he had another life. Mike was actually married and had three children. He worked for a bus company and was somehow able to explain his nights out through overtime and multiple swing shifts.

The realization left my aunt unable to cope. She could not bridge the ten years of deception emotionally through to mental acceptance. Her mind simply could not accept that the man she trusted could have been such a liar. Rather than face that reality, it is my opinion my poor aunts mind split.

There are so many tangents I could go off onto from here. I could draw analogies to the idea that my aunts mother abandoned her when she was 10 through suicide. I could write about how that wound-that sense of abandonment, and betrayal was the unstable groundwork that all of her prior relationships were built, including the relationship with her self, and that instability is what really caused her psychological split, and I would probably be right or pretty damn near close if I did. But these writings are about my souls recovery. And so I choose to connect the dots with a focus on the groundwork that was 'me' instead.

When my mother would find herself frustrated by me for whatever reason, it was not uncommon for her to say cruel things to me like, "You're just like Aunt Eleanor. You're going to end up just like her. You'll never have any friends Lisa. You're a little psycho."

We lived in a tiny little house. My bedroom was on the second floor. Back then only the rich had air conditioners, so we always fell asleep to the sound of crickets, cars passing by, and airplanes taking off and landing in the distance. On one night in particular, I remember my mom talking to one of our neighbors on our front stoop. I overheard her telling our neighbor that she was concerned for me. She told her friend that she thought I was a little crazy like her sister in law. The really fucked up thing for me was, that while my mother was talking to her friend, she made her concerns seem genuine. It confused me, because my mother never acted genuine or considerate of my feelings when ever she did speak to me. In fact my mother seemed to taunt me into frustration.

Her calling me a psycho wounded me. Her telling her friend that I was crazy, cut my emotional Self like a knife. So when my ex husband would not only deliberately frustrate me, or withhold affection, or attention from me, but in addition would refer to me as crazy, or a fruit cake, or flakey, I would react not only to the moment, but through the eyes of that still very wounded little girl I still was.

The Disconnected Self

So many of us seem to be searching for something, but what? At the end of the day, when you close your eyes can you feel peace?  Can you feel joy? Can you feel as if you are satisfied with your life?

All to often, most of us feel as if we are missing something, although we can not name it.  If we are not frantic with worry, or excited at all times, many of us become bored.  Our minds so accustomed to the search, seem to mistake boredom for something that which may be so much more.

Most of us were taught to worry.  As children we worried what the neighbors would think, or what the teachers would say.  We worried about the bullies at school, or about getting good grades.  We were conditioned to worry about what others thought rather than what we thought. The point is we were taught to worry.

Our brains are like computers.  Teach a brain to worry and it will worry even when there is nothing to worry about.  A brain will create an idea out of nothing simply to continue doing what it was taught to do, which is worry.

All of us need to wonder whether we worry because there is something to worry about, or do we worry because we were conditioned to do so.  What your mind does, it does because it has been taught to do so.  Until your awareness of self grows, you can not know why your mind does what it does.

I worried for all of the reasons I mentioned above.  

Because I was born to a mother with a fractured sense of self, she could not help me stay connected to my divine truth.  My divine truth as is your divine truth, is that at your core you are perfect and created by god.  Just as trees, and rivers are a part of this universe, so am I and so are you.  Just as a tree is born and a tree dies, so will you and I.

While in my mothers womb, my being floated in divinity.  Living within my mothers womb, blanketed by all that is good, I knew my truth.  The act of being born, and becoming disconnected from my mothers womb, severed me.  Once my being needed to rely on that of the material world, the connection to my self was lost.

Being born requires that newborns rely completely on their caretakers.  If our caretakers do not know their own truth, they can not possibly help us know our own.  Most of us discover the truth along the path of life, through painful and excruciating experiences.

We all needed to be mirrored.  We all needed to have our goodness reflected back to us by people we knew truly loved us.  When we are not seen by others, it becomes impossible for us to see ourselves.  We learn to do what others do.  We worry, we lie, we obsess, we deny, we manipulate, we hide, we drink, we eat, and we make complete messes of our lives.

Pain is good because it forces the psyche to look at what is causing the discomfort.  Without pain in our lives, why would we need to change?  Without pain, there would be no need to look further  into our own hearts or minds.  A mind that does not know pain, is a mind that may be blind to the self.  The love of self is crucial in order to live a life worth living.  To not love the self, is to not know the experience of joy.  

Many of us were taught to disconnect from our self in order not to upset the apple carts.  This was wrong.  Instead we should have been taught to shake the damn apples from the trees if we had to.  Fear of upsetting others was programmed into us.  It was not our fault. But as adults, we are called to know our minds, to connect with our self, and to give glory to our spirits.