JON’S LAWS CONCERNING CHANGE

First some basic assumptions.  People tend to follow the laws of physics, at least some times. One law being considered is: an object at rest tends to stay at rest until kicked in the butt. Also, a body in motion tends to stay in motion until wacked upside the head.  Another way to say it is that generally people don’t change unless and until they must. They’d rather keep doing what they’re doing even if it doesn’t work, or if what they are doing causes them and others more pain and less pleasure.  For most, change isn’t considered until the pain of what they are doing is greater than their fear of change (the unknown).

 Secondly, thinking of change, dreaming of a new life, hoping that something will change  and $2 will buy a decent cup of coffee.  Change is most effectively demonstrated by a change in behavior.  How often do we hear someone say they want to lose weight, or exercise more yet when you ask what they are doing to attain those goals, the answer often is well, I’m thinking about (it)….  I’ll take the coffee - black, no sugar.  Thank you.

Third: Universal Rules: Everything in the Universe responds with Vibration, Gravity, and Motion. If I understand this, and I think I do, it means that very thing in the Universe is alive except for one thing, petroleum which is very necessary for us, at least for the moment. With full disclosure, I must admit to an AhHa moment. I’ve heard that about Oil based products and never gave it a though. Suddenly, as sometimes happens, an insight appears, just like that. If we acquaint life and death as white or black. Then the rule of in Yang holds: life vibrates and death doesn’t. Life is the line that separates the two. (Roger would give that “a smattering of applause”.

To give us the opportunity to change behavior we need to upgrade our internal as well as external language.  Often this language adjustment is termed positive thinking (getting rid of the “bad thinking”. which creates a problem. Involving the Universe laws. If it moves, responds to gravity and vibrates, it lives. The implication that positive thoughts are good, and dark bad, is ignoring a key element. The Universe does not create good or bad, just what is. The challenge is that our thoughts can only be as effective as our beliefs.  If I believe that I am meant to be fat, all of the positive thinking I can muster won’t produce the change I’m looking for.  I can repeat affirmations until I’m blue and change will only occur if I believe what I’m telling myself.  It’s those little voices of doubt, fear, guilt and the like that we push aside or deny that are the cause of our undoing.  Success brings success, failure breeds failure. Who wants failure? Well anyone who wants to grow, explore, wonder. We learn from experiences that don’t work at least as much, if not more, that experiences that we judge to be positive. If we didn’t overcome our fear of failure we never learned to roll over or sit up - crawl, walk, run; you know the end of that story, Our lives would been to soon ended.

 Fifth: The Five Agreements: Be impeccable with your word, Take Nothing Personally, Make No Assumptions, Do the Best You can, Trust but Verify. We will run into these agreements (personal contracts) often, later

Sixth: The Law of Attraction; What we send out comes back may times over. (put out means to hold an intention, to have a thought, to send a message from your self of selfs or all other forms of personal communication).

Seven: The Wisdom of Marianne Williamson personified it the spirit of Nelson Mandela and others: “It is not our darkness that we fear but our light”.

HOLD ON. THE FOLLOWING SECTION TENDS TO WANDER SOME. FOR THOSE WHO FEEL THE NEED TO TAKE NOTES, FEEL FREE TO TRY. FOR OTHERS, JUST FOLLOW ALONG. (this section follows a definition of jazz: We like to start on the same note and at the same time, and to end on the same note and at the same time. What ever happens between those to notes is jazz.). This follows the same philosophy. Fill in whatever blanks you would like, rearrange the sentences, thoughts, even paragraphs. I would love to hear from you what you made of the message.

 Our beliefs in general hold that some thoughts/feelings are good and some are bad.  Love, joy, compassion are good, fear, anger, sadness are bad.  When something happens that I like, then it is good (and we are blessed) but when something happens that we don’t like the it is bad (and I guess we are not blessed) But a law of the universe is that all of the universe and everything in that universe is a circle, made up of light and dark, yin and yang. One is not good and the other bad. Each part just is. Each has its place and each place is as right as every other place. In order for us to finally change our behavior, we must accept the strength and wisdom of the dark as well as the strength and wisdom of the light.  The upshot of this is that just because I wish it, doesn’t guarantee that what I wish is the best outcome. As an example, I might wish for a new job and when I don’t get it I wonder why.  Maybe it’s because something even better is coming down the trail.  If you took the job you thought you should take, then the one that would have been better won’t be available. Like it or not, things happen for a reason. Someday we might understand the reason, but exactly when that might happen is unknown. There are lessons to be learned that go way beyond the three R’s.

 In a gross simplification used to promote a view of the world, The use of our brain, as an example. The brain is organized with two separate but collaborative hemispheres and it has been designed with a division of some duties. The left side of the brain is the is the home of logic and rational evidence that can be seen and measured. That is good view of the world, but this view of the world alone is not enough.  The right side of the brain has an entirely different non-verbal view of our internal world and has access to a variety of ways to define reality with dimensions that are not available to the left side.  Again, neither side is right and the other wrong.  Both are necessary if we want to tap into all of the resources that are available for us.  For most Western Culture folks, the left brain is dominant and has become used to that dominance. We are accustomed to listening to the voices of the left brain. The brain never turns off and nether do the voices we all here. “where do you want to go for lunch? I don’t know, where do you want to go?” is a conversation I often hold with myself.

The voices deal with all kinds of duties that if feels we should be made aware of. If we don’t listen, the voice tends to be insistent, quite loud and enhanced with rules that we should follow for our own good. Some of the left side voices are providers of guilt and shameful memories that I thought I had long ago dealt with. Apparently not. These voices are often the loudest, rudest, most worthless pies of, baggage, that I seem to love to carry with me wherever I go.

The voices of the right side tend to be quiet, gentle and forgiving and often use sound or color, movies from memories of fantastical as as well as remembered experience to communicate. The messages of these voices are more likely suggestions. Many of us are not comfortable with the right brain’s language, bu even when, or if, we ever think about the laud voices, what can we do about it?

(this is an aside, but useful at this moment. The voices that we’d like to not pay so much attention to have been called Gremlins and there are two great book about this titled: “ Young Gremlins”, and “Taming Your Gremlins”. Like it or not, the voice of the gremlin is part of our internal family, and there is a therapy about this and also. a book Of course there is. (IFS, Internal Family Systems.) I thought I had invented this wonderful idea and was going to be famous. Alas and alack the book has been published (30 years ago) and a very effective therapy is in place and can be viewed on UTube. I hold IFS as a core concept (Carl Jung termed them Archetypes): that each of our internal voices or parts are voices that we have heeded, or ignored, in the past and carry with us to the present is amazing! Regardless of your view of the world, just think of the power the words of darkness have held over you! The decisions that you made as a result of (blank) rather than (blank) may be legend. It is time that the insightful among us might point out - the universe doesn’t make good or bad, we do. And you’d be mindful to do so.

Our internal parts can be worked with once we understand that the voice in our head represents a trusted past power source that were told to stay with me and therefore is mine, and my responsibility to manage and embrace, unless you want to be sent to your room to think about what you did over and over. We love the light, not so much the dark. The well known Yin/Yang symbol is light and dark. we easily embrace the light but push away the dark. Being pushed back only strengthens the darkness. Once the dark is embraced, loved and trusted, I don’t accept that all part’s intention is to protect us including angry, anxious, guilty, ashamed; I have a part of me that feels each of those things and many more. I do call these voices my dark side because I don’t want them to control me. I understand though that while I value love highly, I have trouble feeling the same about those other ones. Yet, I need fear when it is right to be afraid, angry when it is right to be angry, and grateful that the dark and light have agreed to cooperate. I have come to understand that these are the voices of my internal family. They belong to me because I asked them to be with me always. Somehow the dark voices often overpower the light voices. They’re lauder you know. Pushy even rude.

A common error is to give the laud voices priority over the quiet. So anger trumps acceptance; the voice of depression, I call Igor defeats that of Tiger. Now, isn’t that sad. I, my ego, reacts. I don’t agree with what the voice is saying, or the memory it’s giving me. My ego demands that I defend it. I have always assumed that to be a true statement, so I habitually respond. No thought required, thank you. The wonder drug adrenaline and friends have been released! They take over and I’m off (with my ego at my side, hold onto the reins).

Eighth: A different way of explaining the gifts from the left brain, thoughts, plans and presence of the ego that feels required to make something happen may in fact hinder what might happen. The right side of the brain suggests that we just allow for the possibility of what might happen.  Kind of a Hmmmm, I wonder what would happen if - . 

I wonder what would happen if:  

 We chose the option of taking responsibility for our life path and welcome the opportunity to change before pain forces the decision..

 We assess our behavior and ask ourselves is this how I want to behave?  (Am I getting the results I thought I would get?)  My behavior reflects who I am as a person. (Am I happy with that person?  Do I trust him/her?  Would I want this person as a friend?)

We pay attention not only to our outer language, but the internal messages of spirit that are with us always.

 We understand and accept that most of our beliefs are lies.  They are opinions given to us by someone who may believe that they are true, but they are not true.  If they’re not true, then they are lies.

 We let go of the need to understand, and allow for the possibility that there might be  more effective tools available to help us in this journey we call life. There have been laws identified in this piece.  I don’t know if they are true or not.  But I wonder what would happen if we just allowed that they might be more effective than the beliefs we have been holding on to primarily just because we always have.

 These are the rules I first took for myself and applied to my philosophy of counseling of healing.

People always do the best they can in every situation to be (blank) with the resources they have available to them in the moment.

The Map is not the Territory.

Resistance is Personal Power. If you’re not getting the result you intended, do anything else.

The meaning of the communication is the result you get. It is the job of the communicator to be understood, not the responsibility of the listener to understand what has been communicated.

The initial story that is told to me, a stranger where trust has not been established, in the first counseling session is the presenting story used to check me out as one who may be trusted.

I once knew a therapist who said (s)he could define the problem and the solution in the first few minutes of the first session. She then said that one or many sessions might follow for the ah-ha light to go on

Full disclosure: S)He would take longer to observe more communication to verify the intuition, and felt intuition was often more correct than not. (S)he said that more time would be invested to help the client come to the same or similar conclusion usually with more detail. Some of it useful, much of it not. addendum: I came to the same conclusion. I also concluded that most of what I was being taught wasn’t holding nearly as true as my honoring intuition. Which has gotten better with practice and walking through many doors marked fear.

Thanks. I just didn’t know where else I could put these.