The way to stop worrying about being acceptable : ex's response

Mar. 2, 2004

[My ex]: I don’t know why I am asking these questions, I shouldn’t.

Karen: (I only thought this, did not say it) Maybe for the usual reason people ask questions—you want answers?

Guides: Those who do not know their own answer to the question, ‘Am I on the right path,’ will find themselves following the agenda of others. 

You are acceptable and you need to accept yourself.  [I don’t know whether they were talking to her or me here.  Maybe both, because they are actually talking to everybody.]

We are going to use the power of imagination here.  Imagination is immensely powerful. 

Imagine yourself... without all that is emotion.  Strip away the emotion that surrounds how you look at yourself.  Imagine yourself without fear. 

Who are you?  Who are you when you are no longer worrying about how you look, about how much money you make, and so forth (we’ve already established that these things are not you), about whether you are worthy of love?  Who are you when those worries are stripped away, because they are just emotions, just fear? 

Without all that—you are acceptable, aren’t you?  You can look at yourself realistically, without the emotion.  You can see that you are an individual just doing your best, with your talents, skills and training (whatever they are).  You can see that you are just where you are in the scheme of things, and really, that’s okay.  You can lay down the struggle to overcome the worries that you are not acceptable. 

The only way to stop worrying about whether you are acceptable is—to accept yourself! 

But understand also... you have to accept your worries.  That doesn’t mean being ruled by them—we’re trying to get away from that—but accepting that they are human and natural.  Troublesome, yes... you’d be better off without them... but it’s important not to make yourself less acceptable to yourself by criticizing yourself for having them.  Because, frankly, everyone has them.  It’s just part of being human.  By accepting that we have fear, we accept part of ourselves, and so we are one step closer to letting fear go.

--

Give what you can, that is all that is required

I ready a libation to Zeus and think, “It’s too little wine.”

Guides: You always think what you do is not enough.  It doesn’t matter how much you do, you always feel you are falling short.  Never enough... work that is never done... how much have you tortured yourself with this? 

Yes, you are doing enough.  If you are doing as much as you realistically can, you are doing enough.  Is the roof over your head?  Are your kids fed and clean?  Will you be able to pay this month’s bills?  If the answer is yes, you are doing enough.  Stop flogging yourself, give yourself permission to relax, in the full awareness that you are indeed doing enough.  Do your best and you may always live in the peace of knowing you are doing enough.  But you have to give yourself permission. 

Give yourself permission to hear us say: You are adequate to the task.  In fact, it may be that what  you are doing in your life is actually heroic.  Often people who constantly feel they are not doing enough are doing a great deal.  Ask three friends if they feel you are doing enough.  Their judgment will be very much more positive than yours. [This was correct.] 

Give yourself permission to hear and believe them. 

You always tell yourself, you are not giving enough.  Give what you can, that is all that is required.

Karen: So what I ended up saying to Father Zeus was this: “I ask nothing... because I have it all.”  It’s just a matter of finding it in myself, and accessing it.  Then the wind came up and blew in my face for a while, warm and moist.

-- 

This (joyful) state of mind is actually more true

Feb. 22, 2004

Felt like I couldn’t shake off depression.  I’m not sure why, except the period.  Got into a hot bath, read a bit of a book about energy techniques for bringing money into your life positively by following spiritual laws.  And there was a part about visualizing negative thoughts vanishing or blowing away, and positive thoughts being accentuated, etc.  So I did a little of that myself, to see if I could make myself feel better.  And I got this:

I remember times in which all the world seemed perfect, all made sense, all was right, and all was beautiful.  I felt complete security and a deep sense of well-being.  It was when I was a child.

If you are like most people, the last time you had such a perfect moment was in childhood.  If you are like me, and most people, you were taught to discredit this feeling; that it was childish, impractical, unrealistic; that life was serious, if not grim; that there were more important things to feel.

What I realized as I meditated was that this state of mind is actually more true than the chaff that we are taught as we grow up, because it is reflective of the purely spiritual state.  It is the feeling of the presence of the Divine.  We have it in childhood because we were more recently in the spirit world, and remember it better, than adults.

It struck me that nothing is more important, or practical, or realistic, than to not only remember this state of mind, but let it spread out into our consciousness until we live in it constantly, until we become it.  Anyone can access it (if they don’t already); all you need to do is remember the feeling of such a moment, and focus on it, immerse yourself in it, grow it in yourself.

When I realized this, I thought, “I can transform myself this way.”  But something struck me as off-key in the statement, and I soon realized what.  I do not need to transform myself.  None of us do.  It is our habits of thought we need to transform, and that will not transform us at all; rather it will ground us in ourselves, make us more our true selves.

Ever my guides are with me, teaching me what I most need to learn, to be gentle with myself...

-- 

Love and consideration are divine things : reading for my ex

Feb. 21, 2004

“What should I do with my life?  Am I on the right path?  What is it about my career that I cannot see?  Or other manifestation?” (Re an ailment of the eye.)

Karen: All sorts of stuff came to mind... but it all sounded too much like me.  Then I got this...

Guides: Are you on the right path?  For someone who isn’t sure of that, you’ve made some very major decisions.

You said that you can’t allow your arms to be pushed silently [meaning, muscle-testing by the Three-in-One method, using just thought-questions, not spoken questions; I and another friend do it all the time] because you don’t trust yourself.  Why is that?  Do you think your self would lie to you?  That is always a choice, to lie or tell the truth, so why would you choose to lie to you?

If you feel, or fear, that there is something corrupt within you, there may well be.  However, it’s crucial—absolutely crucial, for you—to remember that it is not you.  We all (and here we speak from our experience as incarnate beings) have our negative influences, but they are not the essential us, the core that is who we truly are.  They might be destructive thought patterns learned in childhood, or past lives... they might be genetic susceptibilities... they might be entities.  And in fact these can all be the same.  But they are no more us than our clothes are.  And we can cast any of them off with an act of will... because they are not us.

You were trained to think of God as an oppressive authority... God as a child abuser... that “for your own good” is in truth an excuse for people with power over you to take out sadistic urges on you, that “I love you” means “I have your permission to exploit and use you.”  Love and consideration of another’s good are divine things, whether they come from incarnate or discarnate beings, and they have been distorted for you.

You are still struggling with that, and the idea that your greater self (forget the word “higher”), the one that has the divine connection, is really a big joyless bean counter who wants to stop you from having any fun.  Freud added to this idea with the oppressive, rigid “Id”... really, there was no part of the psyche he identified as being genuinely good... and the mental health field grew out of that and its ideas have trickled into popular consciousness.  So it’s not only in the way you were raised, which was tinged with the selfishness of your mother, but all around.  Thus a tradition which holds that some part of us is genuinely divine and good and loving is still considered “alternative.”  You are right in seeking out other traditions, alternatives to this culture’s—neopaganism, Zen, Buddhism—which teach that a direct divine connection is possible.

Karen has exactly the same issue, of having been cut off from a loving God and trying desperately to reconnect... words we gave to her: now that you have opened your connection more, you can feel very directly how fear closes it.  Fear is an attribute of the incarnate only; our “meat” in its natural urge for self-preservation concerns itself with its survival.  Thus material fear—fear of not enough to sustain the meat, which translates into fear of lack of money, fear of lack of security, etc.—makes the mind focus on itself and distracts it away from what is spiritual.  Thus, imagine how the lack of love and security in your family when you were a child so completely distracted you from the spiritual... on top of the forbiddance against believing in it anyway.  That is what you are challenged with.  You came into this life determined to reconnect with the Gods, from whom you cut yourself off long ago in self-punishment... and so you chose an upbringing which would force you to focus your attention, ultimately, on the spiritual.  Each time you face fear while seeking the spiritual, you mind harks back to all that, hence the challenge.

You feel that your experience connects with another much more huge than your own because this is the state of your entire culture and society.

Your relationship with Karen was entirely fraught with this issue, which was fraught with extreme fear for both of you as you challenged yourselves to process it, and which you never really became conscious of as a issue that you shared, so that it ended up as an issue between you. (All common issues which are not shared consciously by a couple will become issues between them.) Alas, you did not co-ordinate and support each other in these efforts, but competed instead, due to the negative emotional baggage attached to the quest by your respective upbringings.  As well, neither of you wanted to deal with the material, you both wanted to focus on the spiritual, which is why you had such arguments over the material... money, housework, etc. ...at the same time both of you found seeking the spiritual frustrating and frightening.  You also felt that Karen was succeeding in her spiritual search at your expense.

What both of you need to do, actually, is to find the way to harmonize spiritual and material.  Find a way to make enough money that also satisfies your spiritual sides.  The key to this is absolutely internal.  You won’t find it by trying to think up ideas.  You have to continue the spiritual path.

The book you are writing is the path you are taking, and it’s a hard path, which is why writing the book is like pulling teeth.  The difficulty of [main character's] quest to find a loving God in the midst of a corrupted tradition, culture and personal background is the difficulty of your own.  He hurts because he fights it, and so do you.  (And it’s natural, everyone fights it.)

Thus when you ask “Am I on the right path”—yes, we always are; it’s just made tortuous by our meat concerns or by self-punishing or what-have-you.  Understanding what that path is is the way to make sense of your life, to understand why you are suffering and to lessen the suffering (which you do to some degree just by understanding it), and to clarify the future.

Career?  Guides: you’d be best to get out of [workplace] because the place is full of negative energy and all the shenanigans of the management, etc., are wearing you down by constantly kindling your anger.

Which raises the question: how to make enough money to make up the shortfall? 
 

Believe you are worth it.  You tend to wait for others to confirm to you that you are worth your pay, rather than declaring to them that you are, because you find it hard to believe in yourself without the confirmation of others.  However, people won’t confirm that you are worth your pay unless you convince them to try your work in the first place.

Karen: What are you not seeing?  Or seeing that you’d rather not?  ???  Drawing a blank.  Suspect it’s the wrong question.  I keep thinking the eye is somehow connected with anger, so maybe the guides are whispering that to me.  [My ex did not try again with a different question or respond to this at all.]

Karen: Relationships?  I thought I’d get absolutely nothing here... that my guides would declare conflict of interest  ;-)  But they didn’t.

Guides: One person’s greatest good can never be in conflict with another’s greatest good.  Thus, since it’s the greatest good we are always advising toward, we can never be in conflict of interest.  We are not more loyal to any one person than another because everyone’s greatest good is really one.

Be with those who are in true accord with your search to reconnect with a loving God.

Time taps them on the shoulder (mission)

Feb. 15, 2004

[Dialogue with a friend]

 

My guides say: you don’t have to listen to a word we say.  We aren’t authorities, we’re just friends.  Tell us to fuck off if you like.  What do we care?  (Yes, that is how they worded it.  They have no egos, thus get  offended at nothing.)

Guides: remember that a mission is never actually imposed on a soul.  The soul chooses it—always!—based on its interests.  And that can appear to be a choice made during incarnate life.  Thus, do we have the right to choose our missions, during midlife or another part of incarnate life?  Yes, absolutely!  They say: many  people do not discover/choose it until midlife.  They have bound themselves to what they consider “duty”; then time taps them on the shoulder and says ‘There’s only so much more, in this life—what do you really want to do with it?’

If you’ve been taught that you’re not allowed to follow your interests, your mission is never obvious.  Because your interests are the biggest clue.

Karen: My mission has not been obvious either; as you know, I was taught quite brutally not to follow my interests. One thing I’m pretty sure of—it’s spiritual in nature.  That was the interest I was most forbidden to have.  The thing that scares me the most, and interests me the most.  Darn guides gave me the nerve to actually say this.  Spiritual in nature.  I don’t think I’ve ever really been conscious of that before.

Anyway... seems to me you are following steps also, without the ultimate outcome being obvious... which fits with their “one-step-at-a-time” suggestion.

[My friend]: And so I’ve felt like I didn’t have one.  Lately, I’ve decided I don’t give a s--t.  Since the universe is not making it obvious to me, “they” can go screw themselves if they don’t like that I’m not doing it.  So I might as well do what I like.

[You see why my guides told her she could tell them to fuck off if she liked?]

Karen: And wait for the thunderbolts to fall if they don’t like it.  Well, no thunderbolts are going to fall, because they do like it.  My guides talking again.

[My friend]: So, I’m taking courses even though no one in my family understands.  I appreciate that [her husband] is willing to allow it even though he doesn’t understand.  In fact, I think he’s kinda proud of me, that I’m once again doing something that can be described easily <g>.

Karen, citing guides: <giggle> It’s the fate of the immaterially-inclined to not be understood by the materially-inclined.

--

Guideworks Business Planning

[Of course my guides did it.  Me do it?  Are you kidding me?]

Feb 14, 2004

Karen: I’ve been having an on-and-off dialogue with my guides re writing inspirational works from their, um, guidance.

My guides don’t think there’s anything wrong with my making filthy lucre from their words.

Isn’t this just an ego thing on my part?

Guides: Only if you make it one.

Karen: Of course they’d say it’s my choice, wouldn’t they?

Guides: You’re going to get an internal backlash for this.  [Internal backlash: a period of depression or anxiety following an emotional  breakthrough as the mind self-punishes for having it.  I used to get this a lot.]
 
Karen: Do I get a choice about that?  Nah, I’m too programmed.  First time I’ve ever had a truly conscious sense, a solid expectation, that I’d get a backlash for something good.  Because they’re warning me.

Guides: It’s just a backlash.  Eh!

Karen: Where do I start?

Guides: Setting a goal.

Me: Setting a goal?

Guides: Yes.  How much money do you want to make?

Karen: This is always how you do business planning.  I know that.  At the same time, I’m thinking, ‘You’re guides, dammit.  You’re supposed to be airy-fairy spiritual things, not ask me how much money I want to make!’

I did say they were practical, didn’t I? 

Guides: You feel money is something bad, don’t you?  Something corrupting?  Don’t think of it that way.  Think of it as the stuff that keeps the roof over your heads and the fridge full.

Karen: Enough to keep the roof over our heads and the fridge full.  $25,000 a year.

Guides: No extras?

Me: $50,000.  That’s how much I was thinking I could make with that other business thing. 

Guides: Why not $100,000?  That’s how much [friend] made, how much [wife of enemy] makes.  Isn’t this work as important as theirs?

Karen: My head is spinning.  I almost didn’t write this, too embarrassed.  You see how I know my guides are not me?

I can’t set a goal that high!

Guides: Why not?

Karen: .... eh....er.... I can’t make that much money!  I’m not supposed to!

Guides: [Another person I know] makes way more for sticking junk mail in people’s doors, is this worth less than that?

Karen: What am I going to say—‘No’?

Guides: What do you really want out of this?  Whatever you want, that’s what will happen, if you visualize it clearly enough.

Karen: I realized without them telling me—I have always made my goals too vague.  Except when it was publishing a book; then the goal was clear, selling the book.  And it happened.

I have wanted things, but backed off on them out of guilt or self-minimization.  Maybe the guides really mean, not whatever I want, but whatever I choose... at all levels.  Even if at a subconscious level I am choosing the opposite of what I want at the conscious level.  That’s what will happen—that is what has always happened.

I realize that I feel I cannot both help people and benefit myself at the same time.  I’m either screwing someone else or getting screwed, and I’d prefer to get screwed.  I’ve had a revelation about it—business is always give and take—but it hasn’t stuck, not enough to make me go big, yet.

Guides: You have to solve this.  [This is one of the very rare times in which they have said I have to do something.  Keep reading to find out why.]  Sort out your feelings about it... about money, about doing this sort of thing for money, about give and take, about what you deserve.  That’s how to start—sort out your feelings.

Karen: I need to learn the reality of win-win.  I need to learn that what my guides can offer... really is worth something.

Guides: If we can put a spark in someone’s mind that changes their life for the better—it’s priceless.  X number of people = priceless times X.

Karen: I’m cooking rice for myself, to eat with leftover chicken.  I’m just wanting to run away from the computer and cook it and eat it.  Avoidance!

I don’t even want to send this to [friend].  I’m embarrassed about it being suggested that I make a goal of as much money as her husband does.  I mean, wouldn’t she be offended?

Guides: Why would she be offended?  She’d be delighted!  She’s a friend!

Karen: Time for them to play shrink on me.

Guides: Why would you think she’d be offended?  Why would you think she’d think in such a rivalrous way?

Me: I guess this would go back to my family.  Somehow they always gave me a sense that if I was getting anything, I was taking it away from someone else, unjustly.  Also, this is... you know... spiritual stuff.  Airy-fairy.  New Age.  Worthless.  That’s what they’d think.  And I’m still programmed, I guess.  ‘How dare you think anything you could do would be worth so much.’  ‘How dare you try to make as much as so-and-so, who really deserves it.’ The attitude that keeps me in poverty. 

Guides: You have to deal with this, if you’re ever going to provide properly for your kids, if you want to put them through university, if you want to leave them with any kind of advantage.  [They know I do, hence the have-to.]  You have to get out of the I-can’t/I-don’t-deserve thing.  You are seeing the kids as extensions of yourself—undeserving, just as you are. 

Karen: Gods... Gods.... Gods.... it’s true.  And so totally, shamefully unfair to them.

But maybe this whole idea is totally unrealistic.

Guides: Were Robert Fulghum’s writings unrealistic?  How about Kahlil Gibran’s?  Or any other spiritual writings?  If Lao Tzu had thought his idea of writing was unrealistic, we’d never have had his writings, would we? 

Me: I don’t think any of those people were out to make money.

Guides: Fulghum kept writing even after his first book was a bestseller.  He wasn’t ashamed to make money.

Now maybe it’s time to talk about other motivations of yours.

Karen: You are amazing and the world could use hearing your wisdom.

Guides: And you have the ability to get our words onto paper.  [Or pixels.]

Karen: I want to run away from the computer again. 

[I did not accept their goal-setting suggestion at the time.] 

To be continued... though I might be so embarrassed I keep the dialogue to myself.  [Or not.]

Just for being human : reading for a friend

Feb. 14, 2004 

Guides: [Name of friend] is labouring under the delusion that a life mission or calling, because it is so important, must be grim and an ordeal.  The word “mission” has these associations... military mission, missionaries saving souls, etc.  “Life work” also: many people, including her, think that work must be drudgery: dreary and joyless.  Because of that she’s not taking her joy as a clue to what her mission is.  How can it possibly be something so good?  How could she deserve that?  And yet many people make a life and living out of doing what they love to do... if they deserve it, why not her?  (And why not you, Karen?) 

Guides: (Anticipating her argument, ‘But how can I translate what I love doing into dollars?  What are the practical methods? E.g., what can you do with a degree in classics?’) When your head is in the right place about this, the answer to those questions will come to you.  You can’t see them now because you aren’t ready.  Go one step at a time, because you are so steeped in ‘I don’t deserve this goodness’ that you can only handle so much at once.  So just take it easily... one course, one contact, one possibility, at a time.  The way will open up before you as you grow in your ability to handle seeing it.  And keep up your healing work—these two things go together.

 

The advice you give to other people, pay attention to for yourself.  E.g.: You deserve what is good just for the virtue of being human.  If that goes for Karen, it goes for you.