Many of you know that the topic of moving through fear is one have often visited on this blog and that I sometimes broach as a speaker. I think it’s imperative to learn to conquer our fears so we can live our lives fully and accomplish our goals. I rarely publish an interview on this blog, but I felt compelled to do so after reading a free ebook, called The Flinch, by Julien Smith, which is also about moving through fear—or overcoming fear. The Flinch also is about asking people to change, compelling them to change. In that way, Julien is a change agent. So, I was thrilled to get a chance to interview him and to share that interview with you.

Julien is a New York Times bestselling author of two books, Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust and The Flinch. He is a consultant and speaker who has been involved in online communities for over fifteen years, from early BBSs and flash mobs to social web as we know it today. He also was one of the first Twitter users and one of the first people to podcast in 2004 (which is impressive to me since I’ve just struggled to get my first podcast up). He has worked with numerous media publications, such as Sirius Satellite Radio, GQ, CBS, Cosmopolitan, and more.

The following interview is part of a three part interview. You can read the other parts here and here. In this part, Julien talks about our bad habit of “flinching” when we expect to experience pain and how to train ourselves to consciously build the strength to get past our fear–to stop flinching.

I just finished reading your newest book, The Flinch, which, I loved. For those who have not read it, could you just briefly explain the concept?

Sure. I guess in a way The Flinch, in a nutshell, is about our pathological lack of courage as individuals. Many of the things we shy away from are, in fact, not painful, not damaging, not bad in any way, but we just sort of shy away from them out of habit. So, really it’s a book about how to break out of bad habits and break into good ones.

That’s something most people need to do. Fear stops people from doing what they want, from writing and publishing a book, trying something new, getting into or out of a new relationships or jobs, creating the life they desire and succeeding. Can you talk about that a bit?

You start to notice as you speak to a lot of people who are trying to make change in their life that there are two kinds of people. One is a general optimist who knows at the end of everything they’ll end up fine. The other kind doesn’t explicitly say so but often feels like they have a lot of anxiety around life, let’s say quitting a job or something like that. The feeling is, ‘I’ll be broke and then I’ll die,’ or something like that. That’s the kind of sentiment that they have around change, even though they’ve never verbalized it that way. What I tried to create in The Flinch is a feeling, through a number of exercises, that you can do painful things and survive and be better as a result of them. I think that’s a series of habits that you need to develop.
Any time they feel something is difficult, many people just quit. I know I just quit often. That was a terrible habit of mine until I broke it.

That’s a pretty common habit for most people. You suggest that people should get in the ring, like a fighter.

Exactly. The reason for the title of the book, The Flinch, is because I spent a lot of time around athletes and self-defense professionals and officers and so on.  I noticed that the people who understand these things the most are the people who feel it in a visceral way. Some of the best reactions from people about the book have been from swimmers, for example. Swimmers are like, ‘I feel exactly like this every single time I’m about to do an open-water swim.’ And you have, of course, boxers and people who do Muay Thai. Athletes naturally understand this.

I think most people find it really hard to create change. Why do we not change even when we say we want to? Is it a fear of change?

Let’s talk in a more specific manner to try and sort of make this more concrete for people. They get this impression, ‘Oh, why is it so hard for me.’ We have no faith in our ability to reconstruct, and we have no faith in our own ability to make things better for ourselves. Some of the simplest things that you can do are to put yourself in situations where there really are no sort of negative social or psychological or physical consequences for what you do, but you feel this anxiety—what I call the flinch.

 

So try exercises in meeting strangers; you know, strangers are something very new in our lives. A hundred years ago there were no cities, or very few…Ninety-nine percent of the people we see every day are strangers, right? So this is new and in a way a sort of anxiety creating thing. We don’t feel that we have the ability to walk up to these people, but the reality is that there are no social consequences for walking up to a stranger at all.

 

I would say that one of the best things you can do is find hard things and do them over and over again. Before you can find them, you have to feel that sentiment inside of you, and most people just ignore it. Learn to train yourself in feeling that, and going, ‘I know what I need to do when I feel that feeling,’ and then go forward with it.

Talking to strangers is a great tip. Do you have others?

There’s a million of them, you know.  I spoke to this guy who’s one of the lead speakers in regards to the stuttering community, and he said, ‘You know, some of the exercises that you present in [your book] are the same exercises that stutterers do.’ It turns out that [they are] some of the same exercises that people who have PTSD, post traumatic stress disorder, or people who have anxiety attacks use. I’ve, sort of, without really thinking about those problems, have created something which really works for them and also works for the population at large.

 

I’ve been building homework assignments, and I plan to release them later in some capacity. One of them is to stutter on purpose. It’s this amazing thing you can do maybe four or five times in a day, and then just go about your daily life. Everybody knows how to do this, but it’s an exercise they make stutterers do so they can gain control of something they normally would not be able to control at all. If you go over to someone, especially someone who’s paid to talk to you, like a clerk in the corner store or something like that, and you stutter through what it is that you want to do, and then feel that embarrassment—it’s almost like purposeful embarrassment—to realize that when you get past the embarrassment you’re totally fine.Something else I would do to feel it physically is to do something like begin weightlifting at the edge of your capacity.

 

Most people when they go into the gym, they’ll go and they’ll do weights, like twenty five or thirty reps of some insignificant weight. Instead of doing that, do something like put it up to what weightlifters call your five-rep max, and put up a weight that is almost impossible for you to lift. Stare at it, and then go ahead and do it. You’ll feel in your body this extremely hard not only physical thing but psychologically taxing thing. Even weightlifters say if you squat three times a week at that kind of ability you become psychologically drained from how difficult it is, but it also carries forward into other parts of your life if you’re able to do it.

Let’s say we don’t only want to create change in our personal lives, but we actually want to be  change agents in the world. We want to make big change, or affect change. Do these small things you’re talking about doing, these exercises you’re giving us, help us learn to make change in the world?

Some of the criticism of this book comes from people who are like, ‘What the hell. This is so trivial.’ You know, Victor Frankel wrote a book called Man’s Search for Meaning. He was in the Holocaust; he was in a concentration camp, and he was one of the few survivors. He wrote something which is a famous phrase: ‘Between stimulus and response, there is a moment, and in that moment lies our freedom.’  Basically, you have a stimulus, and you have an ability to react instinctively or an ability to think out a reaction to that stimulus, whatever that stimulus is. He claims the reason he survived the concentration camp is because he was able to stay psychologically strong. He could watch people and see that once they had psychologically given way, their bodies would begin to wither away after that.

 

To me, the biggest strength is an internal strength. No person can give you a job that will give you this strength. No individual can ever take it away from you once you have it either. To me it’s an internal strength that you build. It is built with a conscious sort of construction that comes from the mind and from the psyche, and then, thereafter, builds out into the world. And you’ll see that when you do this, when you become a more conscious person as a result of these supposedly trivial acts, that people will see you differently, and doors will open as a result of it.

What does it take to really accomplish something and to create something that affects change in the world?

I’ve already written a few books. To write is actually is not a big deal at all. You just have to sit there and do it. A girlfriend of mine used to say, ‘People respect travelers so much; but really all you have to do to be a traveler is to get on a plane. It’s an easy thing to do.’ In the same way, being a writer is a very easy thing to do. It’s the ability to sit down every single day and do it over and over and over again and to have the humility to destroy things that you once thought were good that you now think are bad because your standards are higher. This is really what makes someone excellent. That’s a great internal change which is really effective in the world.

Julien spoke to me about writing books, making them bestsellers, and being a change agent via your writing. You can read this part of the interview here. He also spoke about blogging and affecting change with a blog. You can read this part of the interview here.

I highly suggest you read The Flinch;  you can download it for free for your Kindle (a free version of this program is free for your laptop). I’ve told all my family members to read it. I have a personal interest in the subject of moving through fear to achieve your goals. I wrote a short book, which will one day become a full length one on the topic: Navigating the Narrow Bridge.

Do you “flinch” often, avoiding fear and not moving toward your goals? Have you found ways to change your habits or thoughts about fear? Tell me about this with a comment.

If you are interested in writing and blogging, read the other parts to my interview here and here.

If you aren’t a subscriber to this blog, please consider actually hitting the RSS button at the top of the page or subscribing by email using the form below. Then you are sure to never miss a post.

2012. The world was supposed to end, some said. (We knew better.) But things were supposed to change–the energy was supposed to change, at least.  A whole week has gone by. We are being flooded now with the light of the first full moon of this pivotal year, which is supposed to affect our consciousness on every level. Something is supposed to be changing. Or it should be getting easier to create change, right?

I wrote my vision and my goals. I created a vision map or board. I set out with good intentions. Nothing. Same ol’, same ol’.

I could blame it on the fact that my daughter is here visiting. That clients called. I had things that got in the way..projects, the need to learn to podcast, interviews to conduct, old work to get handled and out of the way, bills to pay, shopping to do, emails to answer, social media to attend to, etc., etc., etc.

It felt l like 2012 came in with a rush, driving me forward at breakneck speed. That’s how 2011 went out. Why would the new year be any different? I don’t seem to have brakes on this car I’m in. I’m not sure I’m driving. I’m trying to get control.

Here’s the fact: In the first eight days of 2012, I  didn’t keep to the schedule I set as part of my plan. I didn’t do even one of the things I said I would do. Well…I take that back. I did do one thing. I took a bit of time off to spend with my daughter. I relaxed with family. That is on my vision map and in my goals–to find balance in my life between work and personal.

Yay! I made one change. I made it consciously.

Changing habits can prove difficult. Yet, to achieve some new degree of success we must change our old habits. They’ve only gotten us the degree of success we enjoy right now.

Anything can get in the way and become an excuse. For me, getting up early to complete my client work first is a new goal, a new habit, I’d like to form. It’s easy to say I went to bed too late and simply not get up early. It’s easy to answer the phone when it rings during that time period, or to schedule an activity anyway (like walking with a friend, since that’s a goal, too), and to say that’s why I couldn’t meet my goal, make the change, create a new habit.

I find myself saying all too often I just don’t have the time to change, the energy to change. I’ll do it tomorrow or next week.

Well, a week has gone by of this new year…this year that everyone said would be one of such awesome change…when we could affect change in ways heretofore not possible. I, for one, have not found this year much different. It still remains up to me to make the change. (I hear the refrain of some song…I can’t quite put my finger on it…)

Ah, well…the Kabbalists must right. We are simply in transition. We have a long way to go before the predicted time of peace on Earth or the World to Come. (They say not until the year 6,000 on the Hebrew calendar.) Actually, many other people also say we are simply in a time of transition. And it’s likely our consciousness is changing. We can affect change and do so faster, more effectively if we do it in a conscious and focused manner. We don’t need a new year, a new era, a new anything for that.

The trick is to put that lesson–an old one really (and no “secret” either) to use now to create the desired change. For me, I’m starting small–in my life, with my habits. This helps me achieve what I need to achieve and then has a ripple affect, allowing me to affect others through my work.

I’ll go back and focus again on my vision, my goals, my vision board. I’ll work every day to keep on track, making those little changes that end up in new habits formed. By year’s end, I may have achieved a new level of success based upon those new habits.

What about you? How’s it going after the first week of the New Year? Does the energy of 2012 seem to be supporting you? Is change happening in your life or around you?

Do you ever question your beliefs about Your religion? Do you question God’s word, the value of the commandments, the teachings of the forefathers, the meaning of the rituals and prayers?

They say the Jewish people are God wrestlers. We don’t always accept God’s word or anything to do with our religion without questions, without wanting to understand why, without pondering the value, the validity, the truth of what we are told or asked to do.

Yet, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or some other religion, sometimes we get stuck in fear—fear that if we don’t listen to God’s word, believe every single word we hear and do as those words command—something bad might happen. We might be struck down by lightning, fall from grace, not live another year, not receive God’s goodness. Then we stop wrestling with God.

It takes a lot to move out of that fear and to begin questioning again, wrestling again.

I was pleased this week to find a current example of someone who moved through that fear and began God wrestling—and did so in the public eye. I read in a JTA article that Chassidic reggae musician and singer Matisyahu publicly shaved off his beard and peyes and uploaded a picture of himself clean shaven on Twitter on December 13. Along with it, he posted this message:

“This morning I posted a photo of myself on Twitter.

“No more Chassidic reggae superstar.

“Sorry folks, all you get is me…no alias. When I started becoming religious 10 years ago it was a very natural and organic process. It was my choice. My journey to discover my roots and explore Jewish spirituality—not through books but through real life. At a certain point I felt the need to submit to a higher level of religiosity…to move away from my intuition and to accept an ultimate truth. I felt that in order to become a good person I needed rules—lots of them—or else I would somehow fall apart. I am reclaiming myself. Trusting my goodness and my divine mission.”

The next day, December 14, the JTA ran another story. In it he explained this decision in more detail during an interview WNYC’s Soundcheck. He began growing his beard when he became religious. The decision not to shave was based on a teaching from Kabbalah that the beard is a manifestation of the 13 divine attributes of mercy, he explained. (Learn about the 13 Attributes here.) He feared that if he were to shave the beard, he would no longer be privy to those blessings of mercy.

Recently, however, he asked himself, “How can [God’s mercy] possibly be connected to me shaving or not? And I began, over the last few weeks, I went through a pretty major transformation, probably bigger than any in my life, due to several things, but a lot of revelations and a lot of realizations started coming clear to me, and I realized just like these fears that I have, the idea that God’s mercy is connected to whether I shave or not is ludicrous. And I just need to trust myself, and that if I’m deserving of God’s mercy, I’ll get it regardless.”

That’s a big jump…to trust your own goodness and to trust God to be merciful whether you follow His commandments or not. Orthodox, or observant, Jews, live within the confines of God’s laws, God’s mitzvot. They offer structure. They offer a way of life. They offer a means by which to be a good Jew, a mensch.

Yet, here we see someone coming out of that world and saying, “I think I can be a mensch, I think I can be a good person, a spiritual and religious person deserving of God’s grace and mercy without observing every single mitzvah—every commandment.”

And haven’t those of us who are not that religious wondered what would happen—in the reverse—if I suddenly became more observant? Would God be more gracious, more merciful? Would my prayers be answered?

But maybe it’s simply about being a good person, about being deserving—beard or no beard.

What about you? Do you wrestle with God? Do you question your beliefs? And do you occasionally shave  (or have you ever shaved) your beard—metaphorical or real—to see what might happen?

Have you ever thought about why you are who you are right now, and how you will create who you will be in the future?

When I ask most people what makes them who they are right now, they respond, “My past experiences. My education. My environment. My genetics.” These are things that either happened in the past or that you were born with–things you carry with you from the past into the future.

And when it comes to the experiences you had, you made decisions about those experiences that you also take forward with you. In fact, you project them forward into the future. You expect those decisions–those thoughts–to continue being true.  Thoughts like:

• I’m not good enough.
• People don’t like me.
• I should have been a boy (or a girl).
• Men (or women) leave me.
• I never have enough money.
• I’m not worthy of earning more money.
• I make bad decisions.
• I’m unlovable.
• I’m ugly.
• I’m stupid.

With these thoughts projected out into the future–with you expecting them to be true tomorrow, the next day, next week, a month from now–you perpetuate yourself being that same person you believe yourself to be in the future. You recreate the same experiences over and over again, proving to yourself over and over again that you are, indeed, this person.

When you stop expecting to find yourself in that same situation over and over again–expecting to find poof that you are that person, you will stop having those experiences. For this to happen, you have to leave all of these experiences and decisions in the past. Stop bringing them with you into the future.

I learned all of this long ago when I was doing a variety of self-help, personal growth and human potential workshops and seminars, like the Loving Relationships Training. It can be hard to remember these lessons though, when you aren’t around other like-minded people who also know these principles. The other day a colleague invited me to a preview of the Landmark Forum workshops. There I was reminded of this idea.

It made me stop and consider what decisions I made because of past negative events or experiences that I place in my future and then create that same unwanted outcome. If I can become aware of the experience and the thought, or the decision I made about myself, I can then affect my future outcomes, I can begin changing them. If, for example, I believe I am unworthy of earning more than $50,000 per year because I’ve never been paid more than that before and I’ve had many experiences where I was told I would not be paid what I thought I should be paid based on my experience or worth, I can change that thought, that expectation. And I can expect to earn $100,000 per year or more.

By being conscious of the decision made in the past about myself, I can affect my future and change who I become. I can become someone who earns more money.

Byron Katie, an author, says we should always ask if we really know something is true. I would have to ask myself if I really knew it was true that I was unworthy of getting paid more. If I can’t answer, “Yes, it’s true,” then it must be true that I am worthy of getting paid more. So I have to ask myself if this is true. Can I answer yes to that question?

Can you think of a decision you made in your past that is affecting who you are now? Do you know if the decision is based on truth? Can you change your mind so you can affect your future positively?

I’ve been getting emails all week about events related today’s auspicious date: 11-11-11. Sure, it’s cool that the date consists of all ones, but what does this really mean? We all want it to mean something…just like we want the end of the Mayan calendar on December 31, 2011 to mean something…significant.

I don’t think anyone really knows what 11-11-11 truly means. That said, I think we can derive a bit of meaning from some of the research that has been done on the occurrence of the number 11 and 11-11 historically. I found a great compilation of data and some analysis of it by none other than Jewish paranormalist Uri Geller. (You can read it here.) He says the number appears as a wake up call, and that when we see it we should take note.

So what should we be taking note of right now? Should we be remembering that the year is coming to a close and it’s time to start reviewing the last year? Or should we being remembering that we as a people very likely are heading toward a major transformation of some sort?

Of course, if we consider the approach of the year 2012 and the fact that many have predicted that the New Year will bring with it a huge change in consciousness that coordinates with the end of the Mayan calendar, which ends then, I begin to think about what new type of world we will discover, what new word will be created–or we will create, at that time.

The Kabbalists would say that we have been in transition and will continue to be in transition for some time to come. The change of consciousness is, indeed, happening, but the major change expected after January 1 is actually a long time off. The Hebrew date of Cheshvan 14, 5772, or November 11, 2011, is 228 years from the time the Kabbalists expect drastic changes in consciousness.  But maybe today is the day the change begins to be felt, the day we begin to truly see the new world, what Jews call the World to Come  and Christians call Heaven on Earth, beginning to take shape.

Why do I say this? Reportedly, Hebrew Scriptures place September 11, 1999 as the 6,000th anniversary of Adam’s creation and year 1 on the Hebrew calendar. If this is true, maybe today is the day a new human being is created and the new calendar actually begins–not on January 1. Could this be true, at least on a spiritual level? It’s worth considering.

It’s worth considering at least for 11 seconds at exactly 11:11 a.m. on 11-11-11 and again at 11:11 p.m. on 11-11-11. Don’t you think?

Or maybe it’s just the day that you create a new you, that you take on a new consciousness, that you begin to prepare for the new year if not for a new age. That, too, too might be worth considering at least for 11 seconds at exactly 11:11 a.m. on 11-11-11 and again at 11:11 p.m. on 11-11-11. Don’t you think?

Geller says 11:11 is a positive sign whenever we see it–on a clock radio, a hotel door, the odometer of your car, the columns in front of your house. See today’s date as just that–a positive sign that it’s time to wake up. Have you been sleeping, sleep walking through life? Just becoming more awake will change your perspective, your consciousness. That’s also worth considering at least for 11 seconds at exactly 11:11 a.m. on 11-11-11 and again at 11:11 p.m. on 11-11-11. Don’t you think?

Not surprisingly, from a Kabbalistic standpoint, the numerology of today’s date also points to the beginning of the new age: the arrival of the World to Come or Heaven on Earth. If you add up all those ones (1+1+1+1+1+1), you come up with the number 6. Six equates to Tiferet on the tree of life. Tiferet is the domain of beauty, harmony, artistry, gracefulness, synergy, peace, blessing, and balance.  It can be best described as many voices blending together in beautiful harmony; it’s the opposite of discord. Sounds a bit like peace on earth, no? A bit like heaven?

That’s something to think about, to pray about, for at least 11 seconds at exactly 11:11 a.m. on 11-11-11 and again at 11:11 p.m. on 11-11-11. Don’t you think?

Many of us get stuck in the past. By that I mean we end up living our life looking backward at things that happened in our lives and regretting them. Some call this “looking in the rear view mirror.” I call it living life looking backward.

Here’s the thing: No matter what bad thing happened in the past, no matter what we did or what someone else did or what events happened, they are over. We can hang onto the memory of the hurt, anxiety, pain, suffering, sorrow, or whatever other negative emotion we felt at the time, and we can continue to blame others or ourselves, but this does not help us in the moment. In fact, all it does is hurt us more. It holds us in the same old emotions and prevents us from moving forward, from living our lives looking toward the future. It keeps us stuck.

They say hindsight is 20-20, and that really is true. What we really are supposed to see when we look backward at our lives are the lessons we were supposed to learn and the paths we had to take to get to where we are now. For most of us, if we hadn’t learned those lessons and had those experiences we wouldn’t be who we are or where we are in this moment.

Maybe we don’t think those experiences have shaped us for the good, but they can if we learn and grow from them. That’s the point.

In Judaism, just as in most Abrahamic faiths, we study the Torah, or bible, over and over again. Why? To try to learn from our ancestor’s mistakes and experiences. In that way we won’t repeat them. Rabbis and ministers get up ever week and offer sermons about portions from the Old Testament trying to help us learn how to be better people, have fulfilling relationships, live our lives more fully, connect with God, and t be happier and more peaceful–all by looking at the lives and experiences of those who went before us.

It’s important to look backward, but not to beat ourselves up for what we have done. Rather we want to learn from our mistakes and study the paths and detours we have taken. Then we want to  live our lives looking forward toward the future allowing those lessons to guide us on our way. Looking in that direction our vision may not be 20-20 but we will, indeed, see more clearly for having looked backward to glean understanding.

The world did not end yesterday. At least, I didn’t hear about any great earthquakes and I don’t know of anyone who mysteriously disappeared. Anyway, I’m still here. How about you?

However, the idea that the world could have ended yesterday, today or tomorrow offers a wonderful reminder that we must live our lives to the fullest extent possible right now in this moment. And if we want to experience the “rapture”–that connection with God we all seek–we need only find a way to be fully in the present. That’s where God exists. Not in the past or in the future. Not on some cloud in the sky (or in heaven). God is right here with us on this earthly plane if only we become aware, conscious, present.

It’s not so easy. That’ s why we have spiritual and meditative practices and focus our attention on becoming aware of our thoughts. We work hard at being in the now because we’ve let ourselves fall into the habit of being anywhere but right here in this moment.

In this moment, we can experience the rapture. We can experience heaven on Earth and the World to Come. The world doesn’t even have to end. If we can learn to experience that now, we won’t even notice that the world has ended–should that event come to pass.

What if the world had ended and you and I had never managed to be in the now and experience God? I supposed that might feel a lot like being left behind in hell. But it didn’t. We have time to experience rapture right here, right now.

My husband and I were discussing how we react to things that happen in our lives. We have very different approaches to what could be seen as “irritations” that occur. I tend to take what I call a more “spiritual” approach; he tend to take what I call a more “reactive” approach.

I’m not saying I don’t even get upset or angry over things that happen, but I try to switch gears quickly, problem solve and stay pretty positive and grateful. My husband, on the other hand, tends to just get angry and upset and to feel like a victim to circumstance. It becomes hard for him to see anything positive–any upside or opportunity.

So, for example, when our state tax refund showed up just in time to pay for the property taxes and my son’s summer dance program (both of which we were going to have to pay for out of our savings account), he saw that as something about which to be upset rather than happy. The money that we had just received went out the door as fast as it came in.

And when my old car died just as we were about to get our federal tax return, which we hoped to save, again this was something about which to feel angry.

I wasn’t pleased about spending the money we could have saved, but in both cases I simply accepted the fact that we had expenses–and we had been provided with the means to meet them. I felt grateful that we didn’t have to go into debt or deplete our savings. I also didn’t spend a lot of time getting upset or angry about the situation–or shaking my fist at God.

Rather I felt as if God were acting as my partner. As always, I believed in some way shape or form God’s hand was in all of this. I knew I just needed to trust that everything was okay and would be okay. I knew I just needed to feel connected.

Interestingly enough, this morning after more discussions with my husband about new cars and money, I got an email from one of my favorite rabbi–a man and teacher who has helped me with my own writing projects and who put me on the Jewish mystical (and Jewish spiritual) path. I took the time to visit Rabbi David Cooper’s website and found a post there that spoke to this point (and inspired my post today). In reading Rabbi Cooper’s words I was reminded how hard we must work every day to stay conscious and connected to Source, to not react to what we are presented with in our lives each day but instead to respond. That’s why we must stay on the spiritual path no matter how hard that feels, engaging in some sort of spiritual practice. And, and I’ve said before, it does take practice to stay conscious and connected. It doesn’t happen without effort and daily–almost hourly or minute-to-minute–sessions.

Rabbi Cooper writes:

The purpose of spiritual practice is to gently and consistently move us from our place, where we normally “hang out” in our day-to-day behavior, to a mind state of greater refinement. In this context, refinement is connected with our conditioning, our normal reflexes and responses to situations that arise every day. Through practice, we begin to reflect and react in different ways. This change in our behavior actually causes many significant results.

Spiritual practice, is this context, has a series of tiny ekstasis that arise when we behave out of place of our normal reactions. We must keep in mind that “normal” for most of us is quite different from “natural.” Normal is how we are conditioned to respond. Conditioning develops from the time we are conceived; some say that our propensities to be conditioned go back into our genetic dna. But the spiritual principal at the base of many traditions is that our natural inclinations arise when we fully recognize the basic nature of our own minds and thereby gain greater ability to resist conditioned reactions.

Through our spiritual practice we learn to respond rather than react, to stay connected and conscious. Another of my teachers, author Stuart Wilde, says this is like spiritual weight lifting. We become stronger, more able to change how we react to the irritations in our life–the situations that arise–by constantly practicing remaining conscious and connected no matter what arises–in spite of what arises–in our lives. Life becomes our training ground, our gym, our practice field.

Little by little, day by day, hour by hour we change simply by living. As Rabbi Cooper writes:

Skilled practice results from an ongoing engagement in the mystery of what everyday life presents. As we never know what life will bring, we need always to be prepared to meet this unknowable reality with our highest potential. Thus, to the best of our ability, we continuously are challenged to bring our awareness to the many opportunities that present themselves as a series of invitations for manifesting enlightened actions. Each and every time we succeed, we change the world.

I’ve still got a long way to go–a lot of practice before I become truly “awakened” or “enlightened.” I still react more than I’d like; I still get irritated by the irritations. I notice this when I angrily respond to the fact that my son forgot an essential item that prevented him from taking dance class–after I drove an hour and a half to take him there, the shelf in my living room has not been replaced by my husband after five months or the insurance agent takes two hours to ask me questions I already answered once before. So, you’ll find me in my spiritual gym on most days lifting weights in an effort to become more awakened.

As Rabbi Cooper explains:

The highest teachings are explicit in describing the idea that our most enlightened opportunities occur in the ordinary daily life we now experience. The difference is that one who is awakened recognizes the essential nature of what is happening while one who is not awakened is easily overwhelmed by an ongoing flow of “self” induced dramas.

To rid ourselves of this sense of drama, Rabbi Cooper says we must rid ourselves of the belief that we are separate. When we do so, we also lose many of the harmful actions, false beliefs, negative reactions, confusion, irritation, and suffering that go with it.

Instead of believing we are separate–something most of us have believed for a long, long time–we must remember we are connected and always have been. Connection is our normal state of being. We only think we are separate from the Source; the thought doesn’t happen to represent truth.  It’s a meme, a thought given to you by someone else that you adopted. You can choose to adopt the thought that you are connected instead, but knowing and feeling this connection comes with spiritual practice.

Some people end up feeling too irritated, too angry, and they fall off the spiritual path before they can change their reactions or thoughts. They leave the spiritual gym seeing no results from their efforts. They feel alone in their work there and without a personal trainer. They don’t feel connected, so they go off alone blaming the gym and it’s Proprietor for their failure. They don’t realize that if they don’t stay in spiritual shape, bit by bit, parts of their life start feeling harder and harder. Without connection and consciousness, everything begins to feel like an irritation and a struggle.You get stuck reacting to irritations in your life in the same old way you always have.

Is that what you want? I don’t. So I look for “enlightened opportunities” as they occur in my ordinary daily life to respond in conscious and connected manner. I lift spiritual weights daily. Sometimes I’m not strong enough to do all the sets, but I keep lifting.

How do you react to the irritations in your life?

Each year during the Passover holiday Jews tell the story of how the Pharaoh in Egypt enslaved the Israelites. Sometimes we talk about what modern day pharaohs exist in the world. I, however, think most of  us live with personal pharaohs every day–those in our minds.

I know I struggle with the chains put on me by the pharaoh who rules my thoughts. Well, he does not rule all my thoughts, but he does rule my negative thoughts, the ones that hold me back and don’t allow me to achieve my goals or create the things I desire. In this way he keeps me shackled, stuck in one spot.

I was listening to Wayne Dyer the other day and he spoke about how we often have the desire–the thought–that we want to be rich but the opposing thought that we will always be poor (or don’t have the ability to become rich). He said this state of mind equates to insanity. I say it equates to slavery. The part that wants to become rich is shackled by the part that believes it can’t achieve this goal.

Each negative thought that exists in opposition to your positive thought serves as just one more chain that keeps you enslaved to those negative belief patterns. And so you stay stuck right where you are or have been–achieving the same results as before.

How do you free yourself from this bondage? How do you achieve liberation from the pharaoh in your mind?

You become conscious of your unconscious negative thoughts.

Here are a few things to try (and believe me I’m trying them, too)  to help you become conscious of your unconscious thoughts:

1. Catch yourself thinking and saying things that negate what you truly desire.
2. Write down your positive thought in one column of a piece of paper and then write down the first negative thought that comes up in your mind in a second column. Do this until you run out of negative thoughts in your “response” column.
3. Ask a friend or loved one to tell you when they hear you saying something that negates your desires.
4. Spend time journaling about why you think you don’t achieve your desires.
5. Explore any issues of deservability or self-worth with a counselor or coach.
6. Make affirmations of action; rather than saying or writing positive things, actually do things that convince your mind that you are what you say you are.
7. When you say something that negates your positive thought qualify it with the words “until recently” or something like this that nullifies the negativity of the statement.
8. Try talking to your subconscious mind as if is not “sub”-conscious; treat it as if you want it to “come out of the closet” and be known. Talk to it and ask it to talk back to you. Allow those thoughts to come up in meditation or in your journal.
9. In a journal, ask the part of you that feels negative (about becoming wealthy, getting a new job or finding a perfect mate–or whatever) to tell you why it feels that way. Then try to stay aware of this part of yourself when it’s “energy” arises and turns negative at any given point during the day. In Voice dialogue, a therapeutic process developed by Hal Stone and Sidra Winkleman, this is called developing an “aware ego.” The part of you that functions as”you” most of the time becomes aware of the other parts of you that impact how you behave or react–or think.  We all have many parts of our “selves”–an Inner Child, an Inner Parent, an Inner Critic, etc.–and they can become our pharoahs controlling how we behave. Becoming aware of them allows us to free ourselves of their influence over our thoughts (and our behavior).

I suggest you try freeing yourself from the tyranny of your negative thoughts. It doesn’t have to be Passover for you to do this–and you definitely don’t have to be Jewish. We all become enslaved by our negative thoughts to some degree. I hope some of these tips help you find freedom in some way.

Today I spent a lot of time thinking about Groundhog day and what I might learn from a groundhog. After all, it was Groundhog Day, a weird holiday on which we wait for an animal to come out of its hole. We then determine if he saw his shadow or not, a fact that determines if spring will come soon or not.

Here’s what I learned from the action of this groundhog–and how we react to his behavior:

Humans have a great need to look outside themselves for answers. We need to look within ourselves.

Humans like to find a way to predict things. Relying on the shadow of a groundhog seems a pretty hokey way to predict anything, even the coming of spring. We should rely on our on intuition and knowledge when it comes to predicting anything.

Humans, like animals, have a tendency to hide in holes. We need to come out of our holes and look around, interact with people and see the world. And we need to do this more than once a year. If you don’t know what hole you hide in, figure it out. Then find a way out of your hole every day. You might also want to figure out why you hide in your hole.

Humans tend to to run back into their holes too quickly, just like the groundhog on Groundhog’s Day. When you do come out of your hole, don’t hurry back in. Take some time to enjoy the scenery, to meet some people, to explore the countryside, to check out what’s going on, to learn some things, etc. Don’t be in such a hurry to burrow back inside.

Humans, like groundhogs, are predictable. We tend to come out of our holes at certain times, like on a holiday or for a specific event. We enjoy the predictability. That’s a good thing; rituals and holidays help us mark the time and come together in community. However, it’s good to be unpredictable sometimes. Do something unexpected occasionally. Don’t always do the same thing, the same way at the same time. People will be waiting, expecting you to show up and do the same thing at the same time in the same way. Maybe you should surprise them once in a while. See what happens.