30. August 2010 by admin.

You might be one who has to work hard at total self-acceptance. Part of the work of self-acceptance involves the integration of our shame-bound feelings, needs and wants. Most shame-based people feel ashamed when they need help; when they feel angry, sad, fearful or joyous; and when they are sexual or assertive. These essential parts of us have been split off.

If we’re shame-based, we try to act like we are not needy. We pretend we don’t feel what we feel. And then we think of all the times we’ve said fine when we were sad or hurting. We either numb out our sexuality and act very puritanical, or we use sexuality to avoid all other feelings and needs. In all cases we are cut off from vital parts of ourselves. These disowned parts appear most commonly in our dreams and in our projections. This is especially true of our sexuality and natural instincts.

Carl Jung called these disowned aspects of ourselves our shadow side. Without integrating our shadow, we cannot be whole.

Negative self-talk is the inner voice. The inner voice has been described by others in different ways. The voice basically tells a shame-based person that they are unlovable, worthless and bad. Most of us are unaware of the habitual activity of the voice. We become aware of it in certain stressful situations of exposure when our shame is activated. After making a mistake, one might call oneself a “stupid” person. Or say, “There I go again. I’m such a blundering klutz.” Before an important job interview, the voice might torment you with thoughts like, “What makes you think you could handle the responsibility of a job like this? Besides, you’re too nervous. They’ll know how nervous you are.”

Actually getting rid of the voices is extremely difficult because of the original rupturing of the interpersonal bridge and the resulting fantasy bond. As children are abandoned, and the more severely they are abandoned (neglected, abused, enmeshed), the more they create the illusion of connection with the parent, a fantasy bond.

In order to create the fantasy bond the child has to idealize his parents and make himself “bad.” The purpose of this fantasy bonding is survival. The child desperately relies on his parents. They can’t be bad. If they are bad or sick, he can’t survive. So the fantasy bond, which makes them good and child bad, is like a mirage in the desert. It gives the child the illusion that there is nourishment and support in her life. Years later when the child leaves the parent, the fantasy bond is set up internally. It is maintained by means of the voice. What was once external, the parent’s screaming, scolding and punishing voice creates a great deal of anxiety.

The voice is mostly constituted by the shame-based shut-down defenses of the primary caretakers. Just as the shame-based parents cannot accept their own weakness, wants, feelings, vulnerability and dependency needs, they cannot accept their children’s neediness, feelings, weakness, vulnerability and dependency. The voice is the result of the “parents” deeply repressed desire to destroy the aliveness and spontaneity of that child whenever he or she intrudes on their defenses.

There has been successful work in identifying the origins and destructiveness of the voice. And there have been some powerful ways developed to bring these hostile thoughts into the patient’s awareness. The process of formulating and verbalizing negative thoughts acts to lessen the destructive effect of the voice on the patient’s behavior.

In voice therapy patients are taught to externalize their inner critical thoughts. By doing so they expose their self-attacks and ultimately develop ways to change their negative attitude into a more objective, nonjudgmental view. As the voice is externalized through verbalization, intense feelings are released which result in powerful emotional catharis with accompanying insight.

This critical voice can be activated in any situation of vulnerability or exposure. Once activated, a shaming spiral is set in motion. And once in motion, this spiral has a power of its own. It is imperative to externalize this internal dialogue, since it is one of the major ways you keep yourself nonself-accepting and divided.

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23. August 2010 by admin.

Every one of our public fields of endeavor — business, government, medicine, law, technology, urban design — has been shaped by the ideas, images, values, and language of the Warrior. The Warrior is the traditional male hero who charges into the battle with the aim of dominating and winning, and in the process defines and strengthens himself. His quest is not only for dominance, but also for autonomy, which is the prime task of male development. Thus needs for autonomy, competition, and control have been built into the very structure of those organizations that have served our culture in the public realm.So long as Warrior values dominated the public realm, the role of women has been to serve as “carriers” for all those qualities deemed too soft for the demands of battle. Nurturing, mercy, participating in the growth of others, fostering human connection — these were all qualities that the Warrior could not afford to indulge or explore, lest they weaken his resolve to compete. Thus the private, domestic sphere over which women reigned became the repository of humane and caring values, while the world of work and politics flourished by ruthless competition. The Warrior’s wife created an oasis to which he could repair for physical and spiritual refreshment before returning to the rigors of the fray. Assigned to different sexes and different realms, these dualistic divisions deprived each sex and realm of the full range of human possibility. Each was left impoverished, stunted, only half complete.

Splitting off values for human connection and interdependence and assigning them to the female sphere has left the world a hostile place, in thrall to notions of competition that have become more dangerous as technology has become more potent. Our culture’s inability to harness technology to serve human ends, has resulted in the strain of having to live with the threat of nuclear apocalypse on one hand, and the reality of environmental degradation on the other.

The old Warrior virtues — fearlessness, a thirst for combat, single minded devotion to an ideal, aggression, the ability to conceptualize the other as the enemy, the fierce need to prove oneself in contests — all of these once served the evolutionary human purpose of mobilizing the strongest adult males to preserve and protect other members of the immediate tribe. But advanced technology has turned those virtues into liabilities; aggressive heroics now threaten the survival of the larger tribe, the human race.

It has been duly noted that the inadequacy of the Warrior system has long been a subject of modern literature, the primary theme of which is alienation and despair. Since the second world war, popular and scholarly studies about feelings of pointlessness, sterility, and the separation from nature in modern life have continued to capture the public imagination. The antihero has replaced the hero as the central figure in our literature precisely because the hero myth has come to seem outmoded in a world that too well knows the human cost of pure Warrior values.

The nitration of the feminine principles into the public realm offers hope for healing this condition, returning a concern for the nurturing and fostering of life to our public sphere, and decreasing the emphasis on competition — whether to build the highest building, or to “win” a totally abstract arms race. Thus women’s entry into the public sphere can be seen not merely as the result of contemporary economic pressures, the high rate of divorce, or the success of the feminist movement, but rather as a profound evolutionary response to a pervasive culture crisis. Feminine principles are entering the public realm because we can no longer afford to restrict them to the private domestic sphere, nor allow a public culture obsessed with Warrior values to control human destiny if we are to survive.

Drawing on Jung’s study of symbols, under the old dichotomized system, the female heroic archetype was the Martyr. The martyr’s central tasks are care, sacrifice, and redemptive suffering; the Martyr’s central recognition is, “I am not the only person in this world.” This puts the Martyr in total contrast to the Warrior, whose central tasks are individuation, achievement, and action, and whose chief recognition is of his own importance and ability to make a difference in the world. Both archetype’s contain validity and worth, however, let’s hope our culture can move beyond them to acknowledge a new kind of hero that unites the qualities of both: the Magician.

The Magician incorporates the Martyr’s emphasis on care and serving others with the Warrior’s ability to affect his environment by the exercise of discipline, struggle, and will. Thus the Magician knows how to sacrifice and give care without losing personal identity, and how to work hard to achieve something without getting caught up in an unceasing competitive competitive struggle. At the Magician’s level, dualities begin to break down. Magicians see beyond apparent dichotomies of male and female, ends and means, efficiency and humanity, mastery and nurturance, logic and intuition. Instead, they focus on the interconnections that bind all human beings and relate events to one another; they take the long view because they see the relation of the present to the future.

It is this awareness of interconnections that enables Magicians to move with the energy of the universe and to attract what is needed by laws of synchronicity, so that the ease of the Magician’s interaction with the universe seems like magic. Synchronicity, is a Jungian concept that means meaningful coincidences or acausal connections — as when you go into a bookstore and the very book you need but did not even know existed falls into your hands.

This finding of one’s path is similar to the finding of one’s realizing that one’s own talents and experiences make one uniquely suited to the task that one has chosen to do in life.

Magicians in all cultures are associated with circles. They draw magic circles and put themselves in the middle, structuring the world around them as a web. From inside, they act as magnets who attract and galvanize positive energy for change by identifying places where growth can occur for individuals, institutions, or social groups, and then by fostering that growth. Taking opportunities as they come, they build up power by empowering others, valuing connections instead of competition. They recognize that all ships rise when the tide rises, so they use their power to effect a rising of the tide.

The Magician’s great talent is for tapping into and drawing strength from energy sources outside themselves, picking up signals from everywhere, and then beaming them to wherever they need to go. And certainly women with profound values for interconnection and responsibility, their ecological view, their focus on the long term, and their talent for building up strength by building up others, provide examples of the Magician’s way, for they have mastered the Warrior’s skills of discipline, will, and struggle necessary to achieve success in the public realm, but then moved beyond them to provide models of what leadership can become when guided by the feminine principles.

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14. August 2010 by admin.

Men are raised expecting their work to last from “sun to sun,” while women know their kind of work will never be done. All over the world, women’s work is essentially cyclical and unending; the tasks are not the kind that lend themselves to closure. And it’s not just child-raising. The difference goes back to the organization of hunter-gather societies. The men get together and go out for the occasional big kill, a specific event that has a climax, and then it’s over. But the women, who plant and gather, work at continuous tasks that need to be done again and again. This leads them to have more of a process orientation; and when you focus on process rather than on achievement or closure, you get more satisfaction from the work itself.

You get pleasure from the actual doing of it, rather than from the abstract notion of getting it done.Since the mid-seventies, when women began entering the workplace in substantial numbers and attempting to “climb up through the ranks,” there has been a widespread presumption that their progress is being hampered because so few grew up playing competitive team sports. Such sports, football in particular, have long been viewed as an informal training ground for business leaders, and many books for women seeking workplace success have urged that they learn the fundamentals of the game — study a good diagram, and spend a few Sunday afternoons in front of the TV. Football was assumed to parallel business in a number of specific ways: its organizational structure, its tenacious focus on objective, its obsession with blocking the competition, its emphasis on the deployment of efficient units, and its need for team players who do what they’re told and do not question the coach. Football provides a paradigm of professionals, a remaking of human beings in the image of machines, if you like. Football phrases and language are a part of business jargon: fumblers drop the ball or miss the play; real competitors feint, run with it, and punt if they need to hedge.

Even the financial rewards of business success, money, is often one-dimensionally described as “just a way of keeping score.” But above all, football has been imagined to reflect business’s underlying ethos, best expressed in the immortal aphorism attributed to Vince Lombardi: “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”

But football is not a business. It is a mental game that bears no resemblance to a bunch of male brutes crashing around on Astroturf. Many men would like business to be football, so they could feel a kinship with their gridiron heroes, but using football language does not make it so.

Much of the literature that exalts team sports as providing good preparation for business also derides girls’ games as useless for this purpose. Turn-taking games such as hopscotch and jump rope are scorned as particularly pathetic, since they emphasize cooperation over competition and have simple and fluid rules that participants may reformulate as desired. Girls who go into business are widely believed to have wasted childhood hours in activities that stress role-playing — playing house or hospital, or devising scenarios for their dolls.

Yet studies reveal that an ability to self-consciously adopt various roles is an asset in handling the diverse tasks of management. In addition, games without elaborate rules foster improvisational skills, and reformulating rules to fit situations teaches flexibility.

Finally, games that teach cooperation help one to function in organizations where networking provides the structure. Thus girls’ games do instill skills and attitudes that have value in the workplace — particularly in today’s workplace, where innovation, entrepreneurship, and creativity are in demand, and the authoritarian chain of command is increasingly obsolete.

Children’s games enable them to resolve pressing emotional issues — issues that are very different for each gender. Since girls, identifying with their mothers, feel threatened by separation, they are anxious to preserve relationships; thus their games place a high ethical value on defining rules and boundaries, and adjudicating disputes that arise from the clash of competing rights. As a result of these differences, it is ridiculous to argue that girls are handicapped by not having played competitive sports, since sports serve no vital purpose in female development.

In addressing the different needs of boys and girls — the different psychological tasks they face — the kinds of games they play help to form them into very different human beings. Male children learn to put winning ahead of personal relationships or growth; to feel comfortable with rules, boundaries, and procedures; and to submerge their individuality for the greater goal of the game. Females learn to value cooperation and relationships; to disdain complex rules and authoritarian structure; and to disregard abstract notions like the quest for victory if they threaten the group as a whole.

And so a picture of ‘feminine principles’ emerges, principles of caring, making intuitive decisions, not getting hung up on hierarchy or all those dreadfully boring business-school management ideas; having a sense of work as being part of your life, not separate from it; putting your labor where your love is; being responsible to the world in how you use your profits; recognizing the bottom line should stay there — at the bottom.

What business needs now is exactly what women are able to provide, and at the very time when women are surging into the work force. But perhaps even more important than work force numbers is the fact that women — who began this sweeping entry in the mid-seventies — are just now beginning to assume positions of leadership, which give them the scope to create and reinforce the trends toward change. The confluence is fortunate, an alignment that gives women unique opportunities to assist in the continuing transformation of the workplace — by expressing, not giving up, their personal values.

To be continued…….

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7. August 2010 by admin.

Can the Type-A over achiever become a slacker? And how about those people who can’t hold down a job to save their life—could they transform into adrenaline-pumping go-getters? A leading personality psychologist says yes: Personality can change.

The once accepted idea that an individual’s personality is set in stone is changing, reported the psychologist at Stanford University recently.

One reads about all this twin research out there where these people who have been raised apart have remarkable similarities. They married women with the same name; they named their dog the same thing; they both build little ships that fit into a bottle and they show up to their reunion wearing almost identical clothing The implication there is that it’s all programmed in, that personality is permanently stamped into our genes.

This static-character research is typically based on a definition of personality comprising five features, called the five-factor model, including openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

While these factors are important to a person’s character, they aren’t the definitive word, and results generated from the model could be missing subtle, yet critical, aspects of personality. The point is that there’s a really big in-between area that’s not accounted for and these are the crucial beliefs that people develop as they grow and learn.

For instance a person might view intelligence as a fixed trait or one that can greatly impact their “trademark” behaviors. Called fixed or growth mindsets, these two different views of oneself develop early in childhood and can contribute tremendously to personality. It has a big impact on their motivation and achievement, and plays a role in business and in social relationships, or whether people can solve conflicts, and whether they can bounce back from failures and rejections.

Studies of selected students at Columbia University found that those with fixed views about intelligence were primarily focused on proving their smartness and so were less motivated to learn and less likely to take on challenges.

Stanford University research has shown that when you change the belief, a lot of important things happen and students’ motivation turns around; their grades and test scores go up; managers become better mentors, more successful negotiators.

And when children or even adults are taught that abilities and character features can develop and change, they become more resilient to setbacks.

Similarly, when it comes to romantic relationships, pop magazines often tout the idea that certain personalities (or astrological signs) are like oil and water and it’s best to just steer clear of each other. Research shows, however, oil and water can change in a way that permits compatibility.

Couples with fixed ideas about their personalities often don’t try to resolve marital conflicts. Why bother? They just try to either ignore [the conflict] or when it gets really bad they consider leaving the marital relationship. Sadly they are just beliefs, and beliefs can change, and maybe it’s not as tough as most people think to save that relationship.

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29. July 2010 by admin.

People around you will affect the mental environment for you. Because of this, you must become selective about who to be with and what to say. Do not see this as a constraint on your freedom, for this is protecting an emerging awareness that needs protection in a world where it is not valued or honored. Life will teach you this over and over again in difficult situations where you will find yourself recoiling from other people and from situations where you don’t belong or where you have committed an indiscretion.

Remember, you are learning spiritual wisdom as well as spiritual knowledge. Wisdom has to do with how you carry knowledge in life — how you express knowledge, where you share it and how you hold it in regard to yourself and other people.

People are eager to share because they want self-validation. They want somebody else to tell them that they are wonderful and that they are doing the right thing. Avoid this and avoid idle conversation. Avoid talking about spiritual ideas and great things with people who cannot receive them and avoid someone else’s spiritual journey.

Do not dabble in different religions because you will only be a dabbler. You can only know a religion if you immerse yourself within it. And if you immerse yourself in it, how can you be studying everything else?

There are many people who take a very eclectic approach, who try to gather a little of this and a little of that. They have postcards from all over the spiritual universe, but they have never been anywhere. They think they understand what Christianity or Buddhism or Islam or any other religion means, but they have never immersed themselves in any of them. They have never lived them fully. They have lots of big ideas and no Wisdom. Avoid this. Avoid trying to tie in what you are doing with what someone else has done in the past or in the present.

Do not make your way spiritual by saying that it is in keeping with Christianity or Buddhism or any other religion, for you don’t really know. You have not yet gone far enough.

Power is concentration. If your power, your concentration, is spread out over many things, you will not have enough power for anything. Become focused on a few people, a few things and a few ideas. Don’t try to collect all the spiritual information. Don’t try to gather anything that is unnecessary. Let spiritual enlightenment move you to choose the things that you need rather than filling yourself with ideas, with books, with people, with experiences, with places to go and with things to do. In other words, don’t clutter yourself with things that just have to be given up.

Live simple. Let your life be unexplainable. Let your life be inexplicable, for it will be inexplicable to those who cannot share it with you. You are being governed and guided by a greater power within you now, a greater power that you are coming to know through experience, a greater power that you are choosing by making wise decisions. Let there be big gaps in your understanding. Then you will be honest with yourself and honest with others, and you will be a refreshing presence in the world. Do not join with others in their odes to themselves, in singing their songs of self-assurance and self-validation. Remain silent and move on.

Prepare, then, with the right curriculum, the right attitude, the right instructor, the right companions and the right evaluative skills. The correct attitude is based upon your feeling your deeper need, which is necessary even at the outset. You need to discern, and your discerning will take you beyond the conventions of human education, which are limited and specific.

You need to become conscious of something greater in life, and this requires a different kind of preparation. This consciousness lives within you. It is the very essence of your spirituality. It represents the greater part of you that is bonded intrinsically with all life. You do not seek this. It is within you already, but only will you be able to gain access to it in the present moment, never in the future.

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