Tag: reactions

On Patterns

~ SE ~ Leave a comment

Dear True Self,

I find I keep having the same thoughts over and over again. I also find I am repeating some of the same behaviours too and like I am stuck in a pattern. How do I change this?

Sincerely,

Pitter Pattern

Dear PP,

When you say you are stuck in patterns, essentially you are saying life has become repetitive. When life becomes repetitive, it is impossible to be receptive. Without receptivity, there really is no life.

So how to stop being repetitive? How to break patterns?

The first thing is recognizing the patterns. It seems at some level, you are doing this. That is fantastic!

The next thing is to understand why we created these patterns at all. If you observe nature, you will see, everything is happening in cycles. The earth around the sun, the trees shedding and growing, even the cellular functions in you are all following cycles or patterns.

The same is true for your thoughts, your emotions, your energies. It is not only the physiology that is like this. But why is it so?

Whenever you perform anything unconsciously, it will be cyclical in nature. That is the default state of existence. Things are always ebbing and flowing from one state to another. What you call as birth and death is simply a cycle, happening ad infinitum, to all things in this cosmos.

We may call it by different names – a flower blooming and wilting, rain pooling and evaporating, etc. But essentially there is only one cycle: birth and death.

This is the fundamental law all things in this universe follow. So when you move through life without consciousness, simply reacting to everything, of course you will be stuck in this pattern.

When I say you are reacting to everything, I don’t mean that you are getting upset about everything. I mean that you are not consciously choosing how you wish to be. You are not responding. Responding is the opposite of reacting.

You see, to be a human being means that you have the ability to think, feel, and act however you wish. If you don’t harness this, then you will be like every other creature, simply reacting to everything based on your programming.

But if you choose in any moment to respond, then the cycle is broken! It is really that simple.

The beautiful thing about all these patterns and cycles you are endlessly repeating is that you don’t actually have to do anything to stop them. If you simply just stop – stop feeding them, stop encouraging them, stop enabling them – they will slough off on their own.

All these patterns are only happening because you have left nature with no choice. You are a conscious human being, the very peak of evolution on this planet. But when you don’t exercise that consciousness, nature falls back on its cycles.

So the good news is this isn’t all that complicated. If you were someone who didn’t even know you were stuck in a pattern, it would be much harder to help you. But when you are aware that things are cyclical, all you have to do is stop and they go away.

Haven’t you noticed that these things take a tremendous amount of effort on your part to maintain? They may feel like they are running with a mind of their own, but it is only because of their momentum. If you just slow it down and stop it, it’s over. In that emptiness, you can choose what you want to do different, if anything.

The problem isn’t with the behaviour or the thoughts. The problem is they are repeating over and over and you want to be in control of them, not the other way around. Even if you have the same thoughts and behaviours, so long as you are the one choosing them, it’s not an issue.

The more conscious you become, the more these patterns will shed. The more conscious you become, the more aware you will be of how many patterns you are stuck in. Believe me, it is far more than you can imagine.

Just try it for even 1 hour – do everything consciously. It will be extremely difficult. When you can finally understand that the majority of your life is happening unconsciously, it will dawn on you that most of your life you are just running on auto pilot. You aren’t really living your life at all.

To be alive means that you are conscious, aware, involved. To break unconscious patterns, all you have to do is increase the effort into responding to life. Respond to everything. Everything is your responsibility.

With gratitude,

Your True Self

Click here if you have a question to ask Your True Self. All questions are anonymous and may be published unless specified otherwise.

On Consciousness

~ SE ~ Leave a comment

Dear True Self,

You often talk about doing things consciously and how that’s the difference in life. But what is consciousness? How can we be more conscious?

Sincerely,

Confused About Consciousness

Dear CAC,

Consciousness is not really that complicated. The only issue is most people are confusing how alert they are for consciousness. Alertness is about survival – using your senses in a keen way to ensure your safety. But alertness is not a requirement of life. I’m sure you have seen many unalert people somehow manage to survive!

Consciousness is simply always on. It is a requirement for life to even exist. Or rather, consciousness is life; they are not separate.

If it is always on, the only question is how intense it is. How conscious you are determines how alive you feel, doesn’t it? When you are asleep, you are still technically alive and conscious – but it has been dialed down so much that you become unaware of so many things. Your experience of life becomes practically nonexistent.

Inversely, the more consciously you perform any activity in life, the higher your level of experience. It’s like turning up the speaker to 11 – then you get the maximum effect.

Even the most seemingly mundane things in life can become fantastic and beautiful simply by your level of involvement.

The only issue is that you have a psychological drama going on in your head. By it’s very definition, anything psychological is only ever something you made up, or at best, it is an inaccurate interpretation. Either way, you are not seeing life as it is.

Through this filter, you see things based on so many idiotic preferences – I like this, I don’t like that, that is red, that is blue, this is big, that is small. I want you to please let this sink in – none of those conclusions are real. Those conclusions have no meaning.

The truth is, life itself has no meaning at all. Meaning is something that can only be created in your mind, it does not exist independently of you. Life has no meaning, but life is phenomenal. Those two statements coexist in no contradiction.

It is not meaningful that the sun rises every morning – but it is phenomenal. It is not meaningful that even a tiny speck of dust can be examined infinitely – but it is phenomenal. Your life is not meaningful in any way – but it is phenomenal.

When you were a child, you were like this. Everything was just fantastic! Every stick on the ground, every leaf on the wind, just about every damn thing had your undivided involvement and attention.

But somewhere along the way, you traded this all for conclusions about everything. Somewhere, you decided that life isn’t good enough as is, so you gotta be the one who will pin it down and define it better. Life will not let you get away with such nonsense.

When you are stuck in your silly ideas about life, you instead carve up the universe, deciding what is meaningful and what isn’t. The only reason you get such stupid ideas is because you have gotten too attached to your memory.

Through your memory you draw all your idiotic conclusions – what you like and dislike is only because of what you remember. But memory itself is not a bad thing. Without memory, you would never be able to evolve and learn, constantly falling for the same traps endlessly. That would be a truly cruel existence.

Consciousness is essentially this – do you use your memory as a solid foundation, or do you carry it on your back like a burden? The more you dial up your consciousness, the more loosely you cling to your memory, and the greater your experience of life.

If you can keep some distance between your memory and you, then you will use it instead of it using you.

So how to dial up your consciousness? How to shed this attachment to memory? The beautiful thing about life is that if you simply stop polluting yourself with so much garbage and stop clinging to it like it’s precious, it will shed itself.

It takes tremendous effort on your part to cling to all this memory. You carry it all on your back; that takes a huge amount of involvement from you! By simply stopping from piling on more, it will fluff off.

If you just become more involved in life, then you don’t have to actively shed your attachments to memory or try to be conscious. Just in every little way, become an active participant in your life! Whether it’s sweeping the floor or raising a child, treat it with the same level of intensity and involvement.

If you treat each moment of life like this – that it is all equally precious – consciousness is not an issue. It is an inevitability. The only rub is, it won’t happen on it’s own.

The opposite of consciousness is reactivity – you will compulsive react to everything in life, like a slave to your own programming. To break this enslavement is the only real choice you have in this existence.

But life won’t make you more conscious by accident. You have to decide, in this moment and each moment, how involved will you be? That is what it means to have free will, to be human. It’s not about what you choose. It’s simply that you consciously choose it.

With gratitude,

Your True Self

Click here if you have a question to ask Your True Self. All questions are anonymous and may be published unless specified otherwise.

On Stubbornness

~ SE ~ Leave a comment

Dear True Self,

I can be really stubborn sometimes and refuse to change. How can I become more flexible?

Sincerely,

Stub Born This Way

Dear SBTW,

I want you to understand what stubbornness is. Essentially, it means that you have planted your stake into the ground and are not willing to move.

Tell me, are there certain situations where this is a useful quality?

The problem is not your stubbornness, the problem is your stubbornness is working against you, preventing your from growing. If it worked for you, you would not be complaining about it.

Let’s say you are stubborn when someone at your work tells you to do your job differently. You refuse, becoming defensive, and the situation becomes dramatic.

It’s so easy in a circumstance like that to just react. The thing about stubbornness is once it kicks in, it is almost impossible to undo. Have you ever tried to reason with a stubborn person who has made up their mind? You may as well beat your head against a brick wall!

So you are a slave to this reaction, and once you react it’s too late to change. But I want you to understand that you could just as easily choose to be flexible and adaptive. If you were as stubborn about being defensive as you were about your own personal growth, imagine how fast it would happen!

Why is it so much easier to choose to be angry, rigid, unwilling? Only because you have practiced it so much of course. How about you practice being stubborn in more useful ways, ways that actually serve you?

But the word stubbornness is loaded. You only associate it as a negative quality. When it is working for you, we may call it by different names.

Let’s say you are absolutely stubborn about meditating daily. You refuse to miss it. In this sort of scenario, your stubbornness is no longer stubbornness. It is discipline, consistency, focus. Essentially you are unwavering.

Can you imagine digging a well, but every time you dig a few feet, you change your mind and dig somewhere else? You will never find water this way. Only with consistent work in one focused direction will you know if your effort was worth it or not.

Like this you are digging a well within yourself to tap into your ultimate nature. But you keep on changing your mind. At the first sign of friction your stubbornness comes in and you drop your shovel and pout! Is this any way to progress?

You ask about how to be more flexible, but I want you to understand that if stubbornness is truly a practiced quality of yours, then being flexible will not help.

You will make a lot of talk about wanting to be flexible, but you know just as I do that if in a moment you want to be inflexible, then nothing is going to change that. So don’t waste time practicing flexibility.

You must shift your stubbornness so it serves you, then you will naturally be flexible.

The way to make this shift is to decide, right here and now. Use all that stubborn energy you have honed for years, and finally, today, make this one choice:

That your personal growth is more important than your defensiveness.

If you can make this one choice in this moment, then you have the power to stick to it better than most. Not everyone is as practiced as you are at being stubborn. There is power there. Channel it in this way, so that no matter what happens, you make the most out of the situation and grow!

Tell me, if you are unwavering and consistently stubborn about your growth, can any situation in life ever be a hindrance? If you have decided that your growth outweighs your reactions and compulsiveness, then even if you initially react defensively, you are not stuck. You have created a new river for that stubbornness to flow into so it doesn’t cause you to stagnate.

This is really not as complicated as you believe it to be. Simply put, can you avoid change?

Obviously, you cannot. Life will constantly be changing outside of you. But even within you, life is always changing. For as long as you live, you cannot avoid change, even if you sit by yourself like a recluse.

So what the heck is the point in being stubborn in any direction other than one that embraces change? Being stubborn and resisting change which is going to happen anyway? Doesn’t it sound so stupid to try to avoid the inevitable?

So embrace change. Accept that you may still react stubbornly. But decide right now that you want to grow and learn more than you want to be stubborn and stagnate. As you practice, the reactions will lessen, and you moving consciously through situations will increase.

When that happens, your growth will rise exponentially, and you will wonder how you were ever so stubborn in the first place.

With gratitude,

Your True Self

Click here if you have a question to ask Your True Self. All questions are anonymous and may be published unless specified otherwise

On Joy

~ SE ~ Leave a comment

Dear True Self,

You’ve said before the importance of being joyful and how it is generated from within, not dependent on outside circumstances. But sometimes life can be very challenging and it is so hard to be joyful. It feels forced, almost obscene, to be smiling when you’re in pain or hurting. I don’t think joy is an appropriate reaction to when you’re being abused or mistreated. How can being joyful even be possible in times like that?

Sincerely,

Joy Vey

Dear JV,

Joy will never happen as a reaction to an unpleasant situation. This is because reactions by their very nature are situation dependent.

The issue is right now your emotions are not happening when you want them to, nor the way you want them to, isn’t it? If you had the skill to choose how you wanted to be, no matter the situation, the choice is obvious – you would only want the most pleasant experience within.

But you have not developed such a skill. You are not a conscious being. Maybe from time to time you are living more consciously. Perhaps you are growing, and each day living a bit less reactive, a bit less compulsive. But believe me when I say the vast majority of the planet, including you, is not even conscious a fraction of a percent of the day.

Do you disagree? Surely you must be at least 50% conscious? Or maybe you aren’t so arrogant, surely you are at least 1% or 2% conscious?

Let’s say you are walking through a restaurant. Tell me, from the time it takes to walk through the door to sit at your table, how much of your experience is conscious? Are you consciously deciding to listen to the sounds of the kitchen? To smell the food as it cooks? To actively see everything in your vision from the periphery to what’s in front of you? Of course not, your mind is stuck on some past memory or future fantasy.

You are not consciously doing almost any of it. But I guarantee that your body and mind are recording everything. They are experiencing every little disturbance around you and digesting it through your senses. Whether you like it or not, almost all of your experience is unconscious.

The solution is not to somehow become less sensitive. This will not serve you, it will only make you dull. The solution is to be less reactive, and you decide what sticks and what goes through you. That way you will have the capacity to handle the totality of life with exuberance.

So now you find yourself in a pleasant situation. The sun is shining, the birds are singing, the wind is gentle, people smile at you, suddenly you feel so joyful! Just like that your body and mind have digested your world and you react appropriately, with joy.

Then later you find yourself in an unpleasant situation. The clouds are gray, the traffic is roaring, people frown at you, suddenly you feel irritable. In the same way, the body and mind digest your world and you react appropriately, with unpleasantness.

Do you want to keep living like this, a slave to the external? Because if so, then you will be a slave to your compulsiveness, to your reactions. Happiness will never be in your hands, and will always be fleeting.

This is not about faking joy. This is not about forcing happiness. You are right, trying to live like this will not work. It is totally inappropriate.

This is about responding with joy, not reacting with joy. This an important distinction.

If something unpleasant happens, you will almost guaranteed react unpleasantly. You’ve already reacted, you cannot change that. But you can now choose to respond to this reaction with joy.

I’m not saying be happy about what’s happening, to become sadistic and enjoy whatever torturous thing you are going through. This isn’t about what has happened to you. What has happened has happened. You must live out the consequences.

I am saying can you live with these consequences, can you live with this moment the way it is, and be joyful, no matter what way it is? Can you drop your endless criteria for every moment and just be happy to be here, to be alive?

Shift your focus from the external drama to your internal world. Something unpleasant happened, okay. Now will you make the most of it? Accept that it happened, and turn it into the soil needed for growth. Then till that soil joyfully.

Don’t sit there saying “Okay, this will pass and become something good, I just have to get through it…” What is happening is not good or bad. It just is. If you wait for it to pass into something better, that better thing will just pass too and you will repeat this cycle over and over.

Stop paying attention to the detail of the situation. Just look at it like this, and this alone:

It is up to you if you want to grow or not, and up to you if you want to grow joyfully or not.

This is the only choice. But I promise you, one way or another, life will make you grow. You cannot avoid it.

This isn’t just about when you’re miserable. Even when you are experiencing something pleasant, you must recognize that it too is just a reaction and something you must take the reins on.

What I mean by this is that if you are happy when something good happens and unhappy when something bad happens, then both situations are a prison. One is not better than the other just because you felt better in one.

Your reactive behavior is the prison! One’s bars are made of gold, the other iron, but only a fool would place himself in either. You must strive to be free from it.

So when I tell you to practice joy, that life truly is as simple as being happy, what I mean isn’t that you lie to yourself with a stupid grin saying everything is fine when clearly inside you do not feel that way.

What I am saying is that you need to learn how to respond with joy. You need to continually practice responding to both pleasant and unpleasant situations the way you want.

My wish is that life is in your hands and you become free from the bonds of reactivity.

So why joy? If all you must do is practice responding, can’t you choose to respond any way you wish? Won’t that be just as good?

It’s true, you can. If you really want to choose to be angry, or sad, or any other way, that is your freedom. Go ahead and choose it!

But trust me, eventually you will laugh at yourself when you realize that raking yourself over the coals was never necessary, you could have anyway done any situation joyfully.

Practicing responding in spite of your reacting is the real work here. I’m just suggesting you can do so joyfully, because every being deserves to be happy. You are no exception.

With gratitude,

Your True Self

Click here if you have a question to ask Your True Self. All questions are anonymous and may be published unless specified otherwise

On Blame

~ SE ~ 1 Comment

Dear True Self,

I have a hard time taking responsibility for things in my life. I place the blame on others for the circumstances I am in. But sometimes, it feels like if other people just acted differently my situation would be different. What should I do? Should I be accountable even when something isn’t my fault? I feel like that just enables others and isn’t empowering me.

Sincerely,

Same Old Blame Game

Dear SOBG,

There is a difference between assuming responsibility and taking action. Just because you take responsibility doesn’t mean you have to do any external action. It just means that you are choosing how you want yourself to be.

When you take responsibility for the things in your life, it opens up possibilities. Even if something is not your fault, not your doing – it is still best to hold yourself accountable.

The truth is your life is your responsibility, and no one else’s. When I say life I don’t mean the people you know and the job you work. Life is you! You are life! Shifting blame takes it out of your hands.

You can never control the external circumstances 100%. In fact, for the vast majority of situations in your life you will have very little control – over how people act, the setting, the timing, etc.

But the good news is you can learn to manage your internal world. That is 100% in your power. You may not be very good at it, but it is within your capability to learn how to manage yourself in such a way that your life is beautiful.

You see, if you want your actions to have a certain result, so many variables need to move accordingly. But no matter what the result of your actions, if you don’t take responsibility for how you are, then you are just a reactionary human being.

It doesn’t matter what someone did. In your mind, they are at fault. You want to blame them. But it’s never that black and white. If you don’t see your role in the situation, you will never grow. You will never learn. You will only strengthen your ability to blame others and avoid your own self.

Blaming others is a very tempting game to play. It takes all responsibility from you, shifts it to someone else, and since you can’t control the other, you can just walk away and proclaim “It’s all their fault, but what to do?”

It doesn’t help to blame yourself either. This isn’t about blaming anyone. Or when things go well this isn’t about taking credit or assigning credit. This is about moving from a reactionary mindset to a responsive one.

When you react, you are unconscious. Something happens, it triggers you in some way, and you react. But to respond means that you have taken the reigns of your life. No matter what life has given, you can make the choice of how you want to be.

Let’s say someone is helping you move some furniture, and they drop it on your foot. The reactionary mind will jump immediately to pain, anger, blame. But that will serve neither you nor the person who dropped the furniture. It won’t make the pain go away. All it will do is poison your mindset, create a self-talk that is toxic.

But what if in that moment you make a choice to respond? Maybe you still had an initial reaction, but you are able to take a moment and think about how you want to be right now. Yes it hurts. Yes it is unfortunate the person dropped something on your foot. But tell me, when in a moment of pain, would you rather make the experience more pleasant or more unpleasant?

Obviously you would not choose to make the situation worse. Yet that is exactly what blame does. Only when you take responsibility for your own reactions can you turn them into responses.

So you take responsibility for that furniture on your foot. It’s not the other person’s job to make sure you respond in way that’s best for you – only you can do that. This doesn’t mean you are some cowering lamb who says “You didn’t drop that furniture, I did. It’s my fault, I blame myself!”

There is no fault. Something just happened that you didn’t prefer. What will you do with that situation? If you shirk your responsibility and blame, you will satisfy yourself in the short term. But in the long term, you will lose sight of the truth – that your happiness and well-being is a path you constantly walk, not some reward you can claim.

If you want to walk that path, it will not happen unconsciously. So stop blaming others for how your life is in this moment. Your life is your doing. It’s not your blame or their blame. It’s just simply your doing.

Isn’t that fantastic? Your happiness is not in someone else’s hands! All you have to do is take responsibility for how you are in this moment, and the freedom to act in your best interest will become available.

This is why blame is pointless – not because of some morality of who is right and who is wrong. That kind of thinking will only bring you surface level satisfaction. If you want life to flourish for you, take responsibility for everything that happens. Blame only robs you of the freedom to live the best life possible.

With gratitude,

Your True Self

Click here if you have a question to ask Your True Self. All questions are anonymous and may be published unless specified otherwise.