June 2020 - Compassion Group Notes

Turn you eye inward and find out

I don’t know - Resistance

Some people have learned to habitually say, “I don’t know,” as a defense and resistance against knowing. It has become a habitual mantra of denial and dissociation. The truth is that we DO KNOW. The truth is that we know everything if we expand our looking and listening. Self reflection, turning your eye inwards, will always yield an answer, and the answer will deepen and deepen the more you ask the questions. Notice how often when your therapist asks you a question, you say, “I don’t know.” What you are actually saying is, “I don’t want to know. I don’t want to feel.” “I don’t want to have a relationship with the hurt, the shame, the fears of my childhood.” “I refuse to learn to love.” “I don’t want to see why I do the things I do.” You do not have to come up with a “right” answer, but one that speaks from deep within yourself, which is always the “right” answer

Learning to pause and self reflect, is a mindfulness exercise, and a discipline (spiritual exercise). Now you can choose to discipline your ego defense, and serve the wounded soul that wants to be heard, seen, known and related to, by you.

Explore all the layers of your resistance - it is complex and multi-faced and there for a good reason for it developing in the first place - find out the reason.

In order to know:

1. Notice when you say, “I don’t know”

2. Discipline yourself to not say this anymore

3. Pause, turn inward and find out

4. Share what you feel, need, think and want to do around the issue

5. Recognize your refusal and “NO” that keeps you stuck in unknowing and ignorance

6. Ask yourself how you learned to say this and why

“Always say “yes” to the present moment. What could be more futile, more insane, than to create inner resistance to what already is? what could be more insane than to oppose life itself, which is now and always now? Surrender to what is. Say “yes” to life — and see how life suddenly starts working for you rather than against you.” ~Eckhart Tolle

Only when we recognize the needs of our own begging inner child, will we really care about the children of the world

How do we Make Amends with Ourselves?

 Many of you are very well acquainted with the 12-step programs to recovery from addiction in all it’s forms. Addiction is another word for all the defenses we have habitually used to deny, cover up, get away from, our own deep inner suffering.

Our suffering, or what is referred to as suffering is not only physical pain, but the deep emotional pain of not having our needs adequately or correctly met as children by the adult figures in our lives. When needs are either overly met, or not met, or ignored and neglected, or shamed and negated, we end up feeling worthless, bad, unlovable and deeply hurt. This is the worst kind of suffering as it calls into question our very existence and identity as good and loving human- beings.

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“I keep wondering how you find compassion for your own self when you go against what's good in you.” 
~Anissa Gray, The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls

Are you a mindless slave? Why? How is this an internal dynamic of perpetration?

Not Letting Others Down

This is probably something ingrained in your psyche - that you “do not let other people down.” It is held as a high value in our culture to always follow through, to put others before yourself, to be of service to others and never let them down.

You do not let down your country - you rather lose your life fighting for it and protecting it.

You do not let your friends down - you come through for them no matter what.

You do not let your family down - you are there for them through thick and th

This all sounds very noble and very good - and so it is, when it comes from a place of inner freedom. However, for most people this value has never been lived fully from a place of clarity and freedom. Most people unconsciously martyr themselves out of fear of being seen as or labelled a bad person - because this is what you were taught. If you do not martyr yourself, give up your needs, not notice your feelings, then you are BAD. We would rather be dead than bad and so we give up on ourselves and let ourselves down in order to meet the expectations, demands and whiny needs of others, even if this is NOT in their best interests or ours. We foster dependency, we support wars, we repress our souls, we do what is unconscionable in terms of obeying tyrannies, we do terrible bad things, because “we do not want to let others down.” We stay in corporate job situations that exploit and use us, because we do not want to let them down. We put up with addictions and make excuses for the bad behavior of others, because we do not want to “let them down.” We do not want to set limits with others because it will be seen as “letting them down.”

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“What is much harder to handle is the sense that you have to live up to the mark someone else has set for you. The grades become too important, the competition too frantic, the fear of disappointing those who believe in you turns into an overwhelming nightmare. And it is desperately unfair to the boy. He cannot live his parents' life over again for them. He cannot make up for their own lacks, their own unfulfillments. He cannot carry their torch -- only his own.” 
~Sydney J. Harris, Best of Sydney Harris