DOUSING & DISEMPOSERING OURSELVES WITH ACQUIRED HABITS

Version 1.0 | 9.12.2010

(C) 2010 Howard McQueen

Each of us have created and stored disempowering mental states as a result of our feeling vulnerable and over-exposed to the world. These states contain our unprocessed, distorted and obsessed over sensations, feelings and unfelt emotions. They represent our shadow, our pain body.

Take a moment and face this truth: When we become anxious in the moment, we have learned to refer to, to believe and trust these mental states to give us the guidance and wisdom to navigate our life.

When we were little, we were wide open and gullible. When we were overwhelmed, we learned to tell ourselves lies, then listen to the echo of these lies as we repeated them back to ourselves. And then we forgot it was the shadow side of our selves that was doing all the talking, speaking all the lies – all the while we were hoping it was our authentic self coming to our rescue.

My inner liar, your inner liar, it is these liars that are feeding us the poison that we, still gullible and childlike, so robustly continue to consume. Why is this? Perhaps it is because it is easier to still suckle on lies that hurt ourselves and then hurt others. Doing this give us drama and attention. It is much more work to to bring forward the courage to fiercely stop listening to all the lies, discern what is true and live in love!

I understand, first hand, how compelling these lies are. They always seem to start with a judgment about self or someone else - these judgments are typically juvenile and simplistic, and they assassinate character and are ugly. They are ugly because they show us how we are so self-absorbed in trying to defend the brittle ego that has bought into all the lies.

WHY DO THE LIES HAVE SUCH POWER?

The lies are powered through our ancient flight-fight survival response mechanisms, originally developed to protect us as an organism. In reality, in this modern world, 99.9% of what we encounter is merely the exacerbated and accumulated stress of psychological discomfort. Even so, our primitive brain, having encountered pain and the discomforts from past experiences, indelibly etches these experiences and, without us even knowing it, manufactures strategies of avoidance (if experiences were painful) or pursue and capture (if experiences were extremely pleasurable or rewarding). These strategies and their underlying judgments are transmitted to us at near instantaneous speeds, loading up like life-or-death messages, pulling on our awareness, demanding our attention and shaping our intention.

Considerable training is required to begin discerning that this high-potency information coming to us at such a velocity and amplitude have little or no value being reacted to. In fact, if they are reacted to, people around us will begin to wonder why we are “wigging out”, as they sense the in-the-moment reality is calm.

So, the challenge becomes one of beginning to extract our awareness and consciousness from these highly charged messages, so that we do not become hijacked and behave in reactive, unconscious ways. When we give in and succumb to these messengers and the messages, we exit the moment and become non-living, sleepwalkers, living in the dream that is best called a “nightmare”.

Learn to become acutely aware of what you are serving when you feel anxious, or when you feel a story that includes judgment blooming in your mind. Know that you are accessing the demon-liar within, and that believing in any of what is conveyed is to breed suffering – your own, as well as exporting suffering to others.

You need not continue to play the powerless victim, as the unreality of the demon-liar is of your own mind’s making. Be mindful that when you catch yourself loosing focus on being fully in the moment, that confusion, restlessness, doubt, pessimism, fantasy, delusion, illusion and numbness are the breeding ground for falseness, for our conditioning and our deep groove to seek out and listen to our demon-liar.

Get your awareness into your physical body. Get your body moving. Get your breathing deepened and focused. Open your eyes and your senses to what is going on in this moment. Begin discerning what is really real from the veil and inner environmental distortions created by the demon-liar Begin to discern what is a lie from what is real, from what the demon-liar is manufacturing over reality, so you can experience and discern what is real.

And, be fierce as well as kind to yourself. Our current awareness is a work-in-process. When our sense of reality shrinks and/or begins to collapse, know that we are merely repeating the age-old acquired habit of listening to the demon-liar. As we continue to rehearse and bring our increased awareness to bear, we begin learning to no longer trust the demon-liar. If the intensity of the hi-jackings are on the increase, now that the demon-liar knows it is threatened, threatened with extinction. What it fears the most is no having you a willing participant in listening to its lies and then going into reaction.

It may just be that a friend will slap you into awareness! Let it be a blessing if you meet those that will love you without constantly trying to coddle and cater to your dramas!