Well Within, Elese's Blog

Transcend Trauma

10/14/2013

Many of us are troubled by things that have happened to us. In some cases we hold deep secrets about these things, so awful that even our close loved ones are unaware of our pain.

Yet even while these are hidden in the recesses of our minds, we seek ways to release ourselves from the past.

As one who had a violent marriage to a heroin addict, I was such a person. I would have given everything I had to someone who could have helped me transcend my own trauma. But shedding it looked impossible to me. For a long time I could not count a single day when I was not terrified.

Being in that wilderness without an exit was the lowest point in my life. As time passed I had good days when I forgot about it all. I had fewer bad days. I longed for, but wasn't quite able to find what I really wanted: my complete freedom.

Then the way to freedom showed itself. Not in a blaze of light, but a small parting of a curtain. And as I persisted in finding out what was behind that curtain I found my own way.

Sydney Banks, a great teacher of kindness wrote "The Missing Link" and in it he said:

There is no way to guarantee a trouble-free life.

Life is like any other contact sport.
You may encounter hardships of one sort or another.

Wise people find happiness
not in the absence of such hardships,
but in their ability to understand
them when they occur.

The "ability to understand" is they key I was looking for. I spent a lot of time rummaging in the drawers of the past looking for my answer, my freedom, but didn't find it until I found out something deeper about myself and my true nature.

To me, Syd is suggesting we all allow our own deeper nature to show us the way forward through love and understanding. He is inviting us to look away from the searing pain and toward the spiritual, formless side of life -- not to ignore what is happening now -- but to look behind it. To look to something more.

During the time I looked for my answers, I read many spiritual books. Among them, "A Course In Miracles." I even worked helping to translate the Course in the very early years before any translations had yet been published. The Course has been in my life for 30 years now, off and on, and I must admit it has both comforted me and confounded me.

I came across this on page 591 today:

You need no healing to be healed.

The miracle comes quietly into the mind that stops an instant and is still.

I almost missed the great importance of this. I wished I had really seen this those many years ago when I was struggling to let go of all the painful memories I carried with me.

It comforts me to know that these messages of help are everywhere, although we may miss them or not understand them. But even more than this, what truly helps me today is to know that there is a spiritual, or formless life that is me, and remains unchanged regardless of what happens to me.

How can we turn to the remembrance of what we are, within the formless nature of life itself, and know that it is inviolate?

How can we be in acknowledgement of the events and yet separate and untouched by their consequences?

It seems impossible. Yet, it is not. That is all I know. For so it has been for me.

More books that have helped me on my way.

Breaking New Ground

10/16/2012

One day it occurred to me: for EVERYTHING I've ever done, there was a time when I had never done it before.

Obvious. Clearly. Yet this had never struck me as deeply before.

I was speaking to a client recently and we were talking about how we are all hard on ourselves, thinking that we should be further along than we are, or moving faster than we are moving.

It is so common in coaching and in consulting that clients downplay their progress with these kinds of comparisons, forgetting to look beyond events in order to see the underlying plate tectonics.

Take my client recently. In the middle of an argument with his spouse he had the idea to slow down, listen and try to understand what was being said instead of the defense/attack strategy that was in play at the time.

As we talked about how this had happened it was obvious to me that he was underplaying the importance of what he had done. I wondered why. "It really wasn't going very well" and "I could have done this sooner" were threatening to wipe out the significance of a momentous occasion: in the middle of a deep quagmire, he'd actually found his bearings, had a fresh idea flash before him, acted on it and turned the conversation in a more positive direction.

Amazingly, with no provocation and in the worst possible conditions for a new idea to arise, it did. And he listened. Yet what I heard as a sign of success, he was viewing as a near-failure.

How was that possible?

Along the course of our lives we seem to have (most of us, me included) picked up a nasty habit of thinking we should be better than we are in any given moment. This keeps us from knowing what to look for and from perceiving what is happening on a deeper level.

Ruminating over our performances we often judge them to be less than successful ("I could have prevented that" / "I never should have got there in the first place). We compare ourselves to standards no one really ever lives up to: "I should have been able to create an open space of pure listening."

Really? No you couldn't have done that, because you didn't. Are you missing what did happen, however?

No wonder people head in the wrong direction -- thinking they need to double up their efforts, or be even harder on themselves, as if the point of life were to eventually be perfect. Or nearly.

That's not to say one can't do better next time, but surely we are missing the point. The point of self-awareness and self-observiation is self-understanding -- not self-condemnation. Seek to understand and what you see will change. Judge something and you cannot see it at all.

Let's give ourselves a break. This self-flaggelation thing has really run its course. There is so much research out there clearly showing that the carrot and the stick do not work.(Just watch Daniel Pink below on Motivation)

Personally speaking I think it is amazing that I can even have a change of perspective in the middle of a near-brawl, much less to act on it. Compared to the number of times I've ignored by own voice of reason!

Why not look at our lives from the gentler -- yet equally true -- perspective?

Not only does that mean recognizing the significance of our small triumphs, but realizing that they are not just one-off anomalies.

Take our example as a case in point. Consider for a moment just the fact that he got this new idea in the midst of a bad moment between two people. What does that tell you about what human beings need to do to have new ideas?

If you or I, or my client, can have a new thought in the middle of an argument, then surely there are no conditions to be met for us to "get grounded" or "be good listeners" or anything of the sort.

What it suggests is that our ability to hear afresh and to change is natural. Or as my client put it, "something you can count on."

This implies you don't have to be "good" or spiritually advanced, deserving, forgiving, listening attentively or any of the other pre-conditions we sometimes set up.

Imagine. You can just be going about your business and you can count on your ability to see anew just being there.

Regardless then of how badly we think we are doing when we play the game film, there is always the basic movement from: "now you don't see it / now you do." And this movement is always happening in us. We aren't making it happen with our self-development programs. Or better said:

We might be becoming more aware of how it's working; but we are not making it happen.

I know it's common to consider the self development pathway as one in which we get progressively better at this thing we call life. But really, everything we will ever do will always be something that one day, perhaps just the day before, we could not do or had never thought of doing, so I think this whole notion of "progress" and preconditions only gets in the way of that natural flow.

Every person on the planet knows how to shift from not knowing something one moment to knowing it. We did it with walking, talking and eating with spoons. We've been doing it for our whole lives and we'll continue doing it.

Let's start counting on it.

A Certain Uncertainty

4/20/2012

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.
There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.
The dark will be your womb
tonight.
The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.
You must learn one thing:
the world was made to be free in...
(David Whyte, Excerpt from Sweet Darkness)

As I write this I am preparing the last live broadcast of my show "A New Way To Handle Absolutely Everything" on Contact Talk Radio (iTunes podcasts will continue) What lies ahead, I'm not entirely sure.

I must admit, I have always been a great big know-it-all. And a planner. I like to think I have a future, some influence over it, and that I know something.

The truth is, I don't.

Only the other day I was about to state one of my opinions as "fact" when I caught myself. As I pulled back I noticed I quieted down inside and settled into the nicest feeling of not being a somebody. I remembered how important it used to be to me to know (or to not look like I didn't) and to be seen as having authority. It's amazing, isn't it, how life is hard enough and yet on top of that we have the full time job of managing our image of ourselves!

I've learned so much about this and have relaxed much more into my authentic self in recent years.

In "101 New Pairs of Glasses" I included quite a few chapters on releasing this kind of strain and my favorite is the chapter on mystery. In it I advocate for the art of not-knowing. I'd like to remind myself of this message today

How do we listen and just let it become clear as we go?

Are we able to just rest in the fresh scent of the unknown and see what happens?

I'd like to share this piece from the chapter on mystery, mainly as a reminder to myself how valuable it is for me allow mystery to be here as I take each step...

"The desire to know, or worse, the desire to look like we know is a modern plague. In one fell swoop it destroys listening, understanding, cooperation and learning. It undermines peace of mind and peace amongst nations.

Consumed by our desire to know, or not admit that we don't, we finish other people's sentences, we hate people we have never met, and we cling to things we have long outgrown.

Living in the world of familiarity our lives are choked off by the smallness of our ideas. Crowded in by the known we become selectors instead of creators. The death of curiosity is surely the birth of the ego, as children give up on being explorers of wild imaginings and doodads without names and become regurgitators of facts.

Our lack of curiosity leads directly to our unwillingness to fail and spreads from there to our unwillingness to try - because we already know. We know too much. And what we know isn't worth learning.

To allow wonder and mystery into your life is to suddenly find yourself in weightless spaciousness. We work so hard to fuel personal creativity, business and product innovation, but we would automatically have all of these if we added just an extra dash of curiosity to our daily vitamin supplements.

Imagine not knowing your boss, not knowing your children, not knowing yourself - being totally open. You'd listen closely. You would see new and amazing things. You'd discover the people you live with are people you've never met before. In the freshness of the moment you would unable to locate that familiar feeling of disconnection.

You would see into how your world is constructed. You'd gasp to realize you are much bigger than you ever imagined.

You'd lose your fear."

To buy my book:

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Making a Bigger Difference

11/11/2011

photo by Ellen Britt

It's not what we say
or what we do
that makes a difference,
but rather who we are.

Every morning when we wake up and look out from our two eyes into the world something happens. We become aware that we have a body, we seem to step into that body like the crab scrambling for a shell, and then out of that body we gaze, blink, step forward, and spend our day.

We don't give this routine much consideration, so it is very easy to just assume that we are limited, confined, fragile and our sphere of influence is reduced to those we meet or talk with in any given moment.

I think we often start our day inside a feeling of smallness. We forget that our influence is not limited to our task list, our meeting calendar or today's projects. In truth, we are not aware of how wide we reach, how many people we touch, and most importantly, how we are transmitting beyond our shells.

In part I'm simply talking about just lifting our eyes for a moment to take in a wider view of life. A greater awareness of the largeness of ourselves. When you do that, just briefly, right now, do you really think that you are this dinky body and nothing more? How can you be certain that people don't remember you, think of you, care for you and are impacted by you -- in ways that you have no idea of. In fact people right now who have never met you may have some kind of opinion of you.

Each of us has a reach that is far greater than it might seem.

Even people, like myself, who have decided that to reach out deliberately to touch others and to be a part of moving this world forward in a loving direction, may or may not be fully aware of this all the time.

But everyone makes a difference to someone.

Everyone matters.

Everyone.

You don't have to decide to change the world and help thousands of people to be making a difference in your world right now. In fact, you couldn't NOT make a difference if you tried.

The question is, what difference are you making? You don't have to sign up for any cause if you don't want to. But would you like that to be conscious of how impact works?

Anyone who is working for change certainly needs to. Without that awareness people try to influence in all the wrong ways, through bullying, guilt-making, pushing, forcing, and many other angry forms of activism. Every time you've been repulsed by someone's approach to donate to their cause, you were reacting to their impact on you. You were not reacting to the cause itself.

So, difference-makers (in other words, all of us), who are you?

Are you acting from the discomfort of your own badly-fitting shell? Your limited perspective? Your anger? Your frustration? Your blaming others for the state of the world?

I don't think any of us humans will ever be perfect, so forget being squeaky clean. But do pay attention to who are you being. Who you are being is not an action, it is an attitude. Here are some ways we can see you as you transmit who you are:

- are you opinionated or open?
- are you a listener or are you only interested in confirming what you think?
- are you hard with yourself, so you cannot allow yourself to forgive others?
- are you rushing so much that you find it tough to give someone your full attention?
- are you reflective in a conversation, or reactive?
- are you often thinking how other people need to change their ways and habits?
- are you blaming the person you love for not giving you what you need?

Of course we all show up all these way sometimes. No one is immune from being human.

Gage your true impact on others, not from your actions, but from the deeper ways in which you hold fixed opinions and views of other people. Notice the feeling in you when you talk to someone. What's your internal opinion? What do you think you are really transmitting to them? We are never transmitting words, we are transmitting US.

The smaller and more limited you feel inside you, the greater your negative impact on others -- no matter how noble your cause may be.

You cannot replace inner shrinkage with outer expansion. You must expand inwardly first before you can do anything effectively in the world, with your partner, children or your colleagues at work.

May you see something bigger about yourself today. In other words, may you see something true. Because the truth is that your shell is nothing more than the collection of all the smallest ideas you have about yourself. Who you are could never fit into any shell.

And knowing that makes a difference.

Life Jacket For Your Crisis

8/6/2010

If you are experiencing a serious crisis or loss, I highly recommend you read Daphne Rose Kingma's Ten Things To Do When Life Falls Apart.

You will be inspired, comforted and for each of the Ten Things there are exercises for reflection, meditation and journaling that will assist you:

1.    CRY YOUR HEART OUT

2.    FACE YOUR DEFAULTS (four steps to face them)

3.    DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT (No, it doesn’t feel like expansion…it feels like loss but you can change your relationship to the problem)

4.    LET GO (hanging on is fear, letting go is hope)

5.    REMEMBER WHO YOU HAVE ALWAYS BEEN

6.    PERSIST (hope is born of persistence)

7.    INTEGRATE YOUR LOSS (you Are big enough if you remember who you really are)

8.    LIVE SIMPLY (a surprising chapter!)

9.    GO WHERE THE LOVE IS

10.    LIVE IN THE LIGHT OF THE SPIRIT

And remember: There is more to you than what you ordinarily think of as yourself

Musings on death

3/2/2010

Death is not a topic we have comfortably integrated. It is shrouded in superstition, and fear of it underpins so much of our thinking and it plays out in the way we speak about stopping aging, how we treat 'older' people and the things we tell ourselves about our own bodies.

A large plastic surgery industry feeds off a simple fear, that others will not approve of us, although that is not entirely the fault of surgeons. They are only responding to the ways we ourselves are choosing to deal with becoming older.

Would we really treat people the way we do, would we ignore our children, would we not go to dinner with Mom this week, again, if we had a healthy sense of our own mortality? Wouldn't knowing we do not have a guarantee of tomorrow in the least, shuffle our priorities so radically that we might be unrecognizable?   If we really knew tomorrow we'd be lucky to wake up, would we be making any of our same choices today?

Despite all our daily worries about the future, the future in fact does not exist.   (Nor does the past, for that matter, but that's another topic). When we live in worry about what isn't real, we suffer, we lose all our joy and we try run around creating solutions for a problem that is does not exist. We waste so much energy and time and love. You don't have to look further than Chile and Haiti to know there is no tomorrow. Let's be something more than just occupied. Let's stop being busy and consider what's meaningful to us.

There really is only one moment. The one you and I are living now.

if you are interested in this topic, listen to the show with Stan Goldberg, Lessons For Living Without Regret

What You Say Is What You Get

1/27/2010

"If you think you can, or if you think you can't, either way, you're right." Henry Ford

We all experience the world, not as it is, but through the filter of our thoughts about it. No matter how you think of yourself, or how you have judged yourself - good news.

Not everything you tell yourself is true.

We can stop because we started it
On the show today, It Is What You Say It is, (Jan 27) I talked about what builds the house you live in. Ever catch yourself saying "Oh, I'm not good at that"? Our opinions and beliefs build our limiting walls. I've had many clients tell me they can't manage this or that based on having never really tried it. We bust right through those to incredible new places. How? Because they are just lies.

They are lies that we install not just as our walls but also as the windows in our house. Through these lies we view the world outside: a limited place of ever decreasing possibility. It doesn't have to be this way. No matter how long ago you started, or how well practiced you are, or how scary the lie.

Luckily, you can't make a lie true, just by believing it for a long time

Love is one of the big, big areas where we make a lot of decisions about how limited our lives - and our chances! - are: there are only so many single people, only so many healthy single people, only so many not-entirely-insane single people.

Oh, we have so many fixed ideas!

But love isn't limited at all. Love is who you are and it doesn't arrive when your life partner does, or when your child hugs you, or when you complete a successful project. It is always there for you to have and depends on nothing at all. (see the show Jan 29 All You Need Is Love when I talk to John Welshons, author of One Soul, One Love, One Heart )

Greg Baer illustrated this so well in his Master Class with SuperCoach Academy this week. This is roughly the story:

So there you are sitting by the pool, enjoying the sun on your dream vacation. And someone from the pool is splashing you and splashing you, and you are getting wetter and wetter and angrier and angrier.

Then you finally move enough to look into the pool and give this person a piece of your mind, when you realize they are drowning. What would have to "happen" for you to lose you anger and get in touch with caring about them?

Nothing. Your anger is just gone in a poof, you become instantly overcome with a deep desire to help.

Love is just there, in every moment. It's a decision.

Love is just there in every moment. OK, I just said that. But...

Does that sound possible? Does that sound true? Why would you even care?
I'm reminded of an extraordinary day, a day when everyone in New York - and then around the world - suddenly became aware of the presence, the importance and the interconnectedness of us all. We were deeply moved by the preciousness of life.

What I notice when I think about 9/11 is, that day people made a choice to love, to care, to feel connected. You didn't have to. You just did. That choice is available always. Why is it important to know this?

So you can.

Listen to the show here

The Limits of Impossible

1/20/2010

Have you noticed lately that lots of things we never thought could possibly happen, have happened? Did you know bionic research is in the process of creating the 'Million Dollar Man'? (OK, actually she's a woman and she has a bionic arm she can attach where her physical arm used to be. See last months' National Geographic if you think I make this stuff up). More to the point, guess how you control a bionic arm? You use your mind. Not the conscious mind, the one that takes effort - the other one, the one that just simply 'moves the arm'.

The mind truly amazing and too wonderful a thing to waste. I believe it is not confined to a brain, but just as we supposedly activate only a small portion of the brain, we waste the true power of our mind every day.

What does this have to do with the limits of the impossible? Basically, our minds have a lot of say over what we believe is possible. Ever tried to outwit your own mind when it says - I can't? Now when I suggest we waste the capacity of the mind, I'm not talking about creative day-dreaming. I'm talking about going unconscious. For example, you might go to exercise after a hard day, let's say, taking a long run in nature but as the body oxygenates, you use your mind to replay the stress of something that happened earlier, over and over again. I'm talking about going for a massage and lying there thinking about all your faults and all the ways you hate your body. That kind of thing.

How many times have you had a wonderful idea and then stomped it out with all the reasons why it is not possible? If dreams were socks, somewhere there are drawers and drawers full of all the lost socks waiting to be found again and paired up with their owners.

Although we may be more accustomed to choking off our dreams, by labeling them 'Impossible' the good news is that we can use the same imagination either to argue for our limitations, or to find creative ways to dance our way to our target. What I'm saying is essentially, it's possible to change the film running in your head from today's matinee of fear and limitation to tomorrow's long running smash hit called your life. And while I don't think that's accomplished by "positive thinking" alone, I do think our creative resources are easier to access from a mindset of openness rather than shut-down-ness.

Argue for your limitations and quite simply, you'll have them. Unless you have a great friend (or a great coach) who will risk being honest enough to challenge you, I don't think many people will bother to take the opposite view. In fact, most people are happy for you to keep your limitations and live happily ever after with your long list of These Are The Things That Are Quite Impossible For Me, Thank You Very Much. Because they are doing exactly the same.

If this sounds horrid, it's because it is.

Challenging your 'Impossibles' is one of the most liberating experiences you can ever have. I saw it in Michael Neill's "30 Days to Creating the Impossible" and I've talked about it plenty on the show. Most recently with 'Who Says The Impossible is Impossible" (aired January 20, 2010)

To challenge your 'impossibles' I highly recommend keeping an eye out for Michael's next program. Until then, here are some things you can do/read:

Gay Hendricks' book, The Big Leap
Get past your Upper Limit Syndrome, by expanding your tolerance for things going well in your life

Barbara Sher's books Wishcraft and I Could Do Anything, If Only I Knew What It Was (I highly recommend her Twitter IdeaParties on Thursdays for getting past dream blockages!)

And you can:

Create a powerful mantra that is true and makes you feel good (use it to replace the "I can't" dialogues you've got running). "I am open to more good that I have ever experienced before" is a great one!
Create a self-care routine that puts you in touch everyday with the well of good feeling in you
Get a buddy or coach or guidance from a spiritual teacher to challenge your limiting beliefs and fears and let them go
make room in your life for new ideas by mindfulness and openness practices - especially forgiveness - which is the best mental de-clutter I know of

If you know you have a dream and you want to start getting it out of the sock drawer, talk to me about my ProjectDream Mastermind group where you can learn to get creative, take action, enjoy the process and build something you've always wanted. This is a small group of very focused people, so you'll need to talk to me to see if there's room and if it's right for you. You can write me at [email protected]

The Qualities That Will Save Your Life

1/15/2010

When I got Lynne Klippel's book, Overcomers Inc., in the post, I have to say my initial reaction was I liked the book, hated the word. Overcomers. I don't want to be an overcomer. I want to sail effortlessly through life and have everything be easy. Overcoming is such a dull, pedestrian task. Maybe, "Go Climb That Mountain!" just make you tingle with inspiration, but it makes me want to climb back into bed.

I read the book and the true life stories in it, and although I still don't like to think of myself as an overcomer, I have to admit that I am. We all are. If you got through asking someone on a first date, or wearing really high heels for the first time, you are one too.

And that's not a dull thing at all.

In fact, there are some pretty hefty qualities that we need to be able to call on when the going gets tough. Here's what I think those are:

Taking responsibility
Surrendering
Trust
Willingness

In every real life experience in that book, as well as in my own life and the lives of people I coach, these are the core of creating a new life - whether you are creating on the rubble of an old life, or you are just ready to move to the next square on the board.

Taking Responsibility
OK, swallow hard now, this is the painful part. Yes. We all have to take on the fact that we live in our bodies, and that what we chose is what makes our life a heaven or a hell-hole. Until we do, even if it's just saying, "I'm really the only one who can get me out of this mess", no change can begin. As Debbie Ford used to say in our training, over and over again, "No one is coming to save you." Ouch.

Surrender
This is a bit sucky too. When you are very used to being the project manager of the universe, or at the very least queen in your own teacup, surrendering to the idea that you just don't know how to fix it is, well, let's just say, not fun. Surrendering doesn't mean giving up, it just means giving way. You have to get your own ideas out of the way in order for new ones to come in. In my life, this often mean surrendering some idea of who I am, in order to get a glimpse of a bigger me.

Trust
We place our trust in many things, including the universe, our pets, our friends, and our lovers. Maybe you trust that things will 'all work out for good' or some other spiritual principle. Whatever you chose to trust is up to you, the one thing I know you can trust, always? Your own inner guidance. When that channel is clear it is never leading you astray. It might take you in a direction you don't like, but that's another matter!

Willingness
Oh, you have to be willing to change, to move, to be different, to let go of what you thought would be. Willingness is the oil that greases all the wheels. Willingness to try the new, to step when you can't see forward very far, and willingness to fail - help you take it all less personally. And that's a good thing.

For more on this topic listen to the radio show from January 15th with Lynne Klippel