On Transformation to the Authentic Self

 

I want to express my condolences to Ms.  Liliane Desjardins, whose husband and partner in so many ways made his transition on February 9, 2012.  It must be most difficult for her at this time. Liliane Desjardins is the author of this month’s book, The Imprint Journey; A Path of Lasting Transformation to the Authentic Self. 

It is based on their own personal experiences growing up as children of alcoholic parents during the Second World War, the migrations the military conflicts made necessary to survive and their resultant healing of their own addictions, which they used to create the Desjardins Unified Model of Alcohol and Addiction Treatment.  This treatment plan is the basis on which they founded The Pavillon, the center they created in South Carolina to help others free themselves not only of their primary addictions but to instill the tools needed to heal themselves of the secondary and tertiary addictions that often rear their ugly heads when the primary addiction seems well in hand.

Mrs. Desjardins explains in detail and from her own experiences how we are “inprinted” with our opinions of ourselves and our views of the world.  She then goes into great detail on the nine steps for transformation that are the basis of the Desjardins Unified Model of Treatment.  I will list them here without further explanation in the hopes that it will tweak your interest in reading and knowing more.

1. Awareness - awareness of one’s only inner reality and truth

2. Admittance – admit to ourselves where we currently are in relation to what we would like to be

3. Release – “Letting Go Of ‘It’” – shame, negativity, guilt, grief, etc. – we release them, we loose them and let them go

4. Willingness and Permission To Change – focusing on the changes we want to see in our lives and giving ourselves the choice, the chance to be who we imagine ourselves we can be

5. Forgiveness – Radical Forgiveness – see our May 2010 Book of the Month, Radical Forgiveness by Colin Tipping for more information on this step

From these first five steps we gain a shift in self-perception and revelations of who we are and of what we are truly capable.

  

6. Gratitude – our trials, tribulations, journeys, and kindnesses have made us who we are – be truly grateful for all

7. Meditation – Visualization and Affirmation

8. Building and Maintaining Consciousness – we gain mastery of those skills, attributes, attitudes, etc. that we have told ourselves we could have by little steps, one small action in the direction of the correct choices each time they arise

9. Acceptance and Love…Love is The Way

The result of these actions is that we experience Oneness.  Oneness with all living beings, all things and all actions – we begin, slowly at first, to grasp, for an instant, for a minute, that all we encounter is a part of the same whole as we.  In this way we recover to the divinity of who we truly are.

By Beth Outtrim

THREE CONSCIOUS BREATHS

By Beth Outtrim

There is always so much in Pema Chöndrön’s books that it’s difficult to choose something in particular to discuss.  From this month’s book, Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears, one thing struck me and stuck with me more than anything else, Three Conscious Breaths.   

Pema Chöndrön approaches Three Conscious Breaths with three distinct steps:

• Step one – Acknowledge that you have allowed something or someone to disturb your peace
• Step two – Pause, take three conscious breaths and lean into that feeling whatever it is; anger, disappointment, fear, etc. 
• Step three – Relax and move on

I have been “playing with” Three Conscious Breaths since I finished the book about a week ago.  I didn’t realize that I had actually been using all three steps until I sat down to write this.  Of course I took step one – I wouldn’t have even thought to do three conscious breaths if I hadn’t paused to become aware that I was upset in some way.  Step two I knew I was doing.  In retrospect, I see that step three is exactly what I did after I remembered to take three conscious breaths. 

This is truly the pause that refreshes.  It is also the pause that is necessary for us to change old and/or ingrained habits.  This is the month of new starts, new hopes as we make our New Year’s Resolutions.  Three Conscious Breaths is a gold mine.  If we can remember to pause, take three conscious breaths and relax we will find ourselves in an open frame of mind – the one within which we can make a conscious choice; we can step into our new habit or we can choose to stay in our current habits and behaviors.

A program that I was involved in years ago to quit smoking (I haven’t had a cigarette since August 31, 1981) helped me to change old habits with this bit of advice.  Remind yourself that you have the choice.  We always have the choice.  We can change our minds again in a minute, if we want to, regardless of what we choose now.  Three Conscious Breaths gives us a chance to stop and consider our choices.  It also provides our minds and bodies with much-needed oxygen, which will help our general well-being regardless of choice.  

SPIRITUAL RESOLUTION

By Beth Outtrim

I feel that Dyer’s book for October, The Power of Intention, was a mere introduction to this book, There’s a Spiritual Solution to Every Problem, by the same author.  I hope I don’t discourage anyone by saying that this book, for me at least, was a much more difficult read.  Not that Dr. Dyer is confusing – quite the contrary.  He is very clear with a lot of information to consider.  Nor is it a large book but that’s not really the way to measure content.  It is much like January’s book, The Places That Scare You (which took me until September to finish) – you read for a bit and then it’s time to put it down, perhaps do you own investigation into a concept that Dr. Dyer (or Pema Chöndrön) has proposed and see if it “fits” in your life.  That is not to say that you will agree or disagree in all or in part of the selection Dr. Dyer presents.  It also makes a great book to hang onto over the holidays with family coming and going – you can read a bit when you need a break and then let it percolate for an hour, a day, a week. Maybe we should discuss this one in March!   Dr. Dyer not only explains that the problems we face are our own reflection, he also offers ways to deal with this constructively.  One of which, I had practiced years ago; his CD of “Meditations for Manifestation”- the Japa Meditation.  He mentions the speaking to one’s body to heal very much in the same manner as Myrtle and Charles Fillmore.  He presents the theories and easy diagnostic methodology to determine which things in life are beneficial to you and those that are not espoused by David R. Hawkins, MD.  Dr. Hawkins has researched and documented evidence that the body knows and responds to any stimuli within nanoseconds.  Just as quickly it then signals its response which can be tested with kinesiology.  Dr. Dyer puts these and many other methods down in black and white for you to judge for you.   “Mindfulness is a form of mental activity that trains the mind to become aware of awareness itself and to pay attention to one’s own intention,” is how Bernie Siegel, MD defines the practice that Dr. Dyer recommends we use to avoid “problems” and/or to alleviate the suffering we cause ourselves when we allow problems to surface in our lives.  It is Dr. Dyer’s treatise that problems manifest when we allow ourselves the illusion of separation from Source and our energies become slower and lower in vibrational frequencies.   To allow whatever method we choose to work, to “do its magic” for us, we must keep ourselves mindful.  For when we allow ourselves to slip into lower energy fields we are opening ourselves up to potential problems.  Whether battling a health or a legal issue, this is no time to lose one’s focus by allowing one to slide into the “lower energies”, as Dr. Dyer calls it or the “dark side of the force” according to Luke Skywalker.   When we meditate we must be aware of when our minds wander from the nothingness into thinking and gently correct it, bringing it back to one’s focus.  Dr. Dyer proposes that we be mindful at all times.  To be aware of when we slide into judgments and gently correct, into thoughts of limitations and lovingly correct, into thoughts of lack to redirect to thoughts of abundance, into the future to worry, bring it back to the knowing that God is with us, or into the past in regret, guilt, or shame - correct to knowing we are loved, just as we are.  These are low-energy thoughts are killers, spiritually, and will quite literally kill our bodies if not attended to and redirected.     Happy reading and Happy Holidays!

GRATITUDE

By Beth Outtrim

 

I am grateful for the introduction to Louise Hay for all the marvelous new (to me) authors she introduced via this month’s book, Gratitude: A Way of Life.  This anthology of different authors and their viewpoints on gratitude gave me the exposure to many authors that I had not read.  It was like having assorted chocolate creams; each one a little different and all with the same sweet message.

 

Gratitude is the basis to making everything else work.  The first rule to getting what you want is to be grateful for what you already have.  The trick to that – we must be grateful for all of it; the flu bugs and the flowers, the tears and the laughter, the humility and the triumph.  Every bit of it is for us.  Being grateful for the lessons in our lives is a bit more difficult to envision and to practice than being grateful for the gifts, the blessings. 

 

First, that’s a fine distinction.  When a situation that appears as an obstacle first comes into our lives, it may seem to us to be a lesson that we have to “get through”.  Only later in retrospect, do we see that as a blessing.  These authors are suggesting that everything is something for which to be grateful from the very start. 

 

Even if all we are grateful for is the awareness that what we have been focusing on is contrary to our stated goals.  This in itself can be a wonderful gift.  To quote from Louise Hay's prayer of gratitude, “I am grateful for all my past experience, for I know that they were part of my soul’s growth."

 

Secondly, we grow through our challenges and our acceptance of and gratitude for those challenges.  As Dr. Bernie Siegel says, “We all have our problems.  The key is to learn how to live with them and even how to use them.”  Some of the most difficult people I’ve worked with are the people that helped me to raise and then live up to my own standards of excellence.  In The Power of Intention that we read last month the section entitled Making Your Intentions Your Reality, Wayne Dyer has Step 10: As always, remain in a state of eternal gratitude.  "Even be grateful for those whose presence may have caused you pain and suffering.”

 

Lastly, these authors remind us to be grateful for all of the things that we tend to take for granted.  The abilities to hear, see, touch, smell, taste, breathe, laugh, love, cry – all the everyday things that we never think about – they’re all gifts given worthy of gratitude.

The Power of Intention

The Power of Intention By Beth Outtrim

The Power of Intention: Learning to Co-create Your World Your Way by Wayne Dyer is a great follow on to last month’s book, Nonviolent Communication; A Language of Life, by Marshall B. Rosenberg.  Dr. Rosenberg teaches us how to speak gently and non-violently to ourselves and others.  Dr. Dyer takes us further into intention; what is our intention in our every thought, word and deed and how can we direct those to achieve what we want to have in our life?   I, like so many others apparently, since Dr. Dyer addresses it specifically, have tried affirmations for years as though it was an exercise of the will.  As Dr. Dyer writes, “Willing yourself to be happy, successful, wealthy, number one, famous, the top salesperson, or the richest person in your community are ideas born of the ego and its obsessive self-absorption…You may achieve the physical goal of your individual intention.  However, your imagination, that inner place where you do all of your living, won’t allow you to feel peaceful.”  He goes on to say that, “I don’t complete a book because I have a strong will to do so.  That would mean that I believe that it’s me, the body named Wayne Dyer, that’s doing all of this, whereas my imagination has no physical boundaries…my imagination is my very own ‘chip off the old block’ of intention.”   Esther and Jerry Hicks talk about the same thing in The Vortex.  They offer a twelve-step solution; a clock-wise manner of getting yourself to a place of full belief in the affirmation of your choice.  You answer a series of questions with affirmations starting from the smallest that you can fully believe, “I believe that my boss really wants the best for his company”, for example, and then step-by-step to a full blown affirmation that has the best intention for all parties.  Working with this has been very beneficial to me in several different venues – our new domicile is a result of performing one of these exercises.      It is also a great lead-in to the upcoming visioning session at our Unity Center home.  It will help us to prepare our words of intent for what we would like to see our church become.   We intend having so many people in our sanctuary on Sundays that we need to buy more chairs.  We intend to have our Children’s Church staffed with Unity-trained teachers in a well-developed program to cater to more age groups.  We intend to have a full-time Unity minister to support the needs of our Unity Community.  Phrasing our intentions in this manner beckons the universe to assist us achieve our intentions whatever those might be.

COMPASSIONATE COMMUNICATION

By Beth Outtrim

 

This month’s book, Nonviolent Communication; A Language of Life, by Marshall B. Rosenberg reminds of one of the books we read last year, The Places That Scare You, by Pema Chöndrön.  Not from the content so much as from the perspective that there is so much in the book to work with, to grow from, that to try and encapsulate or distill it into a paragraph or a twenty-minute talk is nearly impossible. 

 

I went to the website, www.cnvc.org, for help.  Under the section for trainings I came across the following quote about becoming a Certified Nonviolent Communicator that helped me sum up what I wanted to say:

 

“CNVC brings a unique perspective to trainers who want to become CNVC Certified Trainers… The Certification Team members who support trainer candidates on their journey toward certification are called "assessors." They create a partnership with a candidate -- what we call a “power with” process, rather than domination or “power over.” This paradigm shift allows assessors to carry out their roles in a spirit of shared respect and shared power…”

 

Dr. Rosenberg’s point is so well represented in that paragraph.  It immediately changed this whole piece.  He writes about all kinds of situations where we do violence to others and ourselves, not in ways we normally consider as violence but by shutting them down, coming across to them like we’re better than they are – power over. 

 

Here’s a simple example:  A business associate was explaining what was going on in his life.  Instead of empathizing, per Dr. Rosenberg’s recommendation, I immediately told him what I thought he should do!  The result is not too surprising once you’ve read Nonviolent Communication.  The business associate quickly brought the conversation to a close and I left feeling uneasy, dissatisfied with my actions.

 

This is a great example from two different standpoints; not only did I show by business associate my “power over” him by coming off as the “know-it-all” and telling him what he should do, I then turned around and did the same thing to myself.  “Boy, you really screwed that one up.  You should have asked him more questions.  What makes you think you’re so smart?” 

 

Dr. Rosenberg explains that our language evolved from people who were educated which, in past times, were the people who ruled.  Therefore, our language is framed around “should”, “have to”, ‘must”, etc. - not only to others but to ourselves.  It hurts others, it hurts us, and it perpetuates violence.  The challenge is not solely to change what we do and what we say but to change how we think and what we tell ourselves.

FORGIVENESS

The premise of The Little Soul and the Sun, by Neale Donald Walsch is that, prior to entering into this lifetime, we negotiated and agreed with other angels, or souls, that we would participate in each other’s lives.  We agreed to provide the conditions that are necessary for you to respond in the God-like attribute you have chosen to bring into the world.  In return, you will provide that same service to us.  In that manner, we ensure that we have the opportunity to display God’s love, forgiveness, kindness, etc. to others during our lifetimes.  Using film terminology, we have agreed to play “the heavy” for someone else at one point, just as they have agreed to do that for us or someone else has.

 

We have chosen, as angels, each of us, to come into this life to help each other heal.  We would not be able to provide that service for each other if we all behaved as angels.  However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that we display the trait that we came here to provide either. 

 

Driving in the Los Angeles area serves us well.  Are we able to remember when we’re cut off in traffic, that the angel in the other vehicle is giving us an opportunity?  We are far more likely to remark, “He did that on purpose!  She deliberately cut in from of me and then slowed down!”, than we are to remember that these “angels” are here to fulfill their end of the contract and to allow us to learn to forgive.

 

Or that homeless person that we must walk past on our way to work each morning – he smells so bad and we would prefer that he sit on someone else’s street or, better yet, take a bath, get a job, or something - other than remind us of his presence.  Do we remember that he agreed to help us learn to love unconditionally, not just our family members which, God knows, is hard enough some days, but each and every other living being?

 

In the book God is quoted as saying, “I have sent you nothing but angels.”  Unfortunately the reality is that those angels don’t look like angels to us.  They don’t even look or act like we believe that humans should, much less angels!  It would be so much easier to love them all if they talked like us, looked like us, had the same values, the same sense of responsibility. 

 

Conversely, to reneg, or to interfere by "saving" someone from their lessons, you deny them their unique place in God's plan for the evolution of manking.  As a parent, it is tempting to try and "save" your children fromhurt and pain. When our children hurt, we hurt--we attempt to make the hurt go away by distracting them from it or by providing them with something fun to :make up for it".  The truth is, if we succeed, we break the contract that they have made with that other angel thereby denying them the chance to fulfill the contract they made, to potentially learn the lesson to which they agreed, and to attain grace.

 

 

 Beth Outtrim