intra-personal dynamics
Emotional Freedom Techniques [Part 2]
Be sure to read Part 1 here first.
Practical Steps to Emotional Freedom
Your practice, if you want to develop choice, facility, and ultimately, personal freedom and mastery over your own subjective experience, is the following:
Make a decision right now to take 100% responsibility for your subjective experience. Every bit of it. Your interpretations, your feelings, your emotions, your beliefs—accept that 100% of your subjective experience is generated by…you.
Emotional Freedom Techniques [Part 1]
“We do not respond to reality. We respond to our internal representation of reality.”—NLP Presupposition
“Mind precedes everything. All that you are is a result of what you have thought.”—Buddhist Principle
People of great wisdom and insight in both the East and West agree. Our emotional experience has little or nothing to do with external reality. Oh sure—there are plenty of people, events, situations, and injustices that are easy targets for blame. Bad things happen. And while, often people’s lives are the sum total of their choices, often bad things happen to good people through no action or fault of their own. And less dramatically, unpleasant and undeserved things may happen. Only a fool would dispute that.
The Benefit of a Spiritual Practice [Part 2 of 2]
Be sure to read Part 1 of this article here.
Taking Responsibility
The more you take responsibility—for your emotions, your actions, your life the more you build self-esteem. It is not the person who upset you, it is that you became triggered—or that you lost facility. It is not that the cost of living is too high; it is that you are not generating enough income. It is not that someone treats you poorly; it is that you are ineffective at drawing appropriate boundaries. The locus of responsibility—and therefore power—is within you. Nothing is external. To blame someone is to give them tremendous power over you. When you forgo blame in favor of responsibility, you give up comfort, but you reap tremendous rewards—gaining power and building self-esteem.
Self Hypnosis: The Voices in Your Head [Part 1 of 2]
When most people hear the word “hypnosis” they get a little unsettled. They usually get unsettled as a result of some fantasy about what hypnosis is or is not. Some associate it to stage hypnosis and the Vegas show world. Others are afraid of what someone might do to them when they are unconscious. Still others are afraid of clucking like a chicken when the phone rings. Others my simply roll their eyes thinking that hypnosis is more mumbo-jumbo for the woo-woo set who wear patchouli oil and live in Northern California or in Boulder, Colorado.
The Need for Experimentation and Detachment | Organizing Principles
“There is no such thing as failure–only feedback for course correction.”
It is rumored that a missile is of course over 90% of the time. That the purpose of its guidance systems are to constantly course correct, course correct, course correct. Most of the time, with an effective guidance system, we know that even given that necessity for course correction, the missile hits its intended target with a reasonably high level of accuracy.
The Importance of Self Esteem
As I mentioned in an earlier episode of Evolutionary Sales, it is impossible to over-estimate the importance of Self-Esteem, or as I prefer to say: “esteem for the self”.
Why would I assert it is impossible to over-estimate the importance of Self-Esteem?
Its viability is your immune system for life–and the antidote to most of your day-to-day emotional and interpersonal struggles and challenges. Whether you take things too personally, fail to rebound from rejection quickly enough, have nagging self-doubts, seek validation, or question your ability to create the life you want…it could be considered a self-esteem issue. In fact, whether it is true or not, it would be useful to consider all upset as sourced in self-esteem or insufficient ego development.
Self-esteem is one of the most important, yet most overused and misunderstood concepts in popular psychology today.
What Self-Esteem Is and Is Not
Nathaniel Branden, PhD
Copyright © 1997, Nathaniel Branden, All Rights Reserved
This article is adapted from “The Art of Living Consciously” (Simon & Schuster, 1997).Four decades ago, when I began lecturing on self-esteem, the challenge was to persuade people that the subject was worthy of study. Almost no one was talking or writing about self-esteem in those days. Today, almost everyone seems to be talking about self-esteem, and the danger is that the idea may become trivialized. And yet, of all the judgments we pass in life, none is more important than the judgment we pass on ourselves.
Having written on this theme in a series of books, I want, in this short article, to address the issue of what self-esteem is, what it depends on, and what are some of the most prevalent misconceptions about it.
Self-esteem is an experience. It is a particular way of experiencing the self. It is a good deal more than a mere feeling—this must be stressed. It involves emotional, evaluative, and cognitive components. It also entails certain action dispositions: to move toward life rather than away from it; to move toward consciousness rather than away from it; to treat facts with respect rather than denial; to operate self-responsibly rather than the opposite.
Evolutionary Radio: Session 4: Evolutionary Guidance
In this session of Evolutionary Radio, Ian Blei, founder of Optimized Results, is interviewing me on Personal Evolution, what it means to be an Evolutionary Guide, what clients report who work with me, why I offer a complimentary exploratory session, what people can expect from that session and much, much more.
Your options are much easier now. You can either use the in-line player by clicking on it below, or use one of the various links to download or play it in another window.
Fire Destroys [My] San Rafael Apartment
From the Marin Independent Journal August 7th, 2006:
San Rafael firefighters are investigating the cause of a two-alarm fire that destroyed a D Street apartment Sunday afternoon. No one was injured in the fire. “We have no idea what caused it,” Battalion Chief Ritt Hewitt said.
He said the fire’s origins were confusing, but not suspicious.
“It began in a room that was almost bare, except for some books and small electronic items,” Hewitt said. “We’re not sure what happened.”
Firefighters arrived at 412 D Street at 2:19 p.m. to find a small but intense fire burning in the apartment of Addrianna Reitenbach.
Identity and Identification
Part 1: Identification
“The ultimate spiritual practice is dis-identifying from that which you think is you—objects in your awareness…” —Ken Wilber, Kosmic Consciousness
On August 7th, 2006, my apartment burned down. I lost everything aside from my laptop and the majority of my clothing, which had luckily been moved the night before to another location.
What do you do when your house burns down and you lose virtually all of your possessions? In the context of Personal Evolution, it is an opportunity. An opportunity to dis-identify from that which you think is you—and that which you have grown attached to. It is also an opportunity to explore just where and to what ”things” you are identified, or more accurately—to what degree.
Emotional Freedom Part 4: Guilt and Shame
Be sure to see parts one, two, and three here, here, and here respectively.
In this piece we will examine the assumptions that lead to guilt, the structure of shame, and the antidotes to both.
Guilt
Q: “I often feel guilty for things I have done.”
A: [S.N. Geonka ] “Guilt has no place in Dhamma [the path to enlightenment or ‘the law of nature’].”
I assert that guilt serves no purpose in inter-personal relations. No legitimate purpose.
Some say “if the person feels guilty or remorseful, then I can be assured they will not repeat this terrible wrong they committed against me” or “ I am assured of their good character”.
Is this accurate? Let’s examine this together.
Sharon slept with another man, violating the monogamous covenant she shared with her husband. She felt “bad” and out of guilt, told him the truth. She swore it would never happen again. Seeing how badly she felt, her husband felt assured this would not happen again and stayed with her and the marriage commitment. A few years later, Sharon was unfaithful a second time and in fact, carried on an affair with another man. This time she felt she best not be honest with her husband. How many chances would he give her, really? Unfortunately, he found out about it through some carelessness of hers and some direct questioning which followed. Again, she was authentically remorseful and felt guilty for misleading and breaking her husband’s trust—she did not feel bad just for getting caught, rather she felt authentically guilty for what she had done. They separated, sought counseling, and eventually divorced.
Far from Sharon being a fiction of my mind for the purpose of illustration, this story is real, and the name has been changed. And, this is just one example of many I could give of patterns of behavior, remorse or guilt, and repetition of the problem behavior.
Guilt is unreliable [at best] as a guarantee of future behavior. We have all seen people apologize and be guilt-ridden, yet commit the same acts repeatedly.
I go so far in my own relations as to let people know very clearly that their guilt and apologies hold no currency with me. I WANT them to feel free emotionally about any “wrong” they may have committed against me. At the same time, I may not want them to commit the same act against me again—I do want assurance of a shift in behavior and an honest and earnest intention by them to do so through learning. For that, guilt does not help. In fact, it is a hindrance What is simply needed is their acknowledgement of the mistake and their pledge to not commit the act again. If it happens repeatedly, then there are practical choices to be made: do we continue to invest time and energy with this individual?
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