That was often the opening line to the phone calls between me and my teacher.
I dreaded it.
“Hello Paul, how are you?”
“… (Silence)”
And then came the rampage of how my monster is so in control that I can’t even talk about how I feel and how this means that I have not been witnessing properly etc etc.
His spiel, in the early days at least, would often make me cry. And having another man reduce you to tears (at least from the POV of the ego/monster) is SO uncool!!
It made me cry because the monster would even use that chat to it’s advantage and immediately would turn the situation against me in forms of mega judgement…
“You’re not getting this energy work thing.” which would rapidly turn into “You’re useless at everything” and the like. This is how the monster judgements can really make us miserable. They only make us miserable because we identify with them, we think that voice is us and we let it run us down and we listen to it’s bullshit.
When we stop listening to it, which does take a bit of practice, we lose a lot of that self judgement that I believe many of us have as a dialogue within ourselves. The monster can use all sorts of scenarios and experiences to draw its power from, be it your weight, your wealth, your intelligence.
I would say that the monster works in this way… Let’s say we have always been overweight. We don’t enjoy it but there seems to be nothing we can do to stop it. Add to that the mean kid that made fun of us at school for our weight and then we have the perfect scenario for the monster. The trauma of being judged will not only be held within us but it will set up that cycle of self judgement that keeps us reaching for the fizzy drinks or the sugary treats that will keep us overweight.
The first thing we can do to break this cycle down is learn to spot the monsters
When we start to witness effectively we get our monsters out of the way. We put distance between our crazy, neurotic, judgemental “selves”. I say selves in inverted commas because really it’s not us. It’s a conglomerate of our conditioning and trauma wrapped up in a messy conscience that can pervade our lives, pass as our real selves and cause us a great deal of suffering.
As I’ve dedicated the last few years of my life to “Real Healing”, and by this I mean the disciplines taught to me by my teacher, I am very quick to spot when others are in the control of the monster. I ask these people sometimes “how are you?” and observe that the answer is often anything but the emotions that they are actually trying to deal with.
The answer may be a vague generalisation such as “bearing up” or “I’m OK”. I’m still guilty of it, one of my favourite responses that I still use (tongue in cheek) is “I’m living the dream!”. The problem with all of this is that it doesn’t acknowledge how we are really feeling.
Of course I’m not saying that when a complete stranger asks “How are you?” that you should launch into a rampage of “WELL I’M FUCKING FRUSTRATED AND ANGRY!”. I’m just trying to say that we are not conditioned to acknowledge our emotions, and this is a key area of healing. Dealing with our emotions.
I don’t feel that emotions are given enough credit. They are things to be ignored and subdued in our current culture. The more I have persisted in this healing work, the more I see that they are things that should be acknowledged, accepted, owned and expressed.
I used the word “owned” just now because that was vital in my process of healing. Way back when before I started my healing, I often blamed my uncomfortable emotions on others. It was their fault I was feeling this way and boy I was gonna complain to them about it. This brings me back to something I have written about before and that is not making your emotions other peoples problem. It is yet another tactic of the monster to blame and judge others, when what we really need to be doing is tackling our emotions head on and releasing them in a healthy way.
To give you an idea of responses that get us into or away from our emotions I will write a short list:
I am feeling: Vs I am Feeling:
Well OK
Balanced So so
Joyous Great
Frustrated Cool
Angry Fine
Satisfied Good
Irritated
Excited
Scared
Horny
I hope you can see that the list on the right is how most people will communicate how they feel, and those are not really words that put us in touch with our emotions. I’d go as far as to say that answering the question “How are you?” with a genuine response like on the left hand list would raise a few eyebrows. It may even go as far as making the person who asked uncomfortable, when faced with such an honest response. This is probably at least part of the reason why we are conditioned to answer vaguely.
I wanted to say one last time on this post that no one is expecting you to divulge your innermost feelings to anyone who cares to ask. What I am saying is that when we take the time to get in touch with our emotions, and release them in a healthy way, it will be far more likely that next time someone inquires, we will be able to say “Well, thank you.” and bask in that feeling for a moment. Warm and comfortable in the sensation that we’ve been true to ourselves, and our emotions have been felt and acknowledged.
So, I ask you…. “How are you?”
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