Wednesday, July 20, 2016

The Art of Loving Yourself

The Art of Loving Yourself

I understand that my love for myself is the greatest possession I will ever have.
Love for my self comes into being only when I accept and experience my feelings as they are, at this very moment, both pleasant and unpleasant. As I welcome my painful self, it heals. Loving myself provides the power for transformation.

The Acceptance of Feelings
The acceptance of joy seems natural, but may not be clear why we should accept anger or fear. Negative feelings like these are exactly what we want to avoid. We normally think of negative feelings as preventing or interfering with happiness.
We all have some concept of ourselves as we would like to be – without certain faults, limitations, or emotional “problems”. We fight these conditions, expecting to be happier if we could only get rid of the negative aspects of ourselves, but the truth is that by not accepting, we perpetuate negativity instead of releasing it. Accepting is a difficult concept to grasp, because we have been trained to resist and fight what we don’t like.
We create pain through resistance and non-acceptance. To go beyond pain, and to enjoy wholeness, we must learn to integrate those parts of life we find painful and would like to avoid. Once integrated, they are no longer painful, instead, they add new dimensions to our existence. Life becomes richer, resulting in real, not pseudo, spiritual and material prosperity consciousness. The creative is allowed to manifest. Happiness becomes unconditional. We become artists of life, and realize that what we were resisting was really inside ourselves, not in the outside world. 

When I accept my self and my feelings as they are, I become whole. I am no longer split-fighting or condemning part of myself.
The power of self-acceptance and self-love builds within me. I acquire the ability to heal myself and the conditions of my life.
I awaken the power for transformation.
Accepting means opening to your feelings…

Acceptance doesn’t mean automatic approval of any event, whether an inner feeling or the interaction with another person or happening in the outside world. It means rather that we are open to the experience of the event. We may retain our intellectual discrimination, preferring that something be different from the way it is now manifesting; however, we do not allow our preference interfere with the experience. This is possible because experience takes place on a feeling level, not an intellectual level. As we open ourselves to the full experience of something on the feeling level, we accept it.
Feelings are our connection to life; without them we are hollow, stale, and cut off from true fulfillment. Self-blocking occurs on the feeling level. The feeling level is where we are most unconscious

Working on yourself is not constantly thinking about yourself…

Or your motives, or being thoughtfully introspective, or trying to control yourself and do better, or trying to be something you are not. Using the mind in this manner is self-defeating. We need to learn to sense “what is” through the feeling center, rather than project “what I expect” through the thinking center.

Experiences take place in the moment…

Being in the moment is a mystical perspective. Witness consciousness is activated, and we function on a new and higher plane that results in a sense of well-being and euphoria as well as calling into play transpersonal powers that have been blocked by the personal ego. By accepting we go beyond. We reach the spiritual through the mundane. We discover the spiritual in the mundane.
It is essential to learn how to open up on the feeling level: Processing consists of four steps, each step corresponding to a function of our individuality. The steps are taking to achieve integration of any event. The event can be an inner feeling or emotion, or a happening in the external world.

The Steps of Integrative Processing

1- Awareness                         Intellectual: Knowing
2- Acceptance                                    Mental: Thinking
3- Direct Experience             Body: Feeling

4- Transformation                Spiritual: Transcending

Empathic Listening

Communication Discussion Group

Listening

Listening is the pivotal skill we need to develop if we want to create a world of peace, health and love around and within us.
Real listening involves an attitude of total involvement with the person talking to us; entering the private perceptual world of the other and becoming thoroughly at home in it. It requires being sensitive, moment by moment, to the changing felt meaning which flow in this other person, to the fear or rage or tenderness or confusion or whatever that he or she is experiencing. It means temporarily living in the other’s life, moving about in it delicately without making judgments, living aside all our prejudices, views, and preconceptions, when at the same time being in touch with how this other’s story and emotions are impacting in our body-mind. In this way we listen out and within, constantly attending to the other person’s words, emotions, body language, incongruences, and mental constructions, and we check constantly how this is impacting us by being aware of our feelings, body sensations, strong emotions and mental chatter.

Empathy

Empathy is the quality used as we listen to other’s story as if “we are in their shoe”. Empathic listening centers on the kind of attending, observing, and listening- the kind of “being with”- needed to develop an understanding of people and their worlds.  Such empathic listening is selfless because we must put aside our own concerns to be fully with others.


Sunday, May 29, 2016

JUMPING MOUSE The Role of the Raccoon , the Guide


As soon as the raccoon completes his task of guiding Jeremy to the River, he leaves quietly, unnoticed. He will return to the edge of Mouse Village and await the next person who needs a guide to the River.
Raccoons are midwives who assist in the birth of consciousness. Although the role of the midwife is critical, the focus is the birth, not the midwife. Once the birth process is complete, the midwife is often forgotten. As soon as the raccoon safely delivers Jeremy to the River, he appropriately averted Jeremy’s attention away from himself and his role as a guide and directed attention, instead, toward the next phase in the mouse’s journey. The raccoon’s timing was impeccable. He knew when his task with Jeremy was complete. He sensed when to introduce Jeremy to the frog and when to slip away unobtrusively.
All animals, including raccoons, represent the instinctual self. Meeting with the raccoon was also an indication that the little mouse was coming face-to face with his own instinctual self and was beginning to trust inner impulses.
Raccoons have no need for control, no need for adulation, and no attachment to outcome.
No limit is placed on the number of Raccoons we can have in our journey. And our Raccoons need not only be people. Raccoons can be turning-point experiences that can appear in any number of forms. A book, for example, can appear at a critical juncture and serve as a guide to the next stage of our journey. But no matter how many Raccoons we may have, the experience with our first Raccoon is always a cherished memory.

Activity

Pause a moment and reflect on a significant Raccoon in your life. Who was that person and /or experience waiting on your path once you left Mouse Village?


In what way did that Raccoon guide you into the next phase of your journey?

 Write you reflections down and then can share them with us in our next session.

Tuesday, May 17, 2016

Jumping Mouse- The River of Life


An interesting point in our story is that the mouse went to a river. If Jeremy had gone to a mountain instead of a river, her would have began to climb, for mice can maneuver in earth. But mice can't manage in water. His mouse self was rendered helpless before something he was unable to manipulate and master. He could only surrender to the song of the river and listen to its voices, which together make up the music of life.
When we live in Mouse Village, our identity is determined by who and what others tell us we are. Once we look in the river, we no longer need to depend exclusively on the opinion of others for self-knowledge. The River of Life gives us a more profound way of knowing ourselves. The River, which is life, is a mirror. The people, the situations, the symbols in our life merely reflect inner aspects of self. The mirrors in our outer world reveal messages we would otherwise not be able to hear.
When we look in the River of Life, we begin to see our inner selves. We begin to take responsibility for our underlying issues which determine why we attract certain people and particular situations in our lives. In time, we can detect our weaknesses, the aspects of self we are most afraid of, reflected in life around us. We see our greatest strengths mirrored and face those fears as well. What would happen if we claimed all our power? What would happen if we allowed ourselves to be all that we are? What would happen if we did not undermine or sabotage ourselves?
When we listen attentively to the many voices of the River, as did Jeremy, in time we may discover the oneness in it all and realise that the voices in the River belong to each other. We no longer distinguish the merry voice from the weeping voice, or the childish voice from the manly voice, or the lament of those who yearn from the laughter of the wise. All the voices are interwoven and interlocked, entwined in a thousand ways. All of them together are the world.
We enter that transcendent state of oneness, described so poetically by Herman Hesse in Siddhartha:

"When he listened to this river... to this song of a thousand voices, when he did not listen to the sorrow or laughter, when he did not bind his soul to any one particular voice and absorb it in himself, but heard them all, the whole, the unity; then the great song of a thousand voices consisted  of one word: Om- perfection."