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Why Saying Yes Will Get You Where You Want To Be
One week before Louise and I were due to start writing Life Loves You, I received an e-mail from the author Sandy Newbigging asking me to write a foreword for his book Mind Calm. I felt honored to be asked, but I thought I didn’t have the time and needed to keep my focus on this book. I e-mailed Sandy to say my answer would have to be no, but somehow I ended up saying yes. It wasn’t an I-should yes, or an I-must yes, or even a be-kind yes. It was a truthful yes. Or what I call my Big Yes—with a capital Y.
Another name for this Yes is my Sacred Yes. I sense this Yes in my belly (gut instinct), I feel it in my heart, and I hear it in my head. When it shows up, I feel like I have almost no choice whether to follow it. This is the “Yes” that simply feels true. To go against it would be inauthentic. Continue Reading
1. Is this love or fear?
The basic fear “I am not loveable” is the primary cause of all suffering. When you identify with this fear, it causes many tears to fall. The fear is not true, but if you believe it, you will turn away from yourself. Feeling unloveable causes you to reject your eternal loveliness. Instead, you put on an act that takes the place of your true self in the hope that this will trick people into loving you. However, because you have rejected yourself, you are afraid that everyone else will reject you, too, especially when they get to know the truth about you.
When you believe “I am not loveable,” it causes you to contract inside, to defend yourself, and to behave in unloving ways that add to your pain. You also experience pain when fear appears to triumph over love: for example, when it looks like love is not present, that love changes, that love is being withheld, that love is not enough, and that love dies. In deep pain, the fear is that love has forsaken you. In other words, love has rejected you, too. This is your private hell. The temptation here is to reject love. However, when you stop loving, it hurts you even more. Only by loving can you begin to face the fear, heal the pain, and walk out of hell.
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How to Break Free of This Cycle
One of the themes I’ve been exploring in my inner child counseling is the pressure I put on myself when I was young to be “a good little boy.”
Early on, I worked out that good little boys didn’t get shouted at, didn’t get hit, and didn’t get into trouble. I hoped that if I was always good and never bad, my parents would never say to me, “We are so disappointed in you.” I hated it when they said that.
However, being good full-time is hard work. You have to suppress a lot of feelings. You can’t always speak the truth. Sometimes you have to lie. And that feels bad.
A Battle No One Can Win
Trying to be a “good little boy” is difficult for lots of reasons. For starters, adults have different versions of what good is. Your mum and your dad might not agree on what good is. Your grandparents probably don’t agree with what your parents think. Your teachers have their own ideas—and so too do your friends. And everyone changes his or her mind all the time anyway, and that just makes you mad. You can’t win. It’s so unfair. But you tell yourself that you mustn’t say anything because—of course—that’s not “good.” Continue Reading
How Our Unconscious Fear of Happiness Sabotages Our Efforts to Find Peace
I first became aware of the fear of happiness in my one-to-one psychotherapy private practice, where I experienced three repeating patterns with clients-patterns that my training had in no way prepared me for.
Pattern #1: We Stop Just Before We Get Started
In the first pattern, I would help clients address a particular fear or problem to the point of letting go of fear. Then, when I was convinced they were now ready to let go of their pain and be happy, they would Continue Reading
Learn How to Score Yourself and Transform Your Relationship with Yourself and Everyone
“We don’t need to know how to forgive. All we need is to be willing to forgive,” says Louise. Saying yes to forgiveness is the first step. When you affirm I say yes to forgiveness, it activates something in you, and healing begins. Your willingness orchestrates the healing and arranges for you to meet the right people and find the necessary help along the way. As you keep on saying yes to forgiveness, every step of the way, your healing journey takes you from the past into the present and to an entirely new future.
This spiritual practice is called The Forgiveness Scale. This practice helps you cultivate the necessary willingness to experience the blessings of total forgiveness. The Forgiveness Scale is based on a scale of 0 to 100 percent. You begin by choosing a person to focus on. You can choose yourself, which is always a good idea. Or you can choose anyone else, even someone with whom you have only a slight grievance. You’ll notice there isn’t anyone in your life that you don’t have a bit of a grievance with.
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In the pursuit of happiness, there is a single misperception: the belief that your source of happiness is outside you.
All your pain comes from the belief that your source of happiness is outside you. This little fear that happiness is not inside of you already is what feeds your mental junk, your learned unworthiness, and your “not good enough” stuff. Notice how all your thoughts of fear and lack are reversed the moment you accept that every piece of universal joy rests already in your heart. Feel this, now.
Every culture has its sacred sites and holy meeting grounds. Thousands of people every day travel in pilgrimage to far off places like Lourdes, the Great Pyramids, Ayers Rock, the Grand Canyon, Mount Shasta, Stonehenge, Mount Athos, and the Himalayas. These places hold sacred energy, they say. And yet, nowhere is more sacred than the human heart—home of your Unconditioned Self.
You are sacred ground. Do you see this?
Your two physical eyes see bits of things. They see bits of the color spectrum, bits of the Continue Reading