How Do You Suck?

I was talking with a good friend last night, and she mentioned that I was a great programmer. I found that a little surprising, as despite the unlikeliness of a lot of what I achieve, I don't generally think of myself in this way.

pic by striatic

I've thought a lot more deeply about this since, and I've realised a few things - that apply to any area of skill.

People who are not-so-good in any area tend to look down the tree at those below them on the skill ladder - "Look! I'm better than all those people!"

People who are good in any area tend to look up the tree "See how much more I have to learn!"

This is also part of a natural continuum (great word!) of learning:

1. unconscious incompetence (you don't realise you suck)
2. conscious incompetence (you realise you suck)
3. unconscious competence (you don't realise you don't suck as much as you thought you did)
4. conscious competence (you know you don't suck - and why!)

For example, in Aikido I'm somewhere between step 2 & 3. I'm aware of how much I suck (the more deeply you learn, the more you can see that needs improvement) - but I don't realise that I don't suck in general (and am always a little surprised when someone points this out). This isn't a negative self view, as much as a genuine desire to improve & a focus on this, rather than comparison with others.

Interestingly, I can very concretely remember a time when I genuinely believed I was awesome at Aikido. How wrong I was (in hindsight)!! *laugh*

The real trap, of course, is being aware of the dangers & massive difference between stage 1 & 3. Unwarranted ego-centricism is, after all, known as hubris, & we all know how dangerous the ego is, right kids?

Are You In Love With Your Pain?

A couple of years ago, when I first discovered EFT, it changed my life so much, so quickly, I immediately went around telling everyone I knew about it (Yes yes, I realise now how dopey & threatening this kind of behaviour is, I was just super excited)

I remember one conversation particularly vividly. Telling a friend with dyslexia that she could get rid of it, if she wanted.

Know what happened? She got angry. Yes, angry. Surprised the hell out of me.

"Huh!" I remember thinking, "I guess being dyslexic is just really important to her."

Now here's the funny part of the story. Remember that old saying "We hate most in others what we despise in ourselves?".

I was watching this incredibly informative video by Rozalind Gruben this morning, on Social & Emotional Aspects of Eating (45 mins in 5 chunks, but definitely worth finding time for). She talks about the abandonment & disapproval that we experience as children - as part of the way we're culturally raised. About how we start to see ourselves as flawed, & identify with what we're told by the people around us.

.. and then it hit me

.

I've spent my life - or at least, as much of it as I can remember - defining myself by my pain. My struggle. My misery. (Note the use of 'My' - a good sign it's my ego talking)

Ironically, my spiritual journey has been all about struggling to free myself from this self-imposed identity - that I'm miserable, in pain & suffering. Although I have been moving towards less struggle, less misery & less pain, it's been damn hard work.

Yes, I'm laughing as I write this. It's all so obvious now!

And yes, it's been a struggle. Every key area of my life has been difficult.

Well this is simply because I've wanted it this way. I've been in love with it. It's been a part of who I am. Yes, my decision. Maybe not consciously, but still, my choice.

The wonderful thing is that even just realising this has enabled me to change it. I was doing some tapping (EFT) this morning, and everytime I went to tap on something, part of my brain just went "Peh, ok, that's gone." - before I could even get started.

That struggle, that pain, doesn't have to be part of who I am any more. I chose it for years, but, well, now I choose differently.

Do We Ever Really Do Anything New?

Or is it all just patterns, repeating over and over?

As you may be aware, I recently went through a breakup. As I've been processing this, I've started to see, very clearly, how little of what happened with the ex was actually about her.

I saw:

• Patterns where she behaved identically to several different earlier relationships (in different ways) - Of course, this is me drawing this into my life so I can learn, it's really nothing to do with her specifically at all.
• Two different patterns from my father to me (ie, I was repeating his patterning with me, with her)

Now, thankfully, I can go in (with EFT, or whatever) and stop those patterns - by going back to the earliest one I can think of, and then working forward through the recurrences, healing each one. This is, unsurprisingly, what I've done.

However, combined with recent realisations on ancestors and how those patterns are passed down, I have to wonder - how many of these patterns are actually mine? Are they ALL just passed down from previous generations (or perhaps previous lives)? Am I living anything new at all?

I mean, sure, I could eat toast with peanut butter & vegemite. Never done that before (Actually, I lie. As a kid I ate a lot of weird stuff with peanut butter).

But in terms of emotional interactions. Negative events in my life. All these things seem to be just massive loops.

I guess this is what the ancients talked about in terms of unwinding karma. You'll keep repeating everything that has come before until you learn the lessons required, or heal the events away.

The other thing to watch that is very interesting is that as those patterns are healed, you can visibly see those people who might cause that kind of pain in your life naturally being pushed away from you. Very organic, very "coincidental", very "well, it just happened". Once the patterning is healed the associated pain does in a very real sense simply stop recurring in your life. And yes, this is exactly why I broke up with my ex. Even more interesting is seeing how different the new people that come into your life now become. It is immediately obvious that they simply aren't built to create those sorts of negative events (although, of course, they're quite capable of creating any unresolved pain patterns).

Highly amusingly, if you're aggressively sorting through things (as I have been), you can watch this happen in realtime. Meet someone on Monday, event occurs on Wednesday, realise pattern & heal it Wednesday night, and they're gone (along with any recurrence of that pattern, ever) on Thursday.

If all this is true, then theoretically at least, I should have kids, so they can benefit from this - ie, by passing less junk down the ancestral tree. Maybe just for now I'll have some theoretical kids instead.

The Upside to Abusing Cacao

Last night about 9pm I had a fruit salad. It was tasty. What wasn't so clever was putting raw chocolate sauce on it (cacao powder, coconut oil, raw honey).

I went to sleep around 1-1:30ish. At 3:30 I woke up, wide awake, and could NOT get back to sleep.

Ok, so cacao late at night = bad idea. I'll remember that. I've now been awake for 20 odd hours, and it doesn't show signs of abating.

One upside though, I got to watch the sunrise. Because of the incredible weather patterns over Melbourne - a combination of sea air, interesting landmass curvature, mountains and many thousand miles of desert air, all combining in one place - I got to see all this in the space of about an hour (click each pic for a bigger version):

And oddly, after all that, it was actually quite a cloudy day. You can see this starting in the last shot. Amazing.

I never get tired of watching nature at play.

Healing Your Dreamtime

Australian Aboriginals have a concept they call "Dreamtime" (or, more accurately "The Dreaming"). Very loosely speaking, this is the infinite spiritual cycle that parallels our reality, influencing & creating it. It created the world we live in, and continues to live on, in the present & the future.

Now, what's even more interesting is the reversal they have from how we view reality. In the west we believe that our waking life is our "real" (ie, objective) reality, whereas our dreaming life is only subjective. Aboriginals believe it's the other way around. The Dreaming is what's objective, and this experience we're living in is only the subjective reflection of that.

A mural thought used to teach Aboriginal children about dreamtime. Pic by Damian White

Of course, there's an enormous difference between the beliefs of the oldest living culture on the planet & us as individuals, however, let's push ahead regardless & see what we can find. Here's a dream I had yesterday:

I'm hanging out with friends, in a movie theatre. Before the show starts there's a comedian, a magician. He's giving out CDs. He gives them to the row in front, then when he gets to my row, he does a sleight-of-hand trick to not-give them to me, and my friends. He then continues with the row behind, giving them out, and across the aisle. Then I notice they're MY CD's he's giving out. A friend comes back to sit down, and her face is covered in some kind of drug or other (I have no idea). She has so much that she doesn't care she's covered in it. Then we all go out driving.

So we end up out in the country. I muck about a bit, then end up on the phone with a good friend of mine from London. She's complaining that I'm not working. There are spiders & very bizarre, but large, insects all over the floor. Another call comes in. It's my Mum, & she wants to talk to my brother. They talk, then Mum hangs up, which somehow cuts me off from my friend. I ask my brother about it, but he doesn't really know what's going on.

Just for the hell of it, let's segue out of that, and pretend we didn't see all the bolded bits.

Now, let's also pretend, for the sake of the discussion, that there is some relationship between our dreaming life & our waking life.

There are many obvious pointers to this being true, of course. Our dreams often include people we know (friends, family), situations in our awareness while waking (stress at work, relationship problems, etc), and the visual metaphors commonly used have been interpreted for thousands of years to find satisfactorily explanatory parallels in our waking life.

It's a fairly common, although recent, psychological understanding that dreams are our brain's way of "unwinding". Chaotic signals occur in various bits of the brain, which is then interpreted into the images that we "see". Loosely translated, it's our brain "talking to us" using pictures.

Ok, so we accept that our dreaming life is (in whatever way) a reflection of our waking lives. Now what?

Well, if dreams are our brain's way of talking to us, why not use them to talk back?

Why not use that dreamtime to really, genuinely, just like the Aboriginals believe, affect our waking experience?

So, you know, I've been doing this.

Whenever I wake from a particularly vivid dream, I immediately heal (I use tapping & a few other things, but anything would do the trick) on anything that I felt strong emotion about. Doesn't matter what the emotion is. Doesn't matter how ludicrous the imagery. I don't interpret anything. I'm talking back to my brain (maybe), or healing the dreamtime (maybe), but either way, I use exactly the imagery that's been provided to me.

I deliberately pretend that whatever I've dreamt is real. I relive it, feel it, as strongly as I can, and heal while doing so.

So, in the above dream, all the bits in bold had strong emotions (some identifiable, some not) attached, so I healed on them. Pretty obviously, there's feeling of deprivation, loss, self-recrimination, and so on - and, of course, similarly obvious parallels with those emotions in my own waking life.

Much less obviously, all the bits that are bold cleared things. A lot of them. I still really have no idea what was healed, but it was definitely many, many things. Much of it lead spontaneously to much deeper issues I wasn't aware of. More interestingly, all of it was surprising. I wasn't aware that I was even thinking about any of this while I was awake.

Now that I've healed I can definitely see, in hindsight, those thoughts & feelings I was having that I no longer am, that directly relate to things I healed on. Plus, of course, there's a bunch of other stuff that I know has gone that I simply can't put into words.

I healed my dreamtime, and my waking life has changed, noticeably, significantly.

I still haven't answered the question, "Which is more real, dreamtime or waking life?" or even "Which is the objective, which the subjective?" Maybe I never will, but one thing I know for sure, those Aboriginals are definitely onto something. Even better, we don't have to know or even care which is which to use it as a tool to significantly improve our lives, both dreaming and waking.

I'll tell you something else for free. Every single time I've healed a dream's imagery, that dream has never come back.

The Importance Of Speech

"If you propose to speak, always ask yourself, is it true, is it necessary, is it kind?"
-- Buddha

I heard this quote the other day (thanks @tinybuddha), and it hit like a ton of bricks.

pic by Trove Designs

When I was growing up, I was always told "If you haven't got anything nice to say, don't say anything at all". Conceptually this is the same thing, except that it's negatively framed and a little dictatorial in tone - I guess it's not surprising my younger self rebelled! Still, I guess this is the point where I say "Yes Mum, you were right. Again. I love you Mum."

Buddha provides a pretty simple checklist. Makes it easy to remember.

1. True? Yes/No.
2. Necessary? Yes/No.
3. Kind? Yes/No.

I thought about this a bit deeper & I realised, speech is one level, but what's behind speech?

Thought.

Couldn't the same thing apply here? If you're going to think anything, ensure it is True, Necessary & Kind.

Of course, the vast majority of thoughts are simply self-speech - talking to or about ourselves. We're the cruelest & least forgiving toward ourselves, so if anything this self-speech, thought, is far, far more important to consider.

So, being the extremist that I am, I tapped those two things in - both speech & thought. Because it's tapping IN a positive, instead of tapping OUT a negative, it's worth having a few goes to clear out all the blocks.. but already I'm feeling my attitudes - towards those around me - and myself - softening.

It's a path well worth travelling, no matter how few or how those steps are taken.

Thar's Gold In Them Thar Street

I saw this today:

Yep, a glorious rainbow! Well, that's one end of it. But take a gander at the other end:

Have a look at that!! The end of the rainbow is in front of the building. This means, of course, that there's a pot o' gold somewhere in my street!

Woohoo!

Amusingly, there's already a giant hole in the ground right where this ends - they're digging foundations for a new skyscraper.

.. or at least, that's what they say. I reckon they're just trying to beat me to the gold. Me gold! Me gold! Arrr! (etc)

So, since it's a bit of a silly day, have this too (Captain Vegetable):

You Are Responsible For Your Parents (.. And Their Parents..)

Who cares who's right about Nature vs Nurture? The bottom line is - our parents affect us.

Genetically, it's pretty obvious. Your parents are tall? You play basketball. They're black? It's a pretty safe bet (although not 100%, amusingly enough) that you are too, and so on.

Emotionally (or environmentally/sociologically), it's a little more complex.

And, if you stop to think about it - given that your parents also pass on genetic proclivities to our brains - intelligence, disposition, behaviours, and so on, it's a complicated mess we have to try and unravel.

After all, who really is in control of our lives? Us, or them?

But wait, there's more. Where did they get their lives from? Well, their parents, of course, and so on back up the tree.

So, in summary: Our lives are (at least initially) a result of our ancestors.

Do we want to take back control? Do we want to make choices, and not just be driven by this history? Do we actually want complete free will to lead the life we want to?

Well, if so, we're going to have to take responsibility. A lot of it.

Not just for ourselves, but also for our parents. Not for their lives (after all, that's their job), but for the influence they've had, and continue to have, on us.

image by M Bowman

One of the things that has become abundantly clear to me is how often issues I'm trying to heal in myself really aren't mine. I've learned them, or had them passed on, from one or other (or both) of my parents (and back in time to them).

Now, sure, you can heal everything that's happened in your life - but a lot of times it ends up like that old tale of heroically fishing bodies out of a river - what you really need to do is go upstream & find who's throwing them in.

I'll give you an example.

One thing I've worked on a bit is a definite need for approval. Particularly from the women in my life. This has been noticeable, and, on occasion, actually driven women I've cared about away. *ouch* Now, I took this to be because when I was growing up, I never felt like my mother loved me - the important point here being, how I felt, not how she actually behaved or whether she did or not. Once I had healed, I was able to see that of course she loved me - or, as she put it when I talked to her about it later "Are you crazy? You're my first born son!!"

However, this need for approval, while lessened, hadn't completely disappeared. Hmm, interesting. What to do, what to do?

Then, this week, I heard a very interesting story. My grandmother's mother (on my Mum's side), well, her mother was very young when she had her, so she was raised by her grandmother, not her mother. Keeping up? My great-grandmother was raised by my great-great-great-grandmother. Yep, it's a pretty great story alright. Ha ha, I'm here all week, try the veal.

Imagine that though. The girl you think is your sister is actually your mother. The woman you think is your mother is actually your grandmother. Hmm. Would you ever actually truly know a mother's love? Would you feel like something was missing from your life? I tell you, that's crazy.

Of course, I heard this, a big lightbulb went off in my head, and I immediately went and healed on this. How? As if I was my great-grandmother. Why? Because part of me is. Genetically, big duh there. But more than that. I believe energetically a lot of stuff is passed down. But whether you believe that or not, it's hard to argue against habits & beliefs being passed down from mother to daughter after a significant life event like that.

I've chosen to do similar things with every significant event I've heard about - from my parents & back up the tree. I'm not healing them specifically, what I am doing is healing their effect over me. I'm regaining control over my life. I'm removing the echoes from older generations, and replacing them with conscious choices about exactly the life I choose to live.

If or when I have kids, I'd be pleased if they did exactly the same thing about me - although yes, I'm aware of both the likelihood of rebellion, and the recursive irony of such a desire - I want them to choose to make the same choice I did to make their own choices to.. uhh.. oh forget it!

Regardless, the bottom line is this: If we truly want 100% freedom within our lives, it's necessary to not only consider our immediate history, but that of our parents and ancestors too.

How To Kick A Bad Habit In 2 Minutes

So here's a quick trick I learned recently.

It's using Neuro Linguistic Programming. But don't worry about that, it's super simple.

I was shown this in terms of breaking bad shopping habits, but I figured, since I'm trying out a couple of weeks of 100% raw, why not use it on food places around town that I've developed emotional affection for, but that aren't necessarily the healthiest for me, if-you-know-what-I-mean.

So, here's the drill:

1. Think of the habit you're trying to kick. Get really excited about it. As you do, squeeze your left thumb & fore finger together.
2. Repeat 1 with as many similar habits as you can. Eg, I just went around all the food places I wanted to stop lusting after. Do this until simply squeezing your fingers together brings up the desire.
3. Now, think of something you would never buy, no matter what. Something that fills you with utter disgust. The more outraged and digusted you are the better.
4. Make this disgusting image as big as possible in your mind, so it completely overwhelms you (yeah, puke! puke!). Then, as it maxes out, squeeze your left thumb & forefinger together tightly.

Do this process as many times as you like, until the very thought of the things you craved before leaves you with a feeling of discomfort.

Total time it took me? Oh, about 2 minutes. So far, in the three days since I did this, I haven't had a single positive thought towards any of these places. In fact, I find it difficult to even think about them. My brain just isn't interested.

Nifty!

Beauty At Dusk

Winter is finally thawing into spring, the days are slowly getting brighter. It's finally warm enough to venture onto the balcony at dusk.

This is what beckoned to me:

(click for larger version)

From here I get a three hundred degree view of this every evening. Nothing quite like being overwhelmed by the splendour of nature.

Ten minutes alone with that & a glass of fresh orange juice and it's easy to believe that all is well with the world. That tomorrow can only be more beautiful, wondrous and awe-inspiring than today.

Breaking Up Is So... Easy To Do?

I've just broken up from a two & a bit year relationship.

Normally these things are incredibly painful. This time was very different though, so I'd like to talk about it a little.

I've had a few serious relationships in this life, so I've got a pretty good handle on how these things generally go for me:

• Three to six months of random unprovoked crying & misery
• Lots of various forms of self destructive behaviour (alcohol, mostly)
• Depression & general feelings of worthlessness, loneliness

This time though, ohhhh, completely different.

Very little pain, almost no tears, no depression, no self-destruction (unless you count a couple of cups of coffee). Aloneness, obviously, but no loneliness.

What's changed? Well, here's what I did (and continue to do):

• Every time I've thought about my ex, I've released on the thought
• Every time emotions (even ones I can't specifically pinpoint) have become overwhelming, I've tapped them out.

I admit this is, uhh, a little aggressive, but there are two ways you can do any breakup - short & sharp, or long & drawn out. I choose the former.

I've talked about releasing before (here), but to recap: I imagine the thought or feeling inside me, then just let it go. I imagine it floating up out of me. This is something I got to practice a lot with the juice feast I was on since it's also super useful for food cravings. In terms of repetitive thought patterns, this kills them dead. A lot of the time there would be a sudden rush of emotion, some very brief (5-10 seconds of) crying, and then gone. It's the hanging on to pain that amplifies it, with this it disappears before it can grow into something worse.

In terms of the tapping (EFT - lots more on my site there), a lot of times I didn't even tap on anything specific - I just tapped while letting my mind churn away. This just helped even out my energy field (and hence emotions), and calm everything the hell down.

After all, where does most of the pain of a breakup come from?

1. Emotional trauma (from things said & done)
2. Negative memories
3. Self-inflicted repetitive thought patterns (obsessing over the past)

If you get rid of those, what's left?

Well, the acid test, as always, is how things are when you next see the ex. And the proof? I spent a day with her this week, and the only negative thing that occurred was me saying a few stupid nasty things, from a habit I had left over of wanting those who've caused me pain to suffer. Once I realised what was happening I tapped it the hell out, but really, that was it. And, unsurprisingly, once I'd tapped out the habit, it disappeared instantly & everything was fine between us. Yes, I explained & apologised, of course.

And the rest of the day? I was calm as a hindu cow. Inside & out. No negative thoughts, no negative emotions, nothing. After she'd left, I cried for half an hour - realising I was going to miss her, but some tapping & just releasing all the emotion that came up, and I felt great again.

Now, to be fair, there are a couple of situations I can think of that I'm not sure how I would deal with yet:

1. Finding out that I'd been lied to about something serious, for example, that she'd slept with someone else while we were involved (or very shortly after)
2. When she gets involved with someone new

But really, I suspect these will involve maybe five minutes of tapping each, and they'll be gone too. So, frankly, if they are going to happen, the sooner the better.

What's a good litmus test going forward? We've been broken up for a week or two now, and I only think about her maybe 20-30 times a day - this is with continued contact. Given how closely involved we were (24 hours a day for 2 years - living & working together), I probably would have thought about her at least every 5 minutes - particularly once you include the many fleeting thoughts that spin through our minds (how often do you think aboutt someone while you're talking to them?) .. So once every half an hour or so (if that) is a huge step forward.

I'll continue releasing & healing. I'm damn sure things will drop away to nothing, or near nothing, very, very quickly.

Now, this doesn't mean I'm ready to jump back on the horse (uhh, so to speak) just yet. It is still important for me to re-ground, re-centre & get comfortable with who I am as an individual again. However, in terms of speedy & painless resolutions, this has surprised the hell out of me.

I don't want to hide from the world. I feel calm & positive about myself, my future.. and my ex. It's far better than I ever could have imagined. It's a whole new way of being.