si dawson

experiments in self-improvement

Category: healing

September 12, 2008

How To Get What You Want In Relationships (But Not What You Asked For)

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to how we attract people into our lives – who we end up in relationships with, and so on. This applies both to intimate relationships, and more importantly friendships (since we generally have far more & are less discriminating with friends than lovers)

It’s pretty obvious (in hindsight) that while a bunch of factors determine our partners – very few of these are actually at the conscious level. You want a guy who treats you well, and yet somehow always end up with angry drunks? Huh?

Here are some of the reasons why this sort of thing happens:

Your Patterns
If you look back over all your relationships, what recurring themes can you see? I don’t mean obvious things like age difference, or hair colour.

I mean things like – were you meeting damaged people & trying to fix them? Were you with people who supported you as much as you supported them, or was it all one sided? Did they respect you? Do you often find yourself in relationships with people that were selfish or self-centred? That have no money themselves but lots of ideas how to spend yours? People that are angry? Rude to waiters? Lazy?

The problem is – whether you’re aware of these patterns or not, whatever it is inside you that is creating them will continue to create them – at least, until you heal the patterns or otherwise clear them out.

For example, I know that until very recently I’ve had a very deep need for approval (Thanks, great-great-great grandma! Fortunately this is sorted now). As such, I’ve regularly got in relationships with “broken” people – not bad people per se, just those with a lot of issues I could then help them with. As I help them, they’re grateful, and voila, my need for approval is fulfilled.

Now, I saw this vividly in my very first relationship – with a suicidal bulemic – and swore I’d never do it again. At a conscious level, I chose to stay away from these situations, and yet – they continued to echo through my life regardless. Despite my best conscious attention, I’ve been involved with a violent alcoholic, an anorexic, sociopathic liars & many serious abuse victims. Most interestingly, none of these attributes were visible in the early stages of the relatonships. There was no way I would know until it was too late.

At some level, I was drawing these situations to myself, despite my best (conscious) intentions.

Their Patterns
There are two people in every relationship (well, ok, excluding polyamory), so it’s worth remembering that any characteristics you have will attract people looking for those attributes.

Think about it this way – whatever you dislike most about yourself? There will be people who are drawn to that (for many reasons). You will be part of completing their deepest desires – even if it’s a part of yourself you don’t particularly want to be sharing with anyone.

Your Fears
One of the most maddening aspects of life is that you not only attract things that you desire, but also things you hate, or fear.

It breaks down like this – anything you place attention on – whether positive or negative – is drawn to you. Yeah yeah, law of attraction, etc etc.

So how does this pan out in relationships? Well, if you have (as I have for years) a fear of being used for your dosh? Sooner or later (or worse – very often) you’re going to end up with someone who is mostly there for the bling. Have a deep fear of jealousy – you’re going to end up with people who make you jealous. Trust me on this – like crazy. Afraid of being cheated on? Your partners will cheat on you. Afraid you might be a loser? You’ll attract people who believe you really are.

And so it goes.

relationship.jpg
pic by McNeny

What To Do About All This
This could get frustratingly depressing very quickly. Hold your hankies though! There is, as always, good news!

The first is to be aware that you always have choice. With the exception of family, every single person in your life is there because you (at some point) chose them to be there. So, you can also choose for them not to be.

It’s also important to realise that unless you’re VERY careful (on an energetic level) every person you interact with will affect you, at some point. Your friends that you see all the time? They’re going to have a huge, cumulative effect on your life. Your boyfriend gets angry at the traffic? You’re going to end up road raging along with him.

So, it’s worth thinking about who you want near you. It’s an important decision, and needs to be made for every significant relationship you have (not just your intimate partners)

Secondly, once you figure out the worst of the patterns, merely being aware of them will help you avoid the most egregious examples. While I may have not have successfully avoided girls with eating disorders, that was the last time I spent time with anyone (friend or partner) who was aggressively suicidal. These are small but important steps that will still save you a world of hurt.

Thirdly, by seeing the patterns, you’ll be able to track them back & heal them. There are tons of tools for doing this of course (heh, I feel like I’m always saying that – but I do keep discovering more of them every week).

Even just giving some thought to your most recent relationship – or your closest current friends, you’ll be able to see definite patterns. If you were using EFT, for example, you could start with something really general like “Even though I attract people that don’t respect me..”. Something non-specific like that probably won’t clear the problem out completely, but it will definitely give you enough traction to really find out what’s going on, & then kick that junk to the curb.

think_baby_think.jpg
pic by Mark_2000

The greatest thing is this – if you’re, say, 30 now, you may live another 100 years (yes, the typical life expectancy for 30 year olds today is 125-150 years).

So, how many friends will you have in the next 100 years? If you make 5 new friends a year, that’s 500 friends. If you have one new partner every 5 years, that’s another 20 intimate relationships. So, even just clearing out one negative pattern will mean you straight away get 500 better friends & 20 better partners. How awesome is that? (answer: unbelievably!)

And if you really get into it? Why, the sky’s the limit! Awesome relationships all round, on the double!!

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    September 9, 2008

    The Healing Power Of Music

    When I was in my early teens, my mother ‘encouraged’ me to do three things – take up an instrument (guitar), learn a language (French), & do gymnastics. I pretty much sucked at all three of them.

    I was talking to a friend yesterday about doing some chanting (in Sanskrit) – the thought of which freaked me the hell out. Ok, so what the heck is up with that? Of course – this hits two of the three – languages & music. Pretty obviously this was teenage rebellion at “being forced” to do something – I was thus insisting on being right, & on proving Mum wrong.

    In some kind of synchronicity, I’ve also had this song brought to my attention – “Fall At Your Feet” – by Crowded House:

    The lyrics of which are:

    I’m really close tonight
    And I feel like I’m moving inside her
    Lying in the dark
    And I think that I’m beginning to know her
    Let it go
    I’ll be there when you call

    And whenever I fall at your feet
    You let your tears rain down on me
    Whenever I touch your slow turning pain

    You’re hiding from me now
    There’s something in the way that youre talking
    Words don’t sound right
    But I hear them all moving inside you, go
    I’ll be waiting when you call

    Hey and whenever I fall at your feet
    Won’t you let your tears rain down on me
    Whenever I touch your slow turning pain

    The finger of blame has turned upon itself
    And I’m more than willing to offer myself
    Do you want my presence or need my help
    Who knows where that might lead
    I fall

    Whenever I fall at your feet
    Would you let your tears rain down on me
    Whenever I fall, ever I fall

    (courtesy of lyricsfreak)

    I start listening to this song this morning, and immediately felt stuff start to lift off me. Singing along with it only amplified the effect. I ended up singing this for the best part of two hours, tears streaming down my face as long buried memories surfaced & layer after layer of rubbish cleared away. As I sang or struggled with certain phrases completely different things would lift off. I also instinctively began by singing in a much higher (ie, adolescent) register – then, as the healing progressed, my voice dropped significantly. My vocal cords hurt – they’d never been used at that pitch before.

    Here’s what singing this song lifted off me:

    • “Finger of blame” – that it was time to accept learning
    • “Let it go” – it was ok for Mum to be right
    • I kept forgetting the lyric – which echoed French vocab – & was accompanised by a definite visual of my 13 year old school hall
    • “Want my presence of need my help” – obstinance
    • “Something in the way that you’re talking” – French vocab tests
    • Any time I lost the tune – took me back to 14 year old music & not being able to remember any guitar at all
    • Some obvious residual breakup stuff
    • I was continually starting singing too early – much like business ventures I’ve started that have been a decade (or more) ahead of their time
    • When singing in the higher register, I couldn’t hold “I fall” for the entire length – realising that when I am now is where I am supposed to be
    • I was much more comfortable in a higher register – the belief that things have to be comfortable, familiar, to be safe
    • Still struggling to find the right notes – & the right place in my life
    • The subtle words kept tripping me up – echoing accents/graves, etc in French
    • The 2nd verse got rid of some residual anger at having things hidden from me (despite my fully knowing)
    • “Let it go” – much trickier in the lower register – fear that it was harder to do things this way, easier/safer the old way
    • Was still struggling to remember the most basic words

    At this point I started singing the song without listening to the music or reading the lyrics

    • Still can’t get it right – hit my residual perfectionism
    • At the higher register – I was warbling a bit – not as good as I thought I might be
    • Kept saying “you” instead of “her” – afraid to get close
    • Kept screwing up verb tenses – just like French
    • Kept saying “happy” instead of “willing” – I wasn’t happy, & wasn’t willing to be happy
    • “whenever I touch your slow turning pain” – that I was addicted to other’s pain
    • Kept saying “moving” not “turning” – also addicted to helping them with their pain
    • Kept saying “know” not “go” – knowledge being more important to me than action
    • Kept saying “touch” not “fall at your feet” – that I’m desperate for touch, having spent a long time with minimal human closeness
    • Still singing flat – just like music class when I was unable to tell notes apart
    • Timing was all screwed up – just like when I’ve been trading
    • “Whenever I touch” – that my addictive personality – I can’t get high without assistance (via food, chemicals, whatever)
    • I really struggled with “let it go”. hehe.
    • “I fall at your feet” – I kept warbling “your” – because I had a problem with what others have that I don’t
    • Got a complete mental block at “I’m more than willing”, thought it was “more than ready” – realised I wasn’t “more than ready” for anything

    Needless to say I drank a TON of water & went through a LOT of tissues through this process.

    I’ve seen & used a lot of healing techniques, but this absolutely blew me away in terms of how much it cleared. Amusingly, I’m sure this comes as no surprise to the musicians out there.

    Ok, so now let’s dissect the frog (ie, examine in ridiculous detail an otherwise beautiful thing).

    Here’s what I like, lyrically, about this track:

    1. The subtle tense changes showing the emotional growth of the relationship – first “I’ll be there” when she calls, then “I’ll be waiting” – you can feel him hanging on more as he gets more involved. In the chorus, first it’s “You let your tears rain down on me”, then “won’t you..” – begging, then finally resignedly pleading “would you..”
    2. The growth of the relationship: from early sex “Think I’m beginning to know her”, the development of behaviour patterns, sympathy from her as he falls at her feet; to her hiding something, pulling away; then, finally, his desperation and pain.
    3. The subtlety of the final line – the implication of aloneness – he falls, but there’s no-one there to pick him up “whenever I fall, ever I fall” – so he stays fallen forever.
    4. The tie in – first he’s moving inside her, then, when she’s pulling away, he can hear the (wrong sounding) words moving inside her – as she’s avoiding subjects, wheedling around the (obvious) truth – since he’s already picked up that there’s something in the way that she’s talking.
    5. The subtle transition from – thinking that he’s knowing her, but telling himself to relax & just enjoy the moment “let it go” – to hearing that she’s lying, “words all moving inside you” & breaking up with her – the imperative “go”.
    6. The transition early on from singing about her, to singing to her.

    Oh, & here’s a version I just recorded of myself singing this. It was all done from memory (no lyrics in front of me), and acapella (since I don’t have any instruments here). For comparison, I estimated once that I’ve listened to my all time favourite song, “One” by U2 probably around 1500 times. Last time I checked, I still had no idea what the entire lyrics were. Oh, and this is both the first time I’ve sung in public, the first time I’ve recorded myself, and it was done in one take, with no edits. Fall At Your Feet

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      August 24, 2008

      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

      .sun_rise.jpg

      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 every time 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.

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        August 22, 2008

        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.

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          August 16, 2008

          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.

          dreamtime.jpg
          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.

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