Don’t Relate Your Soap Opera to Others
Relating our personal soap opera to others might be enjoyable but it does not help. Telling dramatic stories about how we have been wronged or misunderstood actually strengthens the soap opera. We become more vested in the drama than we are in finding support or a solution. We get all worked up again and don’t let things drop or die away naturally.
“Guess what my wife did last night?”
“You know what my husband told me when I asked for a new refrigerator?”
These are stories told to entertain others with the ongoing drama that proves our life is interesting. It is a lot different than sitting down and asking someone to listen and help. Everyone wants bigger than life experiences so we tend to exaggerate and embellish.
Most of our stories are about things that bother us or people that bother us. In telling our soap opera many small innocent things can get blown up and take on different meanings until we become convinced that our wife is cheating on us or our husband is abusing the children.
Our listeners add their own drama to ours and soon grandma and grandpa need to sell their home and move into a nursing home where they can be taken care of properly. Forget about what they want. All you know is grandpa fell and broke his hip. Grandma isn’t strong enough to take care of him.
Everyone has opinions and loves a good story. Soon the story is not even ours any more. By telling stories our friends form wrong impressions based upon false data. Sure, they might be supportive and on our side but we might be in the wrong. This is especially true when we are telling negative stories about our partners, friends or family members. False impressions can be very harmful in the long run. There are two sides to every story.
Indiscriminate sharing just provides gossip and prevents us from letting go and healing from the injury or injustice. Others will bring it up again long after the fact just to see how you are doing and what the news is. It also means that we are talking negatively about those we love and care about behind their back. If we do that to those we love, how can we be trusted?
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Who knows why one person gives up and dies while another struggles on through overwhelming odds and comes out on top? We all want to survive. But are we willing to do what needs to be done?
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What You Resist You Become
In a twist of irony life seems to mandate that we become what we most resist. This is part of the paradoxical nature of life itself as we mature and experience more.
How many people have said they resisted becoming like their parents only to find themselves treating their own children in the same manner they were treated. How many have done the pendulum swing reacting against going to church like their parents and later in life finding peace and solace in being born again?
My father told me he would never have a black dog or own a Ford. He has owned both. I hate to think of the times I have eaten my own words. We take a stand and then later find ourselves in a situation where we are on the opposite side. How can this be?
The simple answer is that nothing is really true unless its opposite is equally true. You can love a child to the point they never grow up as self supporting individuals. When you do everything for a child they do not learn to do things for themselves. Tough love is a very hard thing for a parent to learn and to appreciate.
Failure and making mistakes is a painful process, especially watching our children make mistakes. The truth is we learn from our mistakes and they make us stronger. At least they can if we let them.
It is easy to condemn Hitler for his unhuman treatment of Jewish prisoners in the death camps. Still we benefit from limb and organ transplants and other scientific discoveries pioneered in Nazi Germany. This paradox goes on and on.
There is an old saying, “When you point one finger at someone else you have three others pointing right back at you”. Try it and you will see how true it is. We each contain within us the capacity for enormous good and evil. Love of self must compete daily with love of others and both are important. There is great risk when you neglect either one.
As we mature we realize that if we give too much to others we become too weak to survive on our own and become a burden to others. We become a burden because we gave too much and couldn’t take care of our own needs.
In like manner when we are too self centered and self absorbed people will turn away from us. If we want to be treated well by others we need to be decent to them as well.
There is an old proverb about a King that was known for his kindness and generosity. His subjects were taxed very lightly. The king required only what he needed to run the palace. He had no food put away in store houses for insurance against hard times. A seven year drought ruined the crops in his kingdom and he was forced to take food from his own starving subjects. They rebelled against him and had him executed.
The neighboring kingdom was ruled by a mean and cruel king that taxed his subjects heavily and took much more than he needed to keep the palace in luxury. What he didn’t use he placed in warehouses to sell. He was universally hated and despised. The same seven year drought ruined the crops in his kingdom as well. He was forced to open his warehouses and distribute food for his subjects to eat. Overnight he became a hero and lived a long and respected life.
The moral to this story is that it is easier for a mean and cruel tyrant to become loved than it is for a kind and gentle ruler to save his own life in times of disaster.
When our position is secure and our cup overflowing we can give the surplus to others and they can share in our bounty. In this manner we can support them through hard times until they get on their own feet once more.
If we overextend and give until we are at risk we fail ourselves and those we love in times of crisis and disaster. There will always be times of crisis and disaster. If we are prepared we can confront the crisis and be strong enough to help others when they need us most. Take care of yourself so you are strong enough to take care of those that love you and depend on you.
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Who knows why one person gives up and dies while another struggles on through overwhelming odds and comes out on top? We all want to survive. But are we willing to do what needs to be done?
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Negativity Attracts Negativity
Negativity attracts negativity. This is obvious when we think about it. When we get angry at someone it provokes anger back in return. When someone yells at us in anger we struggle with an instinctive impulse to yell back.
There is a magnetic component to both negative behavior and positive behavior that is worth consideration. When people smile and greet us in a friendly manner we feel good and inclined to smile and be friendly in return.
There is a magnetic quality to emotions that pull us into their own polarity. Emotional events in life can really cause extreme highs and extreme lows if we are not careful. The problem with emotional energy is that it burns out so fast. That emotional high or low can not be sustained over long periods of time. It takes more energy than we are capable of generating and leaves us exhausted.
Allowing the bitter-sweet in life is one way to neutralize these extreme mood swings and use less energy. This means remaining open to both energies at times when one is dominant. When we are happy we can remember that there are people suffering and feel compassion for them. When we suffer we can remember it makes us deeper and more sensitive to the suffering of others. We can understand more of what it is like for them.
In reaching out to help others when we are riding high we learn to reach out to others when we are at the bottom as well. It is as important to accept help as it is to give help. Life is an interactive game not a solitary one. When confronted with negativity we grow if we resist falling under its influence. In sharing our joy we bring happiness to those that could really use it.
Indulging in excess emotional pleasure or pain causes harmful burnout when carried to extremes. No good can come of it. They are both dangerous forms of self absorbtion that weaken our bonds with the environment and those we love. They use dangerous amounts of energy and leave us barely functioning.
Our final consideration is that emotional energy feeds upon itself. When negative energy meets negative energy it grows and there is more negative energy than before. Things become more dangerous and a violent confrontation more likely. Being aware of the bitter-sweet can stall this confrontation or side step it for awhile but at some point negativity must be confronted and dealt with.
Stalling or putting off the inevitable confrontation until we are stronger is sound wisdom. But for it to work we must become stronger. There is nothing in life that we can run from or evade in the long term. Building bridges of understanding can help us to relate to our opponent and cope better with the situation. We gamble in the the hopes that with time we will become stronger than our opponent does.
Let me be blunt and say that obstacles are obstacles. Those things that block our success must be removed. We can remove small pieces at a time or tackle the entire thing in one huge confrontation. The main danger is in loosing such a confrontation and being set back into an even more vulnerable condition. That happens when our energy reserves are depleted. At such times our physical health becomes vulnerable as well.
As our energy reserves grow we can joyously confront our opponents in open conflict without fear of losing too much. Open conflict does resolve issues much more quickly and brings peace much more quickly in its wake. To the victor belong the spoils! It is unresolved conflict that causes stress.
In the game of life these are the risks we take in confrontation and avoidance. There is no universal right way or wrong way of resolving conflict and dealing with negativity. There is only the universal hope of creating a win-win situation where all parties are happy.
Win-win situations create quantum leaps that propel us into new ways of being never before experienced. They also bring new challenges.
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Who knows why one person gives up and dies while another struggles on through overwhelming odds and comes out on top? We all want to survive. But are we willing to do what needs to be done?
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Being Affected by Negativity
You have the choice of being affected by negativity or not being affected by it. Sometimes it’s hard to believe we do have this choice. When someone is pushing your buttons to get a reaction they know exactly what they are doing and we fall right into it. This is following old behavior patterns unconsciously even when we don’t want to.
When someone pushed my buttons I used to mentally tell myself that I would not loose control of myself to someone else. I would not allow someone else to yank my chain. I reasoned that if they could yank my chain that meant they had a certain amount of control over me. I was not going to allow this.
The result was a tough armor that I needed to call upon time after time. People sensed that I was blocking their attempts and tried harder. I put more armor around myself. People tried harder to push my buttons. It seemed that I was caught up in a viscious circle where I was withdrawing from human interaction.
The final result was I was left alone and lonely. Not exactly what I wanted but it was at least peaceful. After I centered myself and calmed down I was ready to start relating with people again. It was not so easy. I noticed it most with my wife. She would try to pull me into arguements. She complained that I would only relate with her when things were going well. At soon as things got bad I would emotionally leave the relationship. She wanted me to stay and confront the issues so we could work them out. I was very uncomfortable doing this. We were at a stand still.
Gradually I learned that being affected by negativity happened by not confronting it when it occurred. It was an emotional charge and if I confronted it right away I lost energy but felt better. I was a lot better off just getting it over with and moving on. When I let my wife discharge her frustration she felt better. I didn’t try running from it. A side effect was that I started expressing more of my frustration as well.
Being free to express small frustrations and negativity prevented the build up of anger and resentment that produced many of the big blow ups. This was an important step.
Being able to armor myself was just as important. Imagine being in a restaurant or public place and someone butts in line and starts screaming at you. This is the type of negativity you can block with your armor. Don’t block the negativity from your loved ones. Try to understand it instead.
The only way you can choose is if you are capable of both options. Knowing when to accept negativity is as important as blocking it. The sharing of pain and sorrow is an important part of our important relationships. We need to be supportive of others if we want them to be supportive of us. At times this means accepting their anger and resentment.
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Who knows why one person gives up and dies while another struggles on through overwhelming odds and comes out on top? We all want to survive. But are we willing to do what needs to be done?
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Choose Freedom from Self Defeat
I think we all know what self defeat is. It is when we persist in doing something that not only is not working but can not work or will not work in the future. We are so personally invested in the situation that we refuse to cut our losses and free our selves. We remain in denial about the situation and never move forward.
This can be about jobs, relationships, money or even health issues. Currently its about my truck. I’ve been refusing to believe that it needs to be replaced even after I’ve been stranded with it four times in the last two weeks. The mechanic says the truck is not worth fixing and I’m in a tight spot. I need to listen and I need to move forward. If I had been willing to let go of the truck as soon as it started giving me trouble I could have saved myself almost $400. Now its too late for that. I put money into it that I shouldn’t have. It still won’t run and never will.
Sound familiar? I’m sure something like this happens to everyone sooner or later. Perhaps the better question is why? Why do we stay on the boat until it is sinking? Does some misplaced loyalty demand we go down with the ship?
My first marriage was the same way. I would never have left if she hadn’t. I would have put up with pure hell for the rest of my life just to do the “right thing” for my children. It turns out that getting a divorce was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. Still I was forced into it. It was not something I would have done on my own.
How can we choose freedom from self defeat? I don’t have a good answer. Maybe there isn’t one. What I can say is that if you are putting out tremendous effort and not getting back anything in return something is wrong. That is a big red flag that needs to be paid attention to. It doesn’t matter how emotionally attatched or invested we are. If nothing is coming back we need to seriously evaluate the wisdom of continuing the present course of action.
Jobs and employment have always been a weak area in my life. I am a hard worker and often work two jobs to make ends meet. Still, in the past I have always worked at jobs that were physically and emotionally draining to the point where I would not have the energy to do anything on my days off. I’ve also always been drawn to jobs where I was over qualified for the work I was doing.
My wife, Annie told me there are good jobs. She said I didn’t need to put up with high stress and low paying jobs. She did her best to tell me that I was putting up with things I didn’t need to put up with. I like my recent job or rather both of my current jobs even though the pay is modest. I’m good at what I do and respected. I also have good relationships with co-workers. I also have the freedom to do what I love the most, writing on the internet! This is actually a third job for me.
In the evenings when I get home I have enough energy to do things I want to do. This is a blessing that I had forgotten existed. Life is still hard but I am doing many of the things I love to do. That is the highest freedom of all.
Things may not be entirely the way I would like them but I am certainly moving toward some important goals. I am not currently a victim of self defeat.
Anarchist World Live Join the Revolution today! Online rss community of free men and free women. Let Freedom Ring!
Who knows why one person gives up and dies while another struggles on through overwhelming odds and comes out on top? We all want to survive. But are we willing to do what needs to be done?
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Make Your Physical Actions Count
We all know the feeling of working hard all day and not getting anything done. At least it seems that way. We don’t need to keep spinning our wheels through ineffective actions. Study the experts and champions to find out how they do it. This is the research part of any goal. Before you can do it your way you need to understand how other people have done it in other ways.
Nature in the evolutionary process explores all possible options. There are no good and evil choices in nature. Everything is explored and success is rewarded. Failure to thrive leads to stunted and abnormal living situations.
We can apply this to our own lives as well. Are we enjoying a rich and rewarding lifestyle that we are comfortable with? Or do we live in stunted and abnormal living situations that are slowly choking our spirit and will to live?
For thousands of years the “Collective Soul” of the human race has worked for the good of the entire human race. This meant holding some people back until the rest of us could catch up. Society and culture had the final word on how far a person could go in life.
With the internet things have changed. The human race has gone global! For the first time ever you don’t need to have the support of local community to become successful. You can gather the support you need from the far corners of the earth and you can support others as well. We can’t even begin to comprehend just what this means.
There is a level playing field now and everyone has the same chance to make their mark in the world. Politics and social institutions still exist but as dinosaurs that are fast on their way to extinction. People will loose interest in them as they increasingly prove incapable of coping with today’s social problems.
Self sufficiency and survivalism on an individual basis are going to replace wasteful government handouts. Family is going to take care of family. Local community is going to take care of local community. The solutions to humanities problems are going to appear at the grass roots level or not at all. Those waiting for government bailouts are going to be hurting. The policeman is never there when you need him, but he is there to fill out the paperwork after the fact.
Survivalism doesn’t mean being able to live off the land. It means being secure in your ability to feed and clothe your family and keep a roof over their heads in the winter. It means having a job that is not going away to China or Mexico. It means being able to find a different job if your currrent one does. Survivalism means physically doing whatever it takes to survive.
This is a time to put down roots so you can be strong and support others when they need you. Keeping yourself strong allows you to be there for others. This is not selfishness. It is staying alive!
Cautiously explore every opportunity that comes your way and test it for response. Putting effort out and not getting anything back is a waste of time and energy. Study the results you do get and refine the process to get even better results.
Long term goals might not bring in immediate money but they should bring in something. My long term goals are to make a living as a writer. I’m not making much money now and I’m not trying to. My focus is on getting readers. If I was not getting readers I would not continue producing this material.
Success grows out of success not out of failure. Each small success leads to deeper understanding and insight into what changes need to be done next. Everyone has an area in life that is working for them. Expand that area to include others and see what happens. Make your physical actions count!
Anarchist World Live Join the Revolution today! Online rss community of free men and free women. Let Freedom Ring!
Who knows why one person gives up and dies while another struggles on through overwhelming odds and comes out on top? We all want to survive. But are we willing to do what needs to be done?
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What You Say vs What You Do
During part of my life I worked as an in-home crisis counselor. I would visit families in crisis and try helping them sort the chaos out and find solutions the the crisis. Anyone working in this area knows that to be effective it works best if you have gone through similar situations successfully.
This means you can offer insights and suggestions from personal experience and not theory from some book. Fortunately or unfortunately I have struggled through a lot of dysfunction in my life and learned a lot the hard way.
Listening to family members tell their own side of the story made no sense at all. Every family member could justify their own position and say why other family members were at fault.
Time after time the situation would boil down to family members taking unfair advantage and manipulating other family members. People resent being manipulated, especially when it is unfairly done. Educating the family on unfair manipulations and teaching them healthy alternatives was an important part of resolving crisis.
The other factor was when family members would say one thing and their physical actions said another. Sometimes things were so bad that I couldn’t tell who was lying and who was telling the truth. Everyone was very convincing.
That’s when I told people to shut up. I was not interested in hearing reasons why things went wrong. I was only interested in physical actions and physical results. Who did what to who? I didn’t need to know why. Child abuse or Parent abuse both happen. There are ways to get what you want without being abusive. There are ways to fight fairly and maintain self respect and self esteem. There are ways to create win-win situations. Abuse is abuse and needs to be confronted. It can never be justified.
In my own life I confronted the same weakness. I talk a good show and my actions are not always backing up what I say. In retrospect I will talk alot about what I am going to do, perhaps more than I should until people think I’m a windbag. But I reach a point where I will actually do it.
Writing is a perfect example. Since high school I said I was a writer and wanted to write books. I got into arguments and debates with other friends that wanted to be writers too. When I experienced my first heartbreak I did write some teenage angst poetry but that was it. I wanted to be a writer but I was not writing anything.
The desire to write would come and go in spurts. At the age of thirty I took some writing courses and completed the assignments graduating from the courses with honors but still not writing on my own. At the age of forty I seriously tried writing my first two books, OAK:Foundations and OAK:Magister Templi.
I finished them as rough drafts and called it good enough. Several years later I realized my wife was right. They were not readable. I still was not writing other stuff. I remained a writer that would not write. Consider Stephen King. He began writing as a teenager and continued all through his life. Many people think you need to begin when you are young or it won’t work. They forget Edgar Rice Burroughs was forty when he began writing the Tarzan books.
I was getting old and still hadn’t produced much of anything. Was I lying to myself? In a way yes and in a way no. I thought I knew what writing was about but I really didn’t. In this respect I was lying to myself.
It was only when I turned forty eight and took three months off to write Anarchist Knight:Apprentice that I finally understood. Almost two years later I was holding the first copy in my hands. I never dreamed how much work it was to write a book and I never knew how rewarding it was.
There is a big difference between saying you are a writer and actually being a writer. For forty some years I was kidding myself about being a writer. It is only now that I understand the easy competence of writing something every day. Today for the first time I can say with honesty that I am a writer.
It was the same in families I was working with. Many family members were kidding themselves as well. They were saying one thing and not following through on their promises or agreements. It is better not to make a promise or agreement then to break it. It sounds so simple but these families simply needed to be reminded to keep their promises and agreements. They also needed to learn about being fair and allow win-win situations without trying to manipulate each other to get their own way.
Sometimes it helps to have someone tell us that we are not doing the things we say we are doing. This means confronting us and making us confront ourselves.
What are you doing to make your life better and richer? What are you doing to make your relationships with loved ones better? What are you doing that makes life meaningful and worthwhile? Are you taking the physical actions needed or are you lying to yourself?
Anarchist World Live Join the Revolution today! Online rss community of free men and free women. Let Freedom Ring!
Who knows why one person gives up and dies while another struggles on through overwhelming odds and comes out on top? We all want to survive. But are we willing to do what needs to be done?
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Learn Your False Responses
We all have false responses. That’s when we feel one way and act another way. Someone might ask if we are ok and we tell them we are when we really are not ok.
Other examples of false responses are never completing things we start; feeling the grass is always greener somewhere else; never asking someone out on a date because we fear rejection.
Over and over again our false responses get in our way and cause us to trip and fall right before we reach the finish line. False responses are rationalizatons and lies that we tell ourselves to avoid confronting the things that need to be owned and accepted before we can move closer toward our goals.
In most cases our false responses are protection mechanisms created to avoid unpleasant situations. We live with someone we don’t love for the sake of the children or stay at a job where we are not treated like a human being because we fear unemployment.
We are all blessed with a wide range of sensory awareness and life experience. Our physical human bodies are fully integrated and functional. At least they try to be unless we frustrate and block them with our false responses.
What I’m trying to say here is that our false responses divide and separate who we are and what we feel. They make us feel divided and lead to stress and perhaps mental or emotional illness. When we want something and can’t get it there are two paths we can follow. The easiest option is to rationalize and lie to ourselves that someone or something is preventing us from the achievement of that goal. As long as the cause of our personal failure lies external to us we have no reason to change or try harder.
The second path is much harder. We have to own up to the fact that our own actions have brought us to our current situation and our own actions must carry us forward out of them. The reason we can’t achieve our goal is because we are either doing something wrong or are not ready yet. When we hit the brick wall we need to realize that it usually manifests when we are going in the wrong direction.
Rationalizations and lies are mental in nature. This means that mentally we can’t find a way that will reach our goal. It does no good to tell ourselves that our body is wrong or that our emotions are wrong. We sense what we sense and we feel what we feel. Those are true things. We just don’t fully understand them.
The mental nature needs to be in harmony with the physical body and the emotions. This is obvious but how can we do this? Research and exploration. Research the goal and study how others go about achieving it. An in depth study of any subject will show that it is not exactly what we imagined it to be. Being a writer is much more hard work than I ever imagined it to be. I had no idea that material needed to be re-written up to ten times before it was presentable as a book.
Having a loving and sexual relationship with a partner has been nothing at all like I thought it would be. It’s much more work than I ever dreamed but it is also much more satisfying.
When we first try to achieve a goal we don’t know what it takes to reach that goal. Our expectations are not realistic. We can either stop trying and rationalize why we can’t have what we want or we can research and learn to have more realistic expectations. False responses are when our mental nature gives up.
Learning by doing and having a gentle gradient are the most powerful ways of breaking through false responses. Taking things by baby steps and mastering each small step at a time will break through any false response and replace it with a true success. This is much better than wanting too much too fast and then crashing and burning.
At the completion of each baby step we learn more about our goal. Our expectations become more realistic and we might even find we only thought we wanted that goal. What we really want is something else entirely. We can’t even discover that deeper truth until our curiousity is satisfied about the first one.
Learning and satisfying our curiousity clear the way for advancement to what really matters. This does not mean to give in to every stray whim and fancy. That is what our mental natures are for. When fully integrated they recognize these physical and emotional impulses and understand them for what they are, sensory data and impressions.
Our mental natures discern harmful or negative possibilities and steer us around bad experiences while affirming those feelings and impressions. It’s ok to look as long as you don’t touch. You’ve got your own at home.
Anarchist World Live Join the Revolution today! Online rss community of free men and free women. Let Freedom Ring!
Who knows why one person gives up and dies while another struggles on through overwhelming odds and comes out on top? We all want to survive. But are we willing to do what needs to be done?
Alligator Alley Technorati Tags : survivalism, freedom, Rosicrucian, Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry, Freemasons, conspiracy, opinion, mastery, alternative
Alligator Alley:Survivalism 