Well Within, Elese's Blog

Underestimating yourself?

11/13/2013

Do you underestimate yourself? It's kinda sneaky how that happens.

We underestimate ourselves when we accept limitations and don't notice. Our assumptions go invisible on us. They stop looking like assumptions and simply look like the truth. We then act accordingly.

Personally I know that I have at times hugely underestimated myself. I only saw how invisible this was when kind friends pointed it out to me. But it's not easy to hear. Ever witnessed someone defending their limitations? Maybe you even tried to talk them out of it when they asserted they aren't "the kind of person who..." or "tried but can't..."

I don't have any trouble calling to mind someone I know who can't quite see for themselves just how attractive, strong, capable, loving or giving they are.

A quote attributed to Henry Ford is

Whether you think you can
or whether you think you can't
either way
you are right

A nice way of saying we LIVE what we think and we do not realize that we are the thinker. This is why we become blind to our constructs, assume whatever we think is true and why we hate being challenged about it.

The whole package that makes up what I call "myself" is only a mystery to one person: Me. And it's amazing how wrong we can be about our own base assumptions of who we are.

Underestimating yourself always arises from who you assume you are.

The question "who am I?" deserves more airplay than we give it. Not only are we not entertaining the question, we seem to be moving away from contemplative traditions in which these kinds of questions mattered. We no longer engage in pure inquiry. Are we so intolerant of mystery that we would rather be wrong than not know something.

The price we pay for this is to be overly-engaged in our assumptions. And from the assumption that there is something fundamentally limited about us arises the desire to improve who we are.

Why improve who you think you are when you can simply look to see who you really are "before" the personality arrived that you call YOU.

"Who am I" or better said, "What is I?" are invitations to peek underneath the construct of ourselves, beyond the false self that we made up and just see. What came before the thoughts of "I."

I have come to appreciate these contemplations, and to enjoy following where they lead.

Are you the limited person you think you are? What if you are not?

This self I call me seems nothing more than a bouquet of thoughts, rather than facts. I call them me, but really they are air. They are concepts -- ideas that have nothing to do with who I am or what I am capable of -- if I weren't so interested in what I think about myself.

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.

About Life, Crazy Thoughts and "Evil" Forces

4/26/2013

I recently made a new Facebook friend named Kristian --who you are about to meet. Kristian friended me, I asked him why and we began talking about The Three Principles. Messaging back and forth.

Lead by his thoughtful questions, Kristian and I reflected together about "the voices in our heads," obsessive thoughts, why we all get scared and how we stay safe.

I asked him if I could share our chat here on the blog. He said yes. At first I thought I would edit this to be shorter, but I've decided not to. So...

Here is the unedited dialogue between this wise fellow and myself exploring the nature of thought in the context of The Three Principles.

Kristian Thalin
A question, do you think there are "evil" forces that can control peoples action or is all that just thought?

For example, sometimes people do these really bad things and say stuff like "that was a voice in my head that told me to do it" ... Therefore I thought that is very scary for me at times. "What if I suddenly ..." and then the worst possible thing that I can come up with like kill someone etc..

Have you ever met one with these kind of unwanted almost obsessive thoughts? If so, what makes you think they become obsessive when you don't even want them in the first place... This is where I get confused with our "free" will.
Thank you Elese,
All my love,
Kristian

Elese Coit
Hi Kristian,
How wonderful to meet you. What a thoughtful place to reflect. Here is what I have found most helpful to know about thought. See how this lands for you and let me know.

1. Everyone has every kind of thought.
The most beautiful to the most terrible. The Principles do not say you will not have "evil" or "obsessive" types of thoughts. They say: you will feel the content of your thinking, whatever it is.
Notice in your own life and see if this is true.

2. Everyone has had and continues to have (daily!!) thoughts that they ignore.
We ignore "I could eat that whole cake!" even though we have the thought. So, we do know how to let thoughts come without making them a big deal (even awful ones) and simply allow them to pass. I find that is nice to remember about ourselves.
If you can find one example in your experience, you have established that thought cannot take you over. That is what I call free will.

3. When thoughts come alive in our 5-senses, we feel them very intensely and in full 3-D.
This feels compelling, true and real. And it is. However, most people feel compelled to do something about them to stop the feeling. That means they will act on the outside of themselves in order to get rid of a feeling they don't like: strike out, get revenge, eat the cake... etc. Most people will do this and will truly feel they had no choice to do anything else. Now this is going to sound a bit tricky, but see if you can see that makes sense to people -- but only if feelings are coming from outside of us! (Which they are not).

So here is the REAL KEY: Once you know that your feelings are coming from thinking, and reflect the content of thinking alone, you do not need to act on the outside world in an attempt to rid yourself of a feeling. The more you understand where the feeling is coming from, the less you need to do "out there" to resolve it. (In fact, the less you need to do to resolve it at all. That includes improving on yourself.)

4. Remember, all feelings WILL and in fact MUST change. It is the nature of feelings. There is nothing you can do to stop yourself getting a new idea (and the feeling that will go with it) at any point.

If you want to test out number 4 for yourself, try to take one feeling, any feeling maybe anger or rage and see what you would have to do to keep that feeling going -without a break in the feeling at all.

Most people cannot last one minute with a single feeling. Within seconds they are thinking "I'm hungry" or "how long have I been doing this?" and the feeling they are trying to sustain will simply subside.

This shows you just how much natural feelings are moving along with the thoughts behind them.

So how does this help you to trust that is what is happening and know that it is the Principles that keep you safe, not the content of your thinking?
Love,
Elese

Elese Coit

P.S. and YES, just last week I was totally enraged and wanted to hit someone. I told a friend of mine in the Domestic Violence prevention unit, I could totally see how wives beat husbands and husbands beat wives. I could easily have been one in that red hot moment.

Luckily, I told her, "The Principles kept ME safe because I know what is happening to me -- what they did not do was keep me "safe" from having the thought in the first place!"
Does that make sense?

Kristian Thalin

Elese, all I can say right now is WOW! I acually found myself smiling with a deep sense of relief as I was reading your answer - thank you so much!

What you say just make perfect sense Elese, becouse if we think that our emotions really comes from something or someone then there is no wounder that one might think that we are controlled by something, when we in fact are feeling our own thinking! Thank you for helping me see that
Im starting to realize more and more that there can't simply be any "evil", it's rather a absense of god! In the same way that cold is the absense of heat and darkness is the absense of lightness like Einstein was on about. The way you came across with it made it very clear to me!

For me it feels like that the more we start see our true identity, the less scary our thinking gets simply becouse we just think we need to feel fearfull of it. I mean just look at a little baby, it does not get scared of spiders or snakes or even the most brutal horror movie becouse they don't even know what it is! It's all conditioning!

Or am I all lost when I say that we are learned to fear most things that we are scared of Elese?

Elese Coit

Kristian,
Glad to be in this reflection with you

As to your last question, here is what I think we learned: we all learned to "attribute." We had a feeling, looked for the reason for it, and then just pointed to something outside ourselves and said, "this made me feel ..."

We learned to attribute this way because no one knew any different. I certainly didn't before I came across the Principles and began to reflect on what they mean in practice...

So what we attribute to is random. Which makes sense because no one is afraid of the same things right? It's kind of amazing if you think about it, that we have never noticed this is the reason!!

Anyway, my favorite way of talking about this is "No one can make you feel ...X"* Nothing can make you feel it, but you can attribute feeling to something and believe yourself. That's not something wrong with us, it's just a misunderstanding...

does that help as you reflect on your question?
Love,
Elese

*(With thanks to Mara Gleason who put that on the white board when teaching at Supercoach)

Kristian Thalin

Elese,
First of all I want you to know that your amazing kindness and wisdom means so much to me

The way you explained how we "attribute" makes perfect sense to me! I can really see how this missunderstanding makes one think that there is something wrong with us, when in fact there is nothing wrong at all!

Elese, what do you do when you get caught up with negative feelings from your thoughts?

Sometime I find myself feeling sad but I could not identify what kind of thought that caused it and I tend to get into this strange gap between stress and wellbeing.

Once again thank you Elese!
Love,
Kristian

Elese Coit

Hi Kristian,
Hm, a question on this one ... tell me, why would you want to "identify" the thought that caused the feeling?
Love,
Elese

Kristian Thalin

Hi Elese,
It's funny how we give meaning to meaningless things. The moment I read your response a statement made by Einstein came up in my head:
"Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts."

Identifying the thought that caused the feeling would be like identifying the tiny object on the road that caused a flat tire on a bike. Focusing on that object will not do me much good...

I guess we're so used to focus on our mistakes so our habitual thinking kicks in.

Anyway, thank you Elese for questioning my thought and helping me look at it from a new angle!
Love,
Kristian

Elese Coit

Wonderful. No one could say it better. Even Einstein.

Hey Kristian, I'd love to share some of our conversation on my next blog. Would you be happy with that. I can remove your name and such -- I just think everyone has these questions and it's a comfort to people to know that everyone else does. We often feel we are the only ones, and everyone else "gets it" -- never the case!

What do you think?

I could send you a draft before publishing if that would be helpful.
Love,
Elese

Kristian Thalin

Dear Elese,
Thank you so much and it would be a honour for me to be part of your blog! You can use my name if you want. Im grateful and excited about the possibility to help others find food for thought in our journey in this amazing gift of life!

Once again thank you so much Elese for all the loving kindness and wisdom you've given me and so many others with all awesome things that you do!
All my love!
Namaste!
Kristian

With immense gratitude to Kristian for allowing me to share this dialogue. *bows* We may be individual thinkers living in our individual worlds, but in this sense we Are all in this together!

With or Against The Flow of Life?

4/12/2012

There is nothing to practice. To know yourself, be yourself. To be yourself, stop imagining yourself to be this or that. Just be. Let your true nature emerge.
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Have you ever watched a pelican dive? It will circle high above the ocean and then make a gliding turn for an accelerated downward dive, landing with a huge spray of water.

Today as I watched the pelicans dive it struck me how they never miss their water entry. It is always a perfectly executed turn, drop and splash. I've never once seen a pelican "blow it" landing in a belly flop or forgetting to pull it's wings in before hitting the wall of water. The beach is noticeably not littered with pelicans with broken wings and head injuries. Although anyone who has ever miscalculated a dive into a pool knows, missing your water entry is painful and can be fatal.

In the pelican world today, thousands of birds will make perfect entries and bob back to the surface unharmed.

Yet, unlike humans, the pelican has not practiced 10,000 hours until they reached mastery in order to accomplish this complex set of maneuvers. They didn't study, take exams or get diving certificates. They just know. They just dive. They pull their wings into the perfect formation at the perfect moment because it is what they are born to do.

Out of the egg, straight to the natural self.

Every creature on earth is the same in this respect.

So what about us human beings?

We humans are a part of the same natural world. Do we not also have a natural self that is perfectly made to do what it is made to do? I wonder why it doesn't seem that way to us ...

What is the natural (magnificent) self of a human being?

Why do I experience life as if I am motoring under my own steam, a separate entity making its way through life on willpower and acquisition instead of an integral flowing part of the natural universe, clinging to nothing?

"Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin" (Matthew)

Why doesn't it seem like that for us?

Why don't I experience natural me in the flow of life without the struggle?

Shouldn't all beings have the same endowments -- the ability to be perfect in relation to their surroundings without needing a PhD to do so?

Two Myths:
Life stops if we withdraw personal effort, attention and control.
Without effort nothing happens.

We believe that we are the actors, movers and shakers of each minute of our lives. We also seem to think that we took our foot off the pedal, released the grip on the steering wheel and let go of making life happen -- our lives would slow down to an unbearable snail's pace. We think we would deflate as if we were punctured balloons.

But are we really making life happen?

Many times I've had people tell me that their greatest fear is that if they become too happy or too content, they will no longer want to do anything. Really? Without the push to achieve, to get and to do you'd would just turn into a marshmallow and stop going to work? Some think they will turn into a slug within a month or perhaps just eat and eat and eat until they explode.

Two Truths:
In the natural world no animal ever eats itself to death.
No animal thinks it needs to be worthy.

No purpose, no goals and no savings -- will he be OK?

It is interesting to consider just how much life is in motion and how much we are part of it. Despite what we may think.

Look how during your life you've often been lifted along for the ride. I question that any of us has the kind of control that our daily choices and actions imply.

When a parent tells a child to get an education there are assumptions about how education paves the way for a better life. What I noticed in my life is that although I quit university and was a chef for most of my 20s while I traveled and wrote poetry -- I went back to school and then completed my bachelor's and an M.A. in less than 4 years. Because I had learned 3 languages in the process I then became a Conference Interpreter at the European Parliament. My life was unfolding perfectly for me. I didn't make or plan any of it. I was along for the ride.

In fact I've been along for the ride for every major life event I can think of, including the birth of my daughter.

When we are sick, the body knows how to heal. When we are unsure or can't make a decision, life doesn't throw up its hands in desperation and then drive off without us. It moves on and takes us with it no matter what we say or think -- decisions get made for us all the time.

I was reading some of the stories in "The Pioneer Woman Cooks, Recipes from an accidental country girl" a cookbook written by unlikely city gal who meets rural cowboy, gets married and then writes cookbooks because "Cowboys don't each sushi." A perfect life, I'd say, unfolding despite her other plans! And she wouldn't have it any other way.

What can we take from this?

It is difficult to imagine human life taking place "naturally" without the momentum of our personal effort and planning. Our very concept of how life operates for humans as opposed to other creatures seems, in itself, to remove us from the natural rhythm of life.

How might it be helpful to us to conceive that humans too might be part of a flow that moves, contains and ultimately holds us?

It seems to me that the natural world is showing us something true about ourselves if we would listen a bit more closely.

So what would it be like to live in that flow?

Mirror, Mirror, Why Don't I Love Me?

4/6/2012

What is Self-Love?

Why the ways we try to love ourselves do not work and why it's so much easier than we think...

Generally speaking we all believe it's a good thing to appreciate who we are and not be too hard on ourselves. We get that on some level, it's important at least like ourselves somewhat. After all, we wake up with ourselves every day for the whole of our lives and it's tough to put up with the constant presence of someone you mildly detest.

When it was first suggested that I might need to practice to learn to love myself, I was told to look in the mirror everyday and repeat "I'm beautiful! I am fabulous! I am loved!" over and over until I could feel it.

I've written about using affirmations and I've taught visualization and visioning and I've nothing against them. Affirmations in particular are always intended to have a positive effect. And frankly I can't see how saying "I love you" to yourself could have a negative effect. I have simply noticed that most people, affirmations well in hand, still find it difficult to love themselves and accept love from others. So I started wondering about that.

I came up with a simple reason why affirmations don't work to love ourselves. We are trying to love the wrong thing.

When look to our personalities, which are constructs that we have built over time, pretty much everyone finds it difficult to see their innate value and lovability. We have spent so much time trying to be deserving; it's impossible to see that we are deserving just because we are here.

So stop trying to love your "persona." Personas are not lovable. They are a mask over our true nature. It is no wonder why positive affirmations don't help people. We are desperately trying to love the mask.

"Learning to love the personality you've built in order to interface with the world is a waste of your time" (101 New Pairs of Glasses Chapter on Self-Care)

We need to look beyond the construct, beyond what we have got used to seeing in the mirror and identifying as "me." We are not these personas and masks that we wear. We are not our stories about ourselves. We are something else.

What are we?
Who are we?

What experience do you have of who you are beyond the body and beyond the daily self-chatter?
Do you believe you are broken?
Do you think that although you arrived as a baby perfectly and beautifully made to live your life, that somehow you inner self got taken away from you, dashed to the ground and shattered?

As we look past and beyond the mirror, it may sound slightly esoteric, but really you do have a very real awareness of this. Otherwise you would not know you are talking to yourself. You can only know that because there is something that is you that can observe "you." Aside from this, you'll also recognize that you are are picking up non-physical, or beyond physical information all the time. What is that? How do you know someone can be trusted, for example, when only you've just met them? What sense is picking up on that? What are you picking up on? The fact is that we look beyond the persona that people present to us all the time in everyday life.

Seeing beyond bodies, beyond forms is not as difficult as we make it out to be. And at the same time it is the hardest challenge we face.

Notice times when you have been able to reach beyond what someone is saying or doing and see their essence as a human being. Times will soon come when you can see your own more clearly.

If you are not entirely fooled by what is looking back at you.

No Longer Trapped By Circumstances

3/23/2012

Turn the mind inward and cease thinking of yourself as the body; thereby you will come to know that the self is ever happy. Neither grief nor misery is experienced in this state
--Sri Ramana Maharshi

I hope you had a chance to catch the radio show, The Human Spirit Rises with testimonies of hope, transformation and recovery from addiction and difficult circumstances.

Circumstances seem to have us so very trapped don't they? They come in the form our own habits and compulsions as well as in the ways other people seem to be able to step on our lives, interrupt our peace of mind and just generally create havoc in our world.

Even though we can see that no thing can truly make us happy, it is much harder to see clearly that no thing, person or circumstance has the power to ruin us. For me to have any sense that this is true in my life, I am often questioning the power of things.

How does a diagnosis have the power to make us fearful?
How is stress created in us?
How does someone disappearing from your life create sadness in you?

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying these feelings don't or shouldn't happen. But I do spend time reflecting on how sadness, stress and fear arise within me. What is the mechanism? How does it work?

It may seem like thinking about such questions is pointless. That pain is just pain and sadness just is. And that's it. All I suggest is that for any of you reading who do work with others, this is a rich field for inquiry. Those of us who coach and work powerfully with people who are suffering and in pain, must reflect deeply on the true sources of pain and the means by which humans experience their troubles. If we do not, we can't help people as much or as well.

The closer we look at human feelings and all human experience, the more we notice a simple truth: that all people simply feel whatever they are thinking in the moment. Even the past and the future are experienced as thoughts in the moment. They cannot be experienced in either the past or the future, for obvious reasons.

So all life is made of thought. All thought comes to life within us. The truth about everyone who has a human body is that the nature and depth of pain and suffering arises in the present moment through our present moment thinking. And through nothing else.

I consider the work I do to be the work of liberating people not only from the depressing cycle of having things on the outside make us miserable, but also to free souls to be happy regardless of all the things we try to acquire, resolve or make disappear so that we can experience being satisfied and fulfilled. It seems to me that I am teaching people how to live an uncontingent life. (To the extent that I go first!)

I just cannot think of anything more important.

You Are More Than You Think

3/16/2012

The ego is the sum total of all your smallest ideas about yourself - Robert Holden

As challenges come along in life I notice we are often rush out to meet them in our weakest and most frightened states. Perhaps we've gotten so used to being harried, tired and behind the eight ball that we don't even notice we've rallied up our most inadequate capacities and gone straight out to try to resolve our most important issues.

I have been thinking about the resiliency of the Human Spirit and as I reflected on the nature of all of our "spirit" a rather dis-spiriting idea occurred to me. How many times have I had an important decision, a delicate conversation or a really tough life challenge, and allowed myself to try to resolve it using my poorest mindset? The answer was, unfortunately, many times!

Examples of what I mean:

agreeing to have "the talk" about your relationship when you are tired or have been drinking
standing up to confront a co-worker about a bad habit while thinking "that was the last straw!"
correcting or disciplining children in the heat of anger
talking to the boss after you've already missed the deadline and haven't slept well

What I'd emphasize in each of these examples is not the situations or the physical states, but rather the mental states.

It is common to all of us to lose our way, lose our temper and address issues when we know that our our mental capacities are on low ebb. Everyone can get stretched and find themselves with less of their normal abilities in any given moment.

Of course it would be great to say that we could recognize this is the case in advance and then be sensible enough not to "go for it." But the very real problem with this is that it is precisely in your poorest mental state that you are least likely to listen to your very good sense.

So is there any good end to this cycle?

As it turns out, there is ...