Beyond Broken

Self Exploration

Are You A Good Person Who Was In A Bad Situation?

Lifelong feelings of shame and deficiency are typically found to accompany the distress states caused by early trauma.  Children cannot experience themselves as being a good person in a bad situation.  Failure of the holding environment (family) is experienced as failure of the self.  Later thoughts like, ‘there is something wrong with me’, or, ‘I am not worthy or bad’, are built upon early sensations in the body of ‘I feel bad’.  Simply understanding that your shame reflects the environmental failure you experienced rather than who you really are can help shift lifelong patterns of low self esteem, shame and a sense of worthlessness and help you see yourself in a new, more compassionate way.  Paraphrased from Healing Developmental Trauma with Laurence Heller, PHD

 

Have you experienced extreme highs when something good happens to you and extreme lows or deflation when facing something bad or a disappointment?  Do you feel like you are bouncing up and down, dependent on outside forces?  If things are going really well and you are making your goals, do you still have a nagging feeling that you are not enough?  Do you sense an emptiness that does not respond to how much you fill your life or even how happy you seem to be?  Even as your confidence grows, and your accomplishments pile up, do you notice you are afraid that failure could be lurking right around the next corner? Or do you feel that, no matter how successful you are, you are just fooling everyone—playing a charade of a confident, accomplished person; that you’re a fake?
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Real But Not True

 

According to Tsoknyi Rinpoche,  a most beloved contemporary Tibetan Buddhist meditation masters, to have an open heart and open mind we must develop a deeper understanding of the patterns that drive our thoughts, feelings and behaviors.  Then we will not so easily surrender to the impulse to blindly follow them.

I happened to be reading his book, Open Heart, Open Mind: Awakening the Power of the Essence Love, as I was crossing the International Dateline around the Bering Straits on my way to Tokyo to teach a class on Images. (The Pathwork terms for false beliefs and conclusions formed in early childhood.)

Tsoknyi Rinpoche continues to say that patterns are hard to change, especially the ones that are embedded in our unconscious or even our pre-verbal nervous systems.   This reminds me of Pathwork Lecture #201, which I am preparing to teach. It talks about the negative force field that images create as they go unexamined. The lectures defines images as a “force field of distorted ideas”.  “… it is like a deeply imprinted motor mechanism set in motion with great energy.  Thus a stronger energy is required to deactivate this motor force and change the negative force field into a positive one.”

After going through the hard work of uncovering your patterns or images, Rinpoche suggests a mantra, which is a time honored method of talking to your thoughts and feelings.  Sometimes called prayer, it is a means of opening up a conversation between the heart and the mind.   His mantra is a simple four word phrase: Real, But Not True.…

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AWAKE

 

“I just realized something important”

My husband and I recently taught a workshop in Vermont about the Spirituality of Relationships—the title of a Pathwork Lecture—but the workshop was really about love.

I was walking in the woods a few days later with nothing particular on my mind and started to think about a woman I know who wanted to become a mother about 10 years ago. She told me she was going to manifest this.  She was older at the time and I was cynical.  By that point I had had many failed attempts at having a child.

I will tell anyone who will listen that not having a child is my biggest disappointment or regret in my life.  As I walked through the woods I began to think about disappointment and regret and my story about it began to turn upside down. A new truth emerged.  My friend had  approached being a mother with a full open heart. My approach was different.  I had conditions.  I had wanted a baby of my own with my husband, Tom. I could feel the constraints I put on my heart.  And therefore I could  feel that I had created different results than my friend whose son is now nine years old.  There was no judgement about the different results I had created and I do not wish for my friend’s life, but my sad story seemed to vanish in the light of the truth of my own creation….

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Stand Your Ground

This summer our 5 year old is venturing out into the ocean but he needs to hold hands for support when the big waves hit.  When the big wave approaches I say to him, “stand your ground, buddy” over and over again. My wish is that he remember this as metaphor for the rest of his life.  As I say it to him over and over again, I am learning to stand my ground.

Boundaries are something that did not exist in many chaotic households, or they were held inconsistently.  And I am finding that many of the people I work with have never experienced healthy, safe, flexible boundaries.  As one person put it recently, “I either shut down completely behind my wall or I am wide open with my heart fully exposed”.  The first approach is not a boundary but a defense and the second approach is a merging which is unhealthy and leads to co-dependency and loss of self.

Brene Brown has done the most beautiful work around boundaries that I have discovered.  It came out of extensive research that she did.  She wanted to know what qualities contributed to the most compassionate people.  She began by interview clergy and other known types of compassionate people.  Her hypothesis was that compassionate people were also spiritual people and that spirituality contributed to compassion.  What she found out was very shocking to her and it might be to you too.  She found that the most compassionate people are the people who have the best boundaries.

She uses the acronym BIG for her boundary discussion.  BIG becomes an amazing question.  Here is how it goes:

What Boundaries do I need so that I can be in my Integrity and be most Generous towards you?…

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“If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it” Richard Rohr

or, “The Doom Loop of Righteous Indignation”

I have been having a lot of encounters with people lately who have very strong opinions about our political and humanitarian situations and global issues threatening our planet.

The thing is, I usually agree with whatever they are saying, since we all typically surround ourselves with those who think like us and agree with our point of view.  But I hate the conversations.  The energy between us feels negative before I have said a word and I begin looking for distractions or ways to change the subject.

As the conversation progresses (mostly one sided) I get more and more desperate to escape. Then, if it is a good day,  I am able to find my curiosity and wonder what pain is driving this negativity.  I look into the eyes of the person talking and they look angry and somewhat vacant.  They are not really connecting with me, they are spewing rhetoric or perhaps well reasoned thoughts. But why the rant?

If I ask, (or they may tell me anyway), they say “We have to take a stand, we have to make a difference.”  And I wonder how more righteous indignation and pain will make a difference in our world.

I listened to an inspiring dialogue yesterday between Russell Brand and Brene Brown.  Their conversation spanned many topics, but inevitable led into politics and planetary concerns.  They discussed how politics can never be separated from spirituality (Brene defines spirituality as love, compassion, kindness and oneness.)  They conclude that since our politics are about humanity they must include these very human qualities.

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