(beingthere) Dynamics

When someone raises his or her voice to you, do you automatically raise your voice in return? Or do you get quiet, or sarcastic? Everyone has patterns of feeling certain emotions that are followed automatically by specific behaviors. The behaviors are called reactions. The patterns, of emotion and behavior together, are called dynamics. Since dynamics are the result of specific imprints in your unconscious, they indicate much about your issues. If you want to undertake the work of dealing effectively with your issues, then you must learn to see your dynamics. This is what begins the inward journey.

While you are able to see and identify some of your dynamics on your own, most of your dynamics are in your blind spot. Becoming aware of your dynamics, and being able to use them to deal with your issues, is easier with the help of a trained partner. This partner must repeatedly call your attention to dynamics as they occur. You begin to develop awareness of your dynamics through repetition of attention.

This is risky for the partner. You will need to make a sincere choice that you want this information, that you want your partner to point out your dynamics when they are apparent, and that you will be willing to deal with whatever emerges when this occurs. This is how you make it safe for your partner to help with your self-discovery.

This partner needs to be someone who has frequent interaction with you, and is trained to recognize dynamics as they occur and how to communicate this in a non-threatening manner. This partner can see the places you cannot see and can call your attention to the dynamics you might otherwise miss.

This can be a friend, a parent or a spouse. Very few people are trained in the emotional aspect, however, so it is rare that these nonprofessionals in your life can be helpful, until they are adequately trained. Usually a professional counselor is required to assist you in seeing your dynamics. Most well-trained counselors can easily see dynamics, and will focus on those that cause the greatest difficulty in your life. A good marriage counselor will also train spouses to help each other identify dynamics. This is an important step in being able to deal effectively with issues in a marriage.

Knowing and seeing your dynamics is the intermediary step between effectively dealing with your issues and having seemingly random experiences in life. When you begin to see the patterns, your eyes are opened to the potential of a divine design to your personal growth.

©2005, 2004 BEing There Enlightenment Systems, Inc.

Mick Quinn : Shadow

A series on the shadow:
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Part 4) For those of you who are interested in living as an awakened person, it is good to know that it is possible to go beyond an incomplete sense of self, but only temporarily.
This means that you have spiritual experiences and for a short while you can be free from emotional and psychological suffering. You will, however, drop back to 'normal' sooner or later.

Why is this?

The Shadow!

Unconscious motives are untouched by meditation or spiritual experiences, therefore, should you not reintegrate the denied or repressed aspects of yourself, they will eventually emerge in your actions and you will find that there is little you can do about that. This is why old patterns are hard to break. Therefore, laying claim to the symptoms of the shadow is the key to your liberation.

(beingthere) 12. Issues

All of your lessons in life, that eventually lead you to your Enlightenment, are presented to you in the context of individual issues. These are specific situations that need to be dealt with, if you are to learn the lesson imbedded within.

You know an issue is present when you feel a sense of disharmony. This disharmony may be identified as anxiety, anger, frustration, hopelessness, futility, loneliness, inadequacy or any number of emotions that are experienced as "negative" by you. You may feel a shortness of breath, tightness in your stomach, anus or feet, or tension in the muscles of your back, neck, jaw or hands. The physical expressions of this disharmony can be as numerous as the emotional expressions.

Learning to be aware of the disharmony you feel is the key to knowing when to change focus and get to work. If you miss the disharmony then you miss this opportunity to grow. But you are never excused from the work needed to learn your lessons. If you miss the disharmony, you merely create the need for the lesson to present itself in a more dramatic fashion, in order to get your attention. All lessons come to you in a succession of progressively dramatic situations: first, a whisper; then, a tap; followed by a knock, and a pounding. Until, eventually, you create a situation that hits you over the head with the proverbial large stick to get your attention.

Issues are merely the alarm system that signals your need for growth in the moment. The intensity of the alarm is determined by your awareness of disharmony and your willingness to deal with what you feel. There is nothing inherently wrong with you when you feel an issue coming up. Everyone has issues! Avoidance of your issues, when they present themselves, or denial that you have issues, will result in increasingly greater drama ( emotional pain). Willingness to feel what you feel, and willingness to deal with what you feel, will allow you relatively painless growth opportunities.

The same set of issues in you will show up differently in the spectrum of situations in your life. Knowing what your issues are gives you the power to see them and deal with them the instant they arise, and even to anticipate them before they arise. By studying your dynamics, you will be able to know your issues. The next chapter will start you in the study of dynamics.


©2005, 2004 BEing There Enlightenment Systems, Inc.

(being there) Lessons

Chapter 11.

While an issue is the disharmonious experience you have of a situation, and requires specific skills to discover, claim and enact your Personal Truth, a lesson is the broader application of what you learn from an issue. The issues are indicators of when a lesson is present. The lessons are the steps needed for your growth. When you deal with an issue, you have settled a situation to the point where you no longer feel disharmony. When you learn the lessons imbedded in an issue, you no longer need to re-experience that same issue. Knowing and continuously addressing current lessons in your life, can often preclude the need to create specific issues.

Learning to identify lessons is an advanced emotional skill. It can only occur through consistent use of the basic emotional skills. You learn to see lessons by recognizing the patterns in your issues. You must be able to deal with your issues effectively as they arise, before you can make sense of the patterns.

At every level of consciousness, there are many lessons to be learned. Someday we might be able to catalog these lessons. But even if there was a comprehensive list of the lessons everyone would eventually need to face at each level of consciousness, there would be no predicting which lesson you would need to face at any given stage in development. Personal growth is personal. You learn through your own inner experience, not by studying a cognitive report of inner experience. There is not now, nor could there ever be, a sequential curriculum that is the same for everyone.

To fully understand this concept of lessons, you must ponder your beliefs about the nature of life. Who says there are lessons? Who determined these lessons? How are learning situations set up? Who says you must learn them? What happens if you refuse to learn? How long do you have to complete the learning process? And so on… These are profound questions of faith.

To learn lessons, in the pursuit of Higher Consciousness and Enlightenment, you must also challenge your faith, simultaneously undertaking the lessons on another aspect of being. You do not need to practice advanced emotional skills until you have mastered the basic emotional skills. In fact, you will not be able to do so. But you can begin to see how, when you raise the skill level of your emotional aspect, your consciousness will rise to the next least developed aspect and demand that you learn additional skills there too. Next, the issue of “issues.”

©2005, 2004 BEing There Enlightenment Systems, Inc.--

(thesouljourney) Female Creative Energy

Creation is always happening and you can be an active participant in it. The energy of creation itself, which can also be called life-giving, is traditionally considered to be feminine, except perhaps by the modern western religions of Judaism, Islam and Christianity.

Female energy gives life while male energy orders and arranges things after the life is given. Since we are all both female and male we have the capability of doing both. Very often we tend to neglect one or the other side of our nature, and typically it is the female side.

To give life is to create, which means to give of oneself. If it were only a one-way giving then one would be depleted. When a woman is pregnant she receives a great deal of energy from other levels in order to be able to continue giving to the new life that is being created within her.

Whenever one gives in a selfless way one also receives. The act of creation is always a two-way flow. The creator is not only creating but is being created at the same time. This we can call co-creation - being created and creating in the same act.

The female energy always has two characteristics to identify it:

1. It is receptive; it is open to receive; it is magnetic and attractive.

2. It is radiant; it gives of itself.

In order to create or be creative we must use our female energy, being receptive and attracting to ourselves whatever is needed or desired. And then we must give of ourselves according to what is needed or desired. We could say that the purpose of attraction is to give to what or whom is attracted - to love it, to nurture it, to share oneself with it.

When we receive anything, it is life giving to us, even though it comes to us through others and through nature. Life always gives itself through what and whom we relate to. When we give, it is always life giving through us. We are not originators, we are participants in a constant dynamic mystery, co-creators of manifestation.


Exercises:

We can enhance and participate more fully in this creative process by asking ourselves two questions often:

1. What am I giving right now or what do I need to give in this situation, to this person, or to life?
2. What am I receiving right now from this situation, from this person or from life?

(Mick Quinn) Series on Shadow

Although awakening in no way denies your humanity, ninety percent of all emotional responses- be they positive or negative-to another person, a life situation, or simply even a statement, reflect the presence of the shadow in you. The other ten percent is evidence that you are witnessing an event, which is expressing the verity of that instance. It is fine to despise certain qualities of others, but only if you are absolutely certain they are not a mirror image of your own shattered bit of self; the shadow.

An easy way to tell the difference between the ninety percent and the ten percent is that if you are obsessed with positive or negative emotions or qualities of others (life situations, the world) it is likely a snapshot of denied or repressed aspects of yourself: the shadow in you.

(being there) The Pursuit of Higher Consciousness

You cannot go from where you are now directly to Enlightenment. Each level of consciousness is predicated upon the preceding level. This would be akin to standing on top of the mountain without having to make the climb. This trek to the top is referred to as the pursuit of Higher Consciousness. There is no predicting how long this pursuit may take. All you can do is put in the effort, stay on the right path and remember to take satisfaction in the process.

Enlightenment then, is not about reaching the destination. It is about being in the process, always in the process. The pursuit of Higher Consciousness is a continuous process, one that requires constant learning and refinement. As you integrate the skills you learn on each aspect of being, you begin to sense that your world has changed. You are creating different experiences. You are realizing a higher level of consciousness.

However, in practical terms, the pursuit of Higher Consciousness is more about the pursuit, and less about the reward of Higher Consciousness, or even Enlightenment. The pursuit is the only part about which you have any immediate choice. Enlightenment determines your course. Higher levels of consciousness give you markers along the way. But the process you use in your pursuit is the vehicle in which you travel.


The pursuit of Higher Consciousness is the reason for life. It is in this pursuit that you undertake the work of dealing with all of your issues in their myriad manifestations, and thereby learn the lessons they represent. Life is about learning. It is not about arriving. It is not about success. It is not about accumulating. It is not about progeny. It is not about doing the “right” thing. It is not about obeying the rules. It is not about fulfilling any roles, whether set by you or someone else. It is not about pleasing your parents, your family, your church, your community or any other group in which you find yourself.

Life has the single purpose of learning the lessons you need to learn to realize your birthright, Enlightenment, which is a process of realizing ever-greater levels of consciousness.

The pursuit of Higher Consciousness, the process, involves specific skills. These skills enable you to learn the lessons you need to learn in order to grow. In the next chapter, we will talk about what these lessons are and how you go about learning them. We will continue then.

(being there) Seeking

Enlightenment does not occur accidentally, serendipitously or spontaneously. To realize Higher Consciousness, an individual must learn the skills necessary, deal with the issues that arise and integrate the lessons of each level of consciousness. This requires a lifelong process of commitment and focus. Higher Consciousness is realized as you undergo your personal growth.

You can be fully committed to your growth, deal with every issue, and slowly experience the changes that occur. But there are skills that can be used to speed your rate of growth. One way is to continuously throw yourself into the most tumultuous situations you can imagine. If you remain committed to dealing with every issue as it arises, and if you have the skills to do so, then your growth can be increased by arranging to feel more issues, more disruptive issues and more frequent issues. We do not advocate this method. It leads to a life of high drama, frequent crisis and constant disharmony.

The more sophisticated and productive process of undertaking the pursuit of Higher Consciousness with deliberation is referred to as “seeking”. When you seek, you will greatly increase the opportunities for your growth. When you seek, you look for your experience, knowing that it will allow you to claim more of your Personal Truth. When you seek, you are enthusiastic about potential new discoveries. You carry the attitude of an adventurer, one who seeks new environments to which you can journey.

Seeking is a skill. It is a skill that can be continuously improved. It is a proactive skill, rather than reactive. When you seek, you extract possible future lessons imbedded in current issues. As you become increasingly responsible for yourself, you learn to begin seeking your truth before it is required by the events around you.

Being a seeker means you are on a perpetual journey toward higher levels of consciousness. Others around you may or may not understand your pursuit, but you will know with certainty why you continue to seek. Being a seeker has intrinsic value that you will conclude is invaluable, over and above anything else imaginable in life.

Seeking is an advanced form of the pursuit of Higher Consciousness, but before you can run, you must first learn to walk. The pursuit of Higher Consciousness is profound work. We will introduce this next time.

(being there) Awareness

The term “consciousness” has often been misrepresented to mean “mindful,” “deliberate,” “thinking” or even “smart.” These meanings do not include awareness of your unconscious dynamics (patterns of emotion and behavior), and thus they represent a very low level of emotional skill.

Since consciousness has already been defined here, as the level of life skill that is common to all four aspects of being, any representation that does not include higher emotional skills cannot be considered Higher Consciousness. Being mindful simply is not the same as being conscious.
When you are being conscious, you are practicing a set of skills that allow you complete awareness of your inner dynamics, awareness of your Personal Truth, awareness of the responsibility you are claiming, and awareness of the behavior you must choose to be consistent with your truth.

Since you are so fully aware of you, it is much easier to identify the energy of others surrounding you. In the often-confusing mix between you and everyone and everything else, you are able to clearly identify you. This self-awareness fills you with an ease of being and a confidence that you can deal with anything else.

Awareness begins with being willing to feel all that you feel. It is only then that you can process the experience to gain all of the awareness that follows. Awareness of your emotion means feeling it, exploring it, knowing its color and texture and flavor, recognizing nuances, recalling previous experiences that felt like this, remembering your inclination to behave in automatic ways from this emotion and specifically naming it.

This requires exercising certain skills beyond willingness to feel. You will need to develop a habit of journaling about your experience. This will increase your emotional awareness like nothing else can, and is easily the single best awareness skill you can learn. We have seen from thirty years of experience that those who journal grow at a rate many times faster than those who do not.

Using the forum, BEingThere.net, is a way of "group journaling" that also increases your rate of growth. We have seen unmistakable evidence that those who post on the forum grow much faster than those who do not.

The next chapter will introduce you to the next most effective skill for powering your growth into Higher Consciousness and Enlightenment, seeking.
©2005, 2004 BEing There Enlightenment Systems, Inc.

(beingthere)Chapter 7. The Emotional Aspect

Since your level of consciousness is determined by the aspect of least development (Part 1, Chapter 4), and since for most people the emotional aspect is the aspect of least development, it is important to begin to focus your pursuit of Higher Consciousness there.

As a reader of this short course, you probably have ample skills in the other three aspects of being: the mental, the physical and the spiritual aspects. To pursue Higher Consciousness at this point in your development, you must learn skills on the one aspect where you have the least training.

After thirty years of providing psychotherapy, crisis intervention, public speaking, college teaching and marriage retreats to people of all ages who are just like you, we rarely come across someone who has received deliberate and conscientious training in emotional skills, outside of counseling. Everyone needs emotional training to seek Enlightenment.

It is through your emotions that you feel your world. It is through your emotions that you recognize the unconscious part of you, which only then enables you to find a greater consciousness. It is through your emotions that you become aware of the issues inside you that drive you. It through your emotions that you recognize the presence of a lesson for your consciousness. It is through your emotions that you gain access to an internal guidance system capable of giving you perfect, if not divine, guidance in every situation and moment of your life. Emotional skills are an essential part of the pursuit of Higher Consciousness.

To grow on the emotional aspect, you must first choose to be willing to feel your emotions; not just the ones that are comfortable or pleasant, but willing to feel all of your emotions, all of the time, without prejudice of the degree of pleasure you take or do not take in any specific emotion.
Your commitment to this first act of consciousness, willingness to feel all that you feel and to deal with all that you feel, is the single most important factor in determining your growth into Higher Consciousness, and eventually your Enlightenment.

As you choose to be willing to feel all that you feel, you will create an awareness of yourself that was not previously possible. This will be the next chapter in this short course.

Mick Quinn Weekly quotes

8) Impatience: The ogre (the conditioned mind) knows it can’t command the past or the present moment, so it keeps your attention on the only thing it thinks it can control: the future.
If you become impatient when things don’t go "your" way, any subsequent expression of that impatience is a manifestation of the ogre. This is the lesser-mind offering you the illusion that you can manipulate a future outcome. Accepting that you may be unknowingly pursuing conditioned goals will help you to identify the ogre’s hand in this illusion.

0) Victim Mentality: This is a most common component of the ogre (the ego); it can be overheard daily in conversations everywhere in the world. The ogre speaks over 150 languages!
The ogre plays the victim so it can tell its story, which invariably is more troublesome and tragic than other people’s stories. The victim loves to talk about problems it has with other people (especially those it claims to love).
The victim suffers from the illusion that he or she is the only person in the world who worries about the future. The future (that the victim expresses so much concern about) is not that of humanity, but of the narrow, subjective personal world.
Victim mentality is closely connected to blame, procrastination, and laziness. It is common to overhear two victims trying to “one-up” each other with their tales of woe. Then they exchange a hug and return to their lives feeling good about themselves.
Selective silence ends the ogre's manipulation of your words. When you become aware that the ogre is using your vocal chords—simply stop speaking for a while

11)Complaining: Though complaining is closely related to victim consciousness, it also involves the ego talking about "the need for change." The ego's bemoaning includes the sharing of ideas about change and how it "might" occur, often with a focus on changes "they" should make, or changes that "should" be made to the "system".
Such transformations are then left to "those" who have "all the power", which invariable is never the speaker. If you encounter the ego in this way, it is best to walk (run) away.

16) Shame: Shame results from situations that have already passed in which you acted out of conditioned self-interest. The ego enjoys shame because it can declare that something is wrong with you as an individual. Being ashamed of yourself also plays nicely into the ego's love of victim- consciousness.
Shame can be positive as long as you do not recoil from it. You can learn from the shame of past experiences and allow wisdom to arise.
Repeating the same mistakes ad infinitum, however, is evidence that the lesser-mind is driving your motives, intentions, and ultimately your destiny.
Pay attention to the results you get. Adjust your intentions accordingly to produce an outcome where shame is replaced by your hand on the wheel of your life, and not the ego's.


Simply because a thought is present in your awareness does not mean it has any consequence for you or the world. Accepting thoughts as factual or significant without due diligence energizes the lesser- self. Because the lesser-self loves a wild and inventive mind, recognizing its hand in the process of thinking and letting go of it creates the conditions for awakening. Such attentive action, emerging as both words and deeds, renounces the lesser-self as the director of your destiny. Trust flows as the outcome when you interpret the random content of your mind free from the chorus of conditioned mediocrity and limitation.

9) Multiple Personas: "Niceness" is only one of many masks the little-mind wears when it seems to be suitable. The ego likes to switch your persona to suit the situation or relationship at hand. In this way, the ego feels it can manage life to its advantage.
When awakened, you show the world the One face of Self, not the many faces of the lesser-self. If you notice that you, or another person, shifts personas, you can be sure the ego is pulling the strings behind the scenes in an attempt to construct an outcome that it considers beneficial. This result may not be the most advantageous for you.

20) Thrill Seeking: The little-self likes that you feel alive so it often has you engage in adrenaline- soaked activities. Such extreme excitement and thrill seeking temporarily interrupt the deep, unanswered questions that rest in your conscious or subconscious and also help distract you from the inevitability of the ego's fate in physical death.
The consistent stimulation of adrenaline eventually has the effect of breaking down your immune system. The inevitable is then unavoidable.

24) Ambition: This is a more sinister manifestation of the conditioned mind, which goads us to accumulate for the sake of ourselves. Ambition often emerges when the ego decides to "make things happen". This constant striving towards worldly ambitions, however, is only recognized as success inside the playpen of the lesser-self. The blind ambition of ego reflects a profound suspicion about the goodness of life.
As we evolve through the stages of development, the unwholesome ambitions of the separate self-sense begin to soften and as our perspective grows, we learn to include freedom as one of our goals. This is an awakened ambition. When we learn to trust the essence of life, the need to endlessly accumulate things, friends, admonitions, fame or seek positions of power in the world of the "unawakened" looses its former luster.

A series on the shadow:
Part 2) The trap of the shadow: The shadow impels us to act unconsciously and we do so unfailingly! Do you know if the actions and reactions amid your spiritual path are driven by the hidden determinants of unneeded suffering; the shadow? If you think that you are clear about the motives behind your moves, then consider this story:
Early in his career, Freud attended a performance by a well-known hypnotherapist. As part of the act, a man was hypnotized and then asked to open an umbrella. Later, when questioned as to why he did this, the man responded with various reasons such as: "I wanted to see where it was made," or "To see if it functioned properly". Freud realized that the man was completely unaware of his true motives for acting. This experience was to become a founding component of Western psychoanalysis.