Tis the Season - to Revisit Old Stuff?

The festive season is upon us, and there is a Ram Dass quote that seems to sum up the personal development perspective - “If you think you are so enlightened, go and spend a week with your parents!” 

I was looking to give some practical advice for psychological prosperity during this period, but on researching the quote, I found that Eckhart Tolle has already done that eloquently.  So for our final post of 2011, I will simply pass on his sage advice…

“Most people (and some or even most of your family members fit this description) are largely unaware of their ego and its totalitarian control over every aspect of their life.  The ego loves to complain and condemn.  These are often two favourite family pastimes when they get together for an extended family visit.  One of your jobs is to be aware of when this happens and choose either not to participate in it, to bring the subject to a more positive and meaningful conversation, or to point out the pointlessness of complaining and judging.  What you choose will depend on you and what you feel comfortable with.

Your sense of who you are within your family system determines what you perceive as your needs and what matters to you in life – and whatever matters to you will have the power to upset and disturb you.  So you may want to ask yourself the question: “What are the things that upset and disturb me?”  If small things have the power to disturb you, then who you think you are is exactly that: small.  That will be your unconscious belief.

What are the small things?  Ultimately all things are small things because all things are transient.

If you have been doing inner work for some time, a visit with your family is an excellent opportunity to discover how well you have done.  You will easily identify the areas where you have made significant progress.  You will also see where your weaknesses still lie.

The relationship with your parents is not only the primordial relationship that sets the tone for all subsequent relationships, it is also a good test for your degree of Presence.  The more shared past there is in a relationship, the more present you need to be; otherwise, you will be forced to relive the past again and again.

Many who are on a path of awakening choose to avoid contact with their parents or family members. This can be helpful, if the intentions are truly good and not a pattern of avoidance.

As you spend time with your family, don't expect that you will be the perfect embodiment of all you have learned and integrated.  You will be put to the test day after day, moment by moment.  This is normal.  You will gain the most from this experience if you don't take it too seriously, if you don't create impossible standards for your conduct of behaviour, if you try so hard to be Present and Still that you behave like a robot, if you withdraw into a cocoon of self-protection, or if you blame your family members for every little imperfect act from the past that harmed you in some way.

Instead, and above all, choose to relax, reduce your expectations for what may or may not happen, expect little skirmishes, disagreements, moments of humility or failure, and the distance you may feel with your family as a whole, knowing that you are trying to move beyond the ego patterns that have been impediments to your soul and that they care less about ego and Presence and even Truth.

Love and accept them where they're at.  Have compassion for their pain.  Be observant while being engaged as guilelessly as possible.  Watch yourself and your reactions, out of curiosity, not judgment or blame, but for the benefit of learning how and where you're really at in your spiritual evolution.”

You may even offer someone a VitallyMe Personal Development Guide to help them better manage those unique qualities they keep on showing you at family gatherings ;-)

…And from the VitallyMe team, have psychologically prosperous Christmas and a spiritually abundant New Year.

Stand and Deliver!

What would you do, or not do, for money?  It is a question we all face sooner or later when times get tough, but paradoxically focusing on money is then exactly the wrong thing to do.

Counterintuitive it is, but to understand why it’s such a bad idea, let’s look at why we are paid at all.  Is it to do a job or to exchange value?  At work we might presume that someone values what we do because we do get paid.  But the attitude of being paid to do a job limits the experience to one of survival – and the result is that we usually just make enough to get by.  People sometimes try to justify that situation with statements like “I work to live – I don’t live to work!”  But with 40 – 50 hours a week on the job, another 50 or so hours asleep, travel time and personal maintenance, that adds up to a pretty poor deal with life. 

The attitude of value exchange opens up a world of new possibilities – for personal fulfilment, for making a difference that you consider worthwhile, and for making serious money – not for what you do, but for who you are becoming. 

So whether or not you are employed in the regular sense, here is a formula for being paid more and in a bigger sense, creating more abundance.  Don't work harder – or smarter – just add more value!  Yes, I know – that's just one of those feel-good facilitator platitudes that have about as much impact as a daily calendar quotation.  But my middle name is “practical application” – so let's see how we can make it real!  You need only grasp four principles to benefit from a value-exchange attitude…

Let's consider the basics first.  How is your pay rate determined?  Ultimately it's simply supply and demand.  If you add a value that a million other people can add relative to the demand for that skill-set then your pay will be comparatively low – basically you're easy to replace.  If you add a value that few others can add relative to the demand then your pay will be comparatively high – and you will have much more choice of employment as well.  Yet at the same time, if your heart is not in your work it soon becomes physically and mentally and emotionally draining.  So the esoteric ideal is to be able do what you love doing, and have that add a value that is in high demand.  Esoteric perhaps, but nevertheless it exposes the first principle – “It’s all about value – and it’s only about value”.  

To ground that principle requires an understanding of just what constitutes “value”.  Gold is only valuable because enough people agree that it is.  So the second principle is “Value is not intrinsic – it exists only in the mind of the beholder”, and in the willingness of collective beholders to exchange money for that value.  Therefore we need to discover what lies in the minds of the beholders.  It is quite unlikely that the beholder’s values will match what exists in your own mind – that's why markets exist.  So, how can you probe those minds?  Asking them is risky because customers don't generally know what they want – they simply make choices between various offerings.  No one asked for the iPad to be invented; no one asked for a global Facebook network.  In other words, you need to “run it up the flagpole and see who salutes it”.  That's how real-world value is discovered.

The third principle is “The greatest value you can create is by doing what you love best”.  To add a value that is not in keeping with your heart's deepest desire will be draining and unfulfilling, even if you do get paid.  But it's not about being naive – it’s about discovering the real-world value in what you are passionate about – and packaging it in a deliverable form.  If you are a human being then there are others out there, not far away, who need what you have to offer, who need to know what you have learnt, who need to find what you have found in life, or who are seeking what you are seeking.  That's not usually hard to define after some supportive and objective feedback, but the next step can be a bit tricky!

The fourth principle is “Create and package your value-add in a deliverable form – and then deliver it”.  Some people are good at creating value but not at delivering it.  Others are not so good at creating but they are good at delivering – that is, at selling someone else's value creation.  There’s an obvious opportunity for cooperative effort but the best opportunity for your growth and your personal success lies in learning to master both skills.  This was a painful lesson for me – I spent 10 self-funded years doing what I loved best – creating a product that I was sure every large company would embrace because of its huge and innovative value add.  But it failed to deliver value in the minds of those who put personal success ahead of holistic organisational development – a very big ouch!  In hindsight it was an obvious mistake.

When we get to the “I will do anything for money” stage we've all but lost our way, because then we are likely to attempt to extract money without adding any value.  That's when we’re likely to be tempted to invest in the get-rich-quick schemes, take risks with shonky deals or start using friends as sales targets, and then the problem of diminishing value goes into a downwards spiral.  It's at these times we need to be even clearer about our value-add and focus on that more strongly than ever.

So here is a scenario that will help you get all the ducks in a row.  Quit your job – or at least imagine quitting your job.  If you don't currently have a job, all the better!  Now imagine you have no money – your investments have evaporated – your possessions have lost almost all their value.  If you don’t currently have any money, all the better!  (BTW this is more a global prediction than an imagining!)

Now, don't ask yourself “How can I survive?” Instead, consider the above four principles from that fresh, clean perspective, at that very time when your gut tells you otherwise.  You might just discover who you really are and the truly amazing value you add by showing up! 

… and yes, I do run workshops!  And I would love to hear about your learning experiences in creating abundance for yourself or others.

Your VitallyMe Personal Development Guide identifies ‘treadmills’ and how to get off them.  Staying stuck on a treadmill can limit your transition across the four principles outlined above, so if you’re having any difficulty with that, who you gunna call?

The Importance of Retaliation

“An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” is mostly misinterpreted as a call for revenge.  But in fact this statement is entirely in keeping with building genuine self-respect and healthy community.  To the tribes of the Old Testament (as well as people of tribal consciousness today), breaking of trust – getting hurt physically or having their ‘honour’ dented – stirred strong emotions for self-righteous revenge and escalated feuds that continued for generations.  “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” was more likely a call for restraint – a call to limit revenge to the tit-for-tat rule that ants demonstrate to work so well.  Without the tit-for-tat rule the conflict can only escalate and perpetuate – just watch the daily news for examples.  But let’s look deeper…

Trust is broken when some other entity fails to act according to our hopes, expectations or more often, our assumptions.  That inevitably stirs old emotions in us.  Yet we can't actually be let down emotionally – it takes some action (or lack of action) on the part of others to trigger the emotional response which is truly our own.  So that ancient call to our tribal nature is actually a call to manage our emotional responses – not to suppress them and not to indulge them – but to integrate on the emotional level by meeting the other party on the energetic terms that they created.  This builds mutual self-respect and encourages healthy community to develop.  It’s a call for personal development 101!  So how can we apply it to daily experiences?

When trust leads to getting hurt, one should retaliate “in kind”.  Most often the energetic form of the hurt will be the one most natural to the perpetrator, and therefore the one in which they can best appreciate equality and respect. 

So the physical bully needs to be met on that level because that's what he or she respects.  Get a ‘big brother’ to help if necessary and hand back what was meted out – but no more.  That will get respect.  What won’t get respect is punishment invoked by an authority according to rules that the perpetrator never agreed to.  For someone who steps into the world putting emotions (impulse) or actions (power) first, (which accounts for the vast majority of school children and about 80% of the adult population), being punished according to the law doesn't gain respect – it only gains immediate submission and a determination not to be caught in future.  For someone who steps into the world putting thinking (intellect) first (about 20% of the population), rules are of fundamental importance.

If the breaking of trust involves damage to your reputation, then confront that person directly - with the integrity of your reputation. 

If the breaking of trust involves a faulty product or service that the vendor will not make good then make that poor service public knowledge – that is handing the same energy back. 

If the breaking of trust involves a business or financial agreement then public exposure or recourse to the law might be the appropriate energetic response. 

If the breaking of trust involves matters in those messy areas of family alliances and secrets, then remember that ‘being heard’ and actually hearing the other people as equals, is where the respect and equality lies, even though sibling rivalry and lifelong survival patterns may lurk at the core.

In each case, even though the energy may be different, the principle is the same – to retaliate in kind, and no more, is the key to building robust respect and genuine equality.  Through the lens of personal development, “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” means facing up to the lesson that the situation has presented to you.  To do anything else is to choose not to grow from the experience.  Once the lesson is learned there is of course no obligation to continue in that relationship – but you could choose to move it on to another level if you desired.

Yes, but what about “turning the other cheek”?  That’s the potential of step 4 of the trust exercise – “re-trust”.  See the last blog “A Matter of Trust” for all four steps.  It’s another (often misinterpreted) call for integration, but it's a more sophisticated lesson that can only be mastered after mutual respect has been handled.  “Turning the other cheek” is about integrating the Will – it's not about being a wuss – it's about developing real choice in your actions.  When built on top of mutual respect it's about moving forward rather than dwelling on the past.  And we can only let go of the past through emotional integration.  And just as it takes Will power to manage emotions, it takes Thinking power to manage the Will.

Your own VitallyMe Personal Development Guide will highlight aspects of life that you have already mastered and those that you may still be working on.  Deciding to jump off a ‘treadmill’ is an excellent opportunity to put the four-step trust exercise into practice.  Or perhaps you know someone else who should?