Day 233: Depression and Denial

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to place my focus on ‘getting through the day’

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to walk my day in anticipation of my day being over, to wait for the time where I am ‘too tired to do anything’ and can go to sleep

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to have created a form of depression as a consequence of not directing my fearfulness - where I fear ‘my day’ but really fear myself within my day as I anticipate ‘more of the same’ to take place and be experienced

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to have created a polarity towards the day and night, fearing and wanting to avoid the day, wanting the day to get ‘over and done with’ - while looking forward to the night where I can ‘shut down’ and basically ‘not be existent’

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not want to be existent

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to seek out the time and state as sleep where ‘nothing more is required of me’ because I’ve made myself believe that it is all too much and too overwhelming

I forgive myself that I haven’t accepted and allowed myself to see and realise that I make things too much and too overwhelming through my very relationship with the day and night, my relationship to being awake and not being awake - where each time I resist the day, the night ‘becomes sweeter’ and the ‘sweeter’ the night becomes, the more I resist the day - trapping myself in a compounded loop where I enhance my experiences, polarizing myself even more

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not want to be awake, to not want to be existent because I have on some level given up on myself, given up on the fact that I can change, that my experience can change, that I can be the directive principle of myself instead of a slave to my mind and emotional experiences

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to justify my depression by referencing my experience of fear and overwhelm, that ‘this is just the way things are’ and that there is ‘no way out’ and ‘no chance of change’

I forgive myself that I haven’t accepted and allowed myself to see and realise that the only reason I don’t want to be existent is because I have accepted my state and position as being a slave to the mind - where I am stuck in the haze of the ‘now’ of consciousness where no moment is ‘new’ as every moment is laid over and projected over by my mind 

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to justify my depression by saying that ‘nothing is changing’, looking for external change as a reward that I am ‘doing the right thing’

Within this I forgive myself that I haven’t accepted and allowed myself to walk my process for myself, despite what may or may not be changing on the outside - where I have created conditions around my process that make it either ‘worth it’ or ‘not worth it’

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to have fixated my process on ‘doing’ as what I am doing / not doing and what others are doing / not doing instead of focusing on Who I Am 

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to have created a chore out of process, a religion - where I ‘move’ and ‘do my corrections’ but do not do them as myself, but do them from a sense of ‘avoiding damnation’, of ‘having to do the right thing’ - from a ‘I have to’ not because ‘I want to’

I forgive myself that I haven’t accepted and allowed myself to see and realise that I have become a victim to myself, abdicating self-responsibility by blaming others for the actions and decisions I have made and the actions and decisions I have not made

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to fight and argue for my limitations

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to fight and argue for my limitations instead of fighting and arguing for my expansion and growth

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to want to defend my idea that I cannot be self-responsible, that I am not a creator, that I am not of Life

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to be and live in constant denial of my true nature, in denial of Oneness and Equality as an Equal Creator of Reality

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to within the belief that I am not a creator, that I am just a victim and a slave - not consider what it is I want to create for myself and everyone because apparently ‘that’s not even an option’

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not want to believe or conceive that I am more than who I think and believe I am as a character - to only see and behold myself from a System’s perspective and have stopped seeing myself and who I am within the context of Life, as a Child of Life

Day 232: Fear, so much Fear!

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to live in constant fear and survival

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to find myself things to do to keep busy, to keep engaged and have myself focus on anything but my experience of fear and survival - to then when one moment / task is done - plunge into a panic of ‘what now??? Now it’s all back!’

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to live in fear of myself

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to live in fear of my own fear / of me experiencing and embodying fear

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to believe and perceive that my fear is very valid, where I perceive and believe my fear is my ‘voice of reason’ and that it’s there for a reason and that I must listen to it and be engaged with it because it’s trying to tell me something important that I need to know / be aware of to be able to avoid some worst case scenario -- and yet at the same time be so consumed by the fear that all I exist as is this fear and see no solutions, no direction and only react more to the state I am in which compounds the fear even more

Within this I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to try and distract myself from my fears and my experiences by keeping busy and keeping engaged so that I do not have a moment to myself where I am alone with myself

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to on the one hand want to get away from my experience of fear because I ‘disappear’ and yet at the same time want to be engaged in my fear, give it attention, because I perceive and believe that it’s telling me information to protect me and I must act on my fear

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to have defined my fear in separation of myself, as this external entity that attacks and ‘takes over’

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to see myself as less than my fear

I forgive myself that I haven’t accepted and allowed myself to see and realise that I am the creator of my own fear, that I am the one creating my own overwhelming experience

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not want to see that I am capable of creating overwhelming experiences for and towards myself

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to hold on to my fears where I will tell myself ‘let go of the fear, whether I am in fear or not, I am here anyway’ - where for a moment I have peace inside myself only to then bring up all the ‘what ifs’ I have been fearing as if to put me ‘back in my place’ , ‘back to diminishment’ that I am ‘not allowed to not have fear’, that ‘fearlessness is ignorant and stupid’ - who do I think I am to not be fearful?

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to perceive and believe that the only way to give direction to points of concern is by fearing them

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to have equated fear to being responsible and considerate

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to believe that fearfulness is a practical survival skill

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to have equated fear to being aware 

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to believe that to be able to list all the things that can go wrong and being aware of everything that can go wrong at a given moment is ‘responsible’

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to validate my fears

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to justify fear

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to believe that fear is the answer to everything

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to perceive and believe that fear is justified because of previous moments / events where I didn’t know how to direct something

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to believe that my past shows me my future, in that the future is necessarily going to be the same as the past and that I am bound to experience myself in the same way and respond to things the same way and so I am trapped and a victim and will only ever experience myself as my limitations 

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to trust fear because I do not trust that I can change

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to even within this very self-forgiveness defend and justify my fears through logic

I forgive myself that I haven’t accepted and allowed myself to have shown myself that I do not need fear 

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to hold on to and defend the known while at the same time being unwilling to explore the unknown 

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to defend my fear and justify my fearfulness because apparently it ‘got me this far’ and so ‘has to be of use / valuable’ and that it is ‘reckless’ to ‘give that up’

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to want to place the blame outside of myself as to ‘why I am so fearful’, that it’s because of ‘all of these reasons and things are just worth fearing’ while in reality I have not taken enough time, consistently, to do my writing, my forgiveness and have let things accumulate to the point where I am ‘too full of stuff’ and everything seems hopeless with no solution in sight - while I very well know that when I was most empowered was then I was writing and doing forgiveness consistently and that my current experience is a manifested consequence of ‘letting things slide’

Within this - I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to believe and perceive that I could ‘afford’ to let things slide because I had reached a point of stability within myself and things were working out - perceiving and believing that once it has been ‘achieved’ it will remain there forevermore, taking only note of the end result and not the process of creation and that it is this process of creation that requires to be maintained and practised consistently over time

I commit myself to get back to what I know serves me, to the basics, to the tools that have always supported me as breathing, self-forgiveness, writing and self-corrective statements and actions

I commit myself to trust myself to get back to my real self, to trust that my experience of fearfulness is not a final condemnation and an absolute, that I am not bound to and by fear -- and that I can experience, live and express myself as my best potential both for myself and for others as myself

Day 231: The Disempowerment of Hope – What are you Waiting for?

For a while now I have been going through all the various recordings Bernard has made throughout the years in order to sort through the content and compile them into books by topic. The History of Desteni – Volume 1 being the first such publication. While going through the interviews and deciding how to sort them, I often come across interviews that ‘hit me home’ in terms of a particular point or dimension I am walking and investigating for myself.

This time, it was a discussion on the word: Hope.

It was particularly timely as I had also listened to the latest Life Reviews Holding Back and Imprisoning My Life Part 1 and Part 2. If you haven’t listened to them, I strongly suggest you do so as it gives extra angle/perspective into the particular topic of this blog. (If you don’t have them, leave a comment along with your e-mail address and I might gift it to you ;-) )

Hope – for many a word with a very positive connotation. The little light that shines at the darkest hour. In recent days, maybe even weeks, I have been looking at my relationship with Hope and in how many ways and forms I participate in hope – without necessarily being aware that it constitutes as hope. 

At first, I was using hope as a way to move myself. 

That things may not be as bad as they look.

That anything could happen at any time that would turn things around 180 degrees.

That maybe something exciting will happen during my day that I may not know of – and it’s just waiting to happen, so I better get out of bed!

It worked for a while, I got myself moving, dived into projects, enthused that great things would be coming my way.

But then – my schedule would fall in the water (which is kind of a chronic condition when you have a toddler) or things beyond my control would freeze my efforts. Or I worked really hard on something and the results were naught. The next day – I was experiencing what I dub a ‘Hope Hangover’.

I didn’t quite understand my experience. I had been ‘so full of energy’ (well, that should have already made some bells ring *oops*) the day before and I had ‘such a positive outlook’ – why was I feeling so low and exhausted today? On a purely physical level – there was nothing that could explain my drained experience. I hadn’t been overexerting myself, Cesar managed to not use me as a mattress for most of the night resulting in a pretty good night’s sleep – everything was working out quite okay in my reality – so why this crash?

I didn’t figure it out until later that night, when I slowed down in bed before sleeping and went over the last few days in microscopic detail. I hadn’t realised how much I had been participating in hope because I hadn’t actually used the word ‘hope’ in any of my thoughts. I hadn’t even been participating in verbal thoughts all that much. And then I realised how many small positive movements occurred within me throughout the days. Where I may be thinking of something, and simply because the particular object of my thoughts has a positive energy charge attached to it – I’m actually going into an experience of Hope.

Or maybe I am scrolling through Instagram, and a particular picture triggers a slight positive reaction inside myself – so slight, so undefined – it’s a pretty picture, of course I should admire it, right? Getting excited about a project idea that’s come to mind. Seems innocent enough right? A slight positive experience as I start working through my to-do list. Well, I should be positively moved – I am being all productive and shit, right? This is how successful people get things done! Yeah, role model stuff happening right here.

Right?

Or maybe not.

Maybe all that positivity is just there to cloak what’s really going on inside: fear, powerlessness and most of all =  a lack of self-trust.

The hope that – maybe if I was living that person’s life things would be easier for me.
Why?
Because I don’t trust that I can change despite what environment I am in

The hope that if I work on this project we can bring more people into the Desteni group.
Why?
Because I fear that people don’t move themselves to investigate things unless they are prompted to, as I don’t trust that I can move myself out of my own self-will.

The hope that if I keep myself busy and diligently work through my to do list that people will be inspired.
Why?
Because I haven’t established the trust to be passionate myself through sheer common sense and understanding. That's why I move from fear instead of understanding.

Now, I’m not saying one shouldn’t like things on Instagram, not come up with any ideas/new projects or not work through your to-do list. The point I am making is that our starting point in how and why we engage in our reality determines how we will experience ourselves and move ourselves.

What if I am ever forever stuck in the living conditions I have now? What if things don’t get better, but worse? Will it change who I am? Will it change what I stand for? Does it mean I will give up on pushing for a better world for all, equally?

What if people don’t come and join Desteni, and we remain a relatively small group – or get disintegrated all together? Does it change anything for who I am and what I stand for? Will I turn my back and submit that the world is ‘just the way it is’?

What if doing my best and getting as many things done as possible does not reap any results? Will I regret how I spent my time? Will I wish that I could have ‘not wasted my time’? Or will I stand by who I am and what I do – unconditionally – regardless of the outcome?

These are small examples of ways where can still be stuck in the Design of Hope. Where we focus on our external reality to (magically) change or suddenly support us – while on a deep level not being there for ourselves.

What are we waiting for?

Are we waiting for things to get better, before we will diligently stop our thoughts and emotions and live in every breath? Or do we move ourselves in every breath because we have proven to ourselves that the old way, the way of the mind for sure does not reap the best benefits for everyone in this world, equally?

Are we waiting for someone else to stand up, to prove that stopping your mind and moving your trust and faith in Life makes things better for everyone in the world including yourself, in fact? Or are we going to be that person for ourselves, because the proof has been in our face countless times – and we have just that mustard seed of self-honour to stop torturing ourselves?

Are we going to wait for Desteni to become more financially successful because money has been deemed to be the ultimate sign and beacon of truth, success and validity in this world (which is a highly dubious conviction in itself)? Or are we going to move ourselves unconditionally because in our being we know that what has become of this world and ourselves is disgraceful and have decided: No More!

The more we hope for circumstances to change ‘for the better’ the more we confirm the belief that ‘I cannot do it’ , ‘I’m incapable’.
And that's why I had a 'Hope Hangover'. Because all my movements had been conditional, to achieve something, to appease something. And when those conditions weren't met -- down, down the rabbit hole you go.

Investigate all the various ways you are still participating in Hope and show to yourself how Abandoning All Hope – to make the decision to develop Trust in Yourself – can be the most empowering move you can make.

Here’s a video by Matti which he made closely after Bernard discussed the word ‘Hope’ :

And here are some blogs I wrote around the same time linking in to this, when I went through tickbite fever:

http://ylaww.blogspot.com/2012/08/day-35-reversing-trust.html

http://ylaww.blogspot.com/2012/08/day-36-self-as-creator.html

Day 230: Permission And Self - Worth

Day 229: Guilty until Proven Innocent & The Mathematics of Self-Trust

The other day I was in a discussion when the topic came up of how to work with points that are pointed out by someone else.

In my own process, when someone would point something out that they saw in my words and behaviour – I’d sometimes get this ‘surge’ movement inside of myself coming up where I felt compelled to disagree and set the record straight.

This surging experience I interpreted as being a movement of self-trust, that ‘I know what I’m experiencing’ and that ‘I know where I stand’.

After some trial and error and discussions – I realised that this movement was not at all ‘self-trust’ – but an energetic experience of unquestionable self-righteousness. I also learnt that self-trust – is not an experience. It’s not an experience or feeling of ‘blind faith’ of ‘just knowing’. Self-trust wasn’t so much a ‘decision’ either (like – “I am going to trust myself from now on!). Self-trust is more of a verb – it requires certain actions for you to take.

You wouldn’t just blindly loan out money to a stranger. You’d want to know them, and have a sense of their track record.

The same goes with Self-Trust – it’s not enough to simply ‘experience’ and ‘believe’ that you’re trustworthy – you need to be able to show yourself a track record.
And that track record is your self-investigation, you testing points out, seeing what the feedback is, and specifying your application accordingly.

With being really good at deceiving and sabotaging ourselves, what I started to use whenever someone pointed something out to me -- is to use the principle of ‘guilty until proven innocent’.
I’ll assume that I was in a reaction, a movement, or some form of misalignment – check myself, check what I was looking at, what I was doing before, anything that may have led to developing an experience in the current moment and anything that led to having created my current stance.
Maybe I find something that was not aligned – maybe I don’t. If I do, I can work on it to specify myself, and if I don’t – I can use the information I tracked down within myself to discuss the point further with the person, and so learn to specify my communication (which means that in a way, something was still misaligned!)

It can be handy to have a tagline or a specific Living Word you bring up in those moments – as it’s easy to get lost in an experience and ramble over all the reasons and justifications of ‘why I said what I said’, ‘why I saw what I saw’. To for a moment just shove all the talking aside – remember the decision I made in walking this process, to be humble, to remember the dedication and persistence it takes to work through every little cranny of the mind – to not take anything for granted.

It only takes one moment of being unaware, one moment of letting something slip by, taking something for granted – and before you know it you’re on a slippery slope in altering your entire perception about reality. It kind of reminds me of working though math equations in high school. Where if you make one mistake, in one little variable that you didn’t quite move correctly – the whole path the equation takes and end result is COMPLETELY different to what you end up seeing on the blackboard as the version the teacher worked out correctly. Where it just takes that one little teeny weeny mistake to create a HUGE disparity between what you worked out and what it is in reality.

Same with the mind. If you’re not aware of every breath in every moment, keeping track of your every movement, correcting the mistakes as you catch them right then and there, unless you got yourself covered every step of the way – how can you be trusted? How can you be sure that how you’re looking and seeing things isn’t like a math equation that quietly went astray without you noticing?

Day 228: How We Worship False Images & are Self-Blasphemous

I was investigating a pattern of Self-Compromise within myself where I went back to childhood memories to trace the origin of this pattern and what motivated me to take on this pattern within my life and acting it out.

As I was walking a mini-Mind Construct* on this point, I could see how and why I had allowed Self-Compromise to become such a big part of my life. While I currently experience Self-Compromise to be a ‘very big part of me’, I could see while walking my Mind Construct, that this hadn’t always been so.

I could identify the specific moment in childhood where I had made a particular decision about a direction I would take in my life / a particular ‘role’ or ‘purpose’ that I had assigned to myself which had Self-Compromise has a direct outflow/consequence.

This role/purpose that I had assigned to myself, had been made in separation of myself – where I was aspiring to embody a particular idea/image.

I could see within opening up the point further in my Mind Construct, that in every moment of participating in this role and giving into Self-Compromise, how I was feeding and growing this construct/idea – where initially I as a child had been aware of the decision I had made, and was aware that this ‘is not me’ – to over time continuously participating in the point to where it superseded the ‘real me’ and where I kind of started to forget about this decision that I had made in the past to participate in this construct, and where as time progressed even more, and my ‘real me’ had now been effectively completely suppressed by this construct and others that I had taken on on the way – I now believed that this ‘idea’/’role’ I took on *was me*, and that this was in fact the ‘only real me’ and only ever was and will be ‘the real me’.

As I was applying my Self Forgiveness on this point, it struck me how I throughout my life had actively lived out the point of ‘Worshipping a False Image’ and ‘Serving a False God’ ( because after all, if we are made in the image and likeness of “God”, it means that ‘we are’ “God”). Where I actively served a false image/idea of myself, believing it to be ‘the real deal’ and within doing so, not serving myself as Life, but serving myself as the Mind. This would be: Self-Blasphemy, as we are insulting ourselves and treating ourselves with a great deal of lack of respect within pursuing and maintaining our ‘false images’.

So this was quite cool to see, once again, how we create our limitations and believe ourselves to be all these ideas and images that when you get to the core of it = are actually not. And how within seeing/revealing this creation process for yourself, the simplicity of the realization that you do not have to live-out this particular point or pattern, because you can see/realise that you were never ‘it’ in the first place = is just awesome.

* A Mind-Construct is a specific structured method of Self-Investigation taught within SRA as part of the Desteni I Process