Category Archives: Insights

These are insights into life, gained from my inner processing, that might be useful for other people.

The Inner Deceiver’s Return

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It seems I lied – I didn’t stop my self-deceiver. He came back, and wanted to stop me from moving forward. Started throwing a fit about the fact that he didn’t want his plans to fail, and that those who failed to enact his plans for him should suffer as a result. Perhaps this is the reason behind a fear of failure…

The main thing that stopped him was surprisingly the fact that he didn’t want to be used as a tool, and yet he was using others as a tool (like the hands, brain, body, etc.) to achieve whatever end he decided on. That was his MO. But when I pointed out to him that others, because he was so effective, probably saw him as a tool, he stood down. It was true, after all, he was prone to being used as a tool because he didn’t care if there were any bonds of friendship – he just wanted to get the job done. And in the end this made me a more fit master for myself than him, not because I was more effective, but because I was, in this instance, treating those not in an authority position in my consciousness as I would want to be treated. A.k.a. “Be kind to yourself”. Maybe this is why the Golden Rule has been considered so important? I don’t know.

Furthermore, when this smart but unwise fellow inside me WAS treated kindly, it seems that, because he only pretended to be nice, that kindness never got to him. Everything was still a game to him, and if he dropped his cover, why of course no one would treat him kindly. But you see he wanted to be treated with respect for who he really was, his true talents and wishes, no matter how demonic he seemed. It was more touching a realization than I thought it could be.

Stepping out of the inner world for a moment, I think what this means for life is that not only is it important to consider how you would want to be treated, but that in order to know if someone feels kindness towards you, in order to open the possibility of true friendship, you need to be honest about yourself and your motives and insecurities. And while you’re at it, accept that sometimes your plans fail. Don’t yell at the world for it, or your body, or mind, or whatever – don’t be harsh with it for not giving you what you want. It was as it is, body, mind, or world. And as far as your self goes, at least it cooperated to some extent. And if it didn’t, maybe you had unrealistic expectations in the first place. Like, what if you wanted your body to fly without the aid of any mechanical means. No matter how bad you wanted it, it’s just not equipped to handle that request. So be fair with yourself – you may not know yourself well enough to know beforehand how everything will work out. Just handle the responses you get from your body as you would a friend. “Ok, you can’t fly. Boring, but fine. I’ll think up something else – any ideas?” Something like that. Just think about your stomach – if you refused to eat you soon wouldn’t be in a position to refuse anything anymore, you’d be dead. And you certainly know when the stomach is speaking to you. So everything works together, and you, the authority, are, in my opinion, most effective when you’re a friend to all within. You might find yourself being friendly towards all outside yourself as well. : )

Overcoming Self-Deceit, continued

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So, I said I was going to talk about overcoming self-deceit, but rather than go through the whole story, I’m going to boil it down. What did I learn at the end of this, exactly?

  1. If you desire to escape your problems, you become prone to easy solutions – anything you can grasp on to to get out of it. Instead, you must ask questions, and be part of the solution of those problems, especially those involving your own happiness.
  2. It is extremely dangerous to your spirit to be dishonest if that dishonesty is for the purpose of changing your life situation to be more comfortable. The reason for this is that you place the solution to your problems in the hands of other people (or perhaps the weather) – you are running away from your own power and ability to solve problems.
  3. Not only CAN you face the truth of your own difficulties, but it is the only way to solve them. If you feel bad, rather than distracting yourself with games or food, try to turn your awareness to the nature of the issue. No matter how many dark things lurk inside you, you CAN stand strong in front of them. You are more than a match for what life throws at you.
  4. When you are feeling down, or distressed, treat yourself like a flower who needs water, rather than a nasty bug who needs to change and solve its problems asap so you can go back to feeling “good”. However you feel is how you feel! It’s an expression of your needs.
  5. If you merely act like you care about yourself, you will end up killing your happiness. The reason is because you may see caring about yourself as part of a solution to a problem that bothers you. But caring isn’t a goal-oriented task, it’s something very spontaneous and natural. Given this, you may want to care about yourself only enough so that you can persist towards a comfortable life you want, a future you think will be without a lot of pesky problems. Perhaps a comfortable job, a family so you don’t look too out of place, and such other plans. But what makes you happy is so much more grand than all of that! Yeah, you need courage to bring true happiness into your life, but the alternative is to let a demon who’s only interested in maintaining a small miserable bubble of a life have control over you. Happiness, to it, seems like such a bother – and it will tell you all sorts of reasons why it’s out of reach. This is more manipulation. That brings me to:
  6. To truly break free from the self-deceit – from the lies you tell yourself, from the misery that you invite because of it – you must see the effect it has on you. You must lay your intentions bare before you, and see that if you continue down this road, you will be ruled by a force that treats you like a pawn in its game of finding an escape from difficulty. In other words, you must face the truth. The truth of how you treat yourself – only then will you care enough to break free from this, and you will see how valuable conflict can be, and that your problems are there to point you towards a brighter future.
  7. After all this is done, you may find yourself less distressed at the problems you have, or at least willing to ask questions towards a real solution. You might start asking a lot more questions in general! Because you no longer wish for something you already have in mind – what you want is the truth, when the truth is yet unknown. Only in that vast unknown do the answers to our problems truly lie.

And this was supposed to be “boiled down”? Hot damn. Well, I hope, for those of you who took the time to read it, you took something away. Bye for now : )

A Vision of Self-Control

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Before I continue on with my explanation of how I overcame my inner deceiver, I wanted to share a monstrous vision I had less than an hour ago.

I was bored and didn’t know what to do, so I closed my eyes and started to visualize and open up to the thoughts and emotions inside of me – meditation, basically – but what I saw this time were a number of parts of me who are energetic, caring, and a very positive force in me – inside of a small domed room. Inside was a researcher pacing back and forth, telling us with great enthusiasm how what we needed to do, that this was a meditation room and we needed to relax and everything I just mentioned. I started to argue – “Why do we need to listen to you anyway?” “Just do it, it will be practical, and now is a good time to do it.”

But then the researcher crossed the line and started saying things like:
“You are all very fortunate – you’re important to the project that we have going here.” Or some crap like that. He was treating me as an experiment. A lab rat.

At this, I remembered a time when I had treated one of MY friends this way, when I was 7 or something, and called him average. Well, I felt like a complete monster after that, and now I have a glimpse of why. I am treating myself like an experiment – there’s a bureaucratic part of my consciousness that seeks to control and achieve ends it deems favorable, desirable. Now that I see this, I’m both infuriated and excited. It means I will soon, or some day have a chance to fight with this inane researcher within me – but I’m infuriated because it’s still living in me, and still has that much of a presence that on a random afternoon, IT is what’s talking to me.

Anyhow, just thought I’d share that. Onward! I’ll get back to the other topic tomorrow.

Overview: Self-Deceit and Manipulation

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So I wanted to talk about my recent findings in my inner work.

The main dynamic I want to talk about is the inner victim mentality and how it can be taken advantage of by one particularly nasty demon who has no problem manipulating and deceiving others (or in this case, yourself) if it means he gets his way. Trust is valuable tool to him, after all.

Basically, you have a spirit inside of you who can get very distressed about things that go on with her. I’m sure you’ve experienced when you’ve had a problem, and called someone up and started to tell them about your problems, wondering “What should I do?”

On an inner level, this spirit is part of your decision-making process. For me, my hands would and still do get cold frequently, and in response I would get distressed and ask myself “What do I do???” The reply that I identified told me what to do: “Sit down and be relaxed. Breathe better. Go solve your problems.” But the thing was he had a very demanding tone.

My inner victim (I don’t know what else to call her), would be quick to latch on to any advice given by this guy, because it was to “help” her – but she didn’t make a habit of questioning it. I mean, why would she? She wanted to stop her hands from being cold!

On the other hand, I have inside of me a guy who cared about her, but whose knowledge was limited. This guy would come and try to cheer her up with his various theories about inner exploration, and all the wonderful things that might come her way – this would cheer her up.

So this is the basis of the dynamic I witnessed. A girl who gets upset and needs help, a rather stiff helper who gave her practical advice but didn’t seem to care, and an energetic guy who wanted her to feel better, happier. But in the mean time, whatever the underlying problem was never got solved – she still had cold hands, still got distressed about things, mixed with times of happiness and times of trying things that seemed practical, but weren’t what brought her happiness.

After I saw this, a lot of things happened – I’ll be talking about this over the next couple days. But if you’re interested in this and have any questions for me (I realize the way I talk about this can be confusing), please let me know.

Never Eat to Solve Unhappiness

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Yo, found out some new stuff about eating for comfort today.

Long story short: when you eat to cover over the unhappiness you have while not eating, instead of searching for the root cause of the unhappiness, it’s self-abusive. The same is true for any consumption.

I went back to this issue because I still hadn’t resolved it, rather just figured that being happy and eating was more important than being self-abusive because of that eating, and thus, unhappy. I went back after a discussion I had with my independent study professor about Hansel and Gretel – I thought the story might hold a key to stopping eating for comfort in the addiction-level sense.

The trick I used was to, rather than force my “sweets-eater” to stop eating unhealthy foods, I just brought her to an imaginary land where there was an infinite number of sweets and no one there to stop her or criticize her. As soon as she got there she started digging tunnels with her teeth through imaginary cakes the size of cottages, completely blissful.

But something else was lurking there. A nasty little critter started to sweet-talk my sweets-eater, sympathizing with her plight and former persecution by those who wanted to force her to eat right. I wanted sweets-eater to just leave with me now that she had her fill, but instead she got caught up with this other creature, bandwagoning with such phrases as “Why CAN’T I eat indefinitely” (the creature, agreeing, said “yes, such limited thinking….”)

As soon as it seemed that sweets-eater was on its side, the nasty critter started to pour food down sweets-eater’s gullet. “Eat everything for me! EAT IT ALL!!” But sweets-eater could see this was unfair… she was already full. It turned out this critter valued the experience of eating food over any other possible experience, and sweets-eater could, by eating more, keep that experience coming as much as possible.

In the end, sweets-eater responded to this injustice by:
1) Arguing that it’s important to get to the root causes of unhappiness instead of this madness of covering up, and
2) Eating the critter. (While shouting “MY APPETITE IS BIGGER THAN YOURS!”)

This was quite a fun exercise, but it displays a powerful point about any addiction – that, while the experience may be pleasurable, the part of you that keeps it as self-abuse is relying on sensory experience to solve emotional issues. But this will never work, and never can. Emotional issues can only be resolved by bringing those emotions to the surface, letting them talk, and letting them come to some kind of resolution. So, what do you guys think? Happy eating first, then non-problem covering – does that solve all over-eating? It seems it is the giant’s leap back to healthy, but there may be more to it. Especially given how strong a force that deep unhappiness can be in any one of us.

Self-doubt and Confidence

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Today I found that the key reason why I can feel self-doubt is because the part of me that makes decisions has hidden conflicts with the absolutely confident (and for the “right” reasons only, he might add) part of myself.

This inner warrior draws a hard line and does what he thinks is right at all time, no matter how tough or what he has to go through (at least that’s how he tries to live). So the playful side of myself occasionally gets on his nerves. When there’s a lack of trust between the inner decision maker and the inner warrior, then I feel separate from my confidence. But when we’re going the same direction, we are unstoppable.

Ok, maybe still stoppable, but we’re getting there.

I think the key to go from self-doubt to confidence again is to not let the fear of conflict stop you from having it out with your inner warrior. Resolve your conflicts even if they might be tough ones, even if he doesn’t trust you one bit anymore. And don’t let him boss you around either – that’s not his job, and it can be damaging to be so demanding! Just because he’s a warrior, and he does what he thinks is right, doesn’t mean he knows everything. Or a her – warriors can be females too of course – it’s all dependent on how you imagine these inner forces : )

Impatience

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Today I discovered at least one of the major sources of my impatience. There is a force in me that wants to avoid negative situations – physically, emotionally – and is constantly on the lookout for when they might occur. He doesn’t care much about my fancies, or imagination or any of that crap. He just thinks “ok, what’s the next task I need to do in order to avoid humiliation, or physical discomfort, or disappointment…?” and he goes to great lengths, trying to boss me around to get me to do these things. He likes when I have very low self-esteem, because then I don’t get funny, dangerous ideas in my head that might put me in a bad state.

So I took a stand against this rather negative mean guy, and basically argued that

  1. I didn’t have to abuse myself in order to look out for my well-being,
  2. In looking out for my well-being, I could just listen for signals that said “Hey, I’m hungry” or “oh, I’m getting cold” or “I’m feeling uncomfortable”, etc. and just respond to them rather than adopt a plan of some kind to fend off the hunger or discomfort from ever occurring (like: “3 meals a day at precise times, gotta make those portions right! Oh and 8 glasses of water. That’s what experts recommend… gotta do it…”)
  3. If not abusing myself caused those previously repressed parts of me to overwhelm me, and cause me to do crazy things, I would allow this guy to abuse me again. He got excited at this, but I told him I have no intention of ever letting him abuse me. He got the point. Basically, I feel as though if I stop abusing myself I can hear those inner feelings better, and thus respond to them, and know why they might act in unhealthy ways, if they in fact do.

This whole thing strangely resembled the conversation Harry Potter has with Lucius Malfoy at the end of Book 2, when Dobby earns his freedom. This may just be my overactive symbolic imagination, but I feel like there’s a reason why stories resonate with people, and I’m experiencing those reasons in my own little ways. And everyone with little disgruntled negative people inside them can do the same, too! Hurray!