March 2020 - Compassion Group Notes

Soothing as Defense

When someone else is in pain, it tends to evoke anxiety in us. The anxiety prevents us from being present to the other person’s pain because we want to immediately defend against the anxiety in ourselves. Instead of recognizing our own anxiety and tending to it, we try to stop the pain in the other person, that is triggering our own fear response. One way we do this is by placating and soothing with platitudes like:

“Don’t worry…”

“Don’t be scared….”

“It will be okay….. it’s okay…..”

“Everything will work out in the end….”

“Can I get you something to eat?.....”

“Can I do something for you?.....”

Think of your own version. What are the most annoying platitudes you have heard when you’ve been anxious, filled with shame or in grief? What are the most annoying platitudes you have used yourself?

You all learned these platitudes from grown-ups when you were little because none of them were fully aware and in relationship to their own anxiety. How would a truly awake and loving parent have responded to your pain, fear, shame etc. as a child rather than using a defense of soothing.  Just a clue, there is no right answer in terms of words. This year we are exploring how to re-connect to our Highest Self, who is always connected to Source or BIG CONSCIOUSNESS, in consciousness. It is this knowing we want to apply to the suffering of others and our own inner wounded little soul. When is soothing appropriate? How is it appropriate?  When is it not?

 Distrust in our Gut

 “If your eyes cannot cry, then your gut will."
The head and heart may be in denial of your human needs, but the gut will always carry the wisdom of your needs met and unmet, and thusly respond.” 
~Martha Char Love, What's Behind Your Belly Button? A Psychological Perspective of the Intelligence of Human Nature and Gut Instinct 

How have you been programmed to distrust the distrust in your gut by being told your perceptions, feelings and experience are incorrect, wrong, distorted?  How were you told that you were “over sensitive,” or “making a big deal out of nothing?” Consider what would happen in your gut if you head kept over-ruling the suspicion, doubt, uncertainty, fear and anxiety that you originally had as a child?  How many children have “tummy aches,” around going to school. How many adults suffer with chronic gut problems like heartburn/GERD, IBD, and IBS?

Can we learn to trust that something in our gut means something in our emotions, which means some need is not being met and, that it needs deep investigation, not dismissal. Did anyone ever show you deep interest when your tummy was telling you something. Do you now show yourself deep interest when your gut speaks to you?

 Pay attention to your gut and see how often your head is at odds with your gut knowing.  

Limit Setting 

“The boundary to what we can accept is the boundary to our freedom”. ~ Tara Brach 

Assertiveness and limit setting is inherent in being authentic and honest about feelings and needs. Limit setting is not about stopping another person from doing something, or not doing something (this is control). It is about owning your own experience fully and deciding what is the most loving course of action for yourself.  Limit setting occurs quite organically and naturally if you are authentic about your inner experience and truth.

Consider the power of just stating authentically what your inner experience is - what you genuinely feel and what you need as related back to your own experience in childhood. Then, there is no pressure or blame on the other person that then frees them up to choose to respond differently, in a way that control does not. However, this is not the goal - no matter how the other person responds, it is our own responsibility to make loving choices for ourselves, in relationship to others.

Now consider limit setting within yourself. If your young soul expresses authentically what it is feeling and needing, how do you respond?  If you cannot respond with presence, care and kindness, to your own feelings and needs, you will never do so for another. If expressing your own feelings and needs is met by a tyrannical ego, then this is how you will respond to others. If you do not set limits with your own distorted thinking and beliefs, then you will not do so with others. Our relationship to our young self can only be effective when it is validating and empathic to feelings and needs and strict with bad behavior and distorted beliefs.

How does your inner dynamic mirror your outside relationships?

The Trojan Horse 

The Trojan Horse is a story from the Trojan War about the subterfuge that the Greeks used to enter the independent city of Troy and win the war. In the canonical version, after a fruitless 10-year siege, the Greeks constructed a huge wooden horse and hid a select force of men inside, including Odysseus. The Greeks pretended to sail away, and the Trojans pulled the horse into their city as a victory trophy. That night the Greek force crept out of the horse and opened the gates for the rest of the Greek army, which had sailed back under cover of night. The Greeks entered and destroyed the city of Troy, ending the war. ~Wikipedia

What a great metaphor for all relationships. As with all mythology it is important to  see the external story as a representation of the internal story.  

All of us, when we meet someone new who promises to be the one who can meet all our unmet needs, and  presents themselves as a gift, is seen as a victory trophy. We wheel in the trojan horse, delighted with what we have been given and now it is within the boundaries of our life - our city.  Only then do we discover that hidden within this wonderful trophy lurks the soldiers of rage and demand who are let out to make ware with criticism and judgment, demanding our lives to satisfy theirs! And the opposite is, of course, true of the other person as well. You, in unawareness, have presented yourself as the Trojan horse - big, strong, capable, a gift to anyone, without letting them know about the inner saboteurs who, when let out, will demand and tantrum. Most of us are not very aware of the inner forces - we are aware of the outer presentation - in ourselves and others.  We buy into the subterfuge, and then find ourselves being overrun.

How different the story could have been had the people of the city of Troy been aware and had resolved their own inner struggles with helplessness and pain,  leading to a lust for winning and power. It is this unawareness that lead to the downfall of Troy. What if they had the capacity to see within, the ability to see deeply into the matter within themselves and others…… No wonder we feel like frauds, imposters and like a fake so much of the time. The only way to resolve the problem is to work with each and every inner saboteur with love, instead of pretending they are not there.  

God gave us Free Will. Do you give others Free Will?

Built into the very design of creation is the limit of pain if we do not live in accordance with the Law of Love. However, nothing is personally done to anyone. All “God” has to do, is BE the consciousness of LOVE and when others do not align with this, they themselves are eliminating themselves from the union in love that is always possible.  

Do you allow others the same respect? You merely have to BE LOVE in every way, and then others can decide to be in loving relationship with you, or not.  This means putting every thought, feeling, need and emotion under the magnifying glass and coming to know the blockages to love intimately - with love.  Really seeing something under the magnifying glass with the intense focus of your Love, means that what is seen will burn with the fullest sensation of the experience, and it will burn away to ashes. What is essential will remain.

This demands of you, that you come to know loving relationship within yourself, with yourself. When this is in place, then either others will choose to be with you in that relationship, or not.

The more you live in accordance with the Law of Love, being neither inner victim or perpetrator of yourself, the fewer people will understand the love and truth of your life and will feel diminished in your presence and not want to be around you anymore. This is why we are afraid of moving out of dependent, needy, controlling projections with other people. We know how to play that game. This is new - and it is not a game. 

Saying you feel shame, does not exonerate you from guilt 

The phrase, “I am so sorry, I feel so bad,” typically elicits caretaking from the one who is wronged with something like, “Oh that’s okay, don’t feel bad.”  This is using apology as a defense to excuse our behavior because we now feel bad and, exonerate us from the responsibility of understanding what we did and changing it. The pain shifts from the one wronged to the one who created the pain in the first place. What a clever turn around to avoid self responsibility!  Notice how often this happens in conversation. If one of these is your habitual response to wrong-doing then it needs deep investigation of the many layers under the defense. 

Stubborn and Surrender 

“I like the scientific spirit—the holding off, the being sure but not too sure, the willingness to surrender ideas when the evidence is against them: this is ultimately fine—it always keeps the way beyond open—always gives life, thought, affection, the whole man, a chance to try over again after a mistake—after a wrong guess.” 
                                                                        ~ Walt Whitman, Walt Whitman's Camden Conversations

In the same vein, how long do you stubbornly hold on to a defense? E.g. denial “I didn’t do it.” Can you learn to surrender to truth instead of stubbornly holding on to defense. Consider all the defenses you need to surrender. When we surrender to truth and love, we are also surrendering our defenses. To what do you stubbornly grip? Pride, self-righteousness, justification, denial, fantasy, rationalizations, excuses, caretaking, perfectionism….? You are holding on to lumps of coal for a small fire to warm yourself in the cold, when you could be free in the bright warmth of sunlight. How willing are you to surrender that which does not work, facts and beliefs that are not truth, and patterns that are not loving? Do you have a scientific spirit, that is always investigating the inner motive and searching for deeper truths? Can you keep the way beyond open, or do you shut the door and erect the wall of defense in absolute certainty of your perceptions and beliefs?

TRIPPING OVER JOY
What is the difference
Between your experience of Existence
And that of a saint?

The saint knows
That the spiritual path
Is a sublime chess game with God

And that the Beloved
Has just made such a Fantastic Move

That the saint is now continually
Tripping over Joy
And bursting out in Laughter
And saying, “I Surrender!”

Whereas, my dear,
I am afraid you still think
You have a thousand serious moves.” 

― Hafez, I Heard God Laughing: Poems of Hope and Joy

A wonderful book to order to read about the path as surrender is “The Knight in Rusty Armor,” by Robert Fisher.

Introjection 

What do we mean by this term? An introject is every thought, belief, value, judgment, and way of defense, that you took into yourself as a child. You have all seen small children repeating what they have heard at home as the gospel truth - “My mommy says,” “My daddy says…”  “My teacher says and, so what my mommy says is wrong…”  

Because of this process of incorporating (taking into your body), the beliefs of others, we can say that all unexamined thought or belief is an introject that will be projected out on to others. We do not consciously absorb the beliefs of those around us, it is an unconscious process. It is the most amazing and wonderful child who will actually say, “Wait, I don’t believe that…That doesn’t make sense…. I don’t want to believe what you are telling me…. I want to know why you are saying that…”  It is the exceptional child that breaks from the habitual ways of being in the family. 

You all have seen children that live on pizza and coke because they are never encouraged to be adventurous and taste new things, with devastating effects on their health and life. They are merely introjecting the family customs and ways of doing things without awareness. Or do you know adults that still believe the Christian myth literally because, “the church said so.” Think of the messages around racism and sexism and facism etc. that are indoctrinated and lived without examination throughout the course of an adult person’s life.

Unfortunately, children that question, are punished, rejected or seen as weird, if they push the edges of belief.  Their questions are seldom appreciated. They are seen as deviant, precocious and a problem. You are a good child if you take in the garbage that is dished up to you and eat your plate clean. This is mind control. And then you live your whole life in the belief system of what you introjected as a child without any awareness or examination. You remain an innocent, naïve, and impressionable, taking in what is told to you hook, line and sinker. This is living the introject - not your life.  As Socrates said, “The unexamined life, is not worth living.”  Monkey does as monkey sees, is one way of thinking about introjection. What is introjected is projected - and so we become the very parents we vowed we would not become or, we swing into reaction to the parenting we received and do the opposite with the same harmful results. 

Only witnessing and examining every thought, belief and action brings awareness and real change.  Mimicry of thoughts is not what makes us human, awareness is.  And our emotions are the doorway into assessing and investigating  whether something is true or not.

“In psychoanalysis, introjection (German: Introjektion) is the process by which the subject replicates behaviors, attributes, or other fragments of the surrounding world, especially of other subjects. It is considered a self-stabilizing defense mechanism used when there is a lack of full psychological contact between a child and the adults providing that child's psychological needs. Here, it provides the illusion of maintaining relationship but at the expense of a loss of self. Cognate concepts are identification, incorporation, and internalization. To use a simple example, a person who picks up traits from his or her friends (e.g., a person who begins frequently exclaiming "Ridiculous!" as a result of hearing a friend repeatedly doing thus) is introjecting”. ~Wikipedia

Mass Mind Control vs Mindfulness 

You are in the grips of Mass Mind Control in what you say, think and do, every day, when your witness is not present.

Mindfulness is knowing that all thought, feeling, need, emotion, defense is memory - to which you must be lovingly present as The Witness. This way you have choice, in love. Without the witness you are programmed through fear and shame to live the life of a sheep being led to the slaughter. Split off from your True Self, the Witness, who is always connected to Consciousness, how do you even know what the choices in your life might be. You don’t.  

Dissociation and True Transcendence 

Dissociation is the process of splitting away, disconnecting from, negating, rejecting and fleeing from our suffering self. It is abandonment of the one suffering.  We can dissociate our thoughts from our feelings. We can dissociate our feelings from our needs. We can dissociate and split off from our needs, feelings, body and live in our defensive thoughts.  We can split off our soul from our defenses and live only in thought. This is the most common dissociation in our culture. 

 Dissociation is always a negation and fragmentation. When we leave our pain body and escape into a higher realm of consciousness, we are not enlightened, even if we are having a transcendent experience, we are merely fragmenting and finding a temporary escape. This is not bad or wrong, it is a very effective defense against intolerable pain, but it is an abandonment and splitting away from the wounded and suffering young soul.  Dissociation has its roots in pain, shame and fear.

Stable transcendent states are only attainable though embracing and staying present to all human experience, no matter how terrible and torturous that might be. Presence or consciousness is the energy of love and so to stay lovingly present to the suffering soul and body with maturity of Soul, is to integrate, re-unite, create wholeness and, completion. It is by moving into and towards our suffering that we resolve the fragmentations of life and, bring peace, stability and joy to our lives. The greater the Love, the less the suffering is experienced. Transcendence occurs through loving presence to shame and fear.

Dissociation

• Rooted in pain, fear and shame   

• Defense to move away and outside of the experience

• Up and out

• External focus  

• Results in fragmentation  

• Alienation from self   

• Disorganized and unpredictable behavior 

• Fleeting experiences of transcendence split off from suffering self

• Separate from Spirit  

Transcendence

• Rooted in Love and Presence to pain, fear, and shame

• Lack of defense and full embrace of experience

• Deeper in

• Internal focus

• Result in unity and connection

• Unity of self with Self

• Stable response of love to self and other

• Stable condition of transcendence

• Connected to Spirit