BreakThrough

BreakThrough
By Terryann Nikides

What Pushes our Button?

Some of have our buttons pushed: in traffic jams, with rude people, when kids are disrespectful, when someone pushes us in a line up, someone takes our place in a queue, or when we feel our husbands or wives are not sympathetic to us, when we feel that we are too emotional, when we are in a job we don’t enjoy and would rather being doing something else, the list of daily things that push our buttons is endless. A pushed button means that we are in conflict.

What happens when we are in conflict?

The mind, because it is dual, is in conflict. To understand concepts, the split mind must know dark to know light; to know right it must know wrong and so forth.  The mind runs amok in a stew of paradoxical beliefs grasping here and there between one belief and another- thinking all the while that this is sanity!

When beliefs are held rigidly they run up against each other as two opposing forces conflicting consciously or unconsciously wreaking havoc.  Obviously when we understand that the mind sees only in paradoxes we understand that the mind is constantly over-reacting. In addition, we are strongly identified with the mind as with our emotions and our bodies exacerbating our conflicts. When we believe we “are something” then anything that tells us that we are not we go into conflict. We want an identity no matter what the identity is.

An over-reaction occurs when our emotions are not commensurate with the situation at hand, whether the emotions are overt or covert. We over-react today over something that happened 20 years ago, as though it happened just minutes before. When the mind is busy thinking about emotions the emotions do not have free expression or an emotional contraction which constitutes an over-reaction. The mind is only doing its job but when the mind usurps the job the of emotions and intuition then mind, emotions and intuition are disrespected.

When we over-react we ask: why is this happening again?  I know better? I should be able to control this! Yet it is happening and no, we cannot control it; and if we knew better it would not be happening; but it is happening! We are over reacting!

The Problem with Coping:

When we over-react we look for ways to cope.  While coping we pile one more false construct on top of another until we no longer feel. We desperately say we want to feel and live fully while doping or numbing ourselves with coping mechanisms to avoid experiencing. All the while filled with false pride we make utterances like “I no longer do that” or “I used to be that way now I just take a deep breath and it goes away”. If we understand the over reactive mind then the latter is impossible. We cannot make anything go away especially when we talk of wanting to live fully! When we say things ‘go away” we are only saying that we have put it into a place where we no longer can see it. We throw out our trash but where has it gone. Out of sight out of mind! Until we find one day that everything we have ever done to cope is coming right back at us and we hear ourselves say the words – I thought I dealt with that!

We spend untold hours defending our beliefs no matter how paradoxical and ridiculous they are.  We build a lode of constructs to defend ourselves, our beliefs, and our false identities.  The more rigid our beliefs the bigger are our defenses. The defenses are insidious; sneakily we justify, manipulate and abuse ourselves and others to prove that we are right! We become increasingly deceptive telling ourselves that we know or don’t know the truth.  When we know the truth there is no need to justify it or find proof if it is the truth.  When there is a need to prove, justify or defend we have doubt. Yet we defend something we doubt as though our lives depended on it.  We end up trying to prove a doubt, which essentially is proving a lie!
The truth, we feel, will reveal something so terrible that even we cannot face it. When, in reality, what is revealed are the lies that, once brought to consciousness, only free the psyche and the heart from the burden of defensiveness.    Defensiveness laudably, though painfully, protects only the lies about our selves while bolstering our over-reactions.

Self –honesty and responsibility for our Selves and our lives must be where the journey begins.  If not the latter then only blame and victimization can result. When we do not take responsibility we then thrust the responsibility for our experience on the world around us. This dishonest behaviour only results in further conflict, unhappiness, and defensiveness; but as self honesty grows we unravel the unseen fortress of constructs that keep us from fully experiencing life.

It is only natural to defend. We want to feel safe and to do that we protect ourselves; but our defenses are self-deceptive honorariums to our inner weaknesses, insecurities and hurts.  By acknowledging the latter, we begin our journey from this place of hurt, low self-esteem, and false strength we, then, can take responsibility for where we are now.  We begin to understand that there is no blame. We cannot blame ourselves or another for our predicament.  Though our life stories or mythologies differ one from the other; we are all in the same boat. We have all been children who have not been parented by a parent with compassion love and honesty for themselves. As our parents knew no better nor did their ancestors that leaves no one to blame. We cannot blame ourselves either.  As little children our consciousness could not discern.  Our consciousness did, on one hand, the wondrous task of learning more that we would ever learn again in such a period of time, while on the other hand we could not keep out what was painful. So in with the good went the bad.

We know that if we blame someone for making us feel then we become their victim. Though we know this we feel that there is no other way out but to blame either ourselves or another for how we feel, behave, and respond. In the  deepest throes of conflict, it seems,   knowing that no matter how much you are sure that it
another’s fault and need to change their behaviour or you blame yourself  and want to change your own behaviour you are still stuck in this cycle of blame victim consciousness that seems to have no reprieve. It is here at this point of desperation that we know the way we have been doing things is just not working! At this point we decided that we must be coming at the conflict from the wrong perspective.  We decide that the buck stops here and we take responsibility for our lives and our Selves.

When it happens that we take responsibility for our experience we finally say that the buck stop here!  Once we are honest with our selves we can live into the lie.  This means that even though we will blame we recognize the lie and then we can do the work of being rather than becoming. We, being to live fully into our experience rather than defending against the experience. Instead of trying desperately not to blame; we examine our blaming.  Instead of defending; we examine our defensiveness. Instead of avoiding conflict; we examine our conflict.  In doing so we bring into awareness what we have been doing which results in a shift in perspective.
We can now behave in ways that were previously closed to us.  We can live fully into life rather that living reactively.

Plato said that the unexamined life is not worth living.  When we examine our lives we do it through concepts or our beliefs about life.  One concept can be known through another concept and another. We examine our beliefs or concepts by examining the concepts that we hold as true. What we hold as true, more often then not, is what has not been examined. Hence we believe things that we have not even questioned?   We pay lip service to most of what we say.  Much like saying we want to be free. Yet freedom is a far cry from blame-victim consciousness and defensiveness that results from our daily conflicts.

Questioning

Once we have started to question we are well on the way to breaking though our assumptions and long held truths that have not been previously examined.  We begin to think and question outside the box.  We start to look at life with the eyes of a child, everything new and unexplored. We examine our copes and we cope or why we even feel the need to cope.  Once we find those answers then we keep asking more and more till we
find that what we have held as truths are really only protecting us from seeing the hurtful identities that we acquired from 0-4 years old.

From 0-4 years old our consciousness was undifferentiated meaning that everything goes in, the good and the bad.  The child had no ability to discern.  This is a wonderful part of human development. We learn more in those years than we ever learn again in that time period. Along with the latter comes the bad.  Once we begin to discern we start to defend the identities we acquired during those years.  The defenses are convoluted, rigid, and so often ridiculous.

The questioning process acts much like a detective looking for why we believe something rather than just assuming it is a truth that everyone believes.  Once we see the recipe for how we have been living it unravels the defenses and we can live more fully.  This is the magical part of BreakThrough.

In every class I teach the first few hours are filled with defensiveness. The magic happens one the defenses fall away and peace comes magically over all of us when we find that we have been defending a lie.

 

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