Mass Density

Answers to Frequently Asked Questions about my Spiritual Intensive Retreat

Why do I call it a “Spiritual” journey or retreat?

1.   I got to call it something.
2.  Spirit means Life, and this is part of the Life journey.
3.   Spirit means Love, and this is part of the path to Love and Happiness.
4.   A Spiritual experience is about Connection, and that begins with connecting with one’s self, in a way of love and respect, and then extending that connection to others, and to all living things.
5.  All of the above.

Is it dangerous with all the drug related issues?

NO.   And yes that is a capital NO.  If there were any likelihood of danger for people in a group I am guiding I wouldn’t be going.  Heck,, it’s more personal than that.  If I thought I was personally going to be in danger I wouldn’t go myself.  We fly into the Mexico city International airport where there is plenty of security.  We take our own van with a private driver to our own hacienda/retreat center located next to the old city ruins.  The small town that we stay in mostly sustains itself from the tourist and artist business in the area.  So,,, after having travel to this area regularly over the last 17 years I have no reason to believe it is dangerous.  It is more likely that the scary things you will face on this intensive are your fears and own inner demons.

How many people will be going?

We won’t know til the last week or two.  Last year’s group was 18 in size.  I’ve done trips as small as 6 people and as large as 40.  When it was 40 people it was combined with other teachers.  There are reasons to really like a small group like the closeness and amount of personal time, but we lose out on some of the diversity and richness of personalities and insights that that happen in a larger group.  With a larger group some activities like ceremony and group meditations are strengthened with numbers.   So by my standard the ideal number is the number that show up.

Is there time for personal interaction?

Yes.  There is time during meals which we all have together and walks to and from the grounds.  There is also personal relaxation time in the afternoons before evening class.  For me sometimes the personal interaction is the most enjoyable part.  It’s not just a facilitator and participant relationship. We get a chance to share, know each other as equals, joke, laugh, and create a more well rounded relationship.  Some people that have worked with me over years have become good life long friends.  And that’s not just true for me.  You also meet others on your trip that are of a like mind that you may stay in touch with well after the retreat.

What kind of people go on these trips?

My trips are generally pretty balanced between men and women.  Most are college educated professionals.  Some are starting out in a process of working through emotional reactions that have recently arisen. Others have worked through those basic stages and discovered there is a lot more love and happiness to experience.  They return numerous times seeking deeper levels of truth and understanding of the world, and to experience deeper and more expansive love, compassion, and freedom in their lives.

I tend to attract people who appreciate my common sense and logical approach to love happiness, and changing beliefs and emotions. Last years group included two doctors, two PhD researchers, an auto mechanic, a dentist, a stay at home mom and an investment manager.

Is this process associated with any religious group?

(Sometimes read:  “Is this a cult?”)

I do not adhere to or limit myself to any single doctrine.  The essence of all spiritual traditions is the removal of emotional suffering and unhappiness and replacing it with a feeling of love, happiness, and connection.  So I embrace the fundamental truths in all traditions.  The process actually mixes and changes each day.   The morning might start with a Shamanic journey into dreaming, and in the afternoon we engage in a whole hearted forgiveness exercise based in a Christian perspective.  That evening I might use a story from the Hindu perspective to help in making a point.  What I care about is using these teachings as practical tools to guide people out of emotional suffering.

What you will find is that I am respectful of each person’s belief system.  I’ve had people attend my programs and done coaching with me that are Orthodox Jews, a Christian Seminary student, an atheist, Catholics, Buddhists, and others.  What I teach about is personal belief systems, perspective, changing emotions, and Love.  I also teach it in a way that respects each person’s religious beliefs.

And as far as the cult thing?  No.  I try hard to avoid suggesting to people what they should believe.  (You might notice a great void of this in my website and audios.)   I tend to leave people’s personal choices to them selves, even if they ask me for suggestions.  (which they often do).  Instead I guide people to become aware of their hidden beliefs, be aware of the emotional and behavioral consequences, and then decide if they want to stay attached to those beliefs.

Isn’t the place with pyramids in Mexico where they did human sacrifices?  Is that part of this teaching?

Human sacrifice is not part of what I teach.  What I point people to inquire about is themselves, what they believe, and the emotions they feel.  I then engage them in practices and processes to change those negative states of emotions.

I haven’t studied the history of human sacrifice on this issue except to understand how people could fanatically believe in a dogma so strongly that the would take the life of a fellow human being.  I think it is helpful to be aware of such things so we don’t fall into such practices.  I am skeptical about the history, mostly because it is difficult to say what happened 1000 years ago in a society or why.   There may have been a splinter sect of the teachings that distorted the things and became fanatical about their beliefs.  I really don’t know. It wouldn’t be the first time that a small group of fanatics have seized power and ruled over a large group of people that just wanted simple freedoms and a simple life of happiness.  These civilizations have thousands of years of history and I am not an expert on all of it.

Pointing to one part of the civilizations past and saying they believed in human sacrifice would be like pointing to the Spanish Inquisition and saying, “That is what Christianity is about.”  Or pointing to a few Buddhist monks that set themselves ablaze in past years and saying, “That is the teaching of Buddha.”  Nothing could be farther from the point.  We wouldn’t look at the history of Rome and point to the most horrific of persecutions and conclude that is what they had to teach or is their legacy.

What it helps to be aware of is how our mind fixates on such issues that probably happened for a short period of time within the history of a culture and then ignores a thousand years of history.  How is it that our mind fixates on such a negative and builds it up in our imagination so that it blinds us from seeing the beauty in the world?  This is worth breaking free of and is the type of process that I teach.

Why do I go to the ancient ruins and Pyramids?

I go to the ancient city and pyramids because there is a rich history there of personal transformation.   A large part of their culture for many centuries consciously worked through their individual beliefs and mental states of emotional suffering. A large city of people lived in peace and harmony within their own mind, and with the people around them.  It is that part of the culture that is interesting to me. It interests me because if they could do it, then we can do it.

The city of Teotihuacan was built principally as a University for teaching conscious awakening.  Where people became aware of how the beliefs, chatter, and negative emotions in their mind were causing emotional suffering, and they developed practices to free themselves from their fears, critical judgments, and negative emotional reactions.  When we go to Teotihuacan we engage in the same types of practices that were successfully used for hundreds of years.  In short, I take people there through these processes because they work.  That’s probably the engineer side of me.  I want things to be effective and work for people or they aren’t of much value.

Do you need to do anything to prepare for the Intensive?  NO.

Often people feel they are not ready for a trip.  They feel they need to study more, or do more of my on line Self Mastery course and develop some level of skill and accomplishments before attending a week long intensive.  This is only a belief.  Truthfully this is not so.  My intensives are taught in a way that the material is accessible for the most basic beginner.  It is not necessary to have read one book, or done my online course.  At the same time there is plenty of depth for the more advanced students that have been doing personal transformation work for years.  Some of the people on the upcoming trip have done several events with me in the past, even 4 or 5 intensives to Mexico.   Each time they go the find more subtle, and sometimes more profound changes in their life.

Do I teach alone?  Generally yes.

If I know it is going to be a large group, then I might invite someone to assist.  If there is someone who is has been on several intensives before, I might call on them to share and assist at times.  This benefits them because they get to step out of their role as a “student.”   It also helps them integrate and deepen the material when they talk and share about it.  By sharing they deepen their learning.   I am discerning about the quality of the teaching experience that people get so I have a short list, but I am hoping to lengthen it.  Some people have shared an interest in learning to teach what I do.  In preparing for that these types of intensives are probably the best training.   

Will we be required to share?  No

You don’t have to share anything about your self or your process unless you want to. If you want you are welcome to do the entire intensive in silence.   I’m not inclined to have a big group counseling session where we each air the dirty laundry of our history. What I have found is that long telling of our history can be time consuming and when done in a group can be a distraction to others.  We don’t have to talk about our dark secrets in order to clean them up.  What is important is that we clean them up.  To do this we put our own attention on our own stuff in a constructive healing way.

Given that, I do invite people to share at times if they so choose.  There is value in sharing.  We can learn the lessons of others without having to repeat their mistakes.  We can gain insights and different perspectives on what they did and how they did it to help speed our process.  We get to find out that we are not alone, and not that different from others.  This helps break down the beliefs that keep us feeling isolated.   When sharing we can break the emotional patterns of hiding, and shame, that often accompany self judgment.  There is something healing about sharing what is going on inside with a group of people and realizing they don’t judge you.  It plants the seed that you don’t have to judge your self either.

So share if you like, or don’t if you prefer.  I respect each person’s free will to do their process as they please.

By the same token, when you attend one of these retreats, intensives, or spiritual journeys, you are welcome to participate or opt out of any of the activities.  Sometimes people opt to take the afternoon off and be by themselves.  That is fine.  I completely respect each person’s choices and their own process.

David served in the Army and National Guard. After responding to the World Trade Center and Afghanistan he came home and discovered that his emotional reactions were out of control and inappropriate. In this interview he shares how the Self Mastery course has helped him.

Interview David about the Self Mastery Course Experience
Podcast Audio (42 min)

David first signed up for the free sessions in July and purchased the Basic Self Mastery series two months later in September.  When we did this interview in March he had only received the last of the Basic Series sessions about 2 months prior.  That’s not a lot of time to put all the tools and techniques together.  However he was making personal change in his emotional reactions and was feeling much better about being in the world as he learns to become more efficient with the tools he is learning.

David shared with me that when he came back from Afghanistan he didn’t feel like himself.  His emotional reactions weren’t appropriate.  The  ”thing” that gets turned on in your mind in a war zone that helps you to survive doesn’t just turn off when you get home.  His emotional and physiological systems were still operating in that heightened state for survival even when he was walking into the grocery story, the gas station, or going to the gym.  He realized that he needed to make some changes and found that the Self Mastery Course Exercises has helped.

Love, Compassion, Hope, Integrity, and Loyalty are the subject of this audio.  This is an excerpt from a talk I gave at a Spiritual Retreat in 2010.  Our mind has the ability to imagine in a myriad of ways.  Because of this it also has the ability to distort, confuse, create chaos, and emotional drama as well.  One of the ways that this happens is through the mis-use of language.  Even the basic building blocks of language such as words can be distorted and made confusing by how the mind alters their meaning when we are not aware.

Elements of Confusion (podcast 38   27 min)

If you want to implement changes in the way your mind works, how you feel emotionally, or negative behaviors, start by downloading and listening to the free audios from the Self Mastery Program

I don’t think we should just manage our anger.  I believe in eliminating anger.  Trying to control triggers, circumstances, and other people so we don’t become angry is too much work. It is much easier to identify and change the core beliefs causing our anger.  In this free audio podcast I outline what the process of managing and eliminating anger looks like when you do it with awareness.

Anger Management mp3 audio  39 min

If you want to eliminate anger, and the core beliefs that cause anger follow the step by step process outlined in the Self Mastery Course.

Procrastination…caused by the ego mind (continued from post on procrastination)

Do we get anything out of procrastination?   A little, but the ego gets most of it.  You remember that first part where we committed to doing something like meditating?  We imagined our self in a great role in our mental movie.  We were a wonderful character doing something good, spiritual, even serene.  When we believed that character in our mental micro movie was us, we felt good about our self for a short time.  We got a pleasant emotional feeling.  That’s an important part of the procrastination process because it keeps us trapped in it.  That pleasant feeling is something we want to feel.  So to get it we keep committing to stuff and projecting our self into these stories of good intentions.  In the moment we feel good as we imagine our self to be that positive character in our mental movie. But it is also a set up for a lot of self judgment.  We set up an image of expectation that we are later judged against.

The second part is where we don’t take action.  We let our busy ego mind that is in self preservation mode make our decisions for us.  It directs us to forget about what we committed to, distract us from it long enough for us to believe we failed.  Then it projects thoughts like, “I still haven’t done that, what’s the matter with me.  I can’t just seem to get things done.”  In each of those mental stories it projects us as the main character in a failure role.   This is a path of good intentions leading to emotional hell.

Procrastination is basically a function of our ego beliefs.  Our ego mind pulls us into making commitments that it then operates trying to get us NOT to follow through.  In this way we are tricked into believing in two false images of self, one of a successful self image and one of worthless failure self image.  When we fall for this procrastinate trick of the ego mind we end up identifying with both false images even though they are completely opposite of each other.

There’s more than one step to solving the procrastination problem.

When we notice this problem of having two opposing ego identities our tendency is to try to pick one.  Our mind will be confused by the fact that we can believe in two completely different versions of our self as both failure and success.  In order to alleviate this feeling of confusion it tries to have us accept one self image as true and dismiss the other.  The result is that we end up convincing our self for a little while that we are a worthless failure, or we spend time convincing our self that we a really are a good successful person.  Either way the ego wins when we identify with one of the self images.  We haven’t solved the real problem of false ego images, but in our state of conviction we have temporarily gotten rid of that confusion feeling.

Rarely does the mind come up with an alternative answer like, “Hey,,, those ideas the mind has of what I am,,, those are just ideas about me.  I’m neither of those images of the ego mind.  I’m not more a character in my mind than if someone showed me a home movie and said, the guy on the film was me.”

Am I Procrastinating?

I’m not avoiding, distracted from, or procrastinating on this issue of solving the issue of procrastination.  I’m taking some time to point out the various dead ends and distractions our mind will have us chase.  Procrastination is a problem, but it is also just a symptom of a deeper problem of our core beliefs.  Specifically, the core beliefs we have about our identity.  Solve the problem of false beliefs about your identity and procrastination dynamics go away on their own.

Without that false positive image character projecting commitments, we no longer say we are going to start meditating, or other so called good intentions.  We don’t express from that false projected image.  Instead we are more genuine and say what we mean.   We can even go deeper into action than this and skip much of the dialog of the ego mind.  We just envision what we want and we take action. We don’t need a projected self image in order to take action.

And if for some reasons our actions don’t attain our goals, (even Michael Jordan missed game winning shots) then we don’t fall into self judgment.  This is a lot easier to avoid when there is no false self image.   Without that negative false image we don’t identify with that failure character in the mind.  As we refrain from identifying with the false images of success and failure in our mental micro movies we are on the path towards humility.  We have less of that “unassuming nature.”

It’s important to understand that humility doesn’t mean meek.  Actually humble people can actually be very powerful.  We don’t usually notice their power because they tend to be quiet and listen more than they talk.  Their power takes the form of quiet resolve.  They don’t have a need to project one of their false images so they tend to listen more than talk.  They don’t expend their energy trying to get attention or having debates in their mind convincing themselves.  Since they don’t waste energy on these dynamics they have a lot more power to apply to what they really want.

Changing the Ego that is engaged in Procrastination

Of course it is easy to say, “Hey, just drop those stories and those false images.”  This is the kind of commitment that an unaware person makes.  It then backfires on them.  This kind of commitment is doing the same pattern we are telling our selves to drop.  We project a false image of our self as successfully dropping these stories and false images.  When we tell our selves a story about what we should do, we are projecting a false image of our selves as a success.   Without awareness we are likely to falsely identify our self as the character in our story who successfully drops such stories.  In the mental movie moment of that good intention we are again being played by the ego.   The ego has again won over our attention for another moment.  Of course we might get a pleasant emotional moment of comfort with our hopeful story of positive change, but it is short lived.

It won’t be much longer and we will find out that our false projecting has continued.  We didn’t break the habit at all.  We only reinforced it when we believed the story about dropping false image projections.  When that realization of failure happens then the ego mind swings the other way and tells us that we failed. It projects a story with an image of us as the main character failing to make a change.  We feel like that character in the story of failure we identify through beliefs with that character.   This is the ego mind getting reinforced in two opposing directions.

This same kind of reinforcement of two opposing false images of the ego happen each time we make a commitment of “I’m going to stop Procrastinating.”  Can you see that this statement causes us to identify with a false image in a mental movie taking place in the future?  Can you see that this is a set up for believing that we are that failure image later?

Getting out of the procrastination thing, or any other ego thing might seem like a Catch 22 at this point.  Anytime you commit to change something you might just be reinforcing some part of the dynamic at a more fundamental level.  It’s not hopeless.  There are ways out of these patterns of procrastination, and false self images identification.

You can make these commitments to change, but they are usually only effective when done from another side of our personality, not just our ego.  When the commitment arises from a genuine desire to be happy we are filled with a quiet intent filled resolve.  From your resolve will be action.

At the Source of the Procrastination Problem

To successfully make these changes to procrastination we really have to look at the source of the problem and not just the symptoms.  At the core of the problem are the false self images that we believe are us.  When you no longer identify with those false images it is obvious that the good intentions the mind projects are just false ways to momentarily feel better.  When you are aware and really observe them, they take on the quality of watching a movie and immediately become less believable. When you aren’t aware you are in the movie that your mind writes for you and you can’t change the script.   That’s a big difference.

The good intentions might not seem like a big deal by itself, but it sets up the other half of the ego. The failure to execute by putting things off and that leads to self judgment, self rejection, and feelings of unworthiness and failure.

This problem is actually a lot of small dynamics all working together.  There are the two false images that the ego mind projects.  There are also the mental movies of distraction, deception, and denial layers that keep us busy so we don’t become aware of what is going on in our mind.  Then there are the illusions of solutions that we might fall for.  Those “commitments to change” where our ego takes us on another pleasant story in our imagination as a set up for another false self image identification and rejection.

So how does one dismantle such a web of illusions that are the cause of procrastination?   Do the lessons in the Self Mastery Course and you’ll see how you can regain control of your life and emotional state from the false beliefs and your ego mind.   It’s going to help you be aware of what goes on in your mind and how it can sabotage or lead you away from what you really want.

Procrastination – How it is driven by Ego and How to Stop.

How many times do we say we are going to do something, and then don’t to it?   How many times do we say we are going to do something, notice we don’t do it, and still don’t do it?  We are procrastinating.  Even when we are aware we are procrastinating, we still procrastinate.  It makes you wonder what is really going on with us. More importantly, how do we stop procrastinating?

I like the anecdote, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” Procrastination is a pattern of good intentions.    As we dig deeper into the issue there is a natural follow up question, “If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, then what is the road to heaven paved with?”   “Humility.”  Says James Garner in a line from the movie Ya Ya Sisterhood.  Humility, or a softening of our ego mind has a lot to do with eliminating procrastination.

What is humility?  I checked my Word processing program for synonyms and the one I like best is “unassuming nature.”  Let us take it to mean no ego nature; no mask of a false self-image.  Humility is being authentic and genuine.  It is what is left when you strip away all the layers of ego we carry around as a mask.  So what does this have to do with procrastination?   Procrastination is a product of the ego mind.  It is those false layers of self image that are the root cause of our bad habits.  When we strip away the ego mind we get rid of the root causes of our procrastination.

When we are humble, or without ego, we say what we mean, and we do what we say.  We don’t pretend to others, or to our self, that we are something we are not.  Notice that nowhere do I relate being humble to being meek, weak, timid, or small.  Real humility comes with a quiet confidence that is a source of power and resolve.

So how does humility help break the pattern of procrastination and get on with what we really want?  It all begins with awareness.

The ego and the false self images of the mind tricks us into procrastinating.  When you are aware of these tricks you can avoid falling for them.  To help develop this awareness we’ll start by looking at the your belief system and ego and see how they work.

Why Do We Procrastinate

Let’s first look at how and why the ego mind causes us to create procrastination.  The first noticeable action is that we make a declaration of a good intention for our self or someone else.  We’ll use the example of meditating.  We make a declaration, either in our thoughts or out loud to someone else, “I’m going to start meditating.”  In our imagination we create an image of our self sitting serenely.   We essentially make a movie in our mind with our self image as the main character.  We are doing something good, we are feeling good, and the most important thing is that we feel good about our self in our little mental movie.  Every time we think about meditating and say we are going to start we project that good self image in our little mental movie. It all happens in about 1.5 seconds.  Then it is done.  In our mind we have accomplished the task and we go on with the next thought the mind has.

What this imaginary movie does is satisfy the mind’s need for to control our attention for a little bit and give us a sense of identification with the character in our projection.  In the process we get a nice feeling as we identify with a positive self image in our mental movie.   It is the belief that we are the character in this mental movie that serves the ego and gives us a small emotional boost.

But the ego is not done yet.  It is a bit more complicated than just the singular image from one story.  We actually have many images or aspects from the ego mind that we identify with. One of the common mental movie stories we project is of failure.  Our mind projects a story of us failing or not measuring up in some way and casts a different self image in the starring role.  Sometimes this happens in 1.5 seconds also.   It happens when we think about failing, or other people judging us, or being told no.   In any imagined story like that we are again the main character but in this story we are a failure, or are rejected.  In these mental movies we identify with the failure image and believe that the projected self image in the mental movie is us.  When we are unaware and do not distinguish between our Self, and the image of our self in our mental movie out ego has effectively taken us for an emotional ride.  In this false identification we believe we are the character in our thoughts.   In fact, this is only a facet of the ego.

So far we have both a success image that is a facet of the ego and a failure image that is a facet of the ego.  In the procrastination scenario the ego’s success image gets reinforced by us telling our self we are going to meditate.  The failure image gets reinforced when we don’t meditate.

Each day we don’t meditate the mind projects an image of our selves failing.  Each time we imagine that we will meditating we identify with that positive self image.  Each time we think about meditating we project one of these two images and identify with the success image or the failure image, or both.  When we think about meditating and don’t do it but we reinforce both false images of the ego.  It is these false images of the ego that get served and become stronger.  The detrimental aspect of this is only seen when you are aware that the mental projection of self isn’t you at all.

The Ego Mind on it’s Own

The failure image of the ego mind actually needs you to NOT meditate.  If you actually started meditating regularly, the failure based self image would have no basis for being.  We would no longer identify with the failure image.  If I say I am going to meditate, and then I do it, I have no reason to judge my self as a failure.  Of course the ego mind is likely to adapt in other ways.  Our mind will project that we should be meditating more, longer, our posture should be better, our mind should be quieter, and we should be having blessed out Samadhi experiences by now.  Since this isn’t happening the first week or month the ego mind will project that we are failing, and that we are doing something wrong.  This is just the false images of the ego mind trying in various ways for reinforcement by false identification.

When we don’t reinforce the failure image in our mind it makes the ego very uncomfortable.  The ego self image begins to feel like it is dying.  We might think that if a negative image were dying that we would feel better about our self, but that is not the case.  The collapsing false image in the mind creates a feeling that is very uncomfortable.  We go through all sorts of emotions as the false image that we believe is our identity is threatened.

When this agitation happens the mind becomes very busy with various mechanisms of distraction, deception, and denial trying to get us to not meditate.  It directs us to forget for a while that we said we were going to do it.  Then reminds us at a much later date that we didn’t do it so it can reinforce the belief we are the failure character in our mental movie.

When we think that we are going to sit down and meditate the mind senses the death of the failure image and comes up with numerous other things we could and should be doing.  Yes we got busy and the house is clean, laundry is done, bills paid, and the yard is looking pretty good.  Now there is no time to meditate, or we are too tired to meditate.  In this strategy the ego mind has won the game of distractions until we run out of time, energy, or both.  Then it waits an hour or a day, or a week, and reminds us that we failed to do what we said we were going to do.  It uses the situation to project a mental movie with us as the main character that failed.  If we identify with that failure character in our mind then the ego mind is not challenged and is comfortable again.  Yes we feel like an unworthy loser that has failed, but the ego mind is comfortable with that because it doesn’t feel like it is going to die.  Such is the challenge of not identifying with the images of your ego mind.

This article continued at Causes of Procrastination II

You can find practices and exercises for changing the core beliefs causing procrastination
in The Self Mastery Course on this site.

Overcoming Resistance

“I can’t see this working he said.” He said it with a tone and inflection both of inquiry, and hopelessness.   That’s what resistance will sound like sometimes.

“Neither could I when I started,”  I replied.   “You can’t see how it is going to happen. If you could, you would know what the change and experience was. You can’t see what the view from the mountain top will be while you are still standing in the valley.  You can’t see all the steps you will take and the turns you will make before you make them.”    He heard me and then he changed the topic….. more resistance.

Answering his questions didn’t make the resistance go away. Nor did it spur him to action. Maybe the question wasn’t the issue.    Maybe the questions were part of the problem.  So maybe we have to look at that part of our mind that asks the question or makes the statement of doubt.

“I don’t see how this will work.” It was a loaded statement. It was filled with an attitude of hopelessness and like beliefs. “This won’t work.  I’ll be just as unhappy after trying this as I am now so why even try.” The emotions were hopelessness, depressed, defeated, and that was before trying anything.    It’s like his attitude of hopelessness was in charge of his, questions, his decision making, and steering him away from any actions that would help.   It’s going to be a challenge when your belief state of hopelessness is determining your steps towards happiness.  The answers to the questions didn’t cure the attitude.

It wasn’t that the man didn’t have faith. He had a ton of faith. It’s just that it was invested in the conviction that the whole effort to change his emotional state was useless. That’s a lot of personal power spent convincing our self that we are powerless.

He got this. He understood what he was doing as I pointed these things out to him, but that didn’t stop him from changing the subject and continuing to do it. Resistance is like that. We ask useless questions that run a convincing internal dialog in our head while avoiding any action. The result of all that circling dialog is nothing. We end up where we started.

The important piece to acknowledge about resistance is that it results in staying where you are emotionally.    The questions about where the path leads, what turns will there be, how long will it take, etc are all keeping us from a step on our path.  Those endless intellectual questions keep us stuck.   Some of the smartest people with PhD’s are the best at getting stuck because they can ask endless questions.

What made a difference that day is when I asked  him how he felt. “What emotions are you feeling right now?” Are you miserable, unhappy, tormented by anxiety, fears, anger, jealousy, or other emotional reactions? Just look at how you feel. How long do you want to keep feeling that way?  “NO,  I don’t wan to keep feeling this way” he said.   “What do I got to do to change it?” Noticing how you feel is an action.  Taking the time to really feel it is an action.   With those clear perceptions, the motivation to change happened all by itself.    When we are in the midst of unhappiness we ask lousy questions.  Sometimes, the help we need, is just some guidance in asking better questions.

All I knew when I started taking my first steps was that I no longer wanted to be unhappy. I didn’t have a clue about how I would do it, what would work and what wouldn’t.  I just knew that I couldn’t stay in the emotional cycles I was living in.

I didn’t know how long it would take, what the path would be, or even if it would work. The only thing I knew was that I couldn’t keep living in the emotional drama I was doing. So that’s when I decided to take action.

If you find your self asking a lot of questions about a process that you can’t know until you do it for a while you are probably asking the wrong questions.   You are stuck.  The unhappy part of your mind is asking the questions it doesn’t know the right questions to ask.  Instead take a look at the emotions you feel and how often you do those same emotional cycles. Then ask your self how long you want to keep doing that. If that doesn’t motivate you to take action then you don’t need to go around in circles with questions.  Or maybe get with someone who is skilled at asking better questions and will cause you to find better answers.

No matter what you do to overcome your resistance, you can be sure it will be a different action.

You’ll find numerous actions to take in the Self Mastery Course and The Relationship Course that will help you break the patterns of unhappiness.

As a little driving experiment, or perhaps, as a completely different way to live your life, consider the following.

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Sexual performance anxiety can cause a lot of stress in a relationhip. It creates guilt, shame, and  fears, that corrupt the emotional connection and can lead to and disconnection. In this podcast I outline what goes on in a man’s head and some of the core beliefs at the root of the issue.

Sexual Performance Anxiety (35 min) MP3 Audio

At the core of sexual performance anxiety are fear of failure, rejection from our partner, and self rejection.   These expressions take place in our mind and affect our emotions.  When we are caught up in these core beliefs of rejection our attention becomes so focused on these beliefs and emotions that we are no longer present with our partner and sexual experience.   At that point it is difficult to get aroused when what you are focused on is the beliefs in your head and the emotions they are producing.

In order to change this dynamic it is necessary to identify and change the beliefs causing projections in our imagination, and to unhook our attention from them and focus on what we are doing with our partner and our self.    This shift in our mental state is all parter of better awareness and mindfulness.

Common Sense, Myths, and Ghost Stores of the Spiritual Ego

15 years ago I was enamored with this personal development process.  I had discovered a whole new world.   I felt alive, happy, and excited about my new adventure.  There were fears and false beliefs that I had acquired over my life and I didn’t even know they were there.   I had been dragging them around like a dark cloud over me for years.  I had been unconscious of how they hung on me with worries of success and what others thought of me.  Now I was discovering them and attacking them with excitement and a new sense of freedom as each one fell.

I felt alive, I looked at the world different, and I was happier.  I was excited and wanted to share this new discovery with my friends.  I thought everyone would want to get on board with this process of finding their fears and getting rid of them.

I remember coming back from an Intensive Spiritual Retreat and meeting a friend for dinner.  She asked how my trip was and I proceeded to pour out all my excitement.  After about 3 minutes of non-stop talking I noticed she was leaning back away from me as far as she could.  The look on her face was split between concerns that I joined a cult, and fear that she might catch something.  I realized I needed to soften my presentation.

I continued inviting people to workshops and lectures but with a gentler approach.  I talked in an indirect way about how happy we could be, and how we needed to change these fear based beliefs to do it.  People I talked to continued to be uninterested.   I went from believing that everybody would do this work to thinking hardly anybody will do this work. I began to wonder why such resistance to being happy.

I reflected on my own process and realized the turning point for me was that I was painfully unhappy.  I had become disillusioned in my career, and around the same time had a high drama relationship that ended.  If it was just the relationship that had crashed I probably could have buried my emotions in my work.  If it was a career that had ran aground, I probably could have found comfort in my relationship.  Fortunately for me, both crashed at the same time and I ended up unable to deny how unhappy I was.  Out of a lack of alternatives I needed to so something about the illusions in my mind.

I finally understood why people wouldn’t jump head first into this self awareness process.  It was emotionally uncomfortable.  The process actually involved looking inward at our fears, emotional reactions, and self judgments.  We were doing what some people call shadow work, where we look at the unpleasant emotions we feel.  Facing that critical voice in our head can be a bit scary.  People would tend to avoid that loud abusive voice in their head criticizing them, or the uncomfortable fears they felt.   Over time I realized that I couldn’t push them past this resistance, nor did I want to.

How I Overcame Some Of My Resistance

The word I had for what we were doing was “spiritual.”  The word we used to refer to our selves was “warrior.”  We used the word warrior because we were in a kind of war.  We were fighting to be free of the fears, self judgments, and the tyranny of those voices in our head and false beliefs that controlled our attention.  We were fighting against all the patterns of unhappiness that we created in our mind and our relationships.

As a person’s self importance will do, I began to think of myself and my other spiritual warriors as doing something special.  We were forging into emotionally uncomfortable places others were unwilling to go.  I started to create beliefs that I (we) were more courageous, or fearless, or wiser than others.  I built up a belief system that people who do this type of introspection and belief changing work are more conscious and evolved than the majority of people in the world.   Perhaps I even considered that we were somehow raising the consciousness of the rest of humanity.  The smaller the number of people who entered into this field of challenging their fears and endeavoring to be happy I interpreted as evidence for how special we were, particularly how special I was.  All pretty self important stuff.

Early on in my personal process of change I listened and read Joseph Campbell’s work on the Mythological Journey of the Hero.  My mind used it to feed my self importance.  Yes I was doing something of “mythological” proportions.  I was following the path the masters before me took.  I was doing what the Buddha did facing all the illusions.  My journey inward to an authentic self was the type of journey written about and read for generations to come.  Mythological,,,, that’s what it was.

It’s interesting how the stories about our selves change over time.  Was I really engaged in anything that grandiose?   I don’t think of it that way anymore.  I was certainly living myths, and the story I had of myself at that time was another myth.   All the self importance I had built up around being a spiritual warrior and the special kind of courage it exemplified was another kind of myth I lived by.  They were just stories I had in my mind about myself and other people.   It was a much better story than the victim ones it replaced, but still not the truth.

What of the fears I challenged and the tyranny of the voices in my head telling me I wasn’t good enough and all the things I “should” do to be “good enough”?  Then weren’t they mythological too.  By that I mean they weren’t real.  They didn’t have the properties of physical matter.   I was challenging fears based in stories and beliefs in my mind.  They weren’t even written on paper, that’s how “not real” they were.

One of my fears I had was of what others thought of me.  I was afraid of the opinion or thoughts that might be in another person’s head.  I was living my life and behaving as if I would be hurt, or feel better emotionally depending on anther person’s thoughts.   I tried very hard to impress people and prove myself worthy in their eyes so they wouldn’t have judgmental or negative thoughts in their mind.  I was imagining one kind of story in their head and trying to make a different one exist in their head.  I didn’t have the awareness to realize that all of these assumptions were taking place in my imagination.  I was still in my own imagination when my mind was thinking about what they were thinking.

Later I would realize that if I didn’t have the power to control the voices and opinions in my own head, then I probably didn’t have the power to change the thoughts that went on in someone else’s head

I began to look at these stories, opinions, judgments, and negative thoughts in my fearful imagination that had me scrambling, and that I felt so courageous to challenge? They weren’t real.   They were myths. They were stuff that only existed in my imagination.  They didn’t exist as anything tangible.

Where is a thought?   Can an opinion hurt me?  Can someone actually take an opinion and hit me over the head with it?  Can they do any harm to me physically?   No.  Probably the most solid judgment or criticism that I could receive would be if someone said it out loud to me.  And is it real then?  Is there anything more landing on me than the vibration of their words through the air?   How hard is the vibration of air landing on my skin?   A leaf falling on me from a tree weighs more heavily than the air of someone’s opinion.

So why was I afraid of opinions and judgments from others, or from the voice in my own head?  I believed them.  Those words and judgments from my inner judge landed heavily because I believed them.  I accepted every myth of opinion and judgment as if it were truth.  They only landed with emotional impact when I believed them.   I was scared of the stories in my head simply because I believed them, not because they were real.

Ghost Stories

All those opinion, self judgments, and fears of what others thought were like the ghost stories we had when we were kids.  Little kids are afraid that a boogey man will come out of the closet or out from under the bed.  What makes a child afraid of such imaginary characters?   They believe that such things as boogey men are real.  The ghost they are afraid of isn’t in the closet or under the bed.  It is in their mind, and their mind projects that it is in the closet.

As kids if we leave the light on, and the door cracked we feel a little better.  As if somehow that boogey man will be afraid of the light or a cracked door and will stay away.

As an adult I kept my fears locked in the closet of my unconscious.  I tried to keep my focus on the door cracked open and a little light. I did it by working extra hard to impress people with how much I knew, what my body looked like, or how clever I was.  I focused on those little moments of acceptance and respect from others and lived off that little bit of light.  At the same time afraid to look inward at the self doubts I closeted inside.

Yes I had mythological boogey men inside me.  I was afraid to disappoint the mythical voices in my head.  When I didn’t have any awareness I dreamed up in my imagination failure, rejection, and disappointment a thousand different ways.  Only when I took a journey into those seemingly dark places did I notice they were just dreams. Of course to realize they were just figments of my imagination I had to get in where they were and take a close look.  I opened the closet of my unconscious beliefs and put my attention on what my thoughts and emotions were doing.   I had to control my attention and not look away when there was an impulse of fear or discomfort.  I crawled inside the closet of my mind to see what was really there.

What I discovered were myths in my mind masquerading as something real.    How ironic I thought.  I was convinced that I was some kind of courageous spiritual warrior on a great quest.  What I was really facing were dreams,,, conceptual ideas of the mind… and ghosts stories.  They were no more real than the figments of imagination a child has about what is under the bed.  What I was doing wasn’t very courageous at all when you find out there was nothing there to be afraid of.

Do I think a 10 or 12 year old child who challenges the projected myths of their imagination and looks under the bed are courageous.  No, not really.  They are just doing the common sense thing and waking up from dreams and illusions in their mind.  Then I couldn’t consider myself as this spiritual warrior to be any thing courageous either. I had about as much courage as a 10 year unable to sleep at night finally looking under the bed.  After all,, wasn’t I just facing my own ghost stories.

Why do we avoid dealing with our issues and putting them off?  We avoid it because in our mind we make believe our issues are scarier than they are.  Much like the 10 year old who doesn’t look under the bed, we don’t look inward because it is uncomfortable.  Instead we just crack the door and leave a small light on somewhere to distract us from our imagination.  We hurry about the tasks of our day trying not to notice how our imagination projects illusions and then how we react to them.

The challenge with our own mind is that we are fighting dreams.  They aren’t real, but they seem that way when we believe in them.

Over the course of our life we gather up beliefs.  For the most part that’s not a problem.  Most of our beliefs help us understand the world and how it works so we can function in it. However, some of those beliefs are not going to be true.  Some of those beliefs will have unnecessary fears associated with them. These are myths we believe in and cause us unhappy emotions.  You could also call them lies.

Because we accept these myths to be truth, they appear real in our mind.  We react emotionally to fearful outcomes as if they already happened.  We imagine our partner with someone else and we get angry as if they did it.  In reality it didn’t happen. It was just in our imagination.  With faith in these mythological stories we make them bigger than they are.

Then after imagining these myths we tell ourselves other lies.  We tell our selves that they are hard to change, that we can’t make them go away.  We tell our selves we have to live with them.  We tell ourselves we can’t change, it’s just the way we are.  More myths about change and our self built on top of the first set of lies.

Then, for some people, something happens.  Usually the pain of living by these myths causes so much suffering that we have no choice.  We have to challenge them.  We begin a mythological journey.  A path of challenging the myths we’ve lived by.  We apply some skills, we have some successes, and we celebrate change.  We begin to build better lives.  We tell our self we are doing something big.  It’s true that we feel happier and are more free, but not everything we think is true.

If you run this route far enough you run the risk of self important lies like I did.  You look at your self, compared to others lack of challenging their beliefs, and you begin to think of your self as special.  It’s a nice lie.  It feels good to think of our self as better than others.  It doesn’t really hurt anyone.  In a way it helps give you confidence and faith in your self that you can challenge the bigger fears and false beliefs in your mind.   Your new Ego is an ally helping dismantle the myths we live by.  In some circles it’s called the Spiritual Ego.

Then, at some point in your journey, the Spiritual Ego becomes one of the few remaining myths you live by.  With enough awareness of self, this grandiose image of our self as a courageous warrior no longer fits.  These false beliefs that seemed so big and scary in the beginning aren’t a big deal anymore.  Maybe it is because we have been doing the work for a while so it doesn’t feel like a big deal anymore.  Maybe it is because we realize that we are only fighting dreams in our imagination.  We realize that to face such a challenge doesn’t really take any extraordinary courage at all.  It just takes commons sense.

So with our most powerful tool, common sense, we realize the spiritual warrior or enlightened being with special consciousness story doesn’t seem to fit anymore.  We are left to dissolve that mythological image of a Spiritual Ego.    We drop it.   With that the spiritual ego dissolves, we become more humble.  We become authentic.  We begin to experience a new kind of peace and happiness free of the myths in our mind.

These are some of the steps you may face on your Pathway To Happiness.

You will find an outline of practical exercises and practices for identifying and changing your core beliefs in the Self Mastery course. It’s an audio program that you can download and listen to.   The first 4 sessions are free.

Gary