Can You Stop Terrorism?

If you want to create change externally, first you need to make the shift internally.

So what has the external world view of terrorism today got to do with your own internal state?  Have you stopped to consider where and how “terrorism” lives in you?

Well I have and what I have realised is that I terrorise myself when I agree with my endless infernal, internal, hyper-critical ego-mind! Every time I agree with this internal critic, I terrorise myself with the possibility that I am somehow really in peril ... and the feelings of anxiety, fear and terror begin. The behaviour that follows is anything but pretty - closed rather than open, reactive rather than response-able and resisting rather than accepting.

This “home-grown brand of internal terrorism” is insidious, surprising in it’s ferocity and comes unexpectedly at times. It is the voice within constantly chanting the “not-good-enough” refrain while relentlessly causing you to question your own self-worth and self-value. It’s you agreeing with the thoughts and feelings that you are not okay the way you are, that the world is a frightening place and the best you can do is manage, protect and defend.

Stopping the internal terrorism is not easy and it’s also not hard. It’s just unfamiliar. It requires practice and diligence and rigor. It requires consciously choosing to remember who you really are and who everyone else really is too: magnificent, powerful, lovable, valuable and creative ... willing to choose from LOVE rather than fear, willing to respond rather than react, willing to BE bigger than your feelings and thoughts and perceptions and judgements and limitations ...

And willing to show up in love even when you feel afraid.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If you want to make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and make the change."

Michael Jackson - Man In The Mirror

What Are You Certain About?

The quest for certainty, for knowing what’s coming next is a national epidemic right now. With all the talk of terror on our news 24/7 and the heightened sense of fear palpable in the energy of day-to-day living, more and more people are seeking a sense of security and safety ... personally, professionally and on a world scale.

Yet, certainty, for the most part, is one thing that you can’t count on ... not now, not ever.

Life is a paradox ... unpredictable and mysterious ... things happen that you are not aware of until they do and yet you still seek certainty BEFORE they happen. Fruitless and pointless. The quest for certainty only increases your feelings of fear and uncertainty ... and the more you seek certainty the more fearful you become.

If you want to feel safe and secure, you need to remember WHO YOU ARE - powerful, magnificent, lovable, valuable creative being able to choose. When you remember who you are before you go seeking certainty about what’s going to happen, you put yourself in the driver’s seat of your life and can choose how to respond to whatever shows up.

When you source yourself in love rather than fear, you have more choices about how to respond. Rather than automatically reacting, defending, protecting and managing what shows up, you free yourself to choose how you show up in response....and if you are willing to fully embrace whatever happens next as your loving creation and your opportunity to respond, you find yourself flowing with the mystery of life rather than trying to predict it and control it. It’s the difference between choosing to operate from the biggest context: I Create The Whole Of My Own Reality and being unconsciously consumed by the paradigm of fear.

And if you really need certainty about anything, it’s that YOU are the one who gets to choose ... always.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Let go of certainty. The opposite isn't uncertainty. It's openness, curiosity and a willingness to embrace paradox, rather than choose up sides. The ultimate challenge is to accept ourselves exactly as we are, but never stop trying to learn and grow."

Tony Schwartz, Author

Prepare Yourself For Feeling Fallout

Whenever you go all the way with telling your truth, you will be confronted by the reactions and responses such truth telling elicits ... Feeling Fallout.

Feeling Fallout can be mild to extreme and always occurs when uncomfortable truth is shared. And because no-one likes feeling uncomfortable, sharing deeper emotional truth is often avoided because of the feeling fallout.

I once had a client say to me that she was only willing to tell her truth when she could be certain that no-one would get upset, thereby ensuring that she never went all the way with her truth when things got emotionally charged. Net result ... nothing much got resolved and she was often left feeling anxious and incomplete.

You cannot resolve conflict if you are not willing to share the whole of your truth (which includes how you are feeling) AND be willing to hear and receive the others’ whole truth including their feelings. It’s not difficult to share your feelings ... it may feel challenging but it’s not hard. It’s just unfamiliar because you have been conditioned to be “nice” and “polite” and avoid conflict at all costs.

So how can you prepare yourself for feeling fallout?

1. Remember that feelings are simply energy-in-motion - they let you know how you feel and what you are making things mean, and how the other feels and what they are making things mean.
2. Feelings are not facts, they exist to be acknowledged, validated, felt and released.
3. You cannot have an effective conversation in the middle of a feeling reaction so when feelings arise, breathe ... allow and let them move through you ... and they will if you let them. As Jill Bolte-Taylor observed: It takes 90 seconds for the feeling to move through you and be done.
4. Expect some feeling fallout when addressing conflict and remember to keep communicating until the energy shifts.

Simple and, once again, not always easy when you start. And the more you practice, the easier it will become.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"... emotions heal when they are heard and validated."

Jill Bolte-Taylor

Consciously Withholding

I recently went on an overseas holiday for a special birthday celebration with a group of girlfriends. Early on the morning of the big day, I received the news that a friend had died and I realised I would not be back in time for the funeral. I felt the grief rise up and asked myself:  “What is the most loving choice I can make in this moment?” I was surprised to feel that rather than go into the grief and feel it, I needed to accept it was there to be felt later, tuck-it away and make a conscious choice to withhold my news from my friends for a few days. So I did.

I didn’t want to impact the birthday celebrations with my grief ... and I also wanted some time to process before sharing. I felt very sad yet managed to put it aside and fully participated in all the activities from breakfast through lunch and then onto a sumptuous and beautiful dinner ... all of which were lovely. In bed later that night, I let myself feel and cry and then went to sleep. When I woke up, I felt physically blah and had a rough start to the day. The plan was a full day trip to another town, exploring and shopping and lunching together. I decided not to go and told the girls I was not feeling up to a full day out. Once again, the most loving choice I felt I could make was to consciously withhold all the reasons for my decision. I knew I wanted to spend the day by myself with no need to explain or share ... I just wanted to feel my feelings and be with myself ... which I did.

The next day I told the girls what had been going on with me. When one of them said: “Why didn’t you tell us before now?” I asked: “And if I had, would you have wanted to stay with me and forgo your day out?” “Yes, of course ...” she replied. I then shared all the reasons I did not tell them earlier, I took responsibility for the whole communication ... and they all got it.

The rest of our holiday was wonderful and nurturing and fun.

What I realised ... once again ... is that I am ok and feelings are ok. And sometimes the most loving choice is to consciously withhold until ready to share fully.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What would love do now?"

What's Wrong?

This is an automatic and very common question when enquiring after someone’s emotional state - particularly when you see someone in obvious distress - yet from the paradigm of fear it simply cements the belief that feeling anything distressing is somehow “wrong” or that there is something “wrong” with the person feeling whatever they are feeling.

Asking someone “what’s wrong?” doesn’t allow the responder any space to consider what is actually going on from the paradigm of cause. The very question usually catapults the communication into the paradigm of fear and elicits one of two responses: Either some blurt about how awful something or someone is or “nothing”, which is actually true ... even if not realised in that moment.

In the paradigm of cause, nothing is wrong and nothing is right.

There is only what’s so and any judgement about it (right/wrong; good/bad; negative/positive etc) is something you are doing, it’s meaning you are making of whatever is happening. And the most pervasive, unconscious judgement filters you have will concern feelings and emotions ... hence your unconscious and automatic judgement of intense feelings rears it’s head in the form of the question: “What’s wrong?”

Time to change those filters and become conscious and aware that feelings are not wrong or bad or good or right ... they are simply feelings -  there to inform you how you feel so you can feel them and respond. So the next time you are tempted to ask “what’s wrong?” consider asking this instead: “What’s going on?”

When you let go of your automatic judgement filters, you can more clearly see what is really going on and you can fully respond from love.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What would happen if everything I thought was ‘wrong’
was actually ‘right’?"

Conversations With God Book 1 by Neale Donald Walsch

Nobody's Perfect

I have been hearing this a lot lately ... and although many agree ... I do not.

Actually I know that YOU are perfect, in fact, every single human being is actually perfect although you will not accept this premise from the fear driven paradigm of “not good enough”.

When you say you are not perfect, what you actually mean is your behaviour is not perfect, not ideal, not saintly ... simply put ... not good enough.

And there it is again, when you forget WHO you really are and think that what you DO defines your “perfection” or otherwise, you end up on the relentless roller-coaster of doing more to get approval, agreement or acceptance. It’s a sticky trap of self-judgement and self-criticism that keeps you on the wheel of “never good enough” and on it goes.

WHO you are is perfect LOVE and what you do sometimes reflects this and sometimes does not. When you decide that how you behave defines your okayness, it’s a lie that you tell yourself in order to justify your relentless doing, doing, doing in pursuit of excellence and avoidance of others’ judgement and it never works.

Accept your intrinsic and inherent perfection - WHO you are BEING - as a context for whatever you do and it will be much easier to do “better”. When you let go of needing to DO everything perfectly in order to BE (and feel) ok, you can choose to do whatever you want to do. When you fully own that you are OK and then choose to feel how you want to feel rather than letting your judgement of what you have done inform your feeling state, you will “get better” naturally.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Perfection is a state in which things are the way they are, and are not the way they are not. As you can see, this universe is perfect. Don’t lie about it."

Werner Erhard

Change Yourself

If you want to change anything ... start with yourself.

A simple yet powerful frame of reference is always, always, always, the self first ... then everything and anything else.

Yet the temptation of the ego-mind ruled paradigm of fear is to jump immediately into judgement and critical analysis of whatever is happening. This is quickly followed by endless thinking loops seeking to figure out how best to get them or it to change. It’s tiring and for the most part, a fruitless endeavour that does not (and will never) deliver what you seek.

As cause of your whole reality, you get to choose where to put your attention and what to focus on. Whatever is happening is out of the choices you have been making, some are deeply unconscious and others, quite deliberate, and always you are the one who is choosing whatever is occurring, the whole of whatever is happening, the all.

Here’s the kicker: Acceptance of yourself as loving valuable creator and the whole of your reality is key which means abandoning judgement about yourself and everything and everyone else. So be aware, when you choose this path, your ego-mind will fight hard to enrol you once again in managing, protecting and defending from fear. All you need to do is remember WHO you are - perfect love -  and not agree with the voice of fear.

When you willingly engage from the paradigm of love in acting as cause and accepting that whatever is happening is simply a reflection of you and your choices to date, you become more conscious of the whole and thus have more awareness about how to respond i.e. what choices to make next ... from love.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Be the change you wish to see in the world."

Gandhi