Carol Howe

Well, addictions and distractions basically are anything in which we indulge to avoid feeling how we feel. There are a lot of reasons for that – number one people are afraid of it they are afraid that if they actually allow themselves to feel how they feel they will be overwhelmed in it, that they will be caught up in it, that they will be stuck in it forever which actually is what the case is Right Now. By not feeling it you are stuck in it, Another thing is, it’s a cultural thing. It’s like you’re supposed to be a grown-up person, you’re not supposed to be having difficult painful feelings and so we just act like it’s a character flaw to feel sad or grieving or something like that. The truth is, that feeling how you feel is the one guaranteed path to happiness so it’s the one thing that human beings won’t do.

It’s so strange that we refuse to feel how we actually feel and we do that for a number of reasons, number one people are afraid that if they actually allow themselves to feel that they will be overwhelmed in or that they will be swept up in it that it’s somehow something catastrophically awful is going to happen there’s also all the conditioning and the programming that we’ve grown up with especially men and I’m speaking primarily for our culture here but I think it applies everywhere that um, it’s you’re a big if you’re upset that it’s a character flaw if you’re an adult you should have it handled you should be happy and that should be it so you just are embarrassed for anybody to know or for yourself to have to acknowledge to yourself that you feel awful.

You don’t so much transcend them as you go right through them in other words the one guaranteed path is finally to stop pushing against it because that’s what addictions and distractions are those are all ways to push against resist hate run away from the way we feel and if anybody wonders about that let’s just take a week and we require everybody in the United States to, to give up or to put away cell phones, computers, TVs, video games, drugs, sex, alcohol if you just stop with those and said nobody can have any of those for the next week what do you think would happen I think we would hear an outcry that would go from here to the Moon because people don’t want to feel how they feel and it’s a learned thing and it’s so unfortunate because when you finally do tell yourself the truth one of the things I tell students or clients is when all they fails tell the truth because we do everything else first.

Well, let’s say that at the root of the feelings is a belief that I’m lacking in some way, you know there are a belief that I’m undeserving, a belief that I’ll never measure up, a belief that I’m worthless or something and the feelings that are associated with that are pretty terrible in other words if you have a chronic sense of your of lack or of loneliness or of Yearning or of grief or of sadness or whatever it might be and most of us grow up I’d say virtually all of us grow up to be emotionally illiterate, nobody taught us that there are ways to handle appropriate adult mature ways to handle to self-regulate to feel whatever those feelings are and then make an appropriate response. We’ve never learned how to make an appropriate response, we just learn to react in all sorts of ways.

Then you desperately are in need of changing your mind about that basic untrue fact that’s a programmed in notion but like a computer that can have the programming changed we seriously have got to use some process and there are many that’s what spiritual paths are about and so on to upgrade to literally rewire your brain so that in place of the I’m unworthy you begin to replace that with larger and better and more accurate Notions about yourself so it’s a it’s an ongoing getting better and better and better and with that feelings are different, it certifiably does feel awful nobody is trying to say that their feelings are delusional it’s like at some point people have to give up the story in other words we’re in love with our stories there’s not a person on the planet that doesn’t carry wounding of one kind or the other in fact the actual fact is wounding Begins for every human being at conception when the DNA that makes us up comes together and we start to form a new body because the DNA that we get has got fear and pain in it. In other words some of the DNA we get is closed so it’s not like some people have an unfortunate early childhood and that’s the problem and other people get off scot-free absolutely not true everybody has wounding and then as we get older as we go we we pick up a lot of physical defensiveness in our very early years emotional defensiveness, intellectual defensiveness and this defensiveness starts so early that nobody’s there to say “is this really true”, “do I really need these defenses” in other words “is my basic premise accurate” and the answer to all of those is no, no, no, no and the truth of us the actual created unalterable truth of us is that we are whole, that we’re Divine, that we’re and that’s literally built into the DNA as well in other words that we were created whole and boundless and Limitless and eternal by a source which is impossible for us to possibly comprehend intellectually and we don’t have the capacity to change that.

The ego is a handy word to refer to the image or the self-concept of ourselves, in other words a self-concept is built by us by our early experiences and so on and we present it to the world as if this is who I am it’s not who I am. This thing is changeable, it’s unstable take a look at what we associate the ego with the body mind, okay the body is not stable because the molecules and atoms and so on that make it up or constantly changing. The Mind itself is made of perceptions you know so that we perceive, we hear, we smell, we so on thoughts, feelings, emotions, the sensations in the body of sitting on this chair nothing could be more unstable than that. It’s like those change all the time, think of how many thoughts have moved through your mind since you got up this morning, a lot and yet there is the awareness of us which is always constant if you just think about it. There, we are an awareness at least that’s one way to approach it. It has no edges you can’t come to the edge or the end of awareness it’s empty, it’s clear and everything that we perceive is within that awareness. In other words, awareness is able to be aware of a body- mind but not the other way around in other words awareness is bigger it’s Eternal, it’s Limitless, it’s non-judgmental, it’s non-resistant that cannot be said of the body-mind which is just a big batch of programming and yet we protect it and care for it and maintain it as if it were the central core of my being.

True peace comes about by trading in my sense of identity from this thing which I am not which is literally contrived as I starting from birth and before for a larger sense of myself and that happens by, by changing my mind about the way I want to handle my relationship to myself and other people if I start moving from the getting mode to a giving mode

you’ve ruined yourself. There’s something to matter with you and at some point, if we’re smart, we’re going to ask the question I’ve always taken it for granted that this is true but who granted it and why am I listening in? In other words, we have just to grow up and we have to begin to question the things that we’ve always believed we can’t just go oh I was just told that it must be true well that’s not being a mature adult. I need to begin to question all of the things that I’ve learned and if I do I find out they don’t hold water but if I just act like I’m a victim of everything else I’m never going to get anywhere most of the world lives at that victim mentality somebody else did it to me, the way I feel is somebody else’s fault, that’s not true I can begin and it’s not something you do overnight or with the snap of a finger. This is literally a re-programming, a rewiring of your brain project and it just doesn’t happen overnight but it’s never going to happen if you don’t start.

Forgiveness is releasing so much of this stuff in our minds that are just it’s just simply inaccurate but we’ve never questioned it. If you don’t question it then you’ll never find out that it’s inaccurate so forgiveness is realizing I’m holding on to grievances, I am holding on to making someone else responsible for my upset or my pain or my lack or whatever else. It’s a very immature perspective to have and forgiveness is really releasing these thoughts and ideas and accusations in my own mind out of enlightened self-interest because as long as I hang on to them I will perpetuate the idea that I’m small and lacking an unworthy and a victim it’s just a pointless closed loop to stay in when I have the option of breaking out so to speak and ultimately finding myself in a much better closed loop where I’m fine everybody else is fine everybody’s deserving everybody makes mistakes but everybody’s inherently lovable Etc, It takes kind of hours to go through all of that but that’s just the short answer.

Well, it’s when that energy is so low and the frequency you see we’re essentially energy fields and when the energy field gets slower and slower and slower and we’re operating at that fear of frequency which is one way to look at it. It’s like everything gets held in, everything is being depressed, everything is being closed and that’s at a cellular level as well as any other level you want to talk about and people run to take medication for depression but it would be wise to look to say why am I choosing to be so closed, no there’s not a really another soul on Earth who is making me do this my own programming is My Own Worst Enemy that’s and I and the problem is I don’t question the programming I act like it’s why I’ve used the example before it’s like we were born and raised in a cult you know people who we talk about people in Cults with a tyrannical leader who never lets you look outside the walls or know about material or literature or something from outside the cult walls and it’s kind of like we’ve grown up in the cult of the ego. The Cult of everything is a victim of someone else or of the material world and at some point you need to ask the question is this really true, is there some other way to look at this, are there other options that maybe I just don’t know about yet. It’s kind of to be have an inquiring mind.

Once we’re all numbed out then relationships where we really are entangled with somebody either through marriage, a committed relationship, a next-door neighbor, a Business Partnership, somebody that I’ve invested a lot of money with something that kind of glues me to them there’s always going to be a dynamic in the relationship that pushes my deepest buttons that gets me in touch with whatever that core woundedness is and the problem is we say that person has hurt me or made me angry or something they’ve done no such thing, they have triggered your own unhealed, unexamined, woundedness within yourself and that’s why healing, that that’s why the fastest greatest healing can happen in relationships if you’re willing to say how am I participating what am I bringing to this what is this telling me about me that I might need to look at but we have to be educated in that way.

Projection is when I take the parts of myself that I refuse to own and see them in you instead. Let’s pretend like I really accuse myself and others have accused me of let’s say being lazy and I managed through a kind of selective reception to completely not see that in myself it’s kind of like it gets walled off in a compartment someplace but I will sure see you as lazy. In other words, I and I’ll say no matter where I turn I seem to draw people into my life who are lazy and they just won’t get the job done, they need to get done and that’s projection and so healing happens when I finally am willing to kind of turn around and say oh this is what I accuse myself of  and when I deal with that within Myself the great mysterious circumstance is I will stop running into lazy people. They just won’t be in my life anymore because they’re not going to be in my I heal that within myself.

Always, get this idea in other words this gets to be very visual I did this the other day in this was a trap. It’s like there are 50 or 60 trillion cells in your body so just look at your arm and you think, oh my goodness and this little part right here there are millions of cells and the center of each one of those cells has got DNA in it is the nucleus of the cell and every one of these cells is carefully listening to everything I say, everything I think, everything I believe, everything I assume, everything that makes up what we refer to as attitude and those cells are instantly responding and the way I understand or experience the response is my emotional state and the circumstances of my outer life so it’s like there is a constant give and take, there’s a constant feedback loop, there’s a constant the world and the way I feel becomes a barometer, it’s a measuring device it lets me see out here so to speak the state of my mind and if my mind is a mess and I’m closed down and I’m blaming myself. I, my world will be populated by that kind of experience doors will be closed to me, people will be insulting to me in other words that will be my experience I’m not delusional that’s that is what I will be seeing and my feeling state will be very unhappy happily I’m in charge of change you see it’s not that the world out there is mirrored in, in to my interior parts it’s that my interior attitude is shows up as the world. It does in other words I’m the one in the driver’s seat. It always starts on the inside and then is reflected outward every, this has been stated in one way or the-other for thousands of years this isn’t just a brand new idea. This, this has been known by sages and by wise people and enlightened people and so on forever this is not new. In proverbs or something as a man thinketh in his heart so is he and all kinds of other things that would indicate that your outer life is always going to be a faithful reflection just like a mirror of your inner life and if your inner life is in turmoil your outer life will be in turmoil as well. It has a lot to do with the body chemistry and the body chemistry that keeps changing as a result of your thoughts which of course are all those beliefs that are made up of a bunch of thoughts. Unfortunately, many of which are totally false.

Well, it is certainly true that the ego tries to feed itself through bodily appetites. The body itself doesn’t really have appetites but the ego does because it’s always like a big bottomless pit that can never be filled up but, but primarily we distract ourselves because we feel in pain and we’re doing everything possible to avoid feeling that.

it would be nice if we stopped calling it love and we started calling it like attachment or something like that, in other words because you see, look at the, look at the impossibility of this if my inner life is exactly replicated in my outer life and if in my inner life I think I’m no good, I think I’m not lovable, I think nothing ever works out for me. in other words if that’s my inner attitude what you have to realize is that I’m going to be interacting with a world that is similar in tone and I’m going to send my little body mind out into this in my world which is going to be a picture of my inner life and expect to find love and peace and harmony out there when it’s entirely absent in here, I mean if you see the setup you see the impossibility of that. It’s just impossible that I can find out here something that is absent in here. So it certainly is a big addiction it’s like I’ve got to go find somebody that’s going to love me it’s like I don’t love myself I don’t think that I’m actually lovable but now I go on this Preposterous quest of trying to find a somebody out there who will, who will consider me lovable and desirable and you think does that even actually make any sense to think that this possibly could ever work out. If you take a look around you can see it doesn’t work out well you know because I’m going into a relationship to get something and the problem is the other person is also going into the relationship to get something so to use an unoriginal example it’s like you’ve got two half-filled glasses of water each trying to keep their half and get filled up from the other person who’s also guarding their half it’s just, in other words, both people are coming into it wounded as we all are trying to get something from the other to feel better and so relationships for most people who haven’t done their own inner work just get put in the a different kind of an addiction category. I mean a different, a different item in the category of addictions it’s something we do to greatly distract ourselves.

A special relationship is one that I just described you know, you don’t care, you don’t love yourself but you’re going on a quest to find somebody who will which is pointless. A holy relationship is one where two people have enough sense about this to realize we’re going to come together and together we’re going to, first of all own that we do have stuff that we have to deal with that is not accurate that’s unhealed and we’re going to somehow have an intention to help each other with this that’s very different from saying I expect you to meet all my needs I take no responsibility for meeting my knees and so I now make that your job. It’s kind of like we send a contract out to the other person but it’s so generally gross that we would never acknowledge we’re doing that but it’s like that’s what we want it’s like by the way I have an agenda for you I’m not going to tell you what it is but my agenda for you is you’re supposed to confer the value onto me that I don’t think I have and vice versa you can see how unworkable that is or in a sense to recognize what isn’t love well, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that will I’m feeling lonely or furious or rejected or whatever else. I’m sure not feeling love in other words I don’t really have much trouble differentiating between an experience of love and the other options all of which get lumped into the category of fear.

And the only way you will feel it and will experience it is by making the choice like it’s my responsibility to know how the universe operates and the way the universe operates is, is that what I offer or what I give I have more of in other words always what I put out I have more of. Well, literally as I open up more and I’m and I mean opening up from a cellular level, opening up at however many levels you want to consider that we have the more open I am for the purpose of giving the more I’m going to feel, the more I’m going to experience and the more what I give increases in me so if I’m giving out hate, anger, distress, insults whatever it might be the more I give that into the world the more of that I will experience myself and there’s no way you can keep that from happening so the more I say I’ve got to completely change my mind about a lot of things and I start to offer what I actually want to experience I will then increase that within myself that’s an absolute law. It’s not like you can mess with that and say well maybe that works and maybe it doesn’t it’s like just go try jumping off the roof you can say I don’t know anything about the law of gravity and I don’t think I believe in it and so I’m going to fly off this roof well, ignorance is no excuse you’ll crash to the ground you’ll kill yourself or injure yourself and you might say- well this is not fair because I didn’t really know how this worked it’s incumbent upon us to know how life works.

Well, first of all depends upon if you’re talking about the death of the physical body but it’s kind of like we put ourselves in a dying process all the time because the, the fearful things that cause us to contract is kind of like living in a fearful way is almost like a constant dying and we don’t like the results of it. We will often we don’t call that dying, we call that being afraid or being anxious or something like that but um to be afraid first of anything doesn’t serve us, we need to work our way through that but to be afraid of the one thing that you can be absolutely guaranteed you’re going to experience is unfortunate. You know we’re told our birth is not our beginning, our physical death is not the end. This is a learning experience we’ll just call it a transitory experience that we’re going through and but life itself is eternal. It’s an out-of-time-and-space experience and nothing ever happens to it life itself is a causal that means, it has no beginning, no end, no, we don’t, we can’t say intellectually how it happens. It just is in the song of prayer it talks about once you when your job is done when you’ve followed your guidance you’ve done everything this year is to do then you can simply lay the body aside in a peaceful calm way. In other words, most people go through a getting sick, of getting frail or getting whatever which is part of the daily dying process that we go through but it doesn’t have to be that way so that the time comes when you lay your body aside but it’s not done in a traumatic way.

The reality of change is you, first of all, have to decide you know what I’m really sick of my life being the way it is. I would like to be proactive on my own behalf, I would like to do some, I’d like to find out more, I’d like to read a book, I would like to see how I can take responsibility for how I feel. Now the length people might not use that language, it might just be help you know, I can’t stand my life like this but at some point I have to be self-responsible instead of saying I can’t do anything about it because I was abused as a child well, as I say all of us have our unfortunate stories and wounding from early on and at some point instead of cycling around in the story I’ve got to say what can I do about this, how can the experience that I’ve had up to this point turn into a gift, how can I ask myself better questions, how can I decide I want to be happy rather than thinking I can only be happy if everybody else out there does whatever it is they do and then somehow they’re responsible for my happiness it’s like it’s not done that way I decide that I’m worth changing my mind for, I decide I want my goal to be happy to be at peace so if I don’t set that goal and I just stay addicted and distracted and take some pills I’m going to get nowhere because I’m not fundamentally making any changes the actual releasing process is very fast but the development of our willingness to take this kind of responsibility and actually realize I am a co-creator of any kind of circumstance in which I find ourselves that the, the developing of the willingness is what takes time the actual release of I get it this is about me I’m responsible for this Let It go, doesn’t take long at all but I’m just reluctant to grow up and take responsibility. I don’t know how I could describe it in one word. I feel like an awful lot of letting go has occurred especially, a lot of the victim kind of thinking you know, the somebody did it to me or the world does it to me or I can’t do this because of as if there are reasons out there that are in my way so like the water dripping on the rock and it gradually erodes it as you contemplate the lessons and you rewire your brain and you make the decision to cooperate with the process of seeing things differently now for instance if somebody does something that I think shouldn’t have occurred that way I just drop out all the stuff in the middle about why does anybody act that way kind of thing and go right to what does this situation that I might find troublesome tell me about myself, what is this telling me about, something that I’m still feeling guilty about or that I’m still hanging on to. In other words, I can greatly shorten the time between when I might feel some little distress and when it gets healed and I’m happy to say that distress is now really uh few and far between it’s like almost nothing’s distressing.