How to Prepare for the path of Enlightenment

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What I Believe, matters

youAre

There are a lot of things I don’t know that you probably know. Did you know President Carter coined the term “Human Rights”? I didn’t until recently, but as a therapist, it became a popular term, especially in teaching assertive communication. We have a right, by birth, to our opinions, feelings, and desires; and we have a right to express them in a way that respects others’ right to the same.

And as Buddhist philosophy gains popularity in the west, people say we contain within all the wisdom we need. We are to tap into the Now and ask ourselves what is essential and true.

The two concepts above, human rights and enlightenment, seem to require that we are first civilized. We go through an intense training period for what seems to take at least 18 years in which we are indoctrinated with facts, moral codes, proper behaviors, skills training, and constant evaluation. We rely on the experts for this process – everyone from parents to teachers to books to police to public leaders.

Is it any wonder that the next phase is so much harder? All this taking in, absorbing the outer world of rules, seems to subliminally teach us that we are dependent on external authority, that we are essentially nothing. No wonder we compare ourselves to others, indulge in gossip and envy, develop secrets born of shame and guilt, and struggle with daily right and wrong.

This next phase of human growth, if you want to continue growing, requires undoing much of what you thought you knew. Just letting it go! (easier said than done?) In order to do so we must first channel our awareness to SELF instead of ‘other’.

Becoming self-realized is the only true path to freedom. After spending 18+ years in training so we can respond to routine life semi-automatically, we have to learn to observe ourselves in thought and action, and then, objectively ask ourselves what is essentially true. For you. For me.

“A thought is harmless unless we believe it. It’s not our thoughts, but our attachment to our thoughts, that causes suffering. Attaching to a thought means believing that it’s true, without inquiring. A belief is a thought that we’ve been attaching to, often for years…I still love what I think but I’m never tempted to believe it.” Byron Katie

 

“I do not like green eggs and ham. I do not like them, Sam-I-Am.”

Although he had never tried them, he ‘knew.’ He believed.

Finally, giving into Sam’s pestering, he  samples the green eggs and ham and happily responds,

“I do so like green eggs and ham. Thank you. Thank you, Sam-I-Am.”  Dr. Suess

SamIam

 

For related ideas go to: http://buddhismnow.com/2013/07/05/first-steps-buddhist-meditation/

The Therapeutic Process

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For Therapy to work, you must have a good connection…

and that’s why        

self-help books don’t work.

 

Our emotional lives, with all their emotional cues, are on board before any verbal or conceptual ability appears. And the consequences of these experiences are unaffected by intellectual efforts to change them. That may be because emotions, and our powerful “memories”, seem to be stored in the right hemisphere of the brain. And yet our thinking (or intellectualizing) is a left-hemisphere activity.

Books and conversations about why we act the way we do are certainly helpful, but they don’t seem to be enough to effect real changes in our interactions with the world and ourselves.

So how can we make real changes?

Only by recreating as much as possible the initial conditions in which the processes were created in the first place. We are born wired to seek connection with others. You may have heard that, “your first loves (parents) create the models for every relationship there after.” They become our relationship-blueprints, if you will. Our experiences, especially with our caregivers, will become unconscious, intuitive memories that form the basis of our emotional life.

So if you want to change the deep, un-conscious patterns that define your reactions to life’s events, you need an environment that can mirror those earliest connections, while, ideally, re-writing them (“neuro-plasticity”). The result is a more harmonious existence in your current situations.

Helping-whiteBackgroundCTBA powerful way to do this is through a positive connection with a trained professional (i.e., a psychotherapist). Good therapy aims to create a safe connection with the client so that emotional healing can take place.

And there is more to it, of course. Techniques that require direct experience have proven effective, such as working with the “inner child” through writing exercises, mindfulness meditations, and others. I believe these techniques work because they access the right brain.

When my client opens up to me as much as they can in a session, I know that we are accessing the right brain. In doing so, the chances for authentic change become possible.