There Are No Rules, Including This One

The Rules for Being Human - 
Dr. Chérie Carter-Scott

11.There is no right or wrong, but there are consequences. Moralizing doesn’t help. Judgments only hold the patterns in place. Just do your best.

Albert Einstein once said,

"Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods."

Oh boy, do we ever want there to be rights and wrongs. The vast majority of intra and interpersonal communication that doesn’t work is actually a battle to be proven right. As we’ve been saying for some time now, through Into the Centre and in counselling and writing, in the end, there is simply your opinion. It may make sense to you, indeed, the world may seem to revolve around your understandings, but in the end, they are just that – your understandings.

Let’s talk about consequences. It’s semi-axiomatic that every thought and every action has a consequence. We get that one when something "good" happens – we are reluctant to take credit when something "not so good" happens.

I’ve got a client who is very much into New Age thinking – something that causes me to pull out my hair. She came in because her life is a mess and she’s depressed, and wants me to teach her to have more positive affirmations in her life. As I don't think a new affirmation is worth much more than an old one, we've agreed that she'll come in for Bodywork.  I have a pile of stories I could use here, but here’s just one for now.

She’s new to Bodywork. She’s read my brochure on it, and we had a discussion on what to expect. Because of her mind set, her judgments, she assumes that she is a "very advanced being" and should be experiencing in one session what others might take three or four sessions to get to. My subjective judgment is that not much is happening, as she isn’t open to the experience.

We finished our last session, and she said, "When I started today, I figured I’d need 10 - 15 more sessions. Half way through, I was told (this would be God, I suspect, whispering in her ear – God, having nothing better to do … ) I would only need 7 - 8 more sessions. Now that we’re done, I’m aware that I’ll only need 3 - 4 more sessions."

Now, I amuse myself with this, as I realize I’ve been working on me and my stuff and doing Bodywork for a couple of decades now, and sense I’m scratching the surface of some great depth. I’m in awe of people like my client, who can figure everything out, for all time, in three sessions or so.

Imagine my surprise the next day, when I got a message on my answering machine (God was apparently too busy to deliver it for her) – "I’m standing here in my living room, still totally depressed. I don’t like my house, my marriage, my kids, my career. Surely you can change what you are doing, so I don’t have to feel this way. We need to do things differently so I’m fine after the next session."

This little soul has not understood, yet, that her life is the consequence of her choices. What she sees all around her and in her, which she depresses herself over, is the result of her thoughts and behaviours. The only solution to her dilemma is to rethink her beliefs, and choose different behaviours. Period.

Her judgment, and the judgment of many, is that problems are externally caused. Life then becomes a monumental struggle to get the rest of the world to change.

Another judgment is "I am defective in some way." There’s an overwhelming feeling of powerlessness that connects with this idea. As we said last week regarding filters, if I assume I’m defective in some way, I’ll prove it to myself, and quite easily. I’ll simply ignore all evidence to the contrary.

A subset of this is our judgment about feelings. I touched on this in last week’s "Body of the Matter." One of the interesting things about Bodywork is that emotions, feelings, become more immediate as the body armour begins to melt. Stuff comes up.

Now, most of us have a list of "good" feelings – joy, happiness, ecstasy, passion, love, bliss, contentment – all of which are actually descriptions of a feeling that is "warm and fuzzy." (All that changes is the degree.)

And then there’s the "bad" list – anger, sadness, despair, grief, angst, fear, loneliness – all of which are actually descriptions of a feeling that is "cold and prickly" (again, a matter of degree.)

We want more of the former, none of the latter.

Except it doesn’t work that way.

For example, I may be working with someone on a Bodywork chest release. What will come up is grief. Heartbreak. If the person breathes into it, doesn’t judge it, they will grieve, and the grief will pass. Often what will then emerge is joy. One flowing into the other.

If there is the sense that the "bad" feeling should be (there’s the judgment) repressed, the joy will never be fully experienced.

So, I encourage people to simply feel their feelings. As you feel and then go into your head, evaluating the feeling, the goal is to give your little head a pat, and return to the feeling. Otherwise, the consequence, in this case, for all of us, goes like this: 

If you judge your feelings, you will stop your feelings.
All of them.

This point of view holds for all judgments. As soon as you go to a place that assigns a fixed judgment on anything or anyone, there you sit. Now, we all judge. The way past it is to admit it.

When I go into judgment, I say, "So, my judgment here is that . . ." As soon as I acknowledge the judgment, I give myself permission to let go of it.

I may have used this example before, but bear with me. I was working with a client and suggested to him that he needed to let go and experiment with new behaviours. He replied that he needed more control. I said, "Let go." He replied, "More control." I started to annoy myself, and my judgment was that he wasn’t listening. So, I said to him, "I’m aware that I’m annoying myself over here, over your use of the word control. I have a judgment that control isn’t helpful. What do you mean by ‘control’?"

He said, "I need to control myself from using what doesn’t work, so I can try something new."

Oops. I could have created distance through my judgment. As it turned out, we were saying approximately the same thing, using different words. He picked a word I set myself off over. If I hadn’t admitted what I was doing, I can’t see how this would have resolved itself.

Listen to yourself. Give yourself permission to note your judgments, your "good and bad" list. Let go of the need to think you need such a list. Remember that your life is a consequence of your choices, thoughts and actions.

It’s your show. How do you like it so far?