I find that what really muddies up the water on this one is that it’s so hard not to see it hierarchically. The point is not that one is better than the other. Is it better to be 4 or 40 years old? You may prefer one but neither is inherently better. However, one always precedes the other. It does seem to be that 4 develops eventually toward 40.

So in a way my answer to my friend’s question is that we seek higher vibrations, because we’ve got plenty of low ones already. Because we suspect these higher vibrations will help balance out the overabundance of lower ones, and help us deal with the problems caused by a disproportionate ratio of frequencies. And because that is where all the new stuff is.

If you want to grow and progress and discover, that’s where the new material is. The rest is recycling (not that there’s anything wrong with that…)

To experience more of our full self we must be willing to grow into a more evolved stage of who we are. A child’s consciousness must evolve into an adult’s to deal with the new possibilities and responsibilities of being an adult.  Just to be clear: ideally we would maintain our connection to our child self (and all the wonderful and valuable qualities it gives us access to – imagination, innocence, etc.) while we added the adult consciousness.

When an infant learns to pick up food and put it in its mouth it is a huge development, but in the overall scheme of its life that skill resonates at a very low developmental frequency. Not nearly as high as when a child can ask for what it wants, or safely create it’s own food.

Are these stages better? Honestly, I think most people would say… kinda. But that would still be judgmental. What about if the child were able to create food purely through the power of intention? Would that be better? Either way, the new frontier is in that direction and whether out of curiosity, need or the prompting of our spirit, that’s where we are all headed.

1.  Why do I have this issue?

2.  How do I deal with it?

With many of my clients, I’ve noticed another critical step which often precedes and preempts these questions from ever being asked: overcoming avoidance.  Whether it’s fully recognizing the issue (admitting you have a problem is half the battle) or discovering the willingness to take steps, this bridge must be crossed.

If not, you can end up in No Man’s Land, sometimes indefinitely.

Avoidance comes in many forms, but there’s one particular pattern I want to address here. I noticed an interesting example toward the end of last year.

President-elect Obama was talking about the crisis du jour, gas prices.  Now, we have known for decades that our dependence on oil was destructive and unsustainable and yet barely lifted a finger to overcome it.  We have systematically avoided taking steps, whether prices were manageably low or cripplingly high.

Obama referred to this cycle of doing nothing, regardless of how serious the situation was, as “Shock to Trance.”  You can find this avoidance strategy on a personal level as well.

The pain of facing an issue is so frightening that we are willing to endure the symptomatic flare-ups in order to sink back into denial. It can be an ongoing disagreement in a relationship, a painful family secret or a difficult life decision.

When there is an eruption, you can’t focus on fixing the problem, because you’re too busy trying to survive it.  It feels like it’s all you can do just to get through it (shock).  When the drama subsides, you want to let sleeping dogs lie.  Why stir up all that chaos again (trance)?

Frequently, there is a belief that it’s never going to change, so why aggravate the wound? Like so many sabotage strategies, this is very persuasive, because it seems to be reasonable and make sense. It rationalizes your decision to stay stuck, instead of facing the fact that just because you don’t see a way out, or you lack the tools to create change, doesn’t mean it can’t be different.

Let’s say Bob is having trouble standing up for himself in his marriage.  When he feels criticized and attacked by his wife, he struggles to defend himself because he fears confrontation.  He goes into overwhelm as his self-esteem plummets, and he does what he can to endure the discord.  Eventually the conflict will subside, and Bob’s pain will lessen, since pressure is no longer being directly applied.

Because Bob does not have the confidence to handle the issue, he will instead look to avoid pain.  So, instead of seeing what he could do to work on himself or work things out with his wife when things are more peaceful, he will ignore the problem and hope that it goes away.  Facing it will only create more pain, which he is convinced he can’t handle.

The challenge is to realize that you are stuck because you fear the unknown and the pain you believe change will force you to face. Seeing that the Shock to Trance cycle is a tool for avoidance destroys the illusion of No Man’s Land – that YOU do not have any choice in the matter and it cannot be different.

Photo credit: span

Dr. Jay asks:

“Do you think there is some kind of force for good — some kind of Spirit — within, beneath, behind, or in front of the process of spiritual development, somehow guiding or inspiring it? And, if so, do you think that we are controlled by it? Or do you think that we have a kind of freedom not to respond to its promptings, however understood, such that we can truly miss the mark?

“I am also wondering if you think there are times in a person’s life — or some people’s lives — when it is important to let go of ideals of “progress” and “growth” altogether and accept the sacrament, maybe even the grace, of un-self-awareness.”

It may seem unnecessary or obvious, but I think it’s important that this discussion take place within the context of a disclaimer.  None of us knows the whole truth, and we’re all working with our current best intelligence.  Several great teachers of mine have ever said to me, “This is my answer today. If you ask me a week or a year from now, I may say something completely different.”  To me, this did not mean the last answer was untrue, it meant their relationship to it had shifted.  We each work with the answers that serve us in this moment.  It’s as though each individual answer is a fragment of the ultimate truth, through which, we can access the whole.  Sort of like how each cell contains DNA that maps out the entire organism.

It appears to me that there is very much a Spirit involved in our spiritual development.  Sometimes we experience it as an external force and other times internal.  Perhaps it is like asking, do flowers feel the urge to grow, or does the Universe desire that there be flowers?  I suspect these are different versions of the same thing.  We are free to ignore these promptings; however, there do seem to be junctures where it is insistent, and the price of denial is great pain.

Even though this often feels like we are being made to do something against our will, it is probably more accurate to say that the suffering is caused by an internal civil war.  We are identifying with our ego, which feels attacked by our spirit’s agenda.

In regard to growth: With the possible exception of a few true spiritual masters, I believe we are all constantly participating in the growth process.

“This little self that we have come to believe is the entirety of our being is only a small part of something larger. … We expand to become what we already are.” – Donna Farhi

But what do I mean by growth?  There is this fantasy about the economy in which, if everything were working as it should, there would always be more.   More companies, more products, more money, more customers … I see this as one-dimensional and unsustainable.

Might growth also mean learning to be more efficient, less dependent, more cooperative? The confounding beauty of spiritual growth is that what it means constantly changes. You stop physically growing when you reach adulthood, but don’t you continue to grow as a person? Even within a particular cycle there is plateau and decline.  I see these as part of growing.

When I look at nature, it seems never to stop progressing and evolving, but part of that process is winter, stillness, resting phases, introspection.  The mentality that creates, “ideals of progress and growth” recognizes only the higher, faster, stronger part. Like most aspects of ego, it is excessively literal.

Finally, I agree we must accept un-self-awareness, because that is a part of the process as well.  It has a role to play just like denial can protect the mind from overload and shock protects the body from pain.  However, the question is not, “are we unconscious?”  It’s “how unconscious?”  And how much more conscious are we really interested in being?

I have found it invaluable to become aware of “red flags” that indicate my ego is inflamed.  Assuming there is no truly offensive component to what you’re being presented with, an especially strong negative reaction to something can help you see that you’ve taken it personally and your ego has become deeply engaged.  If it wasn’t, the response would be more along the lines of, “it didn’t really grab me,” “I had trouble understanding it,” or “just not my taste,” without the need to condemn.

My personal favorite red flag is “stupid.” It almost always indicates that my ego has felt the need to attack or reject something that isn’t really that important.

The real key is to recognize the energy behind the word or phrase. It is often a powerful and disproportionate expression of judgment, alienation or hostility that allows you to dismiss or try to feel superior to something by which you feel irrationally threatened.  Ego can show up in a lot of other ways, and for a lot of other reasons, but I find this version particularly valuable to become conscious of.

Red flags can offer you the choice to discontinue travelling down the path of negativity. They also can suggest that there is something very charged about the subject or situation you feel the need to so passionately reject. The more you catch on to the tools and strategies your ego uses to disguise and drive you away from threats, the more you give yourself the opportunity to sabotage its attempts to sabotage you.

You may be familiar with the spiral image of growth.  I feel it is particularly applicable here.  Instead of seeing your development in terms of a timeline, where your life progresses in a straight line from point A through Z, think of a coiled spring or tornado.  This non-linear image suggests that we go through the full range of a cycle, and when the circle is complete, we go up a level and begin a new cycle.

Sometimes a new cycle contains completely new experiences and challenges, another times we are asked to re-explore a theme.  We must work through what it means to forgive, accept or choose to be empowered at THIS level.

A friend of mine once told me he wished he could be like his 3-year-old son, who would just walk up to other children and say, “Hi, my name is Charlie, wanna play with me?” As we all know it will be completely different process in high school.  He might have to revisit what it means to be a friend in mid-life, and again in retirement.

So when we ask why something we felt we had dealt with has resurfaced, it’s a little like hearing the clock chime and saying, “Not again!  Wasn’t it 3:00 yesterday?  I thought we did this already.”  Three o’clock today is not the same as three o’clock yesterday.  Of course it is possible that you didn’t really work through the issue fully the first time, but usually you know when you’ve made a breakthrough, which is why it’s so confusing for it to come back around.

Another helpful perspective is to consider that if an obstacle or challenge keeps presenting itself in different forms and at many levels, it might just be one of your life’s themes. Maybe this time around you are here to work on being independent or not taking responsibility for others, so it’s just going to show up over and over.  This may offer you no comfort, but it can mitigate the surprise and disappointment.  More importantly, it allows you to see it as an ongoing process of refinement and not something you expect to “get past.”  You can do maintenance work on the issue, even when it’s not right in your face. This can minimize the degree to which it hijacks your life when it flares up.

Let’s say you were confronted with self-esteem issues early in your life and had to work through the way your self-image was disproportionately influenced by how the community and your peer group saw you.  Years later, you had to explore dependency on the opinion of a teacher, coach, parent or love interest.  Now you start to notice that you aren’t very nice to yourself.  That you hold beliefs about yourself that are negative and critical and that your standards and expectations for others are much more generous than for yourself.  All of this makes you feel bad about yourself and reminds you in some way of how others used to make you feel.

Instead of going into “oh no, not this again” mode, which will only make you feel worse, you have the chance to recognize that this issue is likely one of the subjects of this lifetime, and your job is to become an expert on it.  A true expert never finishes their investigation of the subject. People are usually hoping their life purpose will look like curing cancer, winning a gold medal or bringing peace to the Middle East.  More often it is more mundane but no less challenging.  Either way, mastery requires practice.

Once you begin to notice that something like self-esteem is one of your major life themes, you can then continue to explore and apply the things you learned through the last crisis.  You can develop your ability to become conscious of subtle symptoms instead of waiting for them to grow into a full-blown disaster and starting over.  When you identify a theme, it gives you clarity about where your energy needs to be focused.

Many times obstacles, especially recurring ones, can be seen as your spirit’s way of saying to you, “It’s time for you to allow me to be a bigger part of your life. [Which is another way of saying “become more conscious” or “go to the next level.”]  But this one thing is in the way.  So I’m going to put it right in front of your face so that you can’t avoid it.  I know you aren’t going to like this, but trust me.  We’re going to be so much better off after you work through it and we can move on.”

Photo by: Ped-X-ing

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We are born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us, it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” [This quote is frequently attributed to Nelson Mandela but is actually by Marianne Williamson, from her book A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of "A Course in Miracles".]

So why would we choose to stay small, be less than our full selves?  I think what scares a lot of us is that we do not know what we REALLY want, and we do not trust ourselves (in most cases correctly) to exercise our power safely, effectively, and responsibly.

Think of the myth of Midas.  By acquiring what he thought he wanted and valued most – gold – he ended up destroying everything and everyone he actually cared about. Every “Behind The Music” and “E! True Hollywood story” are essentially the same: fame, wealth, and power not only don’t end up fixing anything or making stars happy, they end up ruining their lives (at least temporarily).

I once heard someone say that money and fame only magnify what is already true.  People who craved these things thought that’s what they wanted, and on some level probably thought it would make them less insecure, powerless, self-loathing, fearful, alone, etc.

If power feels dangerous to you (and this is usually perceived unconsciously), you often will eschew opportunities to claim it and then disguise this from yourself with confusion, overwhelm or distraction.

As long as we live with self imposed limitations (afraid to fail, not enough money or time, too late for me, etc.) we don’t have to face the fact that we don’t really know what we want.  And, we don’t know what to do with power.

To avoid knowing this, we are willing to pay the lesser price of being disappointed with our lives – it allows us to blame circumstances, God, or those around us … and avoid responsibility. In addition it gives us plausible deniability: “What do you mean I chose this? I don’t WANT to feel this way!  I don’t LIKE to be in this situation!”

We also unconsciously sense the way empowerment will be disruptive to “what is.”  My life will change radically, in ways I can’t anticipate (fear of the unknown should not be underestimated).  Others will not always respond well to your modeling/manifesting something they have chosen to remain safely ignorant of.

Gandhi, Jesus, MLK, JFK and RFK made others feel threatened to the point where they had to destroy the messenger of the power they were being offered.  When we empower ourselves, it affects others.  We are given MANY unconscious messages our whole lives from people we care about that say “don’t get too big,” “don’t overshadow me,” “don’t leave me,” “stay under control,” “don’t risk,” “don’t make anyone mad at you,” even as we are being told “you can be anything you want!” – which they almost never really mean.  (Really? So I can be gay, a drug addict, a different religion, a failure, a serial killer, a thief, have a sex change?)*

Have you found power to be dangerous, daunting or unmanageable?

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* I’m not making a value judgment about any of these.  It’s simply a list of things for which others might reject us.

Photo by Esparta

One of the hallmarks of this growth process is that you are able – and willing – to take more responsibility for your experience. In this case “responsibility” means beginning to work with two ideas in particular:

1. Much of your inner life is largely unknown to you and, in an effort to reveal the mystery to yourself, you will project it outward onto the people, things and events around you so that you can see it. If you disapprove of or don’t like yourself but can’t acknowledge that, you instead will begin to perceive that others don’t think very highly of you.

2. Likewise, you will draw experiences to mirror your internal state. If an unusual number of things in your life are breaking down and failing, you might be trying to tell yourself that you feel in some way like you’re falling apart.  Maybe you’ve outgrown an old belief system and it is breaking down on you.  If you notice that a lot of people seem to be mad at you – many times people you don’t even know – it’s possible you’re carrying unexplored anger.

In both cases taking responsibility allows you to stop blaming circumstances and people, feeling helpless or perceiving the world as a hostile place.  Now you have a lot more information to work with, and you can begin making changes that can transform not just how you view what happens but what actually happens.

What’s so powerful about this is that it reduces your dependency on the outside world shifting to accommodate you.  (“I can be happy as soon as it stops raining.”)  When you shift your internal reality, you will either feel differently about what IS, or what IS will be transformed, because you no longer need it to be the way it was.

If you feel disrespected by your boss at work, instead of trying to get him to treat you better, (or switching jobs, where it’s quite likely you will recreate a similar experience), often the solution is to work on self-respect and then notice how many people around you begin to see you in a whole new light.

It’s also possible that as you begin to respect yourself, you will see that this is the wrong situation for you, and you do want to change jobs.  You’ll probably pursue a different job in a different way than you would have, and prospective employers are going to meet a different person than they would have.

One word of caution: taking responsibility for your experience often feels like taking the blame, at first, and this can be demoralizing – and even prohibitive.  Merely shifting fault to yourself is missing the point and can just make you feel worse.

A big part of this is not just changing your actions but changing your thoughts.  New thoughts, in turn, will inspire new actions.  And, it requires discipline and practice to recognize that you’ve focused on something completely unproductive and switch your mindset.

The good news is: life will always provide you with plenty of chances to practice!  (That’s usually the only way to break habits.)

And those persistent negative thoughts?  They’re belief systems you’ve practiced until they became deeply ingrained habits.

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In our next episode, our hero will tackle “But I Thought I Dealt With That Already?!” Syndrome.  Stay tuned.

[Obstacles - Part 1 of 4] For many of us, after we’re finished with school, we never want to see another test again.  Then the “real” world hands us one obstacle after another, and we’re told to look at it as a challenge, or that God is testing us.

I used to think to myself, “How about I pick my own challenges? And, by the way, why does God feel the need to evaluate me?”

But the more I work with people who are confronting this issue, the more I am seeing it differently.  We aren’t being asked to prove anything to anyone else; we’re being offered the opportunity to know who we are and what we are capable of.

It is very unusual to be confident about something, or know something about yourself, until you have experienced it. We like to think of ourselves as patient, forgiving, courageous, strong, generous, trusting … but until we get a chance to test it out – in traffic jams or dealing with family, for example — we are mostly just hoping.  
If I have an image of myself as “a profoundly spiritual person who trusts the Universe,” I might avoid taking an action that would expose my underlying fear and doubt.  I won’t take a risk — such as following a strong intuitive feeling that I should leave my job and start my own business with little or no savings. It would be too painful to find out that I’m less than I had hoped.

These “tests” also can help us discover something about ourselves that we hadn’t even imagined was true until we were confronted with the need to demonstrate it. How might you react in a real crisis? Can you know that you have the capacity to be calm, clear and efficient until you step in a bear trap or your child accidently starts a fire?

In either case there is a tendency to fear a situation, even if unconsciously, until we realize we can handle it.

There’s a Minor League Baseball coach whose philosophy was, “Once you show a skill, you possess it.” Not that you had mastered it, but that you’d shown it was possible, whereas before we had no reason to think you capable of that skill.

You can’t throw a curve ball until you do.  But after that, it’s simply a matter of repeating something you’ve already concretely demonstrated.  In my own life, I experience a dramatic difference when things move, in my own mind, into the realm of The Possible.  I am expanded, and my willingness to move forward increases significantly.  I am no longer dealing with the situation abstractly, in theory only.

Until these insights are worked through and experienced for ourselves, we don’t really know what they mean or how to use them. It is not enough to be told, “No one can take your dignity without your permission.”  Otherwise, we could just borrow each other’s wisdom and never have to experience any pain or struggle.

The question then becomes, do we resist and resent these “tests,” or welcome them as opportunities to dispel our fear and ignorance and enter into new levels of empowerment?

I have heard myself say many times to clients, “If you can do a thing when it’s hard, you own it.” To me, “owning it” means, at a minimum, you may not wish to be in that situation again, but you will no longer be controlled by the fear of it.  You are freed from worry, and you don’t have to live your life around obstacles like the dread of being able to handle grief or not having money.

In addition, “owning it” can mean the extraordinary empowerment that comes with finding out what you’re capable of in difficult circumstances.  The obstacles can actually reveal not just the ability to cope, but a strength, a gift you will want to share with the world.

Michael Jordan’s experience of hitting the big shot in the big game in college – after being cut from his high school team – not only showed him that he was capable of rising to the moment, it gave him an insatiable thirst for it.  Many pro athletes don’t want the ball in the final minute, because they’re focused on the consequences of failure.  Jordan seemed addicted to experiencing that side of himself that could only come out under great pressure.  He sought out, and even invented, high-stakes situations in order to challenge himself.  But he couldn’t really know his greatness until he allowed himself to risk failure.

So, if the idea of being tested inspires you – great!  If not, the challenge is to learn to see the opportunity disguised as an obstacle.