jasmin-cori

Magic Show

Sat, 24 Aug 2024 00:06:07 GMT

Magic Show

Philosophy can get pretty dry. That’s because the people who write it think they have to sound smart. They aren’t allowed to have much imagination or passion.

Luckily, I’m not a philosopher but a poet, and poets have lots of freedom. We can say it any way we like. We can say it in rhyme. We can say it in images. We can say it without any punctuation. Being a poet is great.

Recently I was reading articles on Advaita philosophy. The basic idea of Advaita comes close to something I really delight in, but the language is different. How I would say it is that the mystery of creation is the best magic trick I know.

Reality is one giant, shapeshifting consciousness that can morph itself into anything. God becomes the cave, the sun, the water, the bee, the child playing in the meadow. Can you beat that? It is all one magical fabric twisted into zillions of designs. The surface of reality is painted over again and again in billions of scenes: the streets of Calcutta, New York City, a cruise ship, a spaceship, a family sitting around a kitchen table. It is like being on the holodeck on the Starship Enterprise; this shapeshifting presence can dial up anything.

You know the part I like best? It is that the magician is creating everything out of himself! Totally. Even the image of the magician is one more trick. Even I am part of this trick! The magician waves his wand and poof ! I am here, watching. Yet I am no different than any of the other phenomena—the rabbit, the sunset, the round globe of earth, all made of the same stuff. All made by him, out of him, as him. (The gender here is arbitrary. I could say her.)

I am nothing but the trickster in this particular location. I’m sure glad he didn’t give me a horn like that funny looking rhinoceros. Or spikes like a prickly pear.

I’ve never met anyone with such an imagination. And he never stops! He just keeps creating and creating. This show may go on forever. Glad I have a front row seat, but that could change too. He’ll wave his magic wand and I’ll be a smudge on the wall back there.

The good news is that nothing is permanent. Anyway, who am I to say No? The shapeshifter is willing to become anything– shouldn’t I be too?

Do I have a choice? Oh, I know that create-your-own-reality line, but from what I’m seeing, it’s not me that is creating, but the One who I am. Now that’s confusing! What I mean to say is that this little me writing is not the magician. Or am I? The magician taking up the pen of the poet. I tell you this guy really does have no limits! He’ll go for anything.

There’s one big trick yet to come. That’s when we all wake up and recognize how marvelous this whole experience has been. It will be so much fun that maybe we’ll decide to forget what we just discovered and start all over again.

Meanwhile, I’m holding on to my front row seat. I’ve never seen a better magic show.

Leaving The Flock

Sat, 24 Aug 2024 00:02:26 GMT

Leaving The Flock

It is seldom easy to leave a community that you have belonged to for any length of time. Groups that are the hardest to leave are those which encourage members to invest a great deal in the community and spurn outside relationships. You may leave fearing for your life (as in some cults) or with deep sadness in your heart from simply outgrowing what was once home for you.

Here are some of the challenges you may face when leaving a spiritual community.

The group may have been a major part of your support system, so departing may leave you feeling alone, lonely, and without support.
If you still have friends or family members who are part of the group, your leaving will likely disrupt (and maybe ruin) your relationship with them.
You will rarely get support from within the group for leaving. In fact, your leaving is often perceived as threatening to those you have left behind, because you are challenging their choice to stay. Often you will be blamed and made wrong, even used as a negative example. Some members of the group may take your leaving as a betrayal. You have broken a loyalty to the group that was carefully cultivated.
Your reasons for leaving may be framed as something wrong with you--you are running away, you are afraid to take the next step, and so on. Of course, no one is looking at these kinds of “defensive” reasons for staying in the group. Once you get away, you may wonder what took you so long and feel foolish and guilty about what you participated in.
It is rare for a group to not hold beliefs that its way is the best way, so now you are up against a belief system that until recently you also held. Lingering doubts may pester you. It takes time to undo a belief system.
If you were part of a more authoritarian group, it has likely eroded your autonomy and confidence to go it alone. If the group centered around a teacher, you may have learned to look outside yourself for direction and guidance, even truth. Reclaiming your own spiritual authority will take some time.
It may not be only spiritual authority you have given away; in authoritarian groups, teachers make decisions about their students’ everyday lives, so life outside the flock more closely resembles someone coming out of prison. You may experience difficulty making decisions, feel a loss of identity, even culture shock.
Often when leaving a spiritual path, you don’t have anything to replace it. You are stepping into the unknown. This will put you face to face with your fears.
People leaving dysfunctional spiritual groups experience a similar “rope burn” as people leaving intimate relationships that were hurtful. It leaves them bruised and mistrustful and makes it harder to commit in the future.

I encourage you to honor this as the challenge that it is and find true support for what you are going through.

What Is Spiritual Abuse?

Fri, 23 Aug 2024 23:57:29 GMT

What Is Spiritual Abuse?

Just as there can be abuse in any type of relationship, there can be abuse from a spiritual teacher or group. Two defining elements of spiritual abuse are

1) exploitation/betrayal of trust (conscious or unconscious)

2) causing spiritual harm

Exploitation

In exploitation, a person uses a position of authority or a relationship where there is some kind of dependency and trust to take advantage of another. It might be taking advantage financially, sexually, or to meet practical or emotional needs (e.g. having a spiritual student do housekeeping tasks or provide emotional comfort).

In childhood sexual abuse, a person in a position of trust takes advantage of a child to meet their own needs. In spiritual abuse, a person uses a position of spiritual authority (even if self-assigned) to meet needs which really should not be part of this relationship.

This is a betrayal of trust, and these leave deep scars. There is clearly psychological harm. In isolated spiritual communities, people often lose their sense of self, their critical faculties, their connection with the world.

Spiritual Harm

Our spirituality is a very precious part of us; it is where we connect with the innermost nature of our being and with the underlying ground of being. It is where we connect with the divine, however we might conceive of that.

There is spiritual harm when an ideology or powerful figure takes over so completely that a person loses their own compass, capacity for discernment, or trust in their own experience.

There is spiritual harm when people are shamed, disempowered, or made to feel undeserving, as these will make it harder to then feel their own light.

There is spiritual harm when spirituality has become so twisted and painful that it causes us to turn away from spirituality completely (as a sexual abuse survivor may turn away from sexual relationship or even emotional intimacy).

These are a few examples of spiritual harm.

Healing from Spiritual Abuse

The first step in healing from abuse is to recognize that something is not right. Perhaps abuse feels like too strong a word. You might start by asking, “Is there anything that happened that I don’t feel good about?”

Another good question is “Is there anything I would rather not expose?” As with other kinds of abuse, our sense of loyalty provides cover for questionable behavior. The “abuser” has often been a source of comfort and care at some point or is credited with our spiritual growth.

Finding a safe and trusted person to talk with about it may be your next step. It doesn’t need to be a professional, although it may be. There are various resources available for those recovering from spiritual abuse, including books, blog sites and networks, counselors. Some are oriented to people in a particular religious tradition; others are more general. As with any kind of abuse, it’s important to do your healing work.

The River of Life

Fri, 23 Aug 2024 23:47:56 GMT

The River of Life

The basic teaching of impermanence is that you can never step into the same river twice. With each step the river has changed, and so have you.

On this journey down the River of Life, the landmarks keep changing. This is true in both our outer and inner worlds. Our bodies, our environments, our work, our relationships, where we live and what we do—it all keeps changing. And who we are keeps changing, along with our beliefs, our reactions to things, even our identity.

Often you don’t notice things as they fade, until suddenly you notice something is gone. “Oh, I’m not young anymore! The world I grew up in no longer exists!”

When something you have oriented to for decades is no longer there, you can feel a little lost. It will take some getting used to, and in the meantime, there will be grief. Let yourself be with that grief. At some point you look up again. You notice that beneath you the river is still flowing.

The world of form is impermanent. All forms come to an end. What does not end is this flow of life in the material world, and the larger metaphysical world it is part of.

The Surrendered Heart

Fri, 23 Aug 2024 23:45:17 GMT

The Surrendered Heart

One of the fruits of spiritual life is the surrendered heart. I specifically use the word surrendered here because the heart has given up resistance. Although we may associate surrender with a sense of defeat, it doesn’t come with weakness. The heart doesn’t surrender because it lacks strength or integrity, but because it is consumed by love.

This is what every mystic knows: love cooks you until there is nothing left, until you release yourself into the stew, no longer a distinct and separate flavor. Rather than defeat, surrender is really the deepest relaxation. It is the relaxation of no longer trying to hold yourself separate and no longer trying to direct the course of reality. When you surrender, you let things simply be.

This is quite a contrast with the ego-self, which is always measuring how much it gives and what it is getting back. It is like a shrewd investor trying to get the best return. The surrendered heart has stopped measuring. The surrendered heart says, “Here. Take it all. Let’s close the stall and go dancing.” We get a sense of this in Rumi and Kabir and other mystical poets.

I look back at my own book of mystical poetry, and one of the most important threads running through it (as well as the whole basis for writing it) is surrender. Surrender through love and surrender to love. This is a theme carried through many of my other books as well. Ultimately it is what the spiritual journey about: letting go into love.

When we surrender into love, we surrender into our own deeper nature, and this deeper nature ripens us. It saturates us with itself until the whole person is juicy with it. The ripened soul is so ripe and so wet and full that it is dripping. It cannot contain itself any longer. When we have matured this way, we have no choice but to be who and what we are.

Stripping Down to the You That Is You

Fri, 23 Aug 2024 23:40:33 GMT

Stripping Down to the You That Is You

At one time or another, we lose almost everything in this life. We outgrow people and places, leave various roles, lose people we love, lose our youth and our health, lose our hair. But there is one thing we can never lose, and that is our essence.

Essence is a beautiful word. When we talk about the essence of something, we're talking about its fundamental character and nature. People have an essence too, both a transpersonal and a personal one. The transpersonal essence is shared by everyone; it's the one fabric that we are all part of. But there is also a "personal essence" and that is what I am calling “the you that is you.” It is not the same as everybody else, and yet it is not the ordinary self that you identify with. It is an innermost essence that would be there even if everything else was gone—even if your body was gone, your name, your history, your likes and dislikes.

In my brand of spiritual work, it’s good to find this you that is you. Isn't it funny to think you must find what you cannot lose? Usually you look right over it, because you're so concerned with all those other aspects, like what kind of image to project, how you look (that one takes forever!), and what others think of you.

It's like the night sky wondering if it has spread out its stars in the most becoming way. The essence of the night sky is not affected by which constellations we see. It is still its glorious, infinite self, regardless—even on a cloudy night. And you are still your glorious, infinite self regardless of the image people construct of you.

In many ways, spiritual growth is more about what you take off than what you put on. You take off everything you've added that is not fundamentally who you are. You take off your defenses and adaptations. You take off your rigidities, your needing to have things a certain way. You take off our prejudices and beliefs (what a relief!). Then you take off your undergarments. (I bet you are wondering what these are.) The undergarments are the self-images you hold; they’re generally as close as you get to yourself. Yet beneath the self-images is the you that is you. Beneath the self-images is a reality that goes way, way beyond image.

It is tricky to find this you that is you because generally we perceive things as objects. I remember one time with my teacher when I was desperately trying to find the essence of me. I had an image of running from one street corner to the next, is if looking for something. Then I realized it didn't work that way. It was more like a drop being absorbed into another drop, surrendering into its own nature.

The fact that it can’t be captured by an image or known as an object makes it seem rather esoteric. Some things just are. Still, it is worth the journey. The first step is this taking-off process that continues until there is nothing left but this you that is you.

Adapted from The Magic of Your True Nature

How To Hold Suffering

Fri, 23 Aug 2024 23:36:36 GMT

How To Hold Suffering

When the world is crumbling around us, we sometimes feel irked when we see people who are blissfully happy. How can they be immune to the problems and pain in our world, we wonder. How dare they be happy?

While it’s true that a great many dim their awareness of suffering, that’s not true for everyone. Think of His Holiness, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. He is certainly aware of suffering but shows us that we don’t need to get lost in the suffering. We can be aware of suffering and also aware of the incredible beauty and love that is here. We don’t need to allow the agony to take away the ecstasy, the pure joy built into the fabric of the universe.

It’s sort of radical to think that we minister to suffering by learning to let it go. I’m from the psychology field, and I understand that we need to feel our hurts for them to dissipate, yet I am also aware that we can easily become mesmerized by our pain and get stuck there. This is not something we do on purpose—sometimes part of us is frozen there. When we get lost in our suffering, we lose sight of the unmarred part of our nature, the part that is whole and is beyond suffering. And also the good that is still present. Then we don’t need to turn away from suffering. Etty Hillesum, a young Jewish woman killed in the Holocaust, wrote this in her diary:

I am with the hungry, with the ill-treated and the dying, every day, but I am also with the jasmine and with that piece of sky beyond my window....It is a question of living life from minute to minute and taking suffering into the bargain.... Suffering has always been with us, does it matter in what form it comes? All that matters is how we bear it and how we fit it into our lives.

Etty was big enough to be with an unimaginable amount of pain without drowning in it. Part of being "big enough" is to keep working on ourselves so that our own pain is not in the way. I've noticed that people with a lot of unprocessed pain often do one of two things: they flee from any pain in their environment or they entrain with it. Much like catching a flu virus, they catch pain on contact. That's one more person in pain and one less to help, it seems. Catching the pain just spreads it further.

I think we need to learn to hold the pain rather than be the pain. As a bowl holds water without becoming water, we need to hold pain without being dragged down by it. That means we have to be larger than the pain and keep at least one foot outside of it.

Then we can also be with the jasmine and the piece of sky. We can stay connected to the beauty and the dignity of life and not get trampled down by unconsciousness and evil. We can honor the happiness as well as the heartbreak, knowing that both are here to serve.

Based on a piece by this name in The Magic of Your True Nature [link to book]

What Will Be Asked of Me?

Fri, 23 Aug 2024 23:32:00 GMT

What Will Be Asked of Me?

A student of the Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön asked a question in a retreat where Pema was teaching tonglen , a practice in which you imagine taking in the suffering of others and sending out your own happiness and well-being. The student had a startling thought: What if it works? Am I really willing to take on the suffering of others?

You might have a similar question: What will be asked of me on this spiritual journey? Will I have to give my possessions to the poor? Give shelter to the homeless? Give up my vacation to do volunteer work? Will I have to forgive my brother-in-law?

I have read book after book saying that spiritual life means giving up everything, including and most importantly your very self. This is true (the small self cannot reach the destination), but it’s not great psychology to sound like you’re out to take everything away. We might have more company on this journey if we focused less on what we must give up and more on what we’re getting.

A spiritual path needs to address suffering, but part of the antidote to pain is the gifts inherent in our essential nature, so we want to get to these gifts as soon as we can. (I’ve always been one to open a present as soon as it comes.)

In this leg of my journey, I'm not giving up things I don't want to give up and not having them taken away by cranky old nuns or Zen masters hitting me with a stick. Rather than follow rules or somebody else’s program, I’m following instructions given to me directly. Let me explain.

We all have different assignments. As we grow spiritually, we do whatever is ours to do. Some people will go to the jungles and provide basic health care to the people who live there. Some will teach inner city kids. Some will write music (we need music!). Some will work at the grocery store (those are the clerks that smile). Some will march in protests and go to jail. Some will hold babies. So it's not like signing up for the army. You have choices.

This is one of those more magical things: it will feel like you are choosing, but there are actually instructions to follow. This time the instructions are not in such tiny print that you have to use a magnifying glass on top of your bifocals. They are written large, but in a place people don't always think to look. You’ll find them in your heart.

So if your instruction is to teach inner city kids, that will be fun for you; if your instruction is to march in the street, you'll want to do that. You might not like every itty bitty part of it, but mostly you'll like it. I think this is a much better design than earning brownie points for doing things you hate. When I do something I hate, I don't feel very good inside.

There will be some sacrifices (full disclosure), but when we’re following the instructions inside, it will feel like those are just the right thing to do. It’s right to give that money or help that person or forgive the jerk that hurt you. You won’t be doing it to be good, but rather to be you.

What is you are called to do will continue to change, and it is a matter of keeping up with that. Back to the tonglen example, there will be a you that is big enough to take on the suffering without losing your light in the process.

Adapted from The Magic of Your True Nature

The Loneliness of Childhood Sexual Abuse

Fri, 23 Aug 2024 23:01:19 GMT

The Loneliness of Childhood Sexual Abuse

Childhood sexual abuse is one of the loneliest experiences on the planet. It is being alone in three significant ways:

1. Alone with the secret . First, such abuse almost always leaves one alone with the secret of the abuse. It is an awful, wounding secret that could destroy, and so we keep it safe, sometimes even from ourselves.

2. Disconnected from the perpetrator. Sex is supposed to be one of the most intimate experiences in the world, but with sexual abuse the two parties are about as far apart as two people in one experience can be. The abuser is totally disconnected from the actual experience of the victim who has become an object. Any previous relationship is lost during these moments.

3. Disconnected from self. The experience of sexual abuse is overwhelming for a child, so many dissociate. They are disconnected from what happens during the abuse and often disconnected for years after, as the experience is not in normal memory.

No wonder a victim of childhood sex abuse feels utterly alone and abandoned. The depth of this aloneness can reverberate through one’s system for years, leaving a trail of tears. It may leave a sensitivity toward experiences where people are together but not emotionally connected. Emotional disconnection paired with physical touch can be especially triggering, eliciting painful earlier feelings or perhaps dissociation.

You were alone then, but you don’t need to be alone now. This kind of intense experience can be hard for friends and partners to hold, so it is good to find a qualified professional to help you process this trauma.

Sexual Abuse Memories: What to Believe?

Fri, 23 Aug 2024 22:54:19 GMT

Sexual Abuse Memories: What to Believe?

Periodically stories of well-known people accused of sexually abusing minors rock the news. These center around perpetrators who are doctors, coaches, legislators, movie stars, but of course that is just the tip of the iceberg. Abusers are found through all walks of life and all roles. Someone in your family may be one.

Of course, it’s simpler when the victim of abuse has always carried memories, but often that is not the case. We block memories that are too much to deal with. So in these cases, if we have memories, they are considered “recovered memories” that have broken through our defenses. Recovered memories have been attacked by some. A group of accused parents are concerned that these memories are actually “false memories” that therapists have implanted in their clients or that self-identified victims have made up. This brings up a number of questions:

Can memories be implanted? If so, how much power can false memories have?
Do people make up stories of being abused when they are not?
Can a recovered memory be trustworthy?

Let’s take a look.

Can False Memories Leave Tracks?

Is it possible to implant memories? Yes. Both experiments and anecdotal evidence have shown that false memories can be implanted in people.

What is less understood is the reach of false memories. Could a memory based on nothing but the improper guidance of a therapist leave the kinds of tracks we see in real memories? Can a few seconds of an imagined experience (or worse, a fabricated story without any experience as its basis) leave you with dozens if not hundreds of unconscious triggers that you find over decades of hard work? I don’t see how they can.

Why Would You Make This Up?

Sometimes it is said that a person grabs onto a made-up story of sexual abuse to explain their emotional disturbance. They hold to the tale to let themselves off the hook of taking responsibility for their own messes. Sounds like an idea of someone who has never been there. As I wrote in Healing From Trauma:

The argument in support of the idea of creating false memories is that a person who is suffering wants an explanation, and a story that seems big enough to provide that explanation offers that support. I can see how this theoretically seems so, and yet I would say that at the level this story [of sexual abuse] is reassuring, it’s really only a story and not a felt experience. As a felt experience, it is shattering.

Early sexual abuse is not an explanation you run to for convenience, but one you fight against, especially when it involves a family member you love and depend on. Most incest survivors fight their experience for years, a combination of not wanting to believe, afraid of claiming something they have no proof for, and fear that it would destroy the family.

As a psychotherapist, I’ve sat with many clients who suddenly find themselves overcome with a traumatic memory. The experience comes of its own accord, often prompted by a sensation in the body or cue in the environment. The natural response to such a memory (especially involving betrayal) is “No, no, no! It can’t be true!”

A few facts about childhood sexual abuse:

Sexual abuse often begins very young. The memories that are formed before we have language are most confusing and lack a coherent narrative. These memories are hidden in our bodies and their stories are told through our bodies’ reactions.
Ongoing sexual abuse by a caregiver is about as damaging as anything there is in this human world. And because of the untenable position it puts the victim in, it is most likely to be shut out of mind. The psyche will resist having its world torn asunder by such memories.
Child victims are often told to keep this a secret. I work with adults who remember repeating as their mantra “It’s a secret--don’t tell” even when they are not clear about what exactly is the secret.
There is often a “grooming” of a child victim. What may later end in sexual penetration often starts with something less extreme, but uncomfortable, even if covert. [Think of Jerry Sandusky wrestling with his victims or the Olympic coach Larry Nassar, treating his gymnasts.] The more grooming, the harder it is to find the moment a perpetrator crosses the line and the harder to hold them fully responsible.

Are recovered memories reliable?

There is indeed evidence that such memories can be accurate. The Recovered Memory Project created by Professor Ross Cheit has documented more than 100 cases of validated “recovered memories” for which there was previous amnesia.

Therapists are confronted every day with unwelcome slivers of memory escaping the strongholds of motivated forgetting. Most therapists are cautious about accepting at face value every detail of a memory, since all memories are subject to distorting influences, yet it is generally believed that these uprisings from the unconscious are indeed true to something.

First Steps in Healing

Trauma of this nature disrupts your relationship with your own experience, and one of the steps in healing is to heal this fragmentation and rupturing by acknowledging and accepting these shards of experience that seep back into your awareness. Can you listen as these returning fragments attempt to come home? Rather than put yourself on the witness stand, demanding facts that are impossible to prove, can you listen for feelings, body sensations, and other clues? Can you feel when something rings true?

This is not a journey to take alone. You’ll need the support of others—whether a therapist or a therapy-related group as well as your partner or friends. Educating yourself about childhood sexual abuse can be good scaffolding, but pace yourself carefully. This is overwhelming territory.

Please share this post. Childhood sexual abuse is rampant. There may be people in your circle who are dealing with memories and suspicions they have not shared.

How Trauma Impacts our Ability to be Vulnerable

Fri, 23 Aug 2024 22:48:17 GMT

How Trauma Impacts our Ability to be Vulnerable

Learning to be vulnerable is a stretch for most people, but harder if you’ve experienced significant trauma. During traumatic events, we don’t know that we will survive and this gets associated with being unprotected, exposed in some way. This makes tolerating the vulnerability of daily life, relationships, and even inner growth difficult.

What actions are “too vulnerable” depend on our history. Things as simple as having your mouth open or your back to a door or your legs in an open position can bring anxiety if associated with past trauma. Publishing or posting something on the internet may feel exceedingly vulnerable as you have no control over where it is going. For some being visible feels dangerous.

Coming Out of Your Shell

We have all, on some level, learned to try to protect ourselves from vulnerability. A primary defense is armoring, where we build a hard shell around ourselves, like a turtle or a snail. Your shell is your protective structure. It consists of physical tension as well as other defenses, such as avoidance, isolation, internalized rules constructed to keep you safe, and trying to control what people can see in you.

The problem with the shell is that it separates you from your softer, more delicate essential nature and from more tender, intimate bonds with people.

Coming out of this shell can be a very long and difficult process. In addition to setting off all your alarms, any thinning of this shell defense can leave you feeling uncontained or out of control, both which may have happened in trauma.

We need to understand that we can be without our shell without being defenseless. In most cases we still have the instinctive defenses (fight and flight), we have verbal defenses (yell, scream, defend boundaries, or softer versions like telling people what we need), we have behavioral defenses (ways we use common sense and caution to mitigate danger, like locking your door or being discriminating about where you meet a potential date). It’s fine to have a shell to return to in emergencies, but not so great to live trapped in it.

Appropriate Risk and Appropriate Protection

If we’ve been hurt a lot, it is sometimes hard to recognize the positive side of vulnerability. Vulnerability allows you to become closer to your partners and friends. This is you outside the shell, available for contact. It may involve extending yourself in an uncharacteristic way, like being more affectionate or transparent. That takes trust that others are not out to hurt you, although in their clumsiness they may inadvertently step on your feelings.

With people who have proven themselves to be untrustworthy, it is wise to protect what is not yet “hardy” in you. Your emerging qualities need a safe place to develop, yet to grow hardy they also need calibrated exposure. It’s the same principle as putting out tender plants on a spring afternoon but taking them in before the temperature drops at night.

If we avoid making ourselves vulnerable altogether, we won’t experience new learning, and we will be stuck in old default patterns. We need to see the feared consequences don’t always happen, and that requires taking a risk, peeking out beyond the shell.

The trick is to take risks that are the right size. If you take too big of a risk, you may short-circuit and dissociate. Increasing the risk level slowly, reassuring scared parts, getting support, and taking in successes are all part of equipping yourself to be vulnerable more often.

Be really compassionate in this. Your system does not quickly go on hair-trigger alert for no reason. It needs to learn you can keep yourself safe, even when you’re stretching beyond your earlier limits.

Please consider sharing this with those you love who are challenged with vulnerability and may have a trauma background.

PTSD: It's Not Over

Fri, 23 Aug 2024 22:43:45 GMT

PTSD: It's Not Over

Unrecognized PTSD

People can have PTSD and not know it. They may wonder why they’re so anxious, have trouble sleeping, are hounded by nightmares, have emotions that careen out of control, never feel safe, have physical symptoms that do not easily resolve, have holes in their memory… The list goes on. (See Am I Suffering From Trauma?)

Many people either do not know the symptoms of PTSD or do not recognize that they suffered a stressor sufficient to create a trauma disorder. There are, for instance, hidden traumas. These include something like an accident in which you were not badly hurt. What we forget is that at some point in that event, we didn’t know we (or a loved one) were going to make it. Especially if others do not consider that we’re still dealing with trauma, we may overlook it as well.

Then there is the issue of traumatic stressors that have been pushed out of mind, because they are too horrific to face. Childhood sexual abuse is the most common example here, although other kinds of childhood abuse also fit. These traumas may stay hidden for a lifetime.

Trying to Stay Safe

In PTSD, we keep our guard up. We are always scanning our environment for danger and making sure we’re not in a vulnerable position. For example, you may not like sitting in a public place with your back to the door. Sometimes we understand why we take these precautions, but often we don’t, especially with unrecognized trauma and repressed trauma.

It can take a lot of attention to maintain this hypervigilance and involves considerable muscle tension as well. You may not realize how much work your muscles are doing until those muscles relax, often through something like bodywork. Sometimes that relaxation is accompanied by a feeling of danger or a memory surfacing. The muscle tension serves as an unconscious bracing.

We also defend against the felt danger when we (often unconsciously) constrict our lives. We stop going places or doing things associated with the earlier threat. That might mean avoiding parties if you were raped at one, the seashore if there was a drowning or near-drowning, the snowy mountains if caught in an earlier avalanche.

Although this may appear as sensible caution, buried feelings make it more intense than that. Many times we aren’t aware of how small our world has become. In my book, Healing From Trauma , I have a section called “Living in a Broom Closet,” a reference based on my own work in therapy as a trauma survivor where I felt my life as that closed in.

Monitor, control, avoid, contract–-we do everything we can to feel safe.

It’s Not Over

Why is it that deep down we don’t feel safe? It’s because the trauma lives on inside us. It is as if, somewhere in our body and psyche, the trauma is still happening. Even when our logical mind has no question that past has passed, the felt sense deep in the unconscious is that it’s not over.

You can think of it as freezing a movie right as the scary part begins. What you did is freeze the situation, and very likely your body as well. This frozen movie does not just go dark. It is as if it is still trying to play through, the projector working overtime and the film at times lurching forward. While I am making an analogy to something mechanical, please remember that this is a powerful, dynamic force inside, more like a huge wave.

Reliving Trauma

In PTSD, we are both defending against trauma and reliving it. One way we relive it is through flashbacks, vivid experiences that feel as if we are back there. It doesn’t matter if it was 50 years ago. In a flashback, it’s happening now.

We may also experience memory fragments that are not as if present time, and body memories in which there are body sensations devoid of any context or with a hazy context only. Or you might feel a body contraction or reaction that is unconsciously trying to prevent something traumatic from happening.

We relive trauma in more disguised form in nightmares. Or when we get all riled up at something that reminds us of the trauma, but we aren’t aware of what is fueling our over-reaction. (We refer to this as “reactivity” or being triggered.)

We may also find ourselves reenacting certain dynamics multiple times—perhaps trying to work something out.

Often in traumatizing situations we were alone or felt alone, even in the midst of throngs of people. It is hard to heal trauma without the presence of others who can break through that aloneness and be with us as we stand and let that wave break over us, let the movie play through and come to an end.

We already survived it. We just don’t know it.

What is PTSD?

Fri, 23 Aug 2024 22:34:09 GMT

What is PTSD?

Trauma affects us in many ways, leading to numerous mental health and physical health conditions, but the one you hear most about is PTSD. Here is a brief introduction.

Does everyone with trauma get PTSD? If not, why not?

It’s estimated that we will all experience events that can lead to PTSD, and yet a slim minority will actually develop PTSD. Whether or not you develop PTSD is a matter of a number of factors, most of them outside your control. These include:

How old you were when the traumatic event occurred
Amount of previous stress
Psychological hardiness before the traumatic event
How your nervous system is wired, what kind of innate sensitivity you have
The nature of the traumatic stressor (some events more often lead to PTSD than others, generally when we are personally targeted and by someone we know and depend upon)
Whether or not you had any control in the traumatic event(s) and could do anything to help yourself or others.
The amount and quality of social support available after the trauma
Appropriate intervention after the traumatic event or when symptoms appear

There can be a lag of years between traumatic events and actually developing the complex of symptoms known as PTSD. You might, for example, have had severe trauma in childhood, had a somewhat normal adolescence and then become overwhelmed by trauma symptoms in your thirties or forties. This may be the result of a stressor that parallels the original trauma or a pileup of stressors that surpasses your resources for coping.

What are the symptoms of PTSD?

PTSD is characterized by symptoms that cause significant disruption to normal life. Here are the three major categories of symptoms:

Re-experiencing the trauma

If you have PTSD, one of the ways you suffer is that you keep re-experiencing the trauma in some way, such as distressing memories, dreams, or flashbacks. Over-reacting to things that remind you of the trauma is also considered re-experiencing, even though you may not be aware of what you are reacting to.

Avoiding reminders of your trauma

Not being able to get beyond the trauma is so distressing that you naturally want to avoid anything that may remind you of it. Most of this is unconscious, like not understanding that you don’t like to do certain activities or be around certain types of people. You can also avoid by numbing out, including through addictions.

Increased arousal level

Unresolved trauma keeps your nervous system in a state of heightened arousal that can result in a number of symptoms like startling easily, hypervigilance, feeling irritable and reactive, having difficulty sleeping at night or concentrating during your daytime hours, as well as physical symptoms, such as your heart speeding up or breathing rapidly.

A more recently recognized type of PTSD is called Complex PTSD or complex trauma. It is not yet in the official diagnostic manual in the U.S., but is in an international one. Complex PTSD involves these same symptoms, plus a few others, and is connected to experiencing repeated trauma in childhood, often at the hands of attachment figures (parents and caregivers). Not feeling safe is sometimes tagged as a major characteristic of complex trauma, but you see it in the hypervigilance of all PTSD.

Understand that PTSD is a short-hand name for a complex of symptoms and that you can have some of these but not others and only if you meet a threshold of symptoms do you meet the criteria for having PTSD.

Can you recover from PTSD?

Fortunately, most people recover from PTSD, but it depends on both the load of trauma and what resources you had or can garner now. It’s worth trying to treat it. The field of trauma therapy has grown immensely in the last 30 years, and the odds are with you. It’s generally a longer-term effort but any relief makes life easier. You don’t need to live forever trapped in the feelings of trauma, as described in the next blog.

Am I Suffering from Trauma?

Fri, 23 Aug 2024 22:25:16 GMT

Am I Suffering from Trauma?

Alyce didn’t understand why, but the thought of getting trapped in the parking lot created a sudden sense of panic. She wasn’t always anxious, but when she did become upset or nervous, it was sort of over the top. She also had disturbing dreams of her home being broken into when she was sleeping. And when her siblings reminisced about family vacations spent with cousins, she found herself with a pounding headache. Other things bothered her too, like leaving her daughter with babysitters. When she saw a movie in which a child was sexually assaulted, she wondered if anything had happened to her.

Sometimes we push traumatic events out of conscious awareness because we don’t have the resources to cope with them. Traumas like sexual assault are often simply too disruptive to a child to deal with, and the best strategy in the moment is to forget about or repress them.

Other times we don’t recognize that our symptoms are the result of traumatic stress because we haven’t identified a remembered event as traumatic. Perhaps others downplayed the importance of it, wanting us to feel better and not “wallow” in something painful. Also an event that may be experienced as traumatic to the nervous system may be accepted within a given context as normal (e.g., battering a spouse) or necessary (e.g., medical interventions).

You may not consciously recall suffering from trauma, but if your nervous system has been overwhelmed and you’ve felt panic, helplessness or feared for your life or sanity, you may be suffering from post-traumatic stress.

Although each traumatic stressor leaves a unique footprint, here are some clues that can help you recognize traumatic stress.

Common signs of trauma:

Overreacting in situations and not understanding why
Disturbing images that intrude into consciousness and seem to come from out of nowhere
Feeling that you sort of fade away at times or don’t feel in your body. Often at such times your brain doesn’t work normally. It’s like when your computer freezes up and everything is on hold (These are indications of dissociation.)
Feeling overly sensitive and easily overwhelmed
A sense that you are running away from something, often by staying too busy to really know what is going on with you
Feeling that it is difficult to settle down, once you’ve become upset
Feeling that it is hard to get your life together, blaming yourself and wondering what is wrong with you
Noticing that you don’t feel safe a fair amount of the time
Significant gaps in memory, sometimes covering years
Anger, sometimes turned against yourself and expressed in self-damaging ways

Unresolved trauma can lead not only to conditions like Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), but commonly to depression, anxiety, panic attacks, eating disorders and other addictions, emotional numbing, chronic tension in the body, and medical problems that seem to defy explanation or treatment, especially those involving chronic pain and autoimmune disorders.

If you have experiences like those listed above, I encourage you to look into it more. Consider counseling if you are not in it and learn more about trauma. My book Healing from Trauma is one introduction to the subject. The next several blogs may also be instructive.

“They did the best they could” — Excusing Parental Abuse

Fri, 23 Aug 2024 22:14:42 GMT

“They did the best they could” — Excusing Parental Abuse

I worked with an intelligent, eminently sane woman whose mother would often become a raging witch who did things she would be punished for if seen today and whose father was a passive bystander. The client thanked me for believing her. When her previous therapist said, “They did the best they could,” (referring to the parents) it was a signal to Donna (not her real name) that there was nothing more to say. Conversation closed. That was pretty much the end of their therapy, too.

I don’t know if it was the best they could do, but it certainly doesn’t look that way to an adult child who has grown up and has elected, through much effort, to do things differently.

The struggle for Donna and everyone who suffered from parental abuse as a child is to heal the self-blame that is both natural to a child’s self-centered view and which is reinforced every time someone minimizes or dismisses their experience.

To make things worse, if the parent denies responsibility or denies what happened, victims don’t know what to do with their experience. They are left to bury it in the unconscious, conceal it, or risk being labeled a problem. It is crazy-making. We need to place the blame where it belongs.

One of the worst things you can do to a person is to force them to disown part of their experience. It’s like creating a crack in their soul. Any time we minimize someone’s experience (telling them, “don’t feel that way” or “that’s not the way it was,” or “you have no cause for complaint”), we make that crack bigger.

What those who have gone through deep suffering need is someone who they feel is on their side, not someone shutting down their process.

Now I know some people think we’ve gone too far focusing on wounds, but I see too much of the alternative, where people leave the dirt piled up under the carpet and trip over it their whole lives. Or, worse yet, pass the injuries on.

Those who are healing from these kinds of injuries are often admonished to forgive, but it is usually premature and can impede the emergence of a more genuine and whole forgiveness. Forgiving at the beginning, before ever ‘opening the book’ makes it likely that any forgiveness is an imitation plastered on top of a mountain of denied feelings and experiences that you can’t get to because that book is closed.

Let’s not use “they did the best they could” to foreclose the pain in the room. Let’s allow people their experience and meet their pain when we can.

Childhood Emotional Abuse

Fri, 23 Aug 2024 22:10:27 GMT

Childhood Emotional Abuse

Rather than whacking a child with a belt or a hairbrush, emotional abuse is whacking a child with cruel words and looks. Verbal forms usually include blaming, shaming, humiliating, and threatening abandonment. Nonverbal forms include hateful looks, refusing to talk with a child, and behaviors that undermine a child’s sense of self-respect, such as providing only inappropriate clothing or sabotaging a child’s success.

Isn’t physical abuse worse?

Not true. According to a study reported by the American Psychological Association, “Children who are emotionally abused and neglected face similar and sometimes worse mental health problems as children who are physically or sexually abused.” It found that children who had been psychologically abused suffered from anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, symptoms of post-traumatic stress, and were suicidal at the same or a greater rate than children who were physically or sexually abused.

10 effects of childhood emotional abuse

Since emotional abuse generally is found along with emotional neglect, this list is supplemental to my original list of effects of emotional neglect [link to blog preceding]. More can be found in the second edition of The Emotionally Absent Mother and in Healing from an Emotionally Absent Mother .

1. High levels of anxiety. Anxiety is the feeling that something is not quite right, often with a foreboding that something bad is about to happen. It is easy to see why a child who is not safe from attack gets filled with anxiety.

Anxiety shows up in many ways. Sometimes it spills out as a panic attack. Or it takes the form of phobias or obsessive-compulsive patterns. Anxiety can also be involved in nervous behaviors like hair-pulling, in excessive worry or becoming overly cautious, or being irritable and restless. Feeling anxious and on guard makes it hard to relax, and the body is then deprived of much that it needs to maintain good health, including good sleep.

2. Deeply ingrained avoidance. When you don’t have good skills for regulating your emotions, you’ve got a big stake in avoiding having emotions set off. That can lead you to not venture out into life and also to avoid feeling what is going on inside. The need to avoid can also feed addictions.

3. Alienation from the body and degradation of health. The legacy of numbing, shame, and unprocessed trauma make it harder to occupy the body. And not fully occupying the body makes it harder for the body to thrive.

Adverse events in childhood are highly correlated with more disease in adulthood in the large-scale ACE study. Your immune and nervous systems, along with all the others, were burdened when they were developing.

A third reason “the body bears the burden” (also the title of a book on trauma) is that what has no other way to be worked out often expresses itself through somatic symptoms, a rather well-known phenomenon.

4. Difficulty trusting. Many times the person who has been emotionally abused as a child continues to expect to be used, hurt, manipulated, and dumped on. It generally feels too vulnerable to let down the walls you’ve erected to protect yourself. It also feels foreign when people act genuinely interested in you, and it’s hard to trust that any interest will last or not have an ulterior motive. There is also a fear that if you rely on someone they’ll leave.

5. Used and unhappy in relationships. Being mistreated in your first relationship with a parent makes you more vulnerable to getting involved with others who behave or make you feel a similar way. You may have learned to be compliant to minimize the other’s aggression, even becoming somewhat numb to it. Those who stay in abusive relationships often have a history of early abuse.

Another likely pattern is that of caretaking, becoming a doormat and giving too much to people who are “takers.” Because you desperately want relationship and don’t expect more parity, you may end up propping up people who need an audience.

6. Internal ceilings. Until we have worked through the deprivations that marked our childhood, they continue on inside of us in the form of beliefs often hidden under the surface. This results in a ceiling we bump up against. It may be the sense that “I’m not allowed” to feel certain emotions, make decisions, or succeed.

Even when we push past barriers to actually succeed, other residues remain. One is the feeling of being a fraud; another is a tendency to take away your own wins, just as your abusive parent did.

7. Internal perpetrators. While we all have an inner critic who pops up at times, those who were cruelly criticized when growing up often have a critic that is over the top. This inner perpetrator often holds the same judgments as your abusive parent: you are no-good, fat, lazy, stupid, and should be exposed.

8. Self-harming . Self-harming behaviors can range from subtle self-sabotage and lack of good self-care to cutting on your body, various kinds of self-punishment, and suicide.

9. Frequent or ongoing dissociation. As I wrote in Healing From Trauma , dissociation is when you are not all here. It is most often a disconnection from your body, your feelings, or your environment. Dissociation is a circuit breaker for a nervous system which has become overwhelmed. It is only somewhat successful in managing the overwhelm, as you usually feel like you’ve just lost your brain. In a severely dissociated state, you feel like you can’t do anything.

10. Not sure what is real. When you have suffered extreme emotional attack at a young age, and especially when that is denied or blamed on you and when you had no safe place to go but to retreat to an inner world, it may leave you with a sense that you’re not quite sure what actually happened and what you may have imagined or dreamed.

As you can see, living with the impacts of childhood emotional abuse is an enormous weight to carry. I wish you the best in finding the support needed—whether a skilled therapist, relevant recovery groups, people in your inner circle, or good self-help reading.

Effects of Emotional Neglect

Fri, 23 Aug 2024 21:59:02 GMT

Effects of Emotional Neglect

Abuse is when something happens that is actively violating of another, but neglect is when we don’t get important things we need as children. I’m not talking about just physical things like food and shelter, but also essential emotional or developmental needs.

For example, one important developmental need for a young child is to explore the world, but if a child is too insecure (with no secure attachment to come back to) and is not encouraged, such exploration will be inhibited and the child may grow into an adult who lacks confidence and stays in a very small life.

Children who are not provided with what they need to have a good start in life are handicapped in serious ways. Their sense of self, initiative, confidence, trust…so many building blocks are damaged or under-developed.

Here are 10 common problems that are the result of neglect:

1. Holes in your sense of value and self-esteem. Self-esteem grows from being seen and mirrored, admired and respected, guided and encouraged. When parents are troubled or overwhelmed, they often do not provide these essential nutrients.

2. Feeling undernourished and emotionally starved. When love is not communicated, it leaves a hole in one’s heart and often a consequent sense of feeling starved for love. Although many who are neglected feel a great need for love (if it hasn’t been repressed), there are barriers to taking in love and being vulnerable.

3. Feeling as if you don’t have enough support. Not having gotten much support as children leaves the under-parented with a less confident sense of self and less inner support because there wasn’t a good parent to internalize. Feeling as if there’s not enough support often shows up as insecurity and difficulty moving ahead.

4. Difficulty accepting and advocating for your needs. In general, need is a dirty word for the under-parented, because needs are associated with the painful memory of having needs that were not met. Needs are often experienced as a source of shame and something to hide. You can’t advocate for your needs unless you feel a right to have them and some expectation that others will be responsive.

5. Feeling Disempowered. Without a strong sense of self-esteem, good internal support, and healthy entitlement around needs, it’s hard to feel empowered. In addition, if you didn’t have a parent who championed you during the exploration stage and didn’t guide and praise your growing competence, your sense of efficacy can be seriously compromised.

6. Loneliness and feelings of not belonging. Feeling that you were not welcomed into the family as a child often leaves a lifelong imprint. You may long to be part of groups yet feel ambivalent about joining, or you may suffer painful feelings of alienation. Many wonder if there is a place for them in this world.

7. Not knowing how to process feelings. If feelings were not shown in your childhood home (or only by an out-of-control parent) and no one helped you learn to regulate or to name and communicate feelings, it leaves you without an important skill in life.

8. A pervasive sense of scarcity. Deprivation can be so deeply branded into your consciousness that it becomes a lens through which you experience life. You may feel as if there’s never enough money, never enough love, and never enough joy.

9. Depression. Depression has a lot to do with loss, deprivation, needs not being met, battered self-esteem, undigested pain and disappointment, grief, and lack of support. Depression is therefore a common outcome of childhood neglect.

10. Addictive behaviors. Addiction is a common response to pain that has not been metabolized. It is also related to not being able to self-soothe and regulate one’s emotions and states of activation. With addictions, the substance or behavior is a misguided attempt at self-soothing. Food addictions seem especially common to those who were emotionally undernourished.

The effects of childhood neglect are pervasive and long lasting, so please do not think that if you weren’t actively abused, you have no cause for complaint or no reason to be struggling.

Adapted from a longer list in The Emotionally Absent Mother .

• Why Was My Childhood Unhappy? (The Hidden Story of Emotional Neglect)

Fri, 23 Aug 2024 21:48:06 GMT

Why Was My Childhood Unhappy? (The Hidden Story of Emotional Neglect)

Parents don’t have to physically hit or terrify or use cruel, biting words to leave scars. This seems difficult for people to understand. I hear phrases like, “They didn’t beat me.” As if a lack of physical or emotional abuse means that parents get a pass.

Not true! There are “sins of omission” as well as “sins of commission,” as I first wrote about in The Emotionally Absent Mother. When parents fail to guide us, protect us, act as an admiring mirror, supply us with abundant affection, or fail to fulfill other important parental roles, this is neglect.

The invisibility of emotional neglect

Because the word neglect is often associated with not attending to our physical needs (food, clothing, shelter), emotional neglect often goes unrecognized, especially when your parent(s) do some of the things good parents do, like go to parent-teacher conferences. What’s to complain about?

What we don’t see is not only is emotional neglect harmful; there is evidence that it is worse than physical or emotional abuse.

The hardest abandonment to face is when the other is right there. Maybe you’ve felt this with a partner or spouse. It also happens with parents, who may see themselves as good parents, even while emotionally absent or clueless about your needs.

It is not that people intend to be emotionally absent. They just are, for a great variety of reasons. Maybe they have a hard time being present in general or making emotional contact with another. Perhaps your parent was busy caretaking someone else, working too much, or perhaps didn’t have an internal reference for what good parenting entails because his or her parenting was so lousy. Many times, it goes back several generations.

Long-term effects of emotional neglect

There is so much we need from parents to create a foundation that will help us succeed in life. I’m not talking about being a super-achiever, but having a sense of self that doesn’t crumble when someone looks at you in other than an appreciative way. I’m talking about feeling innately loveable and that your needs can be met. About being secure enough to be vulnerable and have deep, loving relationships.

Emotional neglect in childhood leaves a wake of incomplete development. Often you’re scrambling as an adult to get attachment needs met (if you’re not denying them), trying to build a sturdy sense of self, patching up holes in your self-esteem. If you were too busy as a child trying to get Mom or Dad to like you, you were focused on what they wanted and didn’t have the chance to learn what you want. Consequently, you may feel a little hollow and as if you don’t really know yourself.

Other common outcomes include feeling alone in the world, as if you don’t have a place that you belong. Or you suffer depression on and off throughout your life. Or feel cut off from your feelings and never quite feel deserving of asking that your needs to be met. Maybe you got caught in the trap of perfectionism, because doing things really, really well gave you at least a small chance of being seen. For more, see my list of long-term effects of neglect.[link to next blog]

It’s never too late: healing from emotional neglect

It’s true that we can’t change what happened, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make up for much of it.

Healing from neglect isn’t about blaming (although we may go through some necessary anger), but about understanding what happened, how it impacted you, and most importantly what you can do now to complete your own development. Those deficits are not permanent defects, but rather places that need attention.

Both of my books The Emotionally Absent Mother and Healing from an Emotionally Absent Mother (a workbook) can help you with this healing project.

When Feeling Good Feels Bad

Fri, 23 Aug 2024 21:40:17 GMT

When Feeling Good Feels Bad

We all believe that we want to feel good, but sometimes feeling good leads to feeling bad. Why does this happen? Here are 5 reasons.

1. Something bad happened when you were feeling good in the past. Sometimes you know what that was (e.g. we were feeling on top of the world when a tragic accident occurred), and sometimes you don’t. You just know that you start to get nervous and avoid things that would lead to feeling good. This is simple learning by association.

These connections can be hard to break. If you continue to avoid things that might lead to feeling good (usually this tendency is unconscious), you never extinguish this learned association. It may take many times of pushing past the nervous feeling before the nervous feeling finally lets go.

2. Other people didn’t like it when you felt good. It may be that when you were “full of yourself” or quite lively it made Mother angry or you were ignored. Maybe there was someone ill at home and you had to stay quiet and invisible.

3. You avoid happy to preserve a relationship. If someone around you is quite unhappy, you may not want to “rub salt in the wound” by being happy. Or perhaps you started a relationship in a low state and are afraid to risk upsetting it by changing. Look for ways you may be trying to protect a relationship by muting yourself.

4. You live in a numb state. If you’ve protected yourself from overwhelming or negative feelings by numbing, you will want to preserve that. Good feelings will shake up a habitual pattern, and there is inherent resistance against changing a safety mechanism like this.

5. You don’t think you deserve to be happy. So where did that idea come from? This is rotten programming worth deconstructing! The more firmly you believe it, the more you’ll need skilled help getting out from under it.

These are not easy patterns to change yet essential to change if you’re to have a chance at a happier life. The happiness strategies of the previous blog may be of help.

How Happiness Supports Healing

Fri, 23 Aug 2024 21:32:55 GMT

How Happiness Supports Healing

Happiness is not just the outcome of healing but can also facilitate healing. When my trauma therapist first suggested I “bathe in grace” every day, it fell on deaf ears. Many years later, I now understand.

Traumatic states are very magnetic, as are any emotional states that we habitually inhabit. Any state can become home for us, the place we naturally reside. Sometimes these are referred to as “attractor states,” meaning it is where the nervous system is naturally pulled to. It can be a state of hopelessness, anxiety, or anything else.

Moments of contentment, pleasure, and meaning (components of happiness) help counter-balance negative attractor states. They provide a different experience for the nervous system, creating more choice. They are also a lubricant, giving us the energy and motivation to then tackle the hard stuff.

Research shows that positive emotions lead to feeling more resourceful, more energetic, and more sociable, all of which further support healing. There are many great tips in The How of Happiness by Sonja Lyubomirsky, PhD. who spent 18 years researching happiness. Rather than think we’ll be happy when our life looks a certain way, the key is to practice the behaviors and attitudes that promote happiness. Many of the suggestions below come from her work.

1. Stop to savor.

Did you ever look forward to something and then realize too soon that it’s over and somehow you sort of missed it? It might be appreciating a particular food or time with a loved one or a special place. This is common, as we are generally not fully present to what we’re experiencing. Savoring is taking the time to really take in and enjoy the small pleasures of life. It is such potent medicine that Lyubomirsky found that those who spent 8 minutes a day savoring for 3 consecutive days felt better a month later.

2. Flow!

Flow has been defined as intense absorption in the present moment, usually involving a task that takes some skill. Playing an instrument or sport or doing an art form all may lead to the pleasurable experience of flow. It is important to have some activities like this that give you a vacation from your attractor states and usual mindset.

I have expanded this to what I call “flow time,” which is feeling moment by moment for what is “in the flow,” the natural thing to do next. I can’t always do this, but when I do, I find this time very pleasurable (and surprisingly productive!).

3. Practice gratitude.

There has been a lot of press about gratitude, and it is well deserved. With gratitude, we focus on what is going right rather than what we don’t like. At any given moment, there is much that is non-problematic, although we take these things for granted and seldom notice them.

Gratitude helps us let go of grudges and not feel so bitter about life, which is easy to get stuck in if you’ve had a lot of hardship. An advanced practice is to include even your hardships in your gratitude practice, which helps you see the learning that is offered in those hardships.

Gratitude raises your vibration. Being grateful opens your heart and makes you glow.

4. Learn how to shift your lens.

People who suffer from depression are often caught in a negative way of looking at the world. What researchers call Learned Optimism is a correction for this. People who think more optimistically fare better in times of high stress, because they have the flexibility to shift their view. That doesn’t require going all the way to the other end of the spectrum where you deny suffering, but you learn to see the both-and.

5. Don’t indulge rumination.

Ruminating on problems can really sink you. This is not to say that you must always push difficult things out of mind, but rather to discern when your contemplation of them serves a useful purpose and when you’re just digging a bigger hole. To not get captured in thoughts, you need a little distance from them. You need to widen your awareness to include what it feels like for your brain to be so busy and everything else that is happening—like holding your breath or contractions in your body. Rumination is getting caught in a negative spiral of thought.

6. Practice random (or planned) acts of kindness.

When you behave in generous and kind way, it helps connect you to your heart. Lyubomirsky found that acting kindly on a regular basis increased happiness for an extended period, although such acts cannot be rote. You have to feel it to have it affect you. Other research has confirmed a “helper’s high” that comes with helping another.

7. Act the way you want to feel.

This is the well-known principle of “Fake it until you make it.” So, for example, when you act happier, you feel happier. There is even evidence that the body picks up on something like a smile and reinforces it.

8. Cultivate close relationships.

Having more close relationships helps people feel better emotionally as well as supporting physical health through things like improved immune functioning. If your relationships are not fully satisfying, look at how you can improve them and cultivate new friends.

9. Get out and exercise.

A Duke University study shows that exercise may be just as effective as drugs in treating depression, without all the side effects and expense. Exercise releases feel-good endorphins and boosts self-esteem. It helps regulate the body and get us out of those stuck states.

10. Adopt meaningful goals.

Goals give you a sense of purpose. They add structure and meaning to life. You want to make sure they are your goals and not just your conditioning, so it’s good to reassess periodically. Ask yourself, What’s really important to me? How am I moving toward this?

These are strategies that have been validated by research, but they aren’t the only ways for you to increase happiness. I encourage you to become curious about how you experience contentment, meaning, and enjoyment, and what leads to these moments. Become a Happiness Detective!

Nurturing Self-Talk: A Kinder Voice Inside Your Head

Fri, 23 Aug 2024 19:44:11 GMT

Nurturing Self-Talk: A Kinder Voice Inside Your Head

“Idiot!”

Is this what you call yourself when you stumble or make a mistake?

My niece called herself an idiot last week when she made a small error cooking. When I commented on it, she assured me she would never call her children that. I believe her. Ann is a particularly giving woman and very conscientious as a parent. So how come she doesn’t extend that to herself? What gives?

The Inner Critic

As a psychotherapist I get to listen in on that voice chattering away in people’s heads, and although I work with very nice people, how they speak to themselves can make me cringe.

There are different names for the critical voice in our heads; the most common is Inner Critic. It’s always more complicated than a simple description, but let me explain one framework, which is that this critic is trying to protect you. It does so by trying to warn you about ways you should not be and push you to behave in acceptable ways. The problem is that this critic is really a young child operating by black-and-white rules. It’s like a terrified four-year-old desperately trying to keep you in line, warning you the world will end if you don’t do something just right. This steering system is overly clunky and the means of reinforcing the desired rules is also primitive. Mocking, ridiculing, threatening with extreme consequences are actually rather coarse influencing strategies.

Wouldn’t you like a kinder voice inside your head?

An Inner Ally

What if you think of this voice you want to cultivate as an Inner Ally? Whereas the Inner Critic is like someone who kicks you when you’re down, this Inner Ally is someone who helps pick you up.

It helps develop a nurturing inner voice if you have (or had) someone in your life who was especially kind and supportive. For me it began with “practicing” the response of a therapist I was working with at the time. An external resource is internalized. If you absolutely can’t think of someone to base this inner ally on, you can work with a fictional image or an archetype. Everyone has been exposed to images of a nurturing other.

Begin by imagining what an ally would say when you make a mistake. Rather than “Idiot!” is would be more reassuring. Maybe something like “You did your best. It’s okay. You learned something.” With practice, this voice is there more and more of the time. I would say late in the process of integrating it, this voice feels indistinguishable from you.

This is a very brief introduction to nurturing self-talk. In my book, Healing from an Emotionally Absent Mother , I go into greater detail, using the framework of Critical Parent messages and Nurturing Parent messages with exercises.

Self Care

Fri, 23 Aug 2024 19:34:05 GMT

Self Care

“What is self-care?” a client asked me. “I don’t really know what that means. Eating well, and sleeping and exercising?”

Yes, and so much more.

Good self-care is finding things that feel good to your heart, whether a favorite stone, a song, sitting somewhere special, calling someone special.

Good self-care is not pushing yourself to function at your optimal level when you’re going through a rough patch.

Good self-care is holding with compassion the you that suffering. Can you have as much compassion for yourself as you would if your best friend going through what you’re going through?

Good self-care is finding (healthy) activities that give you a moment of pleasure or are a time out from what is so stressful.

Good self-care is being kind to yourself. Can you speak to yourself with as much empathy and caring as you would to a loved one? Can you touch your face or arm with tenderness? Can you give yourself a break when you need one?

Good self-care is being responsive to your needs rather than shutting out anything that is painful or inconvenient and gets in the way of functioning. Your feelings and needs are important and deserve to be attended to with respect and loving care.

Caring for someone recovering from an illness often means bringing food and helping out, so the person can rest and heal. In a similar way, caring for yourself when recovering from emotional pain means supplying nourishment and doing what you can to make your life easier. It means that you—your well-being—comes first and is more important than keeping up with expectations. It’s nice to keep up as best you can, but it’s not as important as your healing process.

Just as you might protect an injured finger with padding, good self-care is providing a cushion to your nervous system. It is paying attention to all those things that affect you: sound, temperature, light, the effect of different food and drink on your digestive system, the effect of various people on your emotional system. When we are healing emotional wounds, our nervous system is doing extra work and starts with the disadvantage of already being compromised.

Knowing this, you allow yourself a little more “margin” than usual: an extra hour in bed, time to journal when you would have been paying bills, the option to leave the obligatory social gathering (or not going) because you just want to be alone.

There is feedback in this process. When you feel your body relax or you have a little more space emotionally, your self-care is working. Keep it up!

Holding Your Process

Fri, 23 Aug 2024 19:12:02 GMT

Holding Your Process

Part of the magic of psychotherapy is that a good therapist creates a container for your experience. This container becomes a safe space. It is both a physical space and an emotional space. It must feel safe enough to relax your defenses so that whatever has been kept at bay can now emerge. In this way, the therapist provides a “holding environment.” This is what good friends do as well. When we share our ups and downs with our friends, they are helping to “hold” the experience.

Part of becoming more autonomous is learning how to hold your own experience, not so you won’t need anyone else, but so you don’t have to stop our process when you’re alone. This involves both learning how to stay with the experience and to provide the safe container needed.

One element of a safe container is that all experience is met without judgment. If you are rejecting or attacking yourself, that is not safe. To feel safe, your struggles and your feelings need to met with compassion. Working with a skilled therapist for a period of time can provide valuable modeling that you can build on. You can also imitate the responses of a compassionate friend. Another strategy might be to imagine how a spiritual ally or your Higher Self might respond to your feelings. What is important is to be able to meet your experience in a way that is accepting so that it will continue to reveal itself.

Another element of the container is the physical surroundings. Although ideally we could allow ourselves to have our feelings in even hostile environments, I find it much easier if I can adapt my environment to make it feel more nurturing. When at home, I turn off the phone, reduce surrounding noise as I can, and change the lighting. These are physical reminders that I have marked off this time and space for me.

What has helped me “hold my process” is working with my journal. It serves as an anchor and helps me see when I skirt away from scary and painful states. It helps me by holding the thread. I record my emerging experience and when I find myself wandering away, I look back at what I had been feeling right before the wandering.

The journal also holds my experience by giving me a place to express it. There are times I leave the journal to cry or rage or immerse myself in an internal state, but I come back and write about it. It holds all feelings without judgment.

I’ve talked about journaling because it is so central for me, but maybe your way is a different. Find what helps you stay with your experience. Maybe it is quietly sitting with an internal focus, not turning away from whatever shows up.

It’s not easy to do this. The mind has many ways of distracting us. One is simply to turn our attention in another direction, be it a task or a daydream. A judgment can also serve as a distraction because it turns us away from the experience itself and enmeshes us in an evaluation of it instead. If I am judging my dependency, I am probably not really feeling it. We also create substitute feelings and physical armoring to avoid sensitive emotions. You might, for example, tighten up or get angry in order to avoid feeling helpless. Most of us have a lifetime’s worth of practice in ways to step away from our immediate experience.

The point of staying with experience is so that it can continue to unfold and work itself out. Otherwise, we tend to get jammed up inside, which makes us really cranky. Being able to “hold our process” thus helps with self-regulation and supports our growth.

This topic was first covered in my 2000 book The Tao of Contemplation and recently covered in more detail in Healing from an Emotionally Absent Mother (2025).

Maintaining Energy by Nurturing Well-being

Fri, 23 Aug 2024 18:13:57 GMT

Maintaining Energy by Nurturing Well-being

We all know the sense of being low-energy, and sometimes this leads to a dangerous place where we are low energy all or most of the time. Rather than having a full bucket of naturally produced energy, we seem to have a hole in our bucket, and the body turns on adrenaline to try to make up for it. This kind of energy leaves you “wired and tired.” When running on adrenaline you feel sped up, hyper-alert, and anxious. It’s hard to sleep and you never have that relaxed, well-rested feeling.

Some of our ancient healing modalities caution us to not let our energy reserves dip that low. It is like always having some gas in your tank. It doesn’t mean you don’t spend energy, but only the top half of your tank. Sometimes there are extreme demands that must be met, but whenever possible it is a good rule to not lose sight of whether you have the energy needed to live as you are living or changes need to be made.

Cultivating Well-being

There can be complex reasons we get a hole in our bucket that require highly skilled medical attention, but my focus here is living in such a way we keep our energy from falling to dangerous levels.

A key resource that supports healthy energy levels is well-being. Our body and mind are giving us feedback all the time, but we need to be paying attention. The state of well-being is characterized by both moments of calm, satisfaction, peace, and a quiet kind of happiness and by times the energy becomes excited, enthusiastic, enlivened. Well-being involves a range of experiences, all of which leaving you feeling good and feeling alive. It is both the result of living a life that is nourishing and serves as a high-quality fuel (as opposed to adrenaline) that makes it easy to continue.

You can think of well-being as your north star. If you let it fall off your radar, you may suddenly wake up in one of those hard-to-resolve states of low-energy. So pay attention and when you start to lose well-being, stop and ask what you need more of and what you need less of. Do you need more downtime, more enjoyment or connection in your life, to take better care of your body and move more? Do you need to do something about your stress level or to improve your sleep?

This is an ongoing process. An activity that feels just right one day will not be just right the next. Don’t try to substitute past learning for the more immediate attunement needed. Well-being is not that easily won and doesn’t remain without continued attention. You need to stay aware of feedback from body, mind, and heart and use it to keep you in the sweet spot of your life.

How To Keep A Bad Day From Getting Worse

jasmin@jasmincori.com (Jasmin Cori) — Thu, 22 Aug 2024 22:18:57 GMT

How To Keep A Bad Day From Getting Worse

Everyone has bad days. I define a bad day as when unexpected, unwanted things happen. Things go wrong. Usually it is a series, although one big event can certainly color a whole day.

On our good days, when we are “well-resourced,” we can cope with one of these events without too much disturbance. If we have several of these, or are not well-resourced to begin with, we begin to fall further and further into an internal state of disorganization. How do we to keep this from becoming a landslide? Here are 5 tips for dealing skillfully with bad days:

Accept it as normal.

As some of my favorite Buddhist authors say, your expectation that everything should go right and your protest when they do not is the cause of much of your suffering.

Why shouldn’t you have some unexpected, unwanted events? It’s part of life. See it as normal and a matter of simple arithmetic. How much they create suffering depends on how you manage them.

Put it in perspective.

How bad is it? Will it matter 5 years from now? How does it compare to what other people are going through? I just talked to my neighbor and hearing about her bad day helps me see how insignificant mine was.

Help your body with the stress.

A bad day sets you back. It may kick up stress hormones, lead to muscular tension, headaches, leave you agitated and in need of soothing. It’s easy to make a bad day worse by grabbing the wrong thing to eat or drink. That donut, for example, may give you a sugar high followed by a crash, further compromising your brain. Whatever you can do that helps your nervous system and whole body helps your mind too.

Notice What Your Mind Is Doing.

How you hold what is happening and what meaning you give it is critical to how stressful it is.

Do you engage in catastrophic thinking, making a problem bigger and worse than it really is?
Do you globalize, interpreting whatever happened in stable (ongoing) and universal terms? E.g. I’m just unlucky. Bad things are always happening to me.
Do you have a need to “get points” for your suffering? Watch how you talk about your mishaps. Is there any way you cling to them?
Identify Your Tools—And Use Them!

Knowing there will be bad days, you want to know what helps you reset. It’s different for everyone, and it’s good to have a full toolbox. These might include working with breath, taking a walk, receiving supportive touch, engaging in nurturing self-talk, petting your cat, listening to certain music, using a familiar practice like yoga or meditation, changing the channel by doing a little gratitude process, remembering what is going well, or tuning into spiritual support.

It's also good to know how to “ hold your process” and to work with the parts of self that make up your internal ecology. Stress often leads to a state of regression where you lose your adult consciousness as your awareness blends into your overwhelmed inner child. Sometimes that child needs to be heard; other times the distress doesn’t lighten until we can differentiate from that child and come back to a more capable adult. The road to becoming an emotionally healthy is continually refining your tools.

Decompress and take stock.

At the end of my day, I often journal to take stock of my day. Last night, I knew it had been a more stressful day than usual with more “unexpected, unwanted events,” and I made a list of them. But then I did something new: I made a list of mitigating factors and what went well. So for example, my tech blunders had caused problems in two skype sessions, but both clients were patient and helpful. We found work arounds. And I won’t make the same mistakes again. Making my lists, I found that I had as many items in the second list as in the first.

We need to get the learning from our experiences and to metabolize them. It is not a good idea to just let experiences pile up. Unprocessed experience often shows up in health issues, bad dreams, and symptoms like anxiety.

Bad days vs. Bad hair days

There’s a popular phrase about having a “bad hair day.” This, according to online dictionaries, is when many things “seem” to go wrong. This brings attention to the idea that a cranky day isn’t always about what external events go wrong but where you are coming from.

Just as there are rose-colored glasses, you can get into a lens where everything seems not what it should be. On a bad hair day, you feel more clumsy, more ugly than on other days. Of your several possible self-images, you’ve reverted to one of your more negative ones. And likely you’ve converted to a map of the outer world that ain’t so pretty either.

I am making a distinction between objectively challenging circumstances and being in a place inside ourselves that creates a similar kind of suffering. Certainly, both can exist simultaneously, feeding each other. Bad hair days can require an even higher skill set to tame than the inescapable bad days that come to all of us.

Standing Your Ground: The Inner Game

jasmin@jasmincori.com (Jasmin Cori) — Thu, 22 Aug 2024 19:41:55 GMT

Standing Your Ground: The Inner Game

Many of the people I work with are not highly equipped to set and defend boundaries—to stand their ground. This can happen for many reasons, usually starting in childhood. Do any of these fit for you?

You learned to overlook your needs and boundaries, as they were overlooked. Boundaries? What boundaries?
You felt you’d be clobbered if you didn’t accommodate an unstable caretaker. You learned instead to stay out of sight, or when cornered to show your underbelly, in effect saying, “I’m not a danger. Don’t hurt me!”
You modeled yourself after an adult who was disempowered and accommodating.
Your only memory of someone seeming powerful was red-in-the-face angry, yelling and threatening (or worse). That was terrifying. You don’t want to be that way and don’t understand that you don’t have to in order to have personal power. There are more respectful possibilities.

We don’t need to get “big” in our energy to stand our ground; we need to get firm. We can be soft-spoken and communicate that we are not about to cede ground, unless we choose to.

Although conceding may occasionally be wise, too often it is our default. It is supported by thoughts like:

They won’t like it.
They won’t like me.
They (for some mysterious reason) have more right to what they want.

Learning to be Assertive

One term for standing your ground is being assertive. Assertiveness is much more than saying No, but saying No is part of it.

There are two parts to being assertive: One is believing that it is healthy and appropriate to be assertive (having an assertive philosophy) and that you are deserving. The other is having the skills. Assertive behaviors tend to be:

Matched to the need (Just the right amount of force rather than overshooting it)
Clear
Brief (Being long-winded often comes across as either insecure or manipulative.)
Respectful (of all parties)

You can practice assertive behaviors, yet a less visible aspect is the “inner game.”

The Inner Game

The inner game is how you are holding the situation, including how you are stationed in yourself. Are you “on your back foot” (defensive, desperate, unsteady) or too far forward by being on offense?

It is the stance you take inside that speaks loudest, especially when pressured to do something you don’t want to do. The stance that will best serve you often fits these guidelines:

It is firm but neutral. It is without antagonism and hostility. Hostility and aggression are actually signs of insecurity rather than signs of power. (So much for bullies.) Many do not realize that you can be firm and gentle at the same time.

You are not “on the run”, meaning you aren’t already feeling one-down because of their first move(s) and not in a hurry to quickly resolve this. Aim for a leisurely, nonattached attitude that conveys, “not sure how we’ll work this out. I’m sure we’ll find something.” You are not desperately trying to smooth things over. You’re not busy pleasing. You are definitely not looking like you’re ready to fold.

Rather than act out your emotions, you report your feelings. “I notice I’m feeling pushed and I’m getting my back up.” Feel how different this is that sparring in a competitive way or being passive-aggressive.

The inner game is staying more on the cool side than the hot side. I don’t mean that you are disengaged or hiding behind a mask, but you are centered enough inside, confident enough, that you know you’re not going to be mowed over and don’t need to get all worked up.

When you’ve got a good inner game, you can be more natural and relaxed. From this place you might even bring in humor or other likable aspects of your personality. When people feel your firmness early on, you may be able to shorten or avoid a contest of wills.

Testing Your Spiritual Maturity

jasmin@jasmincori.com (Jasmin Cori) — Mon, 05 Aug 2024 22:44:51 GMT

Testing Your Spiritual Maturity

Reflecting on the subject of spiritual maturity one day, I was thinking about how we get wowed by psychic stunts and people who come in the right package (right credentials, garb, right spiritual name) and end up getting taken for a ride. I decided we could use a more objective way of assessing things.

I thought about emotional development and also intelligence. In both cases, there are specific capacities that can be culled out and also a way to look at an overall level of development. This seemed like a good basic framework.

If, for instance, we are talking about emotional maturity and assessing a person who looks “together” in many ways but repeatedly has temper tantrums and fits of jealous rage, we would likely conclude that person isn’t so mature after all. At best their development is “uneven.”

Same with intelligence. If we look at the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, we see that people can score very high in specific capacities, but if they are really low in others, it limits their overall IQ.

Maybe we should do the same with spiritual maturity, I fancied. We could create a Spiritual Maturity Quotient. Now if I were into pop books, this could be hot stuff. Imagine: people could take a paper-pencil test, find out their SMQ, and then go around feeling either better about themselves or worse, depending on the score. But then just taking a test and being into comparison would knock your score down, so maybe the concept is all wrong.

More seriously, my point is that spiritual maturity should not be measured by the extent of one’s most developed capacity but rather by looking at a whole range of capacities, along with some measure of their integration. Here are some of those capacities as I see them.

The capacity to still the chatter of the mind, to drop into silence and to know and experience in more direct ways.
The capacity to let go, to surrender, to not hold onto things—be they grudges, praise, self-importance, material goods, roles, relationships, or anything else.
The capacity to be open, to not know, to not be in control, to tolerate emptiness and the deconstruction of your small self.
A capacity for discernment, for being able to see what is true and what is false, what is so and what is fantasy or projection. The person with this skill has a capacity for what Zen teacher Toni Packer calls “seeing.” I like this word because it feels sort of like x-ray vision. It is seeing through appearances and recognizing truth.
The capacity to stop avoiding and to be with what is painful without drowning in it. If we can’t let go of our defenses, we’re stuck in our shell and can’t feel the true radiance of our being.
The capacity for compassion and kindness and generosity. The development of the “heart qualities.” For sure, the capacity to love.
The capacity to be ever-more inclusive, to accept what is different from you and recognize truth wherever it is found.
The capacity to allow yourself to be invisible at times and to put yourself at the service of others.
The capacity to take yourself lightly, to laugh at your own shenanigans, to make mistakes and not get all upset about it. The capacity to accept your imperfection.
The capacity to live what you know, to walk your talk.

I could go on, but you get the point. Spiritual maturity, like these other areas of development, can be assessed more accurately if we include constituent parts.

We also need a measure of wholeness. Is there an integrated whole or only a set of capacities with a lot of holes in between? So there would have to be some way to measure that.

Wouldn’t it would be great if I could quantify all this and put the test on the market? I could create a system of levels, ranging from “dull” (haven’t ‘woken up’ yet) to “full beam” (avatar). The levels in between might correlate with a system for rating light bulbs: low bright, medium bright, high bright. It would give us another way to talk about ourselves. Instead of playing the alphabet game (“I’m an INFP. I bet you’re an ESTJ.”) or asking “What’s your fix?” (enneagram, not drugs), we could ask what level they are on the SMQ.

Oh, I suppose to really sell, I’d have to change my list to conform to how people more often talk about these things. The items would be more like these: How many teachers have you had, and at what levels were they? How many retreats have you gone to? How many conversations have you had with God?

At that point I started to lose interest, but then I got a really hot idea. Not only could I measure these capacities and meta-factors, but I could take points off for certain things—just like in the game of life when you lose points for major boo-boos. What would I take points off for?

Hypocrisy. That’s a biggie. You know, the guru who requires celibacy but can’t keep his pants on. Or the evangelical preacher railing against infidelity or homosexuality while secretly living a double life.
Encouraging false images, hiding parts of yourself so that you look like you are more together than you are .
Self-deception/self-delusion. Thinking you are far beyond where you are.
Changing your name too many times (more than two). Teachers get double penalties.
Reciting too many spiritual aphorisms in one conversation.
Having nothing on your bookshelves besides “spiritual books.” Take two steps back. You’re a junkie.
Not having any friends outside your spiritual community. This borders on cult.
Not being able to cut vegetables without slicing your finger because you’re not in your body.
Kicking your dog or humiliating your partner or child or parent. Acting out your anger. (Note: Anger itself doesn’t knock you down—just the unconscious or uncontrolled expression of it.)
Needing someone else to take care of material life because you can’t come out of Samadhi long enough to make a phone call or pay a bill.

I was going strong. It was especially easy to see what spiritual maturity was not.

Then my balloon burst. I saw that we don’t need a test. Life is a test. It constantly mirrors back to us how we are doing, although sometimes we get on the wrong track by scoring the wrong things.

And then of course there’s death. That’s the acid test. What happens when you drop all of your costumes, when your life as this recognized entity is over and your soul has gone home? When you stand next to the incomparable light and look at your life, what will you see? Maybe like all those books about near-death experiences suggest, it will come down to just one question: How well have you loved?

The Role of a Spiritual Teacher

jasmin@jasmincori.com (Jasmin Cori) — Mon, 05 Aug 2024 22:37:37 GMT

The Role of a Spiritual Teacher

As we develop spiritually, what we need and want from a spiritual teacher changes. Here are some different roles a teacher may play.

The first is the role of teacher . There are many forms this can take. One is disseminating “teachings” or some kind of wisdom. A good sermon, a dharma talk, even satsang may involve this kind of teaching.

Yet most of us recognize that we learn something more deeply when comes through our own experience than if we just hear or read it. Truth needs to be directly felt; it is freshest when it is discovered. It is therefore most useful for the spiritual guide to teach the student how to find truth for him- or herself rather than to become dependent on the teacher for truth.

A second role is serving as a model what it is to be a human being living a spiritual life. This can encourage us to live out our own realization.

If we fail to understand the individuality of this process, we will make the mistake of imitating the teacher and lose the real value of the lesson. The teacher-as-model simply shows us that it can be done, not how it should look.

A third role is being a window to the divine , a vehicle for grace. This is both the teacher’s most important role and the most challenging one. It is challenging because it is easy for both student and teacher to associate the person of the teacher with this function and to forget that the teacher is just a window through which we may experience the divine.

The teacher’s role is to fuel the student’s love for God, not to stand in as the object of that love. While that could be useful at moments (just as it can be temporarily useful for a psychotherapist to accept a client’s idealization for the sake of creating a strong bond), in the long run it is counterproductive. Too many students (and teachers) get caught here. In this case, it is the teacher’s job to smash the idealization and to remind the student that the divine shines through everyone. We’re all windows to God. We just need to clean the panes.

Often we want the teacher to take on a fourth role, which I call “Magical Other.” This relates to the transcendent glow the teacher takes on from the above roles, but is also colored by our early infant longings. It is the desire for that all-powerful Other who, with the right look or the right touch, can soothe our distress and put us in a state of bliss. This is less the need of a mature student and more the fantasy of the child inside.

What does it mean to grow up spiritually?

Growing up is leaving this fantasy. We step out of our unconscious identification with the child and step into a more current reality. Taking this step changes many things, including how we receive the teachings, how we hold the teacher, and our requirements for perfection.

First, in terms of teachings, growing-up means that we no longer act like a baby bird needing its mother to chew up its food and feed it to him. We learn how to find our own food and digest it. We don’t need all our nourishment to come from the mouth of the teacher. In fact, if the teacher tries to feed us something that gags us, we spit it out.

Another shift is that when we recognize ourselves as grown-up, we don’t need perfect love or perfect holding. We don’t look to the teacher to give us a sense of safety and legitimacy or to make us feel special.

We neither need to be special to the teacher or to be special because we’re with the teacher. We don’t use being part of a spiritual group to feel “in” or to give us a sense of belonging.

In short, we don’t need the teacher to be Mommy, and we don’t need the teacher to be God. The teacher can be there as an ally and spiritual friend.

What we’re looking for is someone to help point the way, someone to extend a hand when we trip and fall, to encourage us when we feel disheartened. We need someone who can dash our illusions and show us what is false and who can point us to our own resources and essential nature and help open our connection with the divine.

Looking back at this list, I see that what I am describing is not so different from what a good parent provides. The difference is in what age child we’re talking about. Wanting the teacher to take away all our problems, to send us into ecstasy with a magic look or a magic touch is the desire of a baby, whereas wanting guidance and encouragement is both the need of a child and of adults in any stage of mentorship.

Being a grown-up doesn’t mean we can’t receive help; it means we become more discriminating about that help. We learn to differentiate between the message and the messenger and make discriminations about each.

The teacher isn’t necessarily all-good, and the message doesn’t need to be swallowed whole. We don’t require the teacher to be all-knowing or all-powerful. When the teacher is functioning as a vehicle of grace, we’re grateful, but we know that it’s God that is the source.

When we stop idealizing the teacher, we can stop feeling like a child and start to recognize the light that also shines in us.

Go With the Flow

jasmin@jasmincori.com (Jasmin Cori) — Mon, 05 Aug 2024 22:15:46 GMT

Go With the Flow

“Go with the flow” often sounds like good advice. It reminds us to relax and stop struggling so hard. We can let go because, as the phrase implies, there is a natural unfoldment of events, a natural flow that we can harmonize with.

Yet unless we have a clear understanding of how to recognize this inherent unfoldment, what we think is going with the flow can lead us in some wrong directions. Examining some common distortions can help. Each of these misconceptions carries a part of the truth as well, so it is worth looking at them.

The first misconception is the idea that going with the flow is just going along with how things are (the status quo). Not true. Maybe the “flow” means letting a relationship end. Maybe the flow is recognizing that a particular kind of work isn’t satisfying any more. You might be two years from retirement, yet the flow for you could be to make a dramatic change, following an energy that is swelling up inside of you.

Going with the flow doesn’t mean you do whatever people around you want you to do, or that you never rock the boat. Many times, it would be easier to swallow a feeling of anger or dissatisfaction rather than speak it, yet sometimes going with the flow means honoring your recognition that something needs to be said.

Going with the flow is also not simply following our impulses. That is being slave to every momentary feeling that passes through and every biochemical quirk of your body.

If going with the flow is not maintaining the status quo, accommodating others, or thoughtlessly following your own urges, what is it? That’s the sixty-four-million-dollar question. To understand it, you need to see the way that each of these misconceptions carries part of the truth.

The truth in seeing the flow as the status quo lies in the importance of harmonizing with the way things are. The flow does not ignore reality. It takes into account current structures but also their underlying instability and the endless process of change. We need to harmonize with the way things are and also the way things are changing.

What is true about going with the flow as accommodating? You don’t need to continually be compromising or sacrificing for others, but you do need to take others into consideration. You don’t live in the world alone. Your flow is not separate from the larger current you are part of.

What about following your impulses? Isn’t this living in the flow? It is true that you can’t live in the flow without following your impulses. The question is, which impulses? We’re not talking about the flow of stray thoughts or momentary feelings. The flow we are feeling for is the current of the unfolding truth, the current of the Tao.

“Whoa! That’s pretty big. How do I feel that?” you ask. It’s not as hard as it may seem. The flow is present here and now. We feel it in our bodies, perhaps each in our own way. When the impulse to act comes out of contact with a larger truth, it is harmonious with that truth and carries a sense of naturalness. It feels “right” and would feel incomplete if you didn’t follow it. You might say that the action is what “wants to happen.” It is a natural consequence, a natural unfoldment, and so it flows.

Maybe you’re getting a sense for what it takes to live in the flow. It takes both a capacity to discern what “wants to happen” and to surrender into that. That requires letting go of some things.

For starters, we have to let go of the way we want things to be. We have to give up our agendas, our timetables, our preferences. This is difficult. We’re very attached to these things. What helps us let go of these is the deep humility of knowing that there’s a larger order that we can’t always see. This larger ordering or unfoldment is guided by something much wiser than our limited minds. Slowly, we learn to trust that.