“I can’t see this working he said.” He said it with a tone and inflection both of inquiry, and hopelessness.   That’s what resistance will sound like sometimes.

“Neither could I when I started,”  I replied.   “You can’t see how it is going to happen. If you could, you would know what the change and experience was. You can’t see what the view from the mountain top will be while you are still standing in the valley.  You can’t see all the steps you will take and the turns you will make before you make them.”    He heard me and then he changed the topic….. more resistance.

Answering his questions didn’t make the resistance go away. Nor did it spur him to action. Maybe the question wasn’t the issue.    Maybe the questions were part of the problem.  So maybe we have to look at that part of our mind that asks the question or makes the statement of doubt.

“I don’t see how this will work.” It was a loaded statement. It was filled with an attitude of hopelessness and like beliefs. “This won’t work.  I’ll be just as unhappy after trying this as I am now so why even try.” The emotions were hopelessness, depressed, defeated, and that was before trying anything.    It’s like his attitude of hopelessness was in charge of his, questions, his decision making, and steering him away from any actions that would help.   It’s going to be a challenge when your belief state of hopelessness is determining your steps towards happiness.  The answers to the questions didn’t cure the attitude.

It wasn’t that the man didn’t have faith. He had a ton of faith. It’s just that it was invested in the conviction that the whole effort to change his emotional state was useless. That’s a lot of personal power spent convincing our self that we are powerless.

He got this. He understood what he was doing as I pointed these things out to him, but that didn’t stop him from changing the subject and continuing to do it. Resistance is like that. We ask useless questions that run a convincing internal dialog in our head while avoiding any action. The result of all that circling dialog is nothing. We end up where we started.

The important piece to acknowledge about resistance is that it results in staying where you are emotionally.    The questions about where the path leads, what turns will there be, how long will it take, etc are all keeping us from a step on our path.  Those endless intellectual questions keep us stuck.   Some of the smartest people with PhD’s are the best at getting stuck because they can ask endless questions.

What made a difference that day is when I asked  him how he felt. “What emotions are you feeling right now?” Are you miserable, unhappy, tormented by anxiety, fears, anger, jealousy, or other emotional reactions? Just look at how you feel. How long do you want to keep feeling that way?  “NO,  I don’t wan to keep feeling this way” he said.   “What do I got to do to change it?” Noticing how you feel is an action.  Taking the time to really feel it is an action.   With those clear perceptions, the motivation to change happened all by itself.    When we are in the midst of unhappiness we ask lousy questions.  Sometimes, the help we need, is just some guidance in asking better questions.

All I knew when I started taking my first steps was that I no longer wanted to be unhappy. I didn’t have a clue about how I would do it, what would work and what wouldn’t.  I just knew that I couldn’t stay in the emotional cycles I was living in.

I didn’t know how long it would take, what the path would be, or even if it would work. The only thing I knew was that I couldn’t keep living in the emotional drama I was doing. So that’s when I decided to take action.

If you find your self asking a lot of questions about a process that you can’t know until you do it for a while you are probably asking the wrong questions.   You are stuck.  The unhappy part of your mind is asking the questions it doesn’t know the right questions to ask.  Instead take a look at the emotions you feel and how often you do those same emotional cycles. Then ask your self how long you want to keep doing that. If that doesn’t motivate you to take action then you don’t need to go around in circles with questions.  Or maybe get with someone who is skilled at asking better questions and will cause you to find better answers.

No matter what you do to overcome your resistance, you can be sure it will be a different action.

You’ll find numerous actions to take in the Self Mastery Course and The Relationship Course that will help you break the patterns of unhappiness.

15 years ago I was enamored with this personal development process.  I had discovered a whole new world.   I felt alive, happy, and excited about my new adventure.  There were fears and false beliefs that I had acquired over my life and I didn’t even know they were there.   I had been dragging them around like a dark cloud over me for years.  I had been unconscious of how they hung on me with worries of success and what others thought of me.  Now I was discovering them and attacking them with excitement and a new sense of freedom as each one fell.

I felt alive, I looked at the world different, and I was happier.  I was excited and wanted to share this new discovery with my friends.  I thought everyone would want to get on board with this process of finding their fears and getting rid of them.

I remember coming back from an Intensive Spiritual Retreat and meeting a friend for dinner.  She asked how my trip was and I proceeded to pour out all my excitement.  After about 3 minutes of non-stop talking I noticed she was leaning back away from me as far as she could.  The look on her face was split between concerns that I joined a cult, and fear that she might catch something.  I realized I needed to soften my presentation.

I continued inviting people to workshops and lectures but with a gentler approach.  I talked in an indirect way about how happy we could be, and how we needed to change these fear based beliefs to do it.  People I talked to continued to be uninterested.   I went from believing that everybody would do this work to thinking hardly anybody will do this work. I began to wonder, why such resistance to being happy?

I reflected on my own process and realized the turning point for me was that I was painfully unhappy.  I had become disillusioned in my career, and around the same time had a high drama relationship that ended.  If it was just the relationship that had crashed I probably could have buried my emotions in my work.  If it was a career that had run aground, I probably could have found comfort in my relationship.  Fortunately for me, both crashed at the same time and I ended up unable to deny how unhappy I was.  Out of a lack of alternatives I needed to do something about the illusions in my mind.

I finally understood why people wouldn’t jump head first into this self awareness process.  It was emotionally uncomfortable.  The process actually involved looking inward at our fears, emotional reactions, and self judgments.  We were doing what some people call shadow work, where we look at the unpleasant emotions we feel.  Facing that critical voice in our head can be a bit scary.  People would tend to avoid that loud abusive voice in their head criticizing them, or the uncomfortable fears they felt.   Over time I realized that I couldn’t push them past this resistance, nor did I want to.

How I Overcame Some Of My Resistance

The word I had for what we were doing was “spiritual.”  The word we used to refer to our selves was “warrior.”  We used the word warrior because we were in a kind of war.  We were fighting to be free of the fears, self judgments, and the tyranny of those voices in our head and false beliefs that controlled our attention.  We were fighting against all the patterns of unhappiness that we created in our mind and our relationships.

As a person’s self importance will do, I began to think of myself and my other spiritual warriors as doing something special.  We were forging into emotionally uncomfortable places others were unwilling to go.  I started to create beliefs that I (we) were more courageous, or fearless, or wiser than others.  I built up a belief system that people who do this type of introspection and belief changing work are more conscious and evolved than the majority of people in the world.   Perhaps I even considered that we were somehow raising the consciousness of the rest of humanity.  The smaller the number of people who entered into this field of challenging their fears and endeavoring to be happy I interpreted as evidence for how special we were, particularly how special I was.  All pretty self important stuff.

Early on in my personal process of change I listened and read Joseph Campbell’s work on the Mythological Journey of the Hero.  My mind used it to feed my self importance.  Yes I was doing something of “mythological” proportions.  I was following the path the masters before me took.  I was doing what the Buddha did facing all the illusions.  My journey inward to an authentic self was the type of journey written about and read for generations to come.  Mythological,,,, that’s what it was.

It’s interesting how the stories about our selves change over time.  Was I really engaged in anything that grandiose?   I don’t think of it that way anymore.  I was certainly living myths, and the story I had of myself at that time was another myth.   All the self importance I had built up around being a spiritual warrior and the special kind of courage it exemplified was another kind of myth I lived by.  They were just stories I had in my mind about myself and other people.   It was a much better story than the victim ones it replaced, but still not the truth.

What of the fears I challenged and the tyranny of the voices in my head telling me I wasn’t good enough and all the things I “should” do to be “good enough”?  Then weren’t they mythological too.  By that I mean they weren’t real.  They didn’t have the properties of physical matter.   I was challenging fears based in stories and beliefs in my mind.  They weren’t even written on paper, that’s how “not real” they were.

One of the fears I had was of what others thought of me.  I was afraid of the opinion or thoughts that might be in another person’s head.  I was living my life and behaving as if I would be hurt, or feel better emotionally depending on anther person’s thoughts.   I tried very hard to impress people and prove myself worthy in their eyes so they wouldn’t have judgmental or negative thoughts in their mind.  I was imagining one kind of story in their head and trying to make a different one exist in their head.  I didn’t have the awareness to realize that all of these assumptions were taking place in my imagination.  I was still in my own imagination when my mind was thinking about what they were thinking.

Later I would realize that if I didn’t have the power to control the voices and opinions in my own head, then I probably didn’t have the power to change the thoughts that went on in someone else’s head

I began to look at these stories, opinions, judgments, and negative thoughts in my fearful imagination that had me scrambling, and that I felt so courageous to challenge? They weren’t real.   They were myths. They were stuff that only existed in my imagination.  They didn’t exist as anything tangible.

Where is a thought?   Can an opinion hurt me?  Can someone actually take an opinion and hit me over the head with it?  Can they do any harm to me physically?   No.  Probably the most solid judgment or criticism that I could receive would be if someone said it out loud to me.  And is it real then?  Is there anything more landing on me than the vibration of their words through the air?   How hard is the vibration of air landing on my skin?   A leaf falling on me from a tree weighs more heavily than the air of someone’s opinion.

So why was I afraid of opinions and judgments from others, or from the voice in my own head?  I believed them.  Those words and judgments from my inner judge landed heavily because I believed them.  I accepted every myth of opinion and judgment as if it were truth.  They only landed with emotional impact when I believed them.   I was scared of the stories in my head simply because I believed them, not because they were real.

Ghost Stories

All those opinions, self judgments, and fears of what others thought were like the ghost stories we had when we were kids.  Little kids are afraid that a boogey man will come out of the closet or out from under the bed.  What makes a child afraid of such imaginary characters?   They believe that such things as boogey men are real.  The ghost they are afraid of isn’t in the closet or under the bed.  It is in their mind, and their mind projects that it is in the closet.

As kids if we leave the light on, and the door cracked we feel a little better.  As if somehow that boogey man will be afraid of the light or a cracked door and will stay away.

As an adult I kept my fears locked in the closet of my unconscious.  I tried to keep my focus on the door cracked open and a little light. I did it by working extra hard to impress people with how much I knew, what my body looked like, or how clever I was.  I focused on those little moments of acceptance and respect from others and lived off that little bit of light.  At the same time afraid to look inward at the self doubts I closeted inside.

Yes I had mythological boogey men inside me.  I was afraid to disappoint the mythical voices in my head.  When I didn’t have any awareness I dreamed up in my imagination failure, rejection, and disappointment a thousand different ways.  Only when I took a journey into those seemingly dark places did I notice they were just dreams. Of course to realize they were just figments of my imagination I had to get in where they were and take a close look.  I opened the closet of my unconscious beliefs and put my attention on what my thoughts and emotions were doing.   I had to control my attention and not look away when there was an impulse of fear or discomfort.  I crawled inside the closet of my mind to see what was really there.

What I discovered were myths in my mind masquerading as something real.    How ironic I thought.  I was convinced that I was some kind of courageous spiritual warrior on a great quest.  What I was really facing were dreams,,, conceptual ideas of the mind… and ghosts stories.  They were no more real than the figments of imagination a child has about what is under the bed.  What I was doing wasn’t very courageous at all when you find out there was nothing there to be afraid of.

Do I think a 10 or 12 year old child who challenges the projected myths of his or her imagination and looks under the bed are courageous?  No, not really.  They are just doing the common sense thing and waking up from dreams and illusions in their mind and I couldn’t consider myself as this spiritual warrior to be any thing courageous either. I had about as much courage as a 10 year unable to sleep at night finally looking under the bed.  After all,, wasn’t I just facing my own ghost stories?

Why do we avoid dealing with our issues and keep putting them off?  We avoid it because in our mind we make believe our issues are scarier than they are.  Much like the 10 year old who doesn’t look under the bed, we don’t look inward because it is uncomfortable.  Instead we just crack the door and leave a small light on somewhere to distract us from our imagination.  We hurry about the tasks of our day trying not to notice how our imagination projects illusions and then how we react to them.

The challenge with our own mind is that we are fighting dreams.  They aren’t real, but they seem that way when we believe in them.

Over the course of our life we gather up beliefs.  For the most part that’s not a problem.  Most of our beliefs help us understand the world and how it works so we can function in it. However, some of those beliefs are not going to be true.  Some of those beliefs will have unnecessary fears associated with them. These are myths we believe in and cause us unhappy emotions.  You could also call them lies.

Because we accept these myths to be truth, they appear real in our mind.  We react emotionally to fearful outcomes as if they already happened.  We imagine our partner with someone else and we get angry as if they did it.  In reality it didn’t happen. It was just in our imagination.  With faith in these mythological stories we make them bigger than they are.

Then after imagining these myths we tell ourselves other lies.  We tell ourselves that they are hard to change, that we can’t make them go away.  We tell ourselves we have to live with them.  We tell ourselves we can’t change, it’s just the way we are.  More myths about change and ourself built on top of the first set of lies.

Then, for some people, something happens.  Usually the pain of living by these myths causes so much suffering that we have no choice.  We have to challenge them.  We begin a mythological journey.  A path of challenging the myths we’ve lived by.  We apply some skills, we have some successes, and we celebrate change.  We begin to build better lives.  We tell ourself we are doing something big.  It’s true that we feel happier and are more free, but not everything we think is true.

If you run this route far enough you run the risk of self important lies like I did.  You look at yourself, compared to others lack of challenging their beliefs, and you begin to think of yourself as special.  It’s a nice lie.  It feels good to think of one’s self as better than others.  It doesn’t really hurt anyone.  In a way it helps give you confidence and faith in your self that you can challenge the bigger fears and false beliefs in your mind.   Your new Ego is an ally helping dismantle the myths we live by.  In some circles it’s called the Spiritual Ego.

Then, at some point in your journey, the Spiritual Ego becomes one of the few remaining myths you live by.  With enough awareness of self, this grandiose image of ourself as a courageous warrior no longer fits.  These false beliefs that seemed so big and scary in the beginning aren’t a big deal anymore.  Maybe it is because we have been doing the work for a while so it doesn’t feel like a big deal anymore.  Maybe it is because we realize that we are only fighting dreams in our imagination.  We realize that to face such a challenge doesn’t really take any extraordinary courage at all.  It just takes common sense.

So with our most powerful tool, common sense, we realize the spiritual warrior or enlightened being with special consciousness story doesn’t seem to fit anymore.  We are left to dissolve that mythological image of a Spiritual Ego.    We drop it.   With that the spiritual ego dissolves, we become more humble.  We become authentic.  We begin to experience a new kind of peace and happiness free of the myths in our mind.

These are some of the steps you may face on your Pathway To Happiness.

You will find an outline of practical exercises and practices for identifying and changing your core beliefs in the Self Mastery course. It’s an audio program that you can download and listen to.   The first 4 sessions are free.

Gary

I come across many people who assume that the level of mastery they have over their emotions and beliefs is the limit of what is possible.

If a person gets angry and says, “That’s just the way I am,” they assume everyone else will react the same way.

If a person has an emotional reaction and they are able to shift their point of view later and dissolve the emotion.   Then they think that’s normal and all that can be done.    The idea of a person NOT reacting at all isn’t real.  Just fiction.  “Nobody can do that.  They are just repressing their emotions.”

For the person who has lots of ongoing chatter in their mind (the Spanish word is mitote) they dismiss the possibility of anybody having a quiet mind. They haven’t experienced it in their mind, they haven’t imagined it, and so it isn’t possible.  The basic assumption is that what goes on in our mind is what goes on in everyone’s mind.

If you haven’t accomplished quieting your mind or being calm with your emotions during life’s challenges then it is difficult to imagine doing it.  After all,,, that’s where it takes place,,, in the imagination.

There’s even a bit of self importance that resists the idea that more could be done than what you are doing.   There’s probably going to be an emotionally painful self judgment if you really admit that others have developed these skills and you haven’t yet.  So in order to avoid this painful self judgment that might ensue,,,, we avoid imagining what is possible in terms of peace and quiet in our mind and happiness in our relationships.

Our mind through its resistance literally dismisses the possibility of a happier and more enjoyable emotional state before we even consider it is possible.

That’s a pretty limiting assumption behind that fear based belief.

It’s odd because we can imagine someone making a hole in one in golf or a half court shot in basketball because we might have seen it done.  But you can’t see into another person’s emotional state or hear the quietness of their mind very well.  You can only imagine it with your own mind and experience your own emotions.  This is very limiting perception.   To go further you are going to have to perceive beyond what your current beliefs tell you.

For exercises and practices in expanding your awareness and eliminating fear based core beliefs do the exercises in the Self Mastery program.

As humans we live in two worlds. There is the external physical world of work, family and friends that we travel in. Then there is the world of our mind and imagination. It is a virtual reality that can appear and feel just as real. When it comes to your emotions the virtual world of your mind can be more real.

If you are seeking to create greater fulfillment and happiness in your life most sources will point to making changes in your external world. However it is changes in the virtual reality of your mind that will make a lasting impact on your happiness and fulfillment.

Those suggestions to find what you love, do what you are passionate about, and achieve your goals will lead you towards happiness. However without addressing how the virtual reality of the mind affects your emotions you can still end up disillusioned and empty. The importance of addressing the role of the mind in your happiness may be difficult to grasp because even the opinions in your mind will point to changing your external world in order to be happy.

What Your Mind Doesn’t Want you to Realize

Most everybody has heard that money doesn’t make you happy, other people don’t make you happy, and that you have to make your self happy. Very few people will tell you how. Your mind will propose that happiness has something to do with the success and accomplishment in the external world. This is exactly what the mind wants you to believe and act on.

As long as you are more focused on the external world of success and accomplishment your mind can avoid giving up the control it has over your emotions. The mind is a dynamic and living entity that has an agenda of its own survival ahead of your emotional well being.

As you put your attention on the dynamics of the virtual reality of the mind it begins to lose control and power over your choices and thoughts. The process involves first becoming aware of the mind and the projections it makes. More self awareness will result in being aware of your self as separate from your mind that is generating thoughts and opinions.

What your mind doesn’t want you to realize is that your happiness and life fulfillment is really determined by what goes on in the world of the virtual reality. At the most essential level of emotions your happiness and sense of fulfillment in life has very little to do with accomplishments in the external reality.

The virtual reality of your mind is likely to disagree with these statements.

Your Happiness and Unhappiness is Created Internally

Take a circumstance such as being fired from your job. In the moment you might feel like it is the worst experience of your life. Those feelings are really created by the self judgment, criticism, and beliefs in the mind. There might also be blame and anger at your former employer. These opinions about the event are generated in the virtual reality about being fired. It is these opinions and beliefs that drive the emotions.

Now imagine that a few years have passed. You have moved on and circumstances are better in your life. Your virtual reality will interpret being fired as a beneficial turn of events that helped facilitate a better life. It was an event that was necessary to bring you to your current state of enjoyment. The story projected in the mind changed and so did your emotions.

Did the event actually change? No. You were still fired on that day at that time for the same reasons. However since your opinions and beliefs about the event changed so did your emotion. Your emotions are created by the beliefs in the virtual reality of your mind and are independent of the event. Most people only change their interpretations over time. However with awareness you can change the opinions and beliefs in your virtual reality in any moment.

How you feel in terms of happiness, fulfillment, and satisfaction is not a function of success, failure, or other external factors. Happiness and fulfillment is determined by the opinions and beliefs in your virtual reality about your accomplishments and perceived failures. After all success and failure are just description labels projected by the mind. They can change with time or perspective.

Shifting Priorities

When you understand the significance of how your virtual reality impacts your emotions it will become more important to create peace and quiet in your mind. Depending on how important it is to be happy, you might even conclude that changing your opinions, beliefs, and fears is more important than your external goals.

Without accomplishing a shift in the virtual reality of the mind external success will often be empty emotionally and leave you wondering, “Is this all there is?”

The Measure of Success is Emotional Happiness

You can be a success in your field, make lots of money, and receive accolades from peers and authorities in the external world. However if your internal world of imagination dictates that you are not good enough or a poor performer you will hear the stories of failure in your head. You will feel the emotions of a failure in your body.

If you are unable to satisfy the critical voice of the Inner Judge in your head no amount of external rewards will be satisfying.

Numerous studies indicate that wealthy people are not much happier than the middle class. Once a person’s basic needs are met there is very little change in a person’s happiness as they gain wealth. What these studies don’t explain is the lack of difference. That’s because these studies don’t reveal the aspects of fear, judgments, criticisms, and beliefs, that make up the virtual reality of people’s minds. These elements of a person’s mind do not change because of a change in their wealth.
The Conflict Between Worlds

When there is a disparity between the image of success that others have and the image of failure in your mind you will feel a conflict brewing. They believe you are a success and yet you know your self image in your virtual reality as a failure. It will seem as if they don’t really know you and this will create a feeling of disconnection. You will feel like you don’t deserve the attention and compliments. You may end up feeling like a fraud to them.

A simple example of this is when someone tells you that you are beautiful or talented. A person that doesn’t feel congruent to this on the inside with their beliefs will feel uncomfortable and dismiss or minimize the comment. In this way their worlds appear and feel more congruent.

Most people most of the time will dismiss the evidence that contradicts their virtual reality. Sometimes this is called denial. At other times people will sabotage their success in the external world just to rectify the incongruity between worlds.

Hollywood is filled with examples of people who achieved acclaim only to feel empty inside. They often seek an internal high through substance abuse only to have it ruin their hard work and everything they have built. When they crash it appears again that their virtual reality was telling them the truth.The virtual reality of the mind is all too willing to sabotage and destroy external success and accomplishments in an effort to maintain continuity and control.

The Illusion of Fulfillment and Happiness

As people strive to be happier and more fulfilled they purse what they believe will make them feel better. More specifically this is the virtual reality’s version of what will make them happy. What the virtual reality equates to happiness does not necessarily equate to happiness in the real world.

In essence the virtual reality claims that happiness is to be created by changing the external world. When achievements are made and goals reached there is often euphoria albeit temporary. The long term internal feelings of dissatisfaction generated by the opinions, criticisms, and judgments of the mind remain unchanged. The virtual reality solution to this return of dissatisfaction is setting higher external goals.

When a person has little awareness they chase whatever goal their virtual reality proposes will make them happy. As you gain awareness you begin to be a skeptic of the thoughts and proposals in your mind. You turn your attention to changing the how the virtual reality operates.

Anecdotes Don’t Help

Some people refer to the distortions in the mind and claim that “People see what they want to see. These simple explanations are just projections of the virtual reality about the virtual reality. The result is that the mind has added another layer to the virtual world with that belief.

For the person that gets called into their boss’s office their mind may project visions of getting reprimanded or fired. When they get there they might find they are getting a bonus.

A person might project that their partner is cheating on them. In their virtual reality they create a movie of their partner leaving them abandoned and alone. Their virtual reality generates emotions of fear, jealousy, anger, and loneliness. In reality their partner might be madly in love and devoted to them. But they don’t have a relationship with their real partner. They have a relationship with the person in their virtual reality. They treat and act towards their partner according to the beliefs and images the virtual reality projects.

In these scenarios it is not a matter of people seeing what they want to see. People do not want to see visions of being reprimanded, fired, or abandoned. It’s not that simple. The virtual reality of the mind is active and has taken on a life of its own. It projects scenarios continually throughout the day separate from our wants and desires. When these projections in the mind are based in fear the result is unhappiness.

People do not see what they want to see. People see what their virtual reality projects. This isn’t so dangerous by itself unless a person believes what their mind has projected. Without belief in these images they have no power to produce emotions or reactions.

Changing Your Mind is Not Easy

The mind is like a many headed hydra. Often when you attempt to cut off one head two heads grow back. The same thing happens in other places in life. When we prune a tree or bush many buds shoot out with limbs that remain. When you attempt to squash negative thinking the same can occur.

When you attempt to describe, justify, judge, or explain why the mind does what it does you are often adding layers of opinions and projections to the virtual reality. In effect you feed it and make it stronger when you attempt to apply simple anecdotes to the process of changing the mind.

To make changes in the way your mind projects stories and images in your virtual reality is counter intuitive. In the beginning you can not go directly attack it and attempt to cut out everything you don’t want. Without skilled techniques and guidance it is likely to bush out and seem bigger and more difficult than before.

To really change what the virtual reality projects requires that you become skillful in slicing it apart in a way that it doesn’t grow back.

To change the patterns of the mind and currents of emotion might seem like a daunting task. At least that is what the virtual reality projects as if it were truthful analysis.

Whether it is easy or difficult is irrelevant compared to the consequences. Your happiness for the rest of your life weighs in the balance.

Challenge Your Mind

The virtual reality of the mind is alive. It has a life of its own and it is seeking to ensure its own survival. If you are unsure of this simply attempt to make all your thoughts silent for a few minutes and see how the voices in your head behave.

They typically become unruly, tell you to stop wasting your time, this isn’t important, and the guy writing this article doesn’t know what he is talking about. Everything will be an attempt to change the subject or sabotage the process.

The person that becomes a skeptic of these thoughts and recognizes their automatic reactive nature has a chance to change their world.

A Quiet and Peaceful Mind

The difference between happiness and misery begins with changing the quality of images and story projection in the virtual world of your mind. When you go beyond the simple projection of happy stories and images you find another world. In the state of a quiet mind the virtual reality is silent. The visual images and projections are nil. You see the external world as it is. When you do you find out that it is beautiful.

You do not paint upon it your judgments, criticisms, fears, justifications, or even opinions and descriptions. When the internal virtual reality is dissolved so are the voices in your head that keep you from peace and quiet. Only when you dissolve the virtual reality of your mind do you have a chance to live in the real world. In the beginning this may only happen in brief moments. With practice it becomes a normal way to live.

When the mind is tamed and dissolved there is no longer the unhappiness, frustration, anger, or sense of emptiness that it often tempts us into. You are able to see the world as it is, and people as they really are. There is the realization of and perception of beauty as the fog is lifted and your eyes open to this clarity.

Happiness and fulfillment obtained solely from focusing on your external reality is fleeting and may leave you wondering, “Is this all there is?” To discover a greater and more lasting happiness you will have to follow a path of dismantling the virtual reality of the mind.

Only through dismantling the false projections of your virtual reality are you assured of being free of emotional suffering in the changing circumstances of your life.

For more insights into the relationship between the mind, emotions, and beliefs listen to the free mp3 Audio podcasts on Awareness and Consciousness

For specific exercises in Self Awareness and changing the core beliefs behind the virtual reality of the mind practice the exercises in the Self Mastery Audio Program.

The most important aspect to master when dealing with a liar is your emotional reactions. You can’t always change the behavior of a liar, but you can change how you feel and react to them. Once you learn to change your emotions about a situation you begin to see a lot more options.

If you are honest with the situation you will realize that your happiness is more important than their behavior anyways. The motivator for wanting someone to stop lying is so that you don’t end up unhappy.

Change begins with Awareness

The first step in dealing with liars or emotional issues is awareness. With awareness you can deal with a liar without being upset. We’ll start by understanding how someone becomes a liar to begin with.

Our social conditioning has trained us to be liars to some degree. In some ways it is required of us. When you are aware of how people are socialized your expectations change. As your expectations change the judgments in your mind dissolve along with your emotional reactions to them.

This doesn’t mean you learn to condone lying or agree with it. You just no longer have emotional reactions about it. When you are aware that someone lied to you because they were trained by other people and circumstances you won’t take it personally. You then have an opportunity to deal with the situation in a way that isn’t driven out of emotional reactions.

We learned to lie in order to be polite and respectful.

Just for starters we learned to lie in order to be polite. When we were kids, and we visited relatives or friends we ate whatever they served for dinner even if we didn’t like it. If we really hated it we might have slid it under the table to the dog so it looked like we ate it. When the host asked, “How was the meal?” we did the polite thing and told them how much we enjoyed it.

We lie so we don‘t get punished or hurt

When I was in grade school I was visiting my friends house after school. One of the cool things we did was climb onto the garage roof and jump off into grass. My friend’s mom came home later in the afternoon and asked us what we had been doing all afternoon. We didn’t mention the jumping off the roof part. We lied to our parents so we didn’t get punished.

We lied in order to build trust and loyalty

If kids are playing and they break something they try to hide it. If they are playing with something that they shouldn’t play with they don’t confess the truth. Children don’t want to be punished so they lie or withhold the truth.

As a kid if we broke something like a vase while playing we made pact with our friends or sibling not to tell. When the parent asked what happened to the vase we answered, “I don’t know.” We lied to our parents in order to maintain the trust and loyalty of our friends. Of course parents don’t give up that easily. Usually kids will succumb to the pressure of their parent’s questions and tell the truth eventually. This turns the promise of loyalty and secrecy with our friend into a lie.

Without awareness we trapped our self in a conflict of agreements. You either kept the promise of secrecy to your friends by lying to your parents. Or, you told the truth to your parents and your loyalty with your friend became a lie. We end up with either our parents or our friends not trusting us.

Later in life we learn some advanced lying techniques

Lie to people with Power

Learning to lie to parents when we are kids leads to lying to other authority figures later in life. When the higher ups in the company propose a new direction or program do you tell them what you really think? Or is it easier to be quiet and not create the conflict with people who have power over your paycheck. Even when they ask for your input it makes a lot of sense to not rock the boat. It is easy to couch your words and only hint at your concerns. Depending on the power and emotional reactions of the person perhaps you keep your mouth shut altogether.

Maybe you have a relationship with your boss where you can speak freely and that can be great. But do you speak with that same freedom to the vice presidents and owners above your boss. Most people don’t. If people give their “honest opinion” their behavior is often considered inappropriate or political suicide.

Not many company cultures can handle an honest assessment of the negative side of an issue without an emotional reaction. With people who don’t take 100% responsibility for their emotions their upset will be your fault in some way. The paradigm of power over our livelihood combined with the instability of emotional reactions suggests that we lie by omission.

In all fairness it is also a rare person who can give an honest assessment of the down side that affects them without it partly motivated by their emotional reaction.

A Liar doesn‘t want to hurt people‘s feelings.

In personal relationships we lie so we don’t hurt the feelings of the people we care about. Suppose a couple is sitting at a restaurant and an attractive woman walks by. What does a man say when his partner asks, “Do you think she’s pretty?” Can the man say, “She is gorgeous?”

He can be honest if he is with a very secure woman. He can also be honest if she has pretended to be a very secure woman. (lied about her security) He can also be honest if he doesn’t care about sleeping on the couch for a while.

Men lie to women at times so that they don’t hurt the feelings of the people they care about. Men might also lie because they don’t want to be punished by the people that love them. Women lie to men for the same reasons.

You might dismiss all these examples as being “white lies.” These are small lies told to be tactful or polite. But the motivations for lying don’t change when the stakes get bigger. If a person cheated on their spouse would they hide it from them in order not to hurt their feelings? If your friend was cheating on their boyfriend would you tell the boyfriend? Would you tell him if he asked?

The motivation for lying increases in direct proportion to the emotional reaction and potential emotional pain.

We lie when we are in Emotional Denial

When something hurts our feelings we cover it up and say it is no big deal. When we are upset or sad we say we are fine. When our heart is broken we can get mad at our ex, yet we will say we don’t care about them anymore. It’s a lie.

If we didn’t care it wouldn’t matter so much emotionally. If we really didn’t care we wouldn’t be so hurt and angry. The truth is it hurts so much that we tell our selves we don’t’ care to avoid and deny the emotional pain. We lie about the emotions we feel to pretend they are not there. We lie to our self in an effort to feel better because we don’t know a different way to let go of the pain. We attempt to lie our way to happiness.

The best way to deal with people who are liars

The first and most important thing is to manage your expectations. When you have awareness of how people were socially conditioned you have an opportunity for compassion. With awareness your understanding expands and your judgments dissolve. Be honest and aware enough to recognize the socialization patterns that people face growing up. Also be aware of the consequences that telling the truth might incur.

When you realize the extent of social conditioning you gain a greater understanding for why people compensate with lies the way they do. The emotional reactions you had behind the judgments aren’t there any more.

In relationships you are responsible for your half of the emotions.

Taking care of your half means noticing where you are lying. If you are upset with someone for lying it is because you believe they should be telling the truth. Your expectation is that they should drop all their years of social conditioning overnight.

You believe they should adopt a new behavior and become a person you expect them to be. You believe they should be the image you hold in your mind about them. They are not the image in your mind that you want them to be. When you want another person to live according to your expectations you are lying to your self about who they really are.

Use Awareness to Deal with your Lies

Being aware of the image in your mind of another person and your beliefs about who they should be will give you an opportunity to change your beliefs. Being aware of the deeply embedded social conditioning that programs a person to lie will help you drop your misplaced expectations of another. Dropping your false image of them and managing your expectations will go a long ways to dissolving your emotional reactions to someone else’s socially conditioned behavior.

If you are having emotional reactions about someone who is lying then you will need to deal with your half. Your half includes the lies in your mind about who they should be.

Why People Lie

People lie because they have been conditioned through emotional reactions. Emotional reactions aren’t intellectually logical. They are more powerful than that. That’s why people lie in spite of it being the logical or intelligent thing to do. People will stop lying as they learn not to fear their own emotions or emotional reactions from others. Learning not to fear your emotions is a beginning step to being honest that leads to Self Mastery.

If a person isn’t skillful and effective at dealing with their emotions it is unwise to expect them to change the behavior of lying.
I’m not condoning, justifying, or defending lying. I’m attempting to expand the conversation. If you are going to deal with liars or your own lying you will need to deal with the emotional reactions that drive the behavior. Whether the pattern was learned from the past, or you are afraid of consequences of being punished today it is about the emotions. When people learn how to master their emotions they won’t fear honesty and the Truth.

Boundaries

When you have dissolved your emotional reactions to someone that is lying then it becomes a simple process of boundaries. But that doesn’t mean that you need to wait until you have dealt with your emotions before you put up boundaries. Putting up boundaries is a good way to protect your self from your emotional reactions until you clean them up.

Use of boundaries also means you might want to put a boundary on what you believe. Stop believing what they tell you.  Living by the assumption that a liar will tell you the truth is just another way of lying to your self.

For exercises in how to deal with your mind, including emotional reactions, expectations, and changing beliefs download the free audio sessions in the Self Mastery course. I also suggest you listen to the free mp3 audio podcasts on Awareness and Consciousness.

Interesting story about the challenge of radical honesty versus lying.

Be a Dreamer, Just Don‘t Get Lost in Your Imagination

When I refer to an “optimist“ I’m talking about people with an overly developed “look at the bright side of things” or “focus on the positive,” kind of attitude. I don’t recommend doing that. I’ve discovered that an attitude that only focuses on the positive is out of balance with reality. Sometimes you might go so far as to call it denial. It’s a pretty limiting and unrealistic way to look at the world. You tend to miss a lot of opportunities for improvement, success, happiness, and truth. I find that to be truly wise requires a healthy skepticism.

Overly optimistic people drive down the road working to keep their attention on the positive outcome at the end of the rainbow. Their mantra is “Whatever I focus on I create.” I don’t’ buy this. When I drive down the road I like to enjoy the scenery and keep an eye out for the potholes as well. I don’t’ think I create pot holes by being mindful of them.  They are already there. I just think I have a better chance at avoiding pot holes when I can see them.

At the same time I’m not a cynic or pessimist either. I prefer to do my best and look at everything with open eyes. This might seem like common sense, but actually it’s not that common. I don’t buy into the idea that I am any good at it or even any better than anyone else at it. If I did I might set myself up for a blinding dose of over confidence and optimism.  That blinding aspect can cause you to run into a very painful reality.

Importance of Honesty and Facing the Brutal Facts

In the best selling book Good to Great, Jim Collins outlines in wonderful detail characteristics of successful leaders. One of their characteristics is the ability to honestly face the brutal facts. Collins shares the example of David Maxwell becoming the CEO of Fannie Mae in 1981. At the time the company was losing $1 million dollars each business day. David Maxwell faced the brutal facts and began making uncomfortable decisions to change the company. When Maxwell left in 1991 the company was making $4 million a day.

Facing the brutal facts might just seem like the common sense thing to do. My experience is that it’s not that common. If it was common then why didn’t David Maxwell’s predecessors do something long before his arrival? Perhaps they thought the economic conditions would turn around. Whatever their thought process was it paralyzed them from taking effective corrective action.

Jim Collins shares numerous examples of other companies that had the same relevant factual information but did not accept what it was telling them. They balked at the facts and embraced a more optimistic story instead. Their approach allowed them to feel a little better emotionally until the economic realities hit them even harder.

While one characteristic of successful people is their ability to honestly face the facts. Another characteristic is their gumption not to be overwhelmed and paralyzed by the challenge they face.

What does this Mean to Practical Matters of Your Life

When people pump up the idea about being more optimistic, hopeful, or looking at the bright side of things I’m skeptical of what they are doing. I don’t know if they clearly see what is happening around them. Their mind might use that optimism to hide from an honest assessment. It seems only necessary to prop things up with an optimistic attitude if you are compensating for some negative belief or dark perspective underneath.

If something is really the truth you don’t have to pump your self up to believe in it. I don’t need to convince myself that the sun will come up in the morning. It’s the truth. I don’t need to be optimistic about the sunrise or make myself believe that it will happen. When something is the truth you don’t have to invest your belief in it because it will happen anyways.

Practical Money Matters

On the other hand people who spend more money than they make and run up credit card debt have got to be optimistic people. They really have to believe in a bright future so as not to notice their debt. They have to tell themselves a pretty optimistic story like, “The Lord will provide,” in order to feel okay about their debt situation. If they weren’t optimistic about the finances they might curb their spending habits.

Maybe they put off dealing with the debt because they want to avoid feeling uncomfortable emotions. This seems a lot like emotional denial but might just be an overdose of optimism. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.

It’s Not a Lack of Intelligence

I’ve personally seen people with PhD’s run a company into the red and then still not make any changes to the operation. They weren’t alone in this either. They had other very smart people around them that supported the optimistic paradigm. They held strong to the belief that things would change even though nothing did.

Facing those brutal facts isn’t a matter of academic intelligence or education. Those situations come with such an emotional and behavior dynamic that they don’t teach in school. It’s not an academic or intelligence issue. It’s an awareness issue.
Managing your own emotionally driven behaviors is not something that they teach in an academic setting. Without the awareness of how deal with emotional issues people temporarily make themselves feel better by ignoring the reality and hope for a more optimistic tomorrow.

The Dangers of Optimism In Relationships

If you are in an abusive relationship or emotionally controlling relationship being optimistic becomes a dangerous trap. If you are hopeful that your partner will change you are less likely to leave or even ask for help. It is the image in your mind of your partner changing that becomes an illusion that you will cling to. Focusing your attention on that illusion can blind you from honestly assessing the situation.

One clue to this type of behavior is trying to make the relationship appear better than it is to your friends and family. Perhaps you only tell them about the best parts of the relationships and are afraid to share the parts you are embarrassed about. This is a sign that you are avoiding the facts.

Unhappy Relationships

It doesn’t have to be as dramatic as an abusive or controlling relationships. It might just be an unhappy relationship that you feel stuck in.

More than one woman I talked to recalls having serious concerns as she approached her wedding day. She downplayed her concerns and the possible pot holes in the road ahead. She propped up the stories of optimism and hope and forced her self to focus her attention on her hopes. This way she could deny the feeling in her gut until after the wedding. Eventually reality hit and shattered her illusions.

Optimistic about Money

A similar dynamic occurs when we invest money in a stock and then watch it sink. There is a temptation to tell your self; “It will turn around. I’ll wait for it to come back to my buy price and then sell it so I don’t have a loss.” If someone asks, “Why don’t you sell it?” The answer might be, “I don’t want to lose money on this investment.” They some how feel better believing they haven’t lost any money. They imagine that their money is still there even though the value has dropped.

In spite of feeling better temporarily you are paralyzed into being poorer by your illusions of optimism. Later the judge and victim in the mind may kick in and you will be tempted to believe self criticisms for such behavior. This can lead to a downward emotional spiral.

The High Price of Optimism

The philosophy of facing the brutal facts is crystallized with Jim Collins’ interview of Admiral James Stockdale. Adm. Stockdale was the highest ranking POW in the Hanoi Hilton during the Vietnam War. He was tortured multiple times during his eight year imprisonment from 1965 to 1973.

Jim Collins found him self getting depressed just reading the story of Adm. Stockdale’s imprisonment. Collins had the opportunity to ask Stockdale about his experience and how he maintained his spirits and attitude during his ordeal. It was Adm. Stockdale’s answer that helped Jim Collins clarify the dangers of optimism and how it obscures our ability to face the facts that can lead to great success.

“”If it feels depressing for me, how on earth did he deal with it when he was actually there and did not know the end of the story?“

I never lost faith in the end of the story,“ he said, when I asked him. “I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.“

I didn‘t say anything for many minutes, and we continued the slow walk toward the faculty club, Stockdale limping and arc-swinging his stiff leg that had never fully recovered from repeated torture. Finally, after about a hundred meters of silence, I asked, “Who didn‘t make it out?“

“Oh, that‘s easy,“ he said. “The optimists.“

“The optimists? I don‘t understand,“ I said, now completely confused, given what he‘d said a hundred meters earlier.

“The optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, “˜We‘re going to be out by Christmas.‘ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they‘d say, “˜We‘re going to be out by Easter.‘ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.“

Another long pause, and more walking. Then he turned to me and said, “This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end“”which you can never afford to lose“”with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.“

“To this day, I carry a mental image of Stockdale admonishing the optimists: “We‘re not getting out by Christmas; deal with it!“”

(Reference http://jimcollins.com/lab/brutalFacts/index.html#)

The important point I want to make is that there are different forms of optimism. Being aware of the subtle differences between forms and attitudes of optimism can be the difference between great success and emotional denial. Choose your form of optimism wisely.

For insights on awareness listen to the free mp3 audio in the podcast area. For exercises and practices on increasing awareness, controlling emotions, and changing core beliefs start with the free audio in the Self Mastery Program.

By controlling your attention you are able to determine the perspective you choose.   With choice over your perspective you can decide what interpretations to make and which one you will believe.  Choosing the interpretation you make will determine your emotional outcome.

It’s popular today for people to try changing their thinking or beliefs in order to create happiness in their life. However a prerequisite to changing your thinking is that you first have to get control over your attention. If you don’t do this your thinking will attempt to control your thinking. This can become a circular loop in the mind.

If you gain control over your attention then happiness is easy. What people may find challenging is that they were given no training in controlling their attention or even what it is.

A second critical element needed to control happiness is that you expand your awareness. It is not enough to control your attention. You must also be able to shift your perspective to points of view of acceptance, love, compassion and respect. If you can control your attention, but can’t extend it into this range of love and laughter your emotional experience of happiness will be limited. When you have a limited number of ways of interpreting events your possibility for happiness is limited as well.

Consider how differently you might view things if you extended your perception to view an event with the child like wonder. Or what if in the midst of taking something personally you shifted to look at it from twenty years in the future. Would it seem like such a big deal? Would you spend that much emotional drama on it from that perspective? By extending your awareness to this point of view you immediately change your emotions. When you can master perception in the moment you never have to indulge in unhappiness.

Here’s a story to illustrate my point. When I was younger I used to get upset and frustrated with slow drivers. When I was stuck behind them going slower than I wanted to go it never occurred to me to shift my emotional state and enjoy the drive. I sat behind them spewing endless condemning judgments in my mind. It wasn’t a happy experience for me and I didn’t consider changing my interpretations of it. it just didn’t occur to me.

When I was in my twenties I had an experience that shifted my whole point of view to another frame. My dad had serious back pain and I was driving him to the chiropractor. At 55 mph down the two lane country road I went over a little bump in the road. I saw my dad wince with pain in the passenger seat. He asked me to slow down. At 45 mph we went over another small bump in the road. He winced again. Soon I was driving at 35 mph on a road that I normally drove at 65 or more. Cars were lining up behind me.

I imagined myself in one of those cars getting all frustrated at the idiot driver going 35 mph. I could see their limited perspective. It was obvious to me because I had put myself in that same interpretation many times. It was a limited awareness that didn’t include possibilities of the pain my dad was going through. If they would have seriously considered this scenario they would have slowed down for their dad too.

In place of not understanding the actual situation we generally fill it in with internal dialogue of what we have told ourselves many times before. Our attention is trapped in old familiar interpretations and emotional patterns.

This experience expanded my awareness to include interpretations of compassion and respect about slow drivers that I didn’t have previously.

If I had control over my attention before that it wouldn’t have occurred to me to adopt a compassionate point of view in such a situation because it was not in my awareness to do so. I had not previously been exposed to a profoundly caring and loving reason for driving ridiculously slow. I might have come up with the idea intellectually, but that’s not the same as adopting a compassionate interpretation and accepting it.

To control your happiness you essentially need two things. You need to have a conscious awareness that includes perspectives and interpretations based in love, compassion, respect, and humor. You also need to have control over your attention so you can shift to these perspectives when you choose. The more personal power you have, the more you will be able to shift your attention to these points of view in challenging circumstances.

It is easier when you are rested and in a good mood. It is more challenging when you are tired and stressed.

Some people might say that controlling your happiness in this way is a kind of emotional denial. It is just putting on a happy face and covering up what you are really feeling. I’m not suggesting emotional repression at all.

If you are having an emotional reaction like frustration and anger, then that is a different situation. If someone experiences emotional reactions it is because they do not have control over their attention. Previously programmed beliefs and points of view are on automatic and are controlling a person’s attention. To gain control of your attention first requires that you change these core beliefs and interpretations.   Attempting to control happiness before that would not only be challenging, it can often result in repressing emotions.

What I am referring to in controlling happiness is a very different paradigm. It is most easily done once you have eliminated the false beliefs that facilitate unhappy emotional reactions. Without changing these beliefs controlling your mind is like trying to steer a car after it has started skidding on the ice. To effectively control your attention you first have to clean up the belief system that acts as the slippery ice.

When you clear away the slippery ice then you have a chance to control your happiness. As long as you still have fear based core beliefs it will be slippery road on which you can not control where your emotions go.

I will admit that consciously directing your mind can be rather challenging. Sometimes it might feel like you are chipping away at hard ice that encases the mind and the heart. It can be hard work, but not impossible as the mind sometimes thinks. Mostly it seems hard because it is not something that we are taught to do or even encouraged to learn. I don’t consider it hard. I think continuing to live in emotional reactions of anger, frustration, sadness, and unhappiness is a lot harder way to live.

In my experience the only way you can effectively control your happiness over the years of your life is to gain control over your attention. The way to do this is to find and dissolve your fear based beliefs that have it trapped in internal dialog of the past. You will also have to expand your conscious perception to include viewpoints based in love, compassion, respect, and laughter. It might take some time to get the hang of it, but the happy rewards last a lifetime.

For exercises in gaining control over your attention and breaking free of fear based beliefs practice the exercises in the Self Mastery audio series.

I often witness people who don’t feel ready to heal emotionally. They come up to the edge of taking action to free themselves from emotional pain, only to back away. Their mind has many stories as to why, but at the core it is often the same basic reason. They are afraid. It’s kind of crazy to think that people would be afraid of healing their emotions, but I never said that people were logical.

I’ll get into the fear of emotional healing later.

The inspiration for this post comes from a conversation I had the other day with woman we will call Kelly. I had spoken to her a few months about some jealousy issues that was poisoning the relationship with her partner. She had listened to a couple of the free sessions in the Self Mastery course and was encouraged at the possibility of change. She was going to sign up for the remaining sessions and do some individual session with me to focus on her specific beliefs and behaviors. Kelly didn’t sign up for the program and she didn’t schedule a session with me.

When I ran into here recently she brought up her lack of action. Her explanation to her self and me was that she was not ready to heal emotionally.

I could go in a lot of directions with this material but just want to focus on the sabotaging logic of the ego mind that is operating here. From a certain angle it is a factual truth that she doesn’t feel ready to heal emotionally. Notice I say “factual truth” and not a real truth. She doesn’t feel ready, but it is the lies in her belief system that are creating that feeling. In any case that is no reason not to engage the process.

Thinking and feeling that we are not ready for emotional healing is a factual truth that hides a self sabotaging lie. It’s not the feeling of not being ready that stops us. It is the hidden lie that keeps us from taking action. The hidden lie is that we need to be ready to heal emotionally in order to start.

We were not ready to learn to walk when we first began taking steps. When we began to learn to read, we weren’t ready to read. When people begin having sex they generally don’t feel confident and prepared. When parents have their first children, they don’t’ feel ready either. Not only do parents have no experience in being parents, but those kids don’t come with an instruction booklet that would give them the illusion of being prepared.

When we take on any endeavor worth doing in our life it is new until we have been doing it a while. In the beginning we are learning to do something and we stumble through it as best we can. We are never going to be ready to do something that we have no experience doing. But that doesn’t stop us.

When we endeavor to eliminate our emotional reactions and clean up the projections in our mind we are taking on a task that we have never done before. If you haven’t done much of it before then you probably are not very skilled at emotional healing. The next lie hidden in the decision making logic of the mind is that if you aren’t very good at emotionally healing then you shouldn’t start. Of course if we use this logic we will never do anything different in our life.

It is this kind of hidden belief that is buried into the meaning of these words. “I’m not ready for emotional healing.”

If we only do the things we are ready for we would only do the things we already know how to do. If this were the case we would never learn to walk, read, take up a hobby, have sex, or raise children.

The mind is a peculiar thing. It can propose the idea that we are not ready to heal emotionally. It can even make that idea appear to be factual. It is true that if we haven’t done something before that we are not skilled and proficient at it. This may be a fair assessment.

But then the mind does something amazing. It is so subtle that we don’t notice it unless we spend some time developing awareness. The mind tricks us into accepting the one idea of not being ready and assumes the decision is made. Without words it ends the investigation and stops all action on that one note. An unconscious decision has been made not to evaluate any other angles.

The ego mind fixates on one bit of information and uses that one fact to determine the whole stopping of our personal and emotional growth. It would be as if we went to the doctors with stomach pains and when the doctor found our temperature to be 98.6 degrees he sent us home.

All other desires, considerations for the health of our relationships, and future happiness are discarded with this fixation on one fact of not feeling ready. The mind invites us to go unconscious, stop evaluating different possibilities, and become unaware of all these other considerations.

This is the kind of unconscious logic and decision making of the ego mind that keeps us in loops of emotional suffering.

The path to freedom from this kind of self destructive logic is awareness and healthy skepticism. If we develop self awareness we will learn to see past these misdirection traps of words, and hidden decisions. A healthy skepticism and a process of questioning will pull apart the misguiding logic and free us from such an ego mind.

Being a skeptic is an opportunity for freedom from emotional suffering. If we are a skeptic we will question the logic that says if we don’t feel ready then we shouldn’t begin the process of emotional healing.

A skeptic will scrutinize this type of logic and realize that if they followed it they wouldn’t attempt or do much of anything in their life.

A skeptic will realize that you become ready to do something by doing it over and over again until you get good at it. You become ready to heal emotionally by doing things that don’t work out and then doing them again until they do. You don’t become ready to do anything by hesitating and waiting.

Many times you only become ready to do something after you have done it for a while. You will only really feel ready to ride a bike after riding long enough that you aren’t afraid to fall. You will feel more comfortable in raising children after yours are grown. You’ll feel more comfortable with sex after you have been practicing a while. The same is true for emotional change. You will only feel ready to heal emotionally after you practice working through some of the stories and beliefs in your mind.

The Catch 22 for Kelly is that if she waits until she is ready to take take action she won’t ever take action. If she starts when she feels ready she won’t ever heal emotionally.

In the Self Mastery Audio course there are exercises that will help you to be a healthy skeptic of the self defeating logic in your mind. There are also exercises for emotional healing. If you are not yet ready to heal emotionally it would be a good time to start.

Mike lives with his wife and for the past couple of years they have been sleeping in separate rooms. They are good friends, care about each other, but just aren’t in love any more. His wife has asked him a couple times to talk about the relationship and what they were going to do. She even proposed that they should get divorced and asked him to talk about it.

When she asked Mike what he wanted to do he replied, “I don’t know.”

In the conversation with Mike his words and comments alluded to the fact that he knows the relationship is over. “If we were going to do something to really get back together we would have done it by now. The motivation just isn’t there.”

So why hasn’t Mike gone forward and ended what he feels is relationship limbo. Mike cares about his wife. He doesn’t want her to be hurt and he knows that breaking up will be a painful process. He also knows it will be uncomfortable for him. A more specific reason is that he foresees he will feel guilty for putting his wife through the painful divorce process. He will blame himself for the marriage failure and her unhappiness.

These issues are just some of the reasons for staying in the limbo of a lifeless relationship. The beliefs about why Mike will feel guilty and his uncomfortable feelings of detaching are fundamental to the problem. These issues and emotions are real challenges that real people face in their pursuit of happiness.

It’s when people are faced with these types of challenges that trite advice articles on happiness like, “Be more optimistic,” “Find more time for your self,” or “Get involved in a cause you believe in,” just don’t seem to cut it. Mike’s situation has real emotional consequences that quick advice or positive affirmations don’t address.

If Mike takes action to end his relationship he is going to go through an uncomfortable process of detaching from someone one he cares about and giving up all the aspects of comfort in the relationship. He is going to be alone. If he continues to avoid and deny the situation he represses the emotions he is feeling and lives a little less every day. Even if Mike and his wife go to counseling to reconcile, he will have to deal with the uncomfortable aspects of their relationship that they have been avoiding.

Our nature is to avoid emotional pain. In Mike’s case that means avoid dealing with the relationship. Doing nothing is the least painful of the options, at least in his immediate view. It’s understandable that when asked what he wants to do about the relationship his response is “I don’t know.” His mind has already done the math on possible avenues and all of them involve unpleasant emotions. He doesn’t want to be in emotional pain and discomfort, and he doesn’t want his wife to be in pain and emotional discomfort. He doesn’t know what to do because his mind has been programmed to look for the right answer. in this case the honest truth is that there are no “right” answers or even “good” answers. There are only choices and consequences about an unhappy relationship.

Emotional denial and avoidance make a lot of sense when you see them this way. Emotional denial in the short term is a way to avoid hurting our self and people we care about. However it also keeps people from taking action when the overall happiness of their life calls for it. Denial is a reason people keep themselves trapped in unhappy relationships or life situations. They know the situation is not good, but not bad enough to force them into action.

Facing the brutal facts is important to eliminating unhappiness. Facing the truth means acknowledging that Mike pays a emotional price every day he doesn’t take action. He also at worst hurts, and at best, keeps his wife in limbo every day he does nothing. This isn’t a very high price when he is living in the moment of today. (This is another happiness platitude.) But each day adds up. In a short time he will be avoiding the issue through the summer. After the summer he will want to get through the winter. Then it will be another year of dying a slow death of limbo in a lifeless relationship. His opportunity for creating happiness will be squandered away in a series of moments struggling to find a solution that doesn’t hurt at all.

The pathway to real happiness has to include a means to deal with and eliminate unhappiness that shows up in our real life situations. Eliminating unhappiness means taking action to go through an uncomfortable break up, or go through the uncomfortable parts of reconciliation. Both of these paths mean dealing with short term uncomfortable emotions that denial would push us to avoid.

It is only by tackling the real issues of unhappiness that we have a chance to build a new and better life. Real honesty to face the brutal facts will do more than putting on a happy face and acting happy (another shot at those platitudes I mentioned).

By the time we grow up and decide to consciously create happiness in our life it is likely that we are not starting with a blank slate. If we had a blank slate we could just adopt those nice bits of happiness advice and life would be grand. But by the time you are old enough to read this your personality has probably adopted some self sabotaging habits. If this is the case you need more than platitudes. You need some real tools.

When it comes to real life situations I kind of see it like this:

Platitudes of advice on happiness:
When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.

Then there is the reality.
When on the road to happiness and life gives you a flat tire your lemonade and affirmations won’t help you. Neither will platters of platitudes and advice on happiness. What will help are real tools like a jack, and a wrench to get you unstuck from an unhappy situation.

Having a tool box of techniques and methods for getting unstuck from unhappy situations gives you another way to get back to being happy. If you just focus on the positive you don’t have as many options.

When you are unhappy you need more than advice on happiness. You need effective tools to deal with the unpleasant, emotions, thoughts, beliefs, and factors of denial that trap us.

For a tool set to help your self get back to your pathway of happiness download practice the activities in the Self Mastery audio series.