energy

Desire and Suffering
So I’m sitting here trying to evolve and flitting across my consciousness was the phrase: “Desire is the root of all suffering.” I’m not sure why it came up, but it’s something I had always believed was one of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism and probably a generally good prescription for the things that ail us as Americans and as humans. This time, as I thought about it, something didn’t seem to feel right.

Happiness
Too many of us seek reward and recognition from sources outside ourselves and we all eventually find out, as Arjuna did, that we are not entitled to the fruits of our labors-only to our labors. As we undertake our labors and fight the “Long Defeat,” it doesn’t mean that we should no longer continue to seek our bliss or to undertake Joyce’s (and Joseph Campbell’s) “Hero’s Journey.” In fact, I believe that never embarking on this journey or leaving the path is the source of most suffering in the people I run across. We need to do what we are called to do with no thought of reward. Our desire for self-importance becomes a trap.

Desire vs. Craving
I’m not comfortable (or perhaps not evolved enough) to believe that if I was able to eliminate all my desires that I would be in a better place. Our desires not only direct our basic survival but they help us to create as well. I choose to believe that the world is a better place because some people had the desire to create freedom, justice, and artistic beauty.

I think Buddha and the Bible are referring to craving. Excessive aversion or excessive attachment can screw up a lot of things. So can the substitution of hope for action. Our desires create a spiral that requires a constant attention to our material and emotional happiness – to the exclusion of our mission. This keeps us from getting the real work done. We will never have all the facts so we just need to focus on our daily acts on the way. If you want to know what’s required, Micah 6:8 says we are to: “Act justly, and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”

If that’s too much, then if you’re somewhere between “I’m on top of the world!” and “I guess things could always be worse”, you’re probably okay.

What we believe – the things we know are true - influences the quality of our lives. This post had originally been meant for the the first Sunday of Pentecost but reality intruded – again! It was brought back to my consciousness by the master physical therapist and healer, Ming Chew. I have to search through my old posts but I think I wrote about Ming Chew a couple of years ago when I tore the quadriceps tendon of my right knee. Instead of traditional PT, I went to Ming for a couple of painful sessions. I gained mobility and, more importantly, I gained the confidence to take responsibility for the rest of my rehab.

Well, it was now it was my right shoulder that was giving me problems – so it was back to Ming. One of the first things he did was to pull out a plastic doll that had a bunch of different colored lines on it. Now, I’ve been around this “complementary medicine” thing for a while, so I knew the lines represented acupuncture meridians. This was a “Tong Ren” doll. This was new to me. Ming explained that this was another technique in energy medicine that worked “remotely” with lasers, needles, or a magnetic hammer. A muscle test after the Tong Ren treatment showed that my shoulder was stronger. The power of suggestion? Perhaps. As a Reiki master who has done remote emotional healing, I believe otherwise. Placebo effect or something else, the effect improved the quality of my life.

One of the nice things about my new existence as a trainer and transformation coach is that I can talk about these things without worrying about how they sound to buttoned-down bean counters. Tong Ren, Reiki, Therapeutic Touch, hypnosis, Emotional Freedom Technique, the Release Technique, or the gifts of the Pentecost (Mark 16:15-18), I’m working with them all!

Limiting Beliefs
I’m going to end this post with an NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) technique that will help you deal with any belief that have held you back from your true potential.

We structure our experience in different ways. We delete, distort, and generalize in order to organize the barrage of stimuli that seek our attention. We create filters and maps of the world that become self-fulfilling and self-reinforcing. We eventually only allow in information that conform with the beliefs we have developed. These beliefs and filters sometimes get in the way of our “path.”

Submodalities are the way we record our experiences – the building blocks. We experience the world through our five senses. Submodalities are the details and the “control knobs” of our sensory experience. Our memories are recorded as pictures. When you are looking at the pictures of your memories you can change things like the brightness, the focus, the color, and the movement of the pictures. When you think back on something you can change the feelings associated with the memory by noticing its location in your body, moving it around, changing its weight, pressure, or size, etc. We all have memories of conversations that haven’t gone well. The memory of these conversations have a certain volume, rate, pitch, rhythm.

Exercise
Here is an exercise with submodalities that will help you gain better control of your beliefs:

• Think about a belief that you currently have that you would like to change (e.g. – “I’ll never lose this weight.”),  This is called a “limiting belief.”
• Think about something you used to believe but that you now believe is not true (e.g. – Santa Claus brings the Christmas gifts).
• When you access this thought/memory of the thing you no longer believe- what submodalities (like position, color, sound, pitch, weight, etc. like the ones I mentioned above) are associated with this?
• Make a picture of the limiting belief and substitute the submodalities of the thing you used to believe.

Notice how you feel about the formerly limiting belief.  If you want to play further, bring up an empowering belief.  Notice the submodalities and put these in the picture  of the former limiting belief.  Things at this point should have changed.

Let me know how this worked for you or if you have any questions about the process.