Shawn Anchor explains how some of our beliefs about happiness and work may be backwards.  One important point he makes is that we should not delete the statistical outlier when it comes to happiness.  When actually, what we really should be noticing is the person who is happier than others, beyond any reasonable average. When it comes to achieving happiness, we should not be looking to achieve a statistical average.

“I’m a fat slob.  I’ve got to lose 20 lbs.  I’ll never be able to do it.  It’s too much. Maybe I’ll just go for a walk and start there. No!  That won’t do it.  That’s not enough.  You need more than that. You need to go for a run, a big run, a 10 mile run. If you workout really hard you can have a lean sculpted body.  You can even have six pack abs.   That’s what you need to do.  When you get fit like that you’ll feel awesome.

But you are going to need to watch what you eat too.  No more sugar, no more caramel macchiato coffee drinks.  No more desserts.  No more beer either, so stay away from happy hour after work and any social life with your friends.  You need to take this training seriously or not at all.

 No social life, no relaxing with a glass of wine, no wonderful desserts?  Just work and workouts? That’s no fun.  I think I’ll feel deprived of all the stuff I enjoy.  I’ll be miserable if I do that.  I don’t want that. Maybe I’ll just get some potato chips and see what is on TV.”

Then it starts again,,, from the beginning.  “I’m a fat slob.”

(Repeat from above)

The circular thinking resulted with my client on the couch watching television for a number of weeks.  Why are we trapped in unhealthy cycles like this?  It’s a function of our fear based and false beliefs.  These beliefs are lies.   Damn Lies.

When you look closer and study the beliefs held within these words you’ll see what holds this self destructive cycle together.  You’ll see how these thoughts lead our attention and look at certain things and not others.  How our attention goes into certain thoughts and builds whole imaginary dreams out of them.  Then we have emotional reactions to those imaginary dreams, and those emotional reactions cause more thoughts that take hold of our attention again.

I’m a fat slob.

It’s a self judgment: a verbal self rejection using the image of the body as a basis for self worth.  Basing our self worth on our body is an assumption and is the first lie.   Our self worth doesn’t have to be based on our body, but if it is, and you judge your body, you end up feeling emotions of unworthiness.   It’s a damn lie. But we can still create a lot of emotions by believing imagined lies.

I’ve got to lose 20 lbs. 

Maybe that emotional feeling of unworthiness is painful.  Maybe it hurts so much that you get motivated to change it.  So you decide to lose 20 lbs so you feel better about your self.   The problem here is that it wasn’t what your body looked like that made you feel bad.  What created the feeling of unworthiness was believing the lie about your self worth.  That was on top of the other lie of self being related to what your body looks like.

The proposed solution to feeling bad is to change our body even though it didn’t cause us to feel bad.  We lie to our self about the solution and change how we feel by changing what our mind is judging.  We believe changing our physical appearance will change how we feel emotionally. (Lie)  Our physical appearance can be amazing, but if we still believe a judgmental thought, our sense of worthiness doesn’t change at all.  But we get lulled into the effort of changing our body and ignore what goes on in our mind.  (more illusions)

I’ll never be able to do it.  It’s too much.

When we think of making a change our mind can imagine the shift in one step.  That’s not how change actually happens, but that’s why we call it imagination.  Because the imagination produces the new result immediately it didn’t fill in the actual action steps.  The mind has produced an illusion of success.  There is no plan with a step by step approach with time to execute it.  Without a scenario of how to get there, our common sense awareness kicks in and tells us the result looks impossible.  We conclude that the change is too much to do in one step.  Our conclusion is a truth, but it’s based on the lie of doing it in one step. So our thought becomes, “It’s too much.”   Our emotions go to failure and defeat.

Maybe I’ll just go for a walk and start there.

We back up and catch our self.  We begin to piece together some steps to get to our final goal of losing 20 lbs. (or whatever the amount you have I mind.)  We have a start and perhaps develop a sense of hope and possibility.

No!  That won’t do it.  That’s not enough.  You need more than that.

This thought came from a tyrannical voice of authority.  It was the side of Ben’s personality that was serious about getting things done.  It’s the voice in his head he puts in charge of hard projects requiring commitment.  There was some truth to what it said, and that made the rest of the thoughts hard to recognize as a lie.  Yes it was going to take more than one walk to get to the goal.   But it ignores the long term plan with many small steps necessary to complete a long journey.  The truth is that just getting off the couch and going for a walk might be enough to start with.

You need to go for a run, and a big run, a 10 mile run.

Here the tyrannical voice throws out another over reaching goal.  It wants’ to start off with a level of training Ben was at two years ago when he was doing a lot of training.  It’s one that isn’t going to be achieved so it’s a set up for failure.  The flag for the lie here is the word “NEED.”  Ben doesn’t need to go for a run and he certainly doesn’t need to do a 10 mile run.  That’s more likely to be self abusive and injure his body instead of make him healthier.

If you workout really hard you can have a lean sculpted body.  You can even have six pack abs.   That’s what you need to do. 

Here the conversation of voices in Ben’s head goes from abusive tyranny to a sales job.  It’s a beautiful story and it has a happy ending with lots of self images of the ego getting stroked in the process.  The salesman is trying to be his friend and get him on board with the lofty goals.  This illusion takes Ben’s attention away from the present moment and putting his shoes on for a walk.

When you get fit like that you’ll feel awesome. 

This is dangling a carrot out there and telling him his emotions of happiness are dependent on what his body looks like.  It’s a carrot made of good feeling emotions.  All it actually does is reinforce the NEED to run 10 miles story with and make it emotionally appealing so we want to believe the lie.  This is what I’ll call a damn lie.  It’s a lie that makes Ben feel good but has no basis in anything real.  It’s most dangerous because it cloaks the others lies behind this emotionally appealing self image.  It’s setting the goals too high and leads to disappointment. If we buy into the salesman’s pitch here we will have overspent on expectations.

But you are going to need to watch what you eat too.  No more sugar, no more caramel macchiato coffee drinks.  No more desserts.  No more beer either, so stay away from happy hour after work and any social life with your friends.  You need to take this training seriously or not at all. 

If we bought the lie the salesman was selling we feel committed now.  The underlying assumption is that it would be wrong to back out on our commitments.  That’s a lie too, mostly because what we are committed to are stories in the mind.  Once the salesman has got us on the hook with those feel good emotions that it linked to a fit body, it starts pushing for more.  Now it’s not enough to be committed and to run 10 miles at the first work out.  Now you have to give up everything else you enjoy in order to get that fit body.  The salesman just raised the price you have to pay before you can feel good.  Ben would be better off just going for a walk, but that’s not what the lies in his head tell him.

No social life, no relaxing with a glass of wine, no desserts?  Just work and workouts,,, that’s no fun.  I’ll feel deprived of so much I enjoy.  I’ll be miserable if I do that.  I don’t want that. 

There’s a truth in this lie as well.  You rightly figured out the salesman’s voice in your head raised the price and it was too high.  He wanted you to make your self miserable by going to an austerity plan living a fanatical lifestyle of workouts.  Truthfully this is too high a price.  Ben is not deciding to train for a triathlon.  However, the rejection of the extreme lifestyle is a general rejection of, “I don’t want to do “THAT.”   What is the “that” he is rejecting?  It’s called a healthy lifestyle.  The tricky lie is that the salesman bundled healthy lifestyle with a fanatical one.  We are saying NO to the fanatical part, but in the process we are unaware that our mind is throwing out moderate exercise and eating as well.  Another damn lie where the stuff we don’t want got mixed in with the lifestyle we do want.   Without awareness we throw out everything by believing the thought, “I don’t want that”.

Maybe I’ll just get some potato chips and see what is on TV.

When we consider the lies of a fanatical workout and social austerity lifestyle, our mind dreams an unhappy life.  Our natural instinct is to look for something that will make us happier.  At this point watching TV and eating potato chips looks like a good idea.  When we try it on in our imagination it feels a lot better than the last option.  It’s another damn lie that feels better.   We feel better for the moment but that’s only compared to an imaginary nightmare where we have no friends, no social life, and no fun.  The previous ugly scenario makes the couch feel like a relatively better lie.  It doesn’t feel genuinely good, just not as worse.  It’s also an illusion that distracts us from any small healthy steps like taking a walk and having a piece of fruit.

Of course that distraction only lasts until another familiar voice in Ben’s head proposes that he is overweight and should get off the couch.  The end result is that Ben’s imagination is running laps in a circle, but his body doesn’t get taken for a walk around the block.

If you want to get out of such a loop, then you need to get out of those lies, and damn lies.  How so you do that?  Become so aware of what is going on in your mind that you are able to see the lies in there for what they are.  When you are aware that the thoughts in your head are lies, you won’t believe them anymore.  Sometimes it’s not enough to have an opposing belief, or to try and think something else.  This does make pre-existing lies go away.  Just like the story above, these only moved Ben’s attention on to something else.

What helps to get rid of these types of lies is to become aware of the assumptions they are built on, and notice the lies within these assumptions.  That’s what I tried to do above.  I broke down each thought so you could see the underlying false beliefs (lies) they were built on. When you not only see a thought as a lie, but know WHY it is a lie, you are much less likely to fall for that tricky voice in your head the same way.

There are practical steps to learn how to do this in the Self Mastery course. 

Honestly,,, nothing.  In truth you are fine.   There really is nothing wrong with you.  That’s my perspective with everyone I talk to.  And I talk to a lot of people because I do this professionally.  The next question is:

“But I don’t feel fine. Why do I feel so lousy, (angry, sad, unhappy, jealous, insecure, anxiety, etc)?”

Because the emotions you feel are being created as responses to beliefs you have.  Your beliefs are negative, fearful, anxiety ridden, and your emotions respond accordingly.  Your emotions are responding perfectly to what is going on in your mind.  The problem is that you are having negative and fearful thoughts running through your mind,,, and you are believing in them.  How you feel emotionally is just a natural response to the beliefs you have.  The important thing to understand is that YOU are not the problem.  There is nothing wrong with you, it’s what is going on in your mind that is the problem.  Your mind has thoughts and beliefs that are false and fear based. You are not those thoughts and beliefs.  As a matter of fact,,, you aren’t even the one thinking them.   Your mind is tossing them about your imagination all by itself.

In my approach I make a distinction between YOU, and your mind which is made up of your thoughts and beliefs.  YOU are fine, but your mind is filled with false and fear based beliefs.

Some people will then ask, “But why am I thinking all these negative thoughts.   And this is my point,,, YOU are not the one thinking those negative thoughts.  Your mind is thinking them all on it’s own and taking you for a ride much like a daydream, or even a night time dream.  Sometimes those daydreams turn into very focused horrific scenarios and can seem very real.   Your emotional body can’t tell the difference between reality, and what you believe is reality so it reacts according to those dreams in your mind.

Your physiology and physical body can react as well.  Your adrenalin will kick in when there is a fearful thought, as well as other fight or flight responses.  You then might have the physical responses of those chemicals in your system as well as tightness in your muscles, shifts in your digestion, accelerated heart beat, on top of your emotional responses.  Your specific reaction will depend on how fearful the thought is, how strongly you believe it, and how much awareness you have.

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I have made a free audio podcast, “What is a belief?” and how it affects our mind and emotions that explains this in more detail.
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Are you saying this is all in my head?

No.  Some of your emotions might be from very real life experiences.  Some of our emotions can be from real life events while some emotions are in response to what our mind projects.  Suppose you are in the midst of a divorce.  Your spouse is splitting up with you and now you are only seeing your children half time.

Those things are real and you are going to go through some emotional cycles as things change.  Those are not part of what your mind is projecting and dreaming.  Those are the facts.  But the facts probably aren’t causing you as much unhappiness as the dreamed up scenarios your mind is spinning.  Those might be how you have failed as a father, as a husband, that your life is ruined, that your kids lives are ruined, that they will be broken the rest of their life.  Those are dreams you are having in your mind.  They are imagined projections about how the rest of your life will turn out, or how your children’s lives will turn out.   They are generally fearful, unhappy, and only exist as movies in your imagination; or what I call dreams in your mind.  You might also call them thoughts or beliefs.

The distinction that is important to make here is between the facts, and what your mind projects onto the facts.  Some of your emotions are a response to real life events.  But many of your emotions, are from things you imagine.  To have the clarity to perceive the difference between reality, and projections of the mind is what I call awareness.  Awareness is critical to changing how you feel emotionally.

With awareness you first become aware of the thoughts, beliefs, opinions, and judgments the mind projects all by itself.  Then notice how much of your emotions come from your mental projections.   These are the emotions that are easiest to change.  You will still likely have some emotions stemming from the reality of how your life is changing.  These emotions can and will change too with some more attention and practice.  It is also much easier to change these emotions once you don’t have the added layer of emotions coming from your negative thoughts and fear based beliefs.

What you discover in this process is that YOU don’t have to change.  That’s because you are not the problem.  You are fine.  The problem is with the negative thoughts and false beliefs in your mind causing all those emotional reactions.  When you change the interpretations your mind makes, your emotional state changes.  Then you are back on your way to feeling fine again.  This is why developing awareness is the key to lasting happiness.

Even the question, “What is wrong with me?” is a combination of thoughts and false beliefs.  It is built on the assumed belief that:

a)  There is something wrong with me.

b)   I don’t know what is wrong so that is another problem of not knowing.

c)   I should know what is wrong with me but I don’t so I feel confused because I don’t know something my belief system says I should know.

All of these thoughts have us chasing some phantom idea that there is something wrong with us.  Why don’t we find it,,, because there is nothing wrong with us.  Yes we feel bad, but that is because we are caught up in these assumed beliefs that there is something wrong.   It’s like we got on the wrong line of questioning and it is taking us into a nightmare dream that there are no answers for.   It’s equivalent to spending time trying to answer the question, “What is the smell of piano music?”  It’s a nonsense question and we would be wasting our time trying to answer it.  The same is true for the question, “What is wrong with me?

We are much better served asking questions like:

What do I believe that isn’t true?  Is the thought my mind thinking helpful to making me happy?  What assumptions are behind that thought that make it not true?   How are those false beliefs affecting me emotionally?  What are the steps to changing these beliefs?

Go to the Self Mastery Course for  practical steps to finding and changing your false and fear based beliefs. By using the tools you learn in the course you will develop awareness about what is going on in your mind and have the tools to change it.

Instead I liken it to cleaning.  Big cleaning, like a road or driveway after a flood. (Think of it as a Pathway if you want.)  First time through you go to work with a front end loader.  The road gets cleared and you can make your way.  But if you look around closely there is more that can be cleaned.  You go after it with a shovel.    It all gets scooped up.  After a while the shovel doesn’t pick anything up anymore so you think you are done.  But if you look more closely at the path, between the bumps in the asphalt there are granules of dirt and sand.  Granules that could sometimes collect in areas and create bumps or slick spots where it isn’t as safe to drive the car or brake.   So you get a broom and sweep.  Now this dust comes up that the shovel never touched.

It may seem like you are going over the same area covering the same issues and stories as before, and, like you might have failed to do a good job.  (Careful about a judge victim story like that.  Wouldn’t be the first time someone fell for it though. )   Truth was that you are showing  up as a different person now looking at the same issues and can do a more detailed cleaning that you couldn’t do the first time.  It made no sense to start with a broom.  You needed a front end loader the first time.  Now the front loader won’t do the job for these details that were hiding between the cracks and bumps.  So you have to go back over the area of the same story,,, but in a different way this time.  You the cleaner can be more thorough this time with your broom in a way that you couldn’t do with a shovel.    That’s why sometimes these same stories/issues have to be revisited again.

In a way the thing that you are cleaning is your Self from all the false beliefs and false images you carry around in your mind.   At the same time You are the cleaning instrument.  The first time around you,,, the instrument, were still pretty clouded and so you probably didn’t clean your self up 100%.  So now, after you’ve done a thorough inventory and let go a great many beliefs, you are cleaner.  You also are a more finely tuned instrument.  So when you go back and you look at the same set of beliefs that you cleaned up a year or two ago, you see them differently.  You can find the distortions now that you couldn’t see before.  You see the dust in the cracks and can sweep those thoughts out.  When you were using a shovel you didn’t have the skills as the cleaning instrument to finish the job.  Therefore returning to the same topic more than once isn’t a measurement of failure.  Rather it is a progression of your skills to refine, grow, and be more thorough and complete in your changes.

How many times do we say we are going to do something, and then don’t to it?   How many times do we say we are going to do something, notice we don’t do it, and still don’t do it?  We are procrastinating.  Even when we are aware we are procrastinating, we still procrastinate.  It makes you wonder what is really going on with us. More importantly, how do we stop procrastinating?

I like the anecdote, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” Procrastination is a pattern of good intentions.    As we dig deeper into the issue there is a natural follow up question, “If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, then what is the road to heaven paved with?”   “Humility.”  Says James Garner in a line from the movie Ya Ya Sisterhood.  Humility, or a softening of our ego mind has a lot to do with eliminating procrastination.

What is humility?  I checked my Word processing program for synonyms and the one I like best is “unassuming nature.”  Let us take it to mean no ego nature; no mask of a false self-image.  Humility is being authentic and genuine.  It is what is left when you strip away all the layers of ego we carry around as a mask.  So what does this have to do with procrastination?   Procrastination is a product of the ego mind.  It is those false layers of self image that are the root cause of our bad habits.  When we strip away the ego mind we get rid of the root causes of our procrastination.

When we are humble, or without ego, we say what we mean, and we do what we say.  We don’t pretend to others, or to our self, that we are something we are not.  Notice that nowhere do I relate being humble to being meek, weak, timid, or small.  Real humility comes with a quiet confidence that is a source of power and resolve.

So how does humility help break the pattern of procrastination and get on with what we really want?  It all begins with awareness.

The ego and the false self images of the mind tricks us into procrastinating.  When you are aware of these tricks you can avoid falling for them.  To help develop this awareness we’ll start by looking at the your belief system and ego and see how they work.

Why Do We Procrastinate

Let’s first look at how and why the ego mind causes us to create procrastination.  The first noticeable action is that we make a declaration of a good intention for our self or someone else.  We’ll use the example of meditating.  We make a declaration, either in our thoughts or out loud to someone else, “I’m going to start meditating.”  In our imagination we create an image of our self sitting serenely.   We essentially make a movie in our mind with our self image as the main character.  We are doing something good, we are feeling good, and the most important thing is that we feel good about our self in our little mental movie.  Every time we think about meditating and say we are going to start we project that good self image in our little mental movie. It all happens in about 1.5 seconds.  Then it is done.  In our mind we have accomplished the task and we go on with the next thought the mind has.

What this imaginary movie does is satisfy the mind’s need for to control our attention for a little bit and give us a sense of identification with the character in our projection.  In the process we get a nice feeling as we identify with a positive self image in our mental movie.   It is the belief that we are the character in this mental movie that serves the ego and gives us a small emotional boost.

But the ego is not done yet.  It is a bit more complicated than just the singular image from one story.  We actually have many images or aspects from the ego mind that we identify with. One of the common mental movie stories we project is of failure.  Our mind projects a story of us failing or not measuring up in some way and casts a different self image in the starring role.  Sometimes this happens in 1.5 seconds also.   It happens when we think about failing, or other people judging us, or being told no.   In any imagined story like that we are again the main character but in this story we are a failure, or are rejected.  In these mental movies we identify with the failure image and believe that the projected self image in the mental movie is us.  When we are unaware and do not distinguish between our Self, and the image of our self in our mental movie out ego has effectively taken us for an emotional ride.  In this false identification we believe we are the character in our thoughts.   In fact, this is only a facet of the ego.

So far we have both a success image that is a facet of the ego and a failure image that is a facet of the ego.  In the procrastination scenario the ego’s success image gets reinforced by us telling our self we are going to meditate.  The failure image gets reinforced when we don’t meditate.

Each day we don’t meditate the mind projects an image of our selves failing.  Each time we imagine that we will meditating we identify with that positive self image.  Each time we think about meditating we project one of these two images and identify with the success image or the failure image, or both.  When we think about meditating and don’t do it but we reinforce both false images of the ego.  It is these false images of the ego that get served and become stronger.  The detrimental aspect of this is only seen when you are aware that the mental projection of self isn’t you at all.

The Ego Mind on it’s Own

The failure image of the ego mind actually needs you to NOT meditate.  If you actually started meditating regularly, the failure based self image would have no basis for being.  We would no longer identify with the failure image.  If I say I am going to meditate, and then I do it, I have no reason to judge my self as a failure.  Of course the ego mind is likely to adapt in other ways.  Our mind will project that we should be meditating more, longer, our posture should be better, our mind should be quieter, and we should be having blessed out Samadhi experiences by now.  Since this isn’t happening the first week or month the ego mind will project that we are failing, and that we are doing something wrong.  This is just the false images of the ego mind trying in various ways for reinforcement by false identification.

When we don’t reinforce the failure image in our mind it makes the ego very uncomfortable.  The ego self image begins to feel like it is dying.  We might think that if a negative image were dying that we would feel better about our self, but that is not the case.  The collapsing false image in the mind creates a feeling that is very uncomfortable.  We go through all sorts of emotions as the false image that we believe is our identity is threatened.

When this agitation happens the mind becomes very busy with various mechanisms of distraction, deception, and denial trying to get us to not meditate.  It directs us to forget for a while that we said we were going to do it.  Then reminds us at a much later date that we didn’t do it so it can reinforce the belief we are the failure character in our mental movie.

When we think that we are going to sit down and meditate the mind senses the death of the failure image and comes up with numerous other things we could and should be doing.  Yes we got busy and the house is clean, laundry is done, bills paid, and the yard is looking pretty good.  Now there is no time to meditate, or we are too tired to meditate.  In this strategy the ego mind has won the game of distractions until we run out of time, energy, or both.  Then it waits an hour or a day, or a week, and reminds us that we failed to do what we said we were going to do.  It uses the situation to project a mental movie with us as the main character that failed.  If we identify with that failure character in our mind then the ego mind is not challenged and is comfortable again.  Yes we feel like an unworthy loser that has failed, but the ego mind is comfortable with that because it doesn’t feel like it is going to die.  Such is the challenge of not identifying with the images of your ego mind.

This article continued at Causes of Procrastination II

You can find practices and exercises for changing the core beliefs causing procrastination
in The Self Mastery Course on this site.

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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

More than once people have been told by professional that their personality is fixed by the time they are 6 or 10 years old. They have emotional aspects when they are adults and told that they can’t be changed. “All you can do is manage the condition.” I don’t believe this one bit. And now there is good evidence for you not to believe it either.  A neuro-imaging study of the brain indicates changes in areas of the brain related to self awareness, compassion, and introspection.

The study points out that it doesn’t prove a direct link, but that’s understandable considering that it is rather difficult to show a direct link between where and how we focus our attention and how our brain matter responds.   What it does indicate is that there is more here going on than assuming there is no relation at all.  It is also worth noting that areas of the brain associated with our emotional state do change.  So the notion that our personality is “fixed” should be considered a myth lacking evidence and not the other way around.

If you want to engage in some practices of meditation and mindfulness you will find some free exercises in the Self Mastery course.

It is the best of times.  It is the worst of times.  It’s that time of year when we have more parties, social gatherings, big meals with family, presents, beautiful music, all celebrated in our best attire.  It can also be the most emotionally stressful of times as well.  How does that happen?

What produces stress?  Stress can be created by a difference between reality, and our mentally projected version of reality, or a mentally projected version of what reality “should be.”   This mentally projected version of reality is what I like to call “Virtual Reality.”   When our Virtual Reality expectations don’t match with real life, we feel uncomfortable tension emotionally.  We can call that feeling stress.  But it doesn’t stop there.

We then have the impulse to feel better.  This is perfectly natural and a good thing.  Except the way that we go about trying to “fix” things or make changes can make things worse. The assumed solution to changing this feeling is to make reality fit our mental virtual reality.  We try to change people and everything in our life assuming it will make us feel better.   Our thoughts focus on “making every issue perfect” and worrying about what might fail to meet our mental virtual reality.  We work extra hard to control those variables of people, food, decorations, lighting, timing, music, parking, and even other peoples emotions to make things “just right.”  However, “just right” is really a reference to what our belief system has defined as “just right.”  And all of this is to satisfy that made up world of a belief system in our imagination.

Even if we are successful at making things fit our virtual picture we are likely to end up exhausted from the work and worry. We didn’t have a very enjoyable time.  Our experience of the event was largely an experience of stress and worry in our mind and hard work in the real world.  We stressed and willed things to turn out just like planned but ended up not enjoying them that much.  The only satisfaction is in the mission of the virtual reality accomplished but no enjoyment in the moment.   More likely though we didn’t make holiday event fit our virtual formula of “perfect” and react with disappointment, self judgment at failure, or even anger.

Sometimes the tension and worry we feel and why we work so hard to control things is because we want so desperately to avoid the painful emotional reaction our mind will have if expectations are not met.

There is another solution to all this holiday stress.  We don’t have to stress and work hard to control all the variables and make all people, events, decorations, music, food, and conversation fit your mind’s imagined script of “just right.”  The other option is to be aware of your beliefs that make up the virtual reality version and do some mental stretching.  Make your expectation beliefs flexible so they fit closer to reality. You might do this from the start.  Or if something happens during the execution phase of the plan (your plane is delayed due to weather) you adjust your expectation beliefs right then.   With some practice you will find that it is much easier to change the scripted expectations in your virtual reality than it is to change events and people.

There is nothing wrong with trying to make life and events what you want them to be.  That’s not a problem.  The problem is when we automatically follow this agenda that we fail to be aware of what we can not change.  Being aware of the virtual reality desires and consciously modifying them when needed gives us a way to reduce and even eliminate the stress of the holiday season.  It’s also how you can lower your stress all year round.

One of the hidden beliefs behind stress is that we can control all things, all things.  We might intellectually know that we can’t control everything.  We might remind our selves that we can’t, but underneath the thought we still believe that we can. It is a false belief that adds to our stress and results in controlling behavior even when we intellectually “know” better.  Intellectual ideas and thoughts of rationality don’t change emotional beliefs.

Telling our self,   “Oh I should just relax because I know that I can’t control everything,” is not an effective antidote to stress. It can help, but probably won’t fully dissolve the tension and feelings of stress.  In some cases it can actually add to the stress problem.

The thought, “I should just relax and enjoy what is going on,” can actually add stress.  How could a helpful reminder actually cause more stress?  This added stress is caused the same way that celebrating the holidays causes stress.   In the virtual reality of our mind we create an image of how we should be relaxed and enjoying things.  But that virtual version of our self doesn’t match with our real self.  Our real self is still stressed, worried, and maybe frantic.  There is a disparity between our stressed self and our imagined self that should be relaxed.  The difference between our real self and virtual relaxed self sets up another layer of tension.  We are not what the virtual story our mind says we should be and that induces more emotional stress.

We may have the intellectual thought about being relaxed, but ideas aren’t usually enough to change beliefs driving our emotions and behaviors.

Actual relaxing would entail taking a deep breath, feeling it, putting attention on where your muscles are tight in your body and relaxing them, observing the chatter in your mind and laughing at it, taking a moment to notice the beauty and the people around you  etc.  This would be actually relaxing.  But telling your self to do it and doing it are two different things. I suggest relaxing in those moments of stress, don’t just tell your self to do it.   If you find your self telling your self to relax, then please actually do some of these things.

Our Reactions:  “ You’ve Ruined Christmas”

Planning is good, helpful, and even necessary to get things done. The desire and effort to make things beautiful and enjoyable are to be commended.  But what happens when decorations, events, people, or the stuffing doesn’t come out just right?  We react with disappointment, frustration, sadness or anger?   These emotional reactions are clues that our belief system has a virtual reality version different from reality.

With the myriad of events going on this month, something is going to get overlooked, be out of budget, or there just won’t be time for it.   The person responsible for the stuffing might use the wrong sausage (yes a little spicy sausage makes it amazing) or the wrong apples, or no apples at all. Maybe somebody got apple pie instead of your favorite pumpkin, or the turkey is a little dry.  In our mind the most important element of the meal didn’t get met.  The first, and sometimes the only interpretation from the belief system is, “the stuffing (or fill in your own dish) was ruined.  Maybe with all the expectations of our virtual reality about every detail we’ve built up a big reservoir of emotional stress.  Perhaps with so many things not getting met we are filled with disappointment, frustration or anger.  We build up a reservoir of emotion and not it is under pressure.  That emotion wants to vent out. It doesn’t feel good to us to keep it under pressure.  It sees the disappointment with the stuffing as the opportunity and the reservoir of emotion bursts.  Our thoughts and comments about the stuffing exaggerate to “Now the whole meal is ruined”.  With enough emotion we can even feel that “Christmas is ruined.”

At that point we aren’t really experiencing the Holiday. What we are feeling and experiencing is our own emotions.  Those emotions are there largely as a result of the expectations in our mind not getting met.  Those expectations in the virtual reality of our belief system are something that we are responsible for, and that we can change.  It’s not that the meal was wrong, it is that the meal was “wrong” according to the virtual version in our mind of what was “right.”   At that moment you might not be able to change the stuffing, the pie, the turkey, or what someone said, but you can change the belief in your mind, and that will change how you emotionally experience your Holiday.  Changing your beliefs is not only a way to avoid the stress in the preparation phase, but to avoid the emotional reactions in the execution phase.

Maybe you won’t be completely successful at your attempt to have a stress- free holiday this year.  But with some guidance from the Self Mastery course, and some practice, perhaps you will make some changes and be on the path to making every holiday a happy one.

One other thing that will help with Holiday Stress

Nobody else has your script of the Perfect Holiday.  Your child might have a big story (read virtual reality version) of what will make Christmas perfect. For him or her it might be a particular present they want.  You sister’s preferred recipe for stuffing doesn’t include sausage.  (Hard to believe but it is possible.  Maybe she is vegetarian.)  For her, putting sausage in the stuffing ruins the dish.  She doesn’t eat turkey so the stuffing is the meal and now the meal is ruined.  She has a lot of her virtual reality expectations not getting met and her stress disappointment, sadness, and anger is building.

In your script of the perfect holiday, your odd Uncle or grandpa doesn’t tell the same story that you hate every year.  In reality, he does tell that story.  He loves telling that story.  He can’t wait for the holiday meal so he can tell that story again.  The point here is that everyone has developed expectations about this time of year.  The person next to you has expectations in the virtual reality of their mind about how people and things should be, and how they shouldn’t be.  And I’m willing to bet that their version is different than yours.   Each of your versions will be different.  If you try to impose your will and make everything perfect to your version, you might just be “ruining their Christmas.”

Maybe this holiday season the solution to a happier, stress free holiday is a spirit of giving.  Perhaps this year we give up some of your expectations.  Specifically virtual reality expectation in the mind that cause us to stress and then react when things don’t go as expected.  The first step in this path to happiness is to be aware of what your expectations are.

By giving up things in your belief system you can let someone else have it their way.  This is a simple way to help share some joy.  Some people distort this to mean that they are giving in.  In reality you are using the opportunity to free your self from the limiting beliefs that cause you stress and unhappiness.  So in truth, you are giving your self the opportunity to experience greater freedom and happiness.  It’s a gift that serves your happiness, and those around you.  Freedom from the limiting beliefs that cause you emotional stress and unhappiness is a great gift to give your self this holiday season. And any other season as well.

I wish Many Blessings to You, your family, and friends this year and next.  May you experience the emotional feeling of happiness, love, and joy every day of your life.

Gary van Warmerdam

PS.  As a reminder of the many blessings you have, you might take the time and listen to session 1 of the Free Self Mastery series on Gratitude.