Let me just men­tion that the draw­ing for this series of arti­cles comes from work done by Ben Wong and Jock McK­een. I’ve fid­dled around a bit with the word­ing and the arrows, but the con­cept is theirs.

So, today I want to move to the upper left of the chart. See above. (The full chart is here)

We talk a lot about the effects of the Social Lens (the process of teach­ing our kids to fit in)—but I want to sim­plify here.

Who you are at age 18 is almost com­pletely the result of social con­di­tion­ing. Who you are and how you are is so hard wired that you’re mostly run­ning on auto-pilot.

As the draw­ing shows, the Social Self, or Small Self is made up entirely of soci­etally approved-of ways of view­ing things. I often sug­gest that it’s like wear­ing blue col­ored glasses. If such glasses were put on our faces when we were infants, our brains would adjust to the tint. (Par­en­thet­i­cally, if the glasses were removed, the world would appear yel­low, and then the eyes would adjust again – back to nor­mal.) If that’s all you know, that’s all you see.

The point is this.

We are all look­ing at the world through tinted glasses—our biases, prej­u­dices, opin­ions, and sto­ries are all col­ored by the social­iza­tion process. Because this is what hap­pens to every­one, we sim­ply do not notice, unless some­one helps us to remove the glasses.

And here’s the kicker.

There is absolutely noth­ing we can do about our social con­di­tion­ing. This mate­r­ial is so old, so repeated, so focused upon, that the best we can hope for is that we can find the ways and means to make it “go back­ground.” In other words, we can learn to dial back the noise of our social­iza­tion, we can learn to pay atten­tion to the sto­ries we tell our­selves, and then we can begin to make other choices.

Which is not to say that this is easy.

Most of my clients have spent decades vainly attempt­ing to defend the way they’re choos­ing to live their lives. They are quite unaware of the tinted glasses. They find it hard to believe that oth­ers are not see­ing exactly what they’re see­ing, hear­ing exactly what they’re hearing.

And when it comes to feel­ings, it gets even stranger. One of the inter­est­ing things that hap­pens in Body­work is when the recip­i­ent begins to feel the energy flow­ing. You see this amaz­ing, sur­prised look on their faces. They’ve been so busy feel­ing what they were told to feel, and espe­cially block­ing what they were sup­posed to block. So it really is amaz­ing to them to sud­denly dis­cover what lies under the surface.

Now, that’s not to say that they will not freak them­selves out, tighten down, and re-block the feel­ing. I see this a lot when peo­ple are first explor­ing their anger. The cul­tural par­a­digm is very strong here, espe­cially for women. Big emo­tions like anger are almost never con­doned, let alone expressed. The feel­ings rat­tle around inside, just below the level of con­scious­ness, and when they peek out, most just want to jam the lid back on the bottle.

The chart for today shows the road most taken

The Cul­tural Ideal has to be present. It’s the tar­get that the Social Lens aims at. There is, for every cul­ture, a “state of excel­lence.” It’s been fine tuned over cen­turies, pro­moted ruth­lessly, and the repres­sive action of the Social Lens removes the other items not val­ued by the society.

The two green arrows are what I call the “Ego Voice”

It’s the job of the The Ego Voice to keep us mov­ing ever upward and onward. The Ego Voice is loud, harsh, and per­sua­sive. It speaks in the voice of the absolutes.

• ” Every­one knows…”
• “All (wo)men are…”
• “It’s right to…”
• “You should never…”

The absolute being pro­mul­gated or resisted is deter­mined by the Cul­tural Ideal. The ego voice wants noth­ing more than for us to fit in—to not be ostra­cized, rejected, or judged. It’s deathly afraid of any­thing that falls out­side of the norm. So it doesn’t want to know any­thing about Shadow mate­r­ial con­tained in the Sea of Chi. (More on this next week.)

No, it just wants us to behave.

While the Ego Voice might sound famil­iar (it might sound like mom, or dad, or some sig­nif­i­cant power fig­ure) it’s just us, talk­ing to our­selves. Like the para­ble of the recal­ci­trant don­key, the Ego Voice waves a car­rot, and uses a stick.

The car­rot is the promise that we can achieve great­ness, but great­ness of a pecu­liar kind. We hear, “If you try really hard you can be per­fect,” where per­fect means “fit in even bet­ter.” We are urged to try harder, to make more, to be more, to think like the masses, and to do it all with­out mak­ing waves.

The stick is the judge­ment, “You have failed again.” You tell your­self “loser” stories—examples real and imag­ined, all from your past, designed to make you feel really, really bad. The Ego Voice has learned that pun­ish­ment often gets peo­ple back on track.

Then, after mak­ing us suf­fi­ciently guilty, the Ego Voice once again purrs, ” But if you try harder, you can be per­fect.” It’s no won­der peo­ple describe their lives as being caught on a merry-go-round or a roller-coaster.

Same game, dif­fer­ent day.

Just notice, when you go to a cock­tail party, that everyone’s com­plain­ing of the same thing—it isn’t going the way it’s sup­posed to go—and there are groups of peo­ple describ­ing being held back by cir­cum­stances, the econ­omy, pol­i­tics, or the boss. Vir­tu­ally 100% of the time, the fin­ger being pointed is aimed at an out­side vil­lain, and all that changes is which fin­ger is being pointed.

Or, if the per­son is in to self-flagellation, all that you hear is how change is impos­si­ble. And because they believe it, of course it is.

So today’s arti­cle is really meant to point you to notic­ing the glasses you’re wear­ing. In other words, to pay atten­tion to the way you see things, the way you act, and the sto­ries you tell yourself.

Oh yum… health food!
Ele­phant ears!

A quick story. Dar­bella and I were off to the Elmira Maple Syrup Fes­ti­val this past Sat­ur­day. Big event—often, 100,000 peo­ple show up. Our neigh­bour grew up in Elmira, and we lived there for almost a decade.

The neigh­bour asked if that’s where we were head­ing. We allowed that we were. She said, “Too bad, it always rains for the fes­ti­val.” I men­tioned a cou­ple of years when we wore shorts. She repeated, “Yeah, but it always rains.”

The joke: “It was 12 degrees C and sunny when she spoke, and it didn’t rain all day. But, of course, it always rains…

Here’s some homework

• Notice how often you seem com­pelled to fit in.
• Notice how, when a new feel­ing arises, you ten­dency is to re-block it rather than explore it.
• Notice how, when a new per­spec­tive is offered, you tend to argue for what you already believe, despite the fact that it’s not work­ing for you.

In the next arti­cle, we’ll look at the other path, which involves chal­leng­ing where you are, what you believe, and were you think you’re going.

In the mean­time, just have are real, seri­ous look at how you are block­ing your­self, keep­ing your­self stuck and and doing noth­ing more than com­plain­ing about it.

Life is a mean­ing­ful flow of energy – QiGong Secrets – Week 3

Last week I was expe­ri­enc­ing some cold symp­toms. My biggest dif­fi­culty was get­ting a good night’s sleep. Fri­day morn­ing, I strug­gled the most. I was too stub­born to stay home from work and get some extra rest. I quickly decided that it was going to be a very, very bad day! I was mis­er­able and grumpy and I had not even left for work yet or had to deal with another human being.

There was a lit­tle tiny voice in my head that was ques­tion­ing why I would want to set myself up for hav­ing a very bad day but I chose not to listen.

I have been prac­tic­ing my QiGong in the morn­ing before work. I set a goal to prac­tise every day. I knew if I skipped my morn­ing prac­tice time, it would be easy to find excuses about why I could not pos­si­bly prac­tice later in the day. Even though I wanted to skip this morning’s prac­tice, I spent some time doing the sim­ple move­ment I learned in the first two weeks of the course, and then con­tin­ued on to get ready for my awful, mis­er­able, no-good day.

About half way through my drive to school, I noticed that I was smiling.

My next thought was wait a minute – I am hav­ing a ter­ri­ble, awful day – I can’t be smil­ing. That resulted in a big­ger smile, a chuckle at myself for being so silly, and a very good day. Did my fif­teen minute QiGong prac­tice that morn­ing make the dif­fer­ence? I don’t know, but I do know that my daily QiGong prac­tice and my medi­a­tion prac­tice do make an incred­i­ble dif­fer­ence in my life.

Accord­ing to TCM (Tra­di­tional Chi­nese Med­i­cine), there is only one ill­ness. It is nat­ural to be healthy. Yin is our body’s nat­ural abil­ity to keep us healthy. Yang is any­thing that may cause ill­ness. Our nat­ural state or good health is to have Yin/Yang har­mony in your body. The only ill­ness is a dishar­mony in this Yin/Yang balance.

This dishar­mony can be caused by a deple­tion of Yin caused by things like exces­sive worry and poor life style choices. An increase of Yang can be caused by expo­sure to dis­ease caus­ing agents. Both will result in ill­ness. Qi flows through the merid­i­ans in our body. When the Yin/Yang is in dishar­mony, block­ages occur in the merid­i­ans and the Qi flow is slowed or stopped. This results in ill­ness. An increase in Qi flow is needed to get bet­ter no mat­ter what the symptoms.

Prac­tis­ing QiGong pro­motes the flow of Qi through the merid­i­ans. Your prac­tice can help main­tain or restore a har­mo­nious chi flow. It can help remove the block­ages. The best part is that you do not need to know where the block­ages are located. When you prac­tise QiGong, sim­ply let go and let the Qi flow. Qi will nat­u­rally flow to an area of low energy, increas­ing the energy flow in the area of the block­age and cre­at­ing a more har­mo­nious Qi flow in your body and bet­ter health.

Although this is very sim­ple, it is not easy. QiGong prac­tice only needs to be 15 min­utes a day. The move­ments are gen­er­ally easy to do. These move­ments have to be prac­tised in a mind­ful way. Your mind is engaged in the actions as much as your body is. You can’t spend 15 min­utes in the morn­ing, with your body com­plet­ing the move­ments, as you mind plans out the day and what you will have for sup­per. You also can’t expect that a few sim­ple move­ments even if you prac­tise them mind­fully will undo years of bad habits. The good news is that it does not take long to feel the results of a mind­ful prac­tise. This does not mean that you will never again have a bad day if you prac­tise QiGong, but you will change and how you show up on that bad day will be dif­fer­ent. Life is a mean­ing­ful flow of energy.

That brings me to this week’s learn­ing. Mar­cus presents a sim­ple relax­ation tech­nique to prac­tise. Qi does not flow when the body is tense, so learn­ing this sim­ple tech­nique to relax will help to make your prac­tice more effec­tive. The more relaxed you are, the more Qi flow you will experience.

If you have not already checked out this afford­able online QiGong train­ing course, I sug­gest you take the time to click on the link. The two week free trial is fully refund­able if you are not happy with the course.