More Realistic
A delusion of suffering and pain is not "more realistic" than a delusion of joy and prosperity.
Narrative, aka delusion, plays a huge part in the emotional landscape. My recognition and management of the narratives within me, my ways of meeting them, my beliefs about narratives have served to set me free emotionally, to experience Emotional Mastery.
Everything I imagine is equally real in the moment I imagine it.
It gives me a real experience, and this real experience is what I then create a meta-narrative about, calling it "realistic" or "unrealistic."
As I guide clients inside their own imaginations, I watch them flinch away from imagining real joy and peace.
The narrative says "that's not realistic." But I know this narrative serves to validate and excuse their withdrawal from an unfamiliar experience, an experience they've determined is risky.
Even that is more narrative than what is really happening within them. Narrative arises to explain the dispositions of the body. The somatic turning-away-from joy and peace is simply energy trying to maintain familiar patterns, the maintenance of familiar patterns engaging to steer back to what's familiar.
Like everything real, this is impossible to sort into fault or cause, and such categorization is useless. The what of what is happening is law, every what that's happening is in collaboration with every other what to form exactly this. Seeing the collaboration is different from assigning fault or creating narratives of blame.
The knife-edge of narrative! To use it, knowing how powerfully it can trick you! To engage with it without taking it too seriously. To take not taking it seriously very seriously. To read between its lines, discovering beliefs and experiences.
This practice is not enough in its own, and it's not all I'll be teaching in the Emotional Mastery workshop tonight, but this is the kind of concept that, when you get it, reorders your thinking and belief systems forever.
The narrative "that's not realistic" reveals and reinforces the belief that sometimes I am imagining real things and sometimes I am imagining not real things.
The truth is that I am only ever imagining imaginary things. Nothing is more imaginary than anything else in my imagination. I can use my imagination to imagine anything I want, anything at all, not just anything in the world.
Believing that my clients' experience is really about how unrealistic their imagination is being would be dismissing pure somatic physics. Their body is having an uncomfortable or unfamiliar experience as a result of their imagination. They are in unfamiliar territory. They're generating a story to validate a very natural hesitancy. We are exactly where I'm meant to bring them.
I don't take my clients' imaginations any more seriously than I take my own. When their imaginations flag that this is "not realistic" I know I'm doing my job. We go to the realms of unimaginable love, peace, and prosperity within the exact life they're living right now. It's like unlocking the secret tunnels at Disneyworld.
No, my love. It will not seem realistic to you. It will not seem realistic to the imagination you were trained to have or to the way you were trained to understand your imagination. But I know you feel it in your heart. That's what all the dissonance is about, what it's always been about. Your heart knows how to love. And you were trained to fear.
Living the love you know in your heart will require similar training, and I know you know this, cause you've done a lot of it so far.
But much of that work is about why it goes how it goes and feels how it feels, why you think how you think. Why you are suffering.
My work is about what to do when you know you want to do something different. It has the feature of immediate integration because it comes in the form of practical minute actions to take in mundane moments.
This is how to have prosperity, immaterial prosperity, like how you learned to have immaterial poverty when you were taught to live in fear.
Overwhelmed caregivers use fear and shame to control those in their care because it works quickly. But that fear and shame becomes a disposition we tend to label "damage," a poor posture from which to enact adulthood.
Life is long, and I'll be parenting me for all of it, so as I've taken over as my caregiver, I've taken the time to learn more longterm strategies. My personal parenting empowers a relaxed, loving, nourished internal posture from which I meet life.
I'd like to offer you the same.
