How do we know?
Well, now I’ve gone and done it, taken charge of my life and mowed down a few people in the process. I am randomly intolerant of what seems like unnecessary drama, but I used to eat it up like butter on toast. I am unpredictable in a way that eludes even me these days, and the only thing to the negative is the reaction of others to my less than tactful foray into clear communication. How far is too far? Is there a “too far”? From who’s perspective?
If there was anything about my mainly High Risk/ICU oriented nursing career that impacted my life and communication style for business, it was training in a ‘cut to the chase’ kind of assessment and delivery of information. In High Risk intervention centers, you literally have no time to hesitate or be distracted by issues with co-workers. Maybe that’s a challenged position in a world of limited face to face interactions and the reliance on technology to express our thoughts to one another…side by side texting?…seriously?…
I just found a bumper sticker that says, “The older I get, the more ridiculous you all seem!” I laughed out loud, and then I thought of how ridiculous a lot of things seem, including me. I have gotten into the habit of telling people, “I used to be a nice person, now I have no patience.” I usually say it in reaction to my newly blossoming inability to get sucked into the kinds of personal drama that people have been sharing with me for my entire adult life, and maybe before. I have gone from being the epitome of compassion to being a bit of a heartless bitch when it comes to self-generated drama. Not only am I not drawn there, sometimes my response is a bit intolerant!
Now, I used to be an advocate for a person’s right to their own experience, and except for a new addition to my skill set, I still am. The one tiny addition is the ability to exercise my right not to have to be subjected to other people’s drama in my personal life. This may sound a little cold, but my reference point for real life drama has been reset…I watched my sister die of ovarian cancer…that pretty much did it for me. She wanted nothing more than to live; she did everything the doctors told her with a grace and patience that seemed super human. Then she died anyway… now THAT was real life drama. Anything less than that in my personal sphere doesn’t really draw me in the way it used to. I got nuthin’… This is most likely a good thing. It leaves me the clarity to focus on detecting the real thread in the people I choose to work with.
Lack of dramatic circumstance isn’t the prerequisite to this work, it’s the willingness to free one’s self from the sticky drama and get out of one’s own way. There is no judgment in me about the details of people’s lives; there is only a firm refusal to feed people’s drama, to collude with them to stay a victim. The longer I do this work, the more educated I become in my responsibility to be an example of a healthy adult. I know that recently I have done a one eighty and there are a few friends who would challenge the concept of me and my behavior as healthy… that saddens me but doesn’t deter me. The ego, the generator of mental drama, will do anything to keep itself alive, even try to discredit me. There was a time when that would have concerned me…now I really have no attachment to other’s having a “good opinion” of me. I just tell the truth, my truth, and the chips can fall where they may. If people are so entrenched in their comfortable victimhood that they need to point fingers, so be it. I am finding the internal presence to practice what I preach, and for the kind of work I have been gifted to do, this is a deal breaker.
I work with energy; we learned about it in sixth grade…matter is energy and energy is matter. I am focusing right now on the distinction between clear intuitive interpretation and emotionally distorted intuitive interpretation. People ‘feel’ what they ‘feel’…we use our intuition each day, all day. How the mind interprets the ‘feeling’ is a rich landscape of options. The more conscious we become, the more valuable intuitive information becomes. It brings us out of the unconscious fear state and moves us into an internal guidance system that outshines the most technologically advanced GPS. With a little effort and training, our internal guidance system will get us on the path to fulfilling our purpose. It’s not easy…simple yes, but not easy. In a world focused on making things ‘easier’, this position seems counter-intuitive.
As kids we used our intuition daily and didn’t have the rational thinking to counter it until we were taught how by our culture. Just like the person who easily rode a bike as a child but hasn’t been on one in decades, the skill hasn’t been lost; we have just developed fear based beliefs that stop us from trying and rationalizations that justify our ‘maturation’ away from the things of childhood. If we reclaim that innocence and develop the skills we were born with we can make a conscious decision about what we will aspire to…it will make life so much more enjoyable…
How do you Know? cont…
Intuition is the lens through which our spiritual selves are equipped to view reality. Before we were so caught up in rational mind, we used intuition to navigate and create. In this day and age, since our world has changed to endless overstimulation, our electromagnetic hell assaults us and distorts our energy. Intuitive awareness isn’t a cultural expectation. How can you sleep peacefully when you are bedfellows with a cellphone? Not only are you endlessly on call, but the cellphone’s electromagnetic field wrestles with your natural energetic rhythms. Maybe we use technology to manage our emotions.
Basically, if we make it up through the lens of emotion with no spiritual understanding, we create from fear. The condition of fear as a perception of the rational mind is informed by unconscious information. If we allow the circumstance to unfold and view it through the eyes of spiritual awareness, that consciousness reexamines the idea of habitual emotional reaction versus intuitive awareness and response.
If we were born into indigenous cultures, the ‘sixth sense’ would not have been presented as a foreign state; it would not have been ‘presented’at all; any more than the amount of attention required to help children put names to the smells they are experiencing constitutes presentation. Intuitive function is a vital part of surviving in Nature, and indigenous people live in tune with the Earth, minus the electromagnetic interference we live with today. Intuition is refined as the sense of taste is refined, a natural tool in our skillset, sharpened with use. The intuitive receptors wherever they may be, do what they are meant to do, receive intuitive information; the ideal circumstance for intuitition to flourish. The individual is aware of and acts on that information with complete trust. The rational mind is in service to the intuitive.
The not so great news is that we weren’t born into an intuitively aware culture; the real news is that we are still INTUITIVE…we just don’t know it, or if we know it, we haven’t a clue what to do about it. In order to ignore the intuitive information that is available to us, we have to ‘cover’ those intuitive receptors, something like putting your hands over your ears, but requiring constant internal vigilance to generate that which will occupy the intuitive receptors through manipulation of the emotions. This manipulation is the work of the rational mind as informed by unconscious expectation.
Emotions, as we established, are factual in that they arise unbidden from our core in response to a change in circumstance. As a child they give us information regarding our position …if I am being tickled by my mother I experience happiness, if I have been scolded, I experience sadness or anger. I may be sad because I have made someone else sad, in other words, my sadness is empathic, or angry because I am being treated unfairly. Either way, the emotion is the messenger, and children need to learn how to read the information and apply it to their lives productively. That requires the participation of the rational mind but as a servant of higher principle; the intuitive perception. Our emotions are intuitive, the human version of animal instinct. The difference between us and our animal counterparts is rational thinking.
If a deer is eating in the forest and hears a twig snap, it becomes alert, tuning into the source of the sound, returning to her meal as the squirrel skitters up the tree or running for her life as hunters approach. If she must flee from hunters, when she reaches safety, all of those fight or flight chemicals will have been burned up in the action she took, and once she catches her breath she’ll go back to eating her lunch.
She doesn’t have to enter therapy to manage the unprocessed fear that exists in the rational mind; she doesn’t have one! Even if she had never encountered a hunter before, she would just ‘know’ the intention of reality as it presents itself. She doesn’t question her decision. Action is based on knowing, and there is no gap, no intrusive thought to trip up the process, no individual unconscious informing the present.
We, the ‘higher’ intellectual beings, are that only because we have the capacity for ’conscious awareness’. I was told that the Bonomo is believed to be the most evolved of the chimps because they have been observed building rudimentary shrines or alters which they treat with what appears to be reverence…the seedling of conscious awareness. Still no rational mind.
What is the rational mind? I think of it as middle management, requiring direction and management itself to function effectively. Most of our culture gives it far greater respect than that. Not that the mind isn’t powerful, quite to the contrary. The rational mind is the storehouse for paradigms of belief, a piece of the mind as a whole. What you believe ultimately shapes your reality. To be rational is to have the ability to ‘normalize’, to make ‘logical’ sense.
Without awareness of the origins of the belief structures the rational mind enacts, the habituated rational mind perceives unconscious familiarity as ‘normal’…like the witness to domestic violence who grows up to marry an abuser. Familiarity is mistaken for ‘normal’ because it was the sum total of her experience…’normal’ to her.
Unprocessed fear as the lens through which we view the world allows the unconscious storehouse of expectation to ‘prove’ itself as reality to us over and over again. Perceptions go a long way to bring the process of emotional experience to conclusion, and if those perceptions are tainted by unconscious expectations, the emotion becomes trapped. We are frightened all of the time because we are unable to use the thing in our skillset put there to keep us safe…our intuition.
More on that next time…
How do you Know?
An old friend once told me a story about the way he interacted with his daughter around learning. “It’s simple!” he said, “There’s a formula I use, it’s ‘See One, Do One, Teach One.’ That,” Michael told me with an assured grin, “is a formula that leads to mastery!” These simple steps as I embrace them, flow through my work and make me a better teacher. I observe, transform, and teach these life lessons, and if I stay present to my own process, I end up grateful rather than bitter; enthusiastic rather than depressed.
As I observe myself in my life more and more, I find myself much more comfortable being present. Inside of that presence I notice themes in my life that pervade my personal and work life equally. It appears that after I have learned the lesson, I notice the themes in my life showing up in the energies of the people that seek my counsel. “See One…Do One…Teach One…”
I believe emotions are facts, and maybe the only reliable human truth. What do I mean by that? Well….think about it….can you change your feelings really? They arrive as they are from the reservoir of experiential aptitude within us. Something creates momentum, and the catch term ‘trigger’ is an apt word to describe the process of emotional experience. Something will ‘trigger’ an emotion, and suddenly I’m crying in a restaurant again, reliving a story from my hospital days as I tell it, still flooded with unbidden emotion that didn’t really come through during the actual event.
Working in any type of intensive care setting demands focus and level-headedness; the intensity of the work allowing for interventive presence. I’d always tell anyone who asked, “How can you stand working there, isn’t it a disappointing outcome a good percentage of the time?” that I’d ‘get through’ the crisis and then ‘feel’ about it later. Retrospectively, I no longer believe this to be an accurate assessment of what I was actually doing.
After a crisis, I would be flooded with my human emotions, like sadness and loss the time someone who had been with us on bed rest for the last four weeks in an attempt to save her unborn baby had an emergency Cesarean Section and delivered a stillborn; my patient, my vested interest. But now as I look back on what lead up to that C-Section, I realize that it was pure intuition in me that ‘knew’ we had to get that baby out of there ASAP and that same intuition that held me fast in the face of more ‘logical’ opposition. The ability to be present, which I believe was cultivated in settings where every second counts, allowed for the intuitive function to be at the forefront, pretty much without my ever having to notice!
Well I notice now, and I have for a while, and I’m beginning to wonder if the palette of human emotion expresses itself through the intuitive receptors, much the way cocaine attaches itself to the norepinephrine receptors; providing the short lived ‘rush’ that takes over, craving itself through us, creating chaos until we take notice and take charge.
Like cocaine, the emotions last only a short time until they dissolve. People get physiologically addicted to cocaine because it covers the receptor for norepinephrine, a mood stabilizer, and the body stops producing it. Withdrawal is the time between the cessation of the artificial cover and full production of the mood stabilizing agent once again. I believe that we also have the potential to become addicted to emotional rushes rather than aware of intuitive information. After all, since when is intuitive awareness a cultural expectation? We have to cover those intuitive receptors with something so we seek out the triggers to emotion like an addict seeks the next fix. Now are you totally confused?
Well, yes, I did say you couldn’t change your emotions, that they are in essence factually real and undeniable. I also said that our emotions continue to run us until we take charge. The missing piece here is what we need to take charge of. What’s the missing piece? Most of us know that the missing piece is our own will, but that’s where the knowing ends. If it was as easy as saying it was so, then we’d all be the media’s idea of fit and attractive. I don’t believe that’s a healthy aspiration, but I can say with conviction that the obstacles to manifesting your best self-have everything to do with the emotional addiction cycle…once you get that handled, you can make it up any way that you decide is for your highest and best good.
So how do we learn to tell the difference between repetitive emotional cycles and true intuitive function? The good news is, it can be done! More next time…
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