Attitudes and A Path With Heart

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
Henry David Thoreau

The measure of success is not whether you have a tough problem to deal with, but whether it is the same problem you had last year.
John Foster Dulless

Ah, great it is to believe the dream,
As we stand in youth by the starry stream
But a greater thing is to fight life through
and say at the end “The dream is true!”
Edwin Markham

Heaven is not reached in a single bound;
But we build the ladder by which we rise
From the lowly earth to the vaulted skies,
And we mount to its summit round by round.
Josiah Gilbert Holland

All human beings have failings, all human beings have needs and temptations and stresses.

Men and women who live together through long years get to know one another’s failings; but they also come to know what is worthy and respect and admiration in those they live with and in themselves.

If at the end one can say, “This man used to the limit the powers that God granted him; he was worthy of love and respect and the sacrifices of many people, made in order that he might achieve what he deemed to be his task,” then that life has been lived well, and there are no regrets.

Eleanor Roosevelt

The man is a success who has lived well, laughed and loved much; who has gained the respect of intelligent men and the love of children; who has filled his niche and accomplished his task; who leaves the world better than he found it, whther by an improved poppy, a perfect poem or a rescued soul; who never lacked appreciation of earth’s beauty or failed to express it; who looked for the best in others and gave the best he had.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Sometimes, playing the game feels very good. It’s like once we start, we cannot stop. A door opens in us, and all these aspects of us come galloping out and believe they can do so because they are coming out as “I am not me! – I am someone else because I am operating under the influence of the game!”

At the end of the day, though, it wasn’t enjoyable and, in our heart of hearts, we know it is both us running away from ourselves, and the expression of aspects of ourselves that are still locked away, still verboten, within ourselves. Still, getting up one more time than we fall down, causes more and more cracks to appear in the wall of immunity with which we have surrounded our authentic selves.

Speaking of walls, this is a good time to bring up the subject of who builds what walls, and when. Children are very forthright, and do not create a defense against something or someone until they have had their trust violated. A child’s trust is absolute and unquestioning, and so also is their response to the violation of their trust.

Just remember, it is violated a layer, an experience, at a time, until critical mass is reached, and then the absolute, and unquestioning, wall goes up. It is very painful to be treated as a specimen in a jar.

As children, our responses to the teaching of the game grew slowly. As adults, we are still busy recreating the wall scenario. It has been with us, around us, right from the beginning and it has grown is us – it was implanted, suggested, taught and trained in us, it was the very basis of the way we were treated, regarded and dealt with. It was both implicit and explicit in everything that was said, done and planned for us, and to us.

Through the whole course of our childhoods the comfort and convenience of those who taught us the game was paramount while ours was non-existent, and didn’t matter beyond social appearances and the token effort needed to convince themselves they were good and right in what they did.

As we heal each layer of the dynamics of the game, under each freshly healed one we find another one. Each one has its own identity, all them tied together into the dance of the game. It is fascinating to discover that it’s because we have been stuck back there in that place of infancy.

There is powerful magic to all what we have been doing. Powerful. And it is a “Close my eyes and it all goes away” level of magic – a “Hold my breath and control it” level of magic. Next thing you know, the word “shame” pops into mind as we’ve needed massive amounts of shame in order to meet our own picture of ourselves.

We begin to see that there are so many aspects to all this. The one collective answer to a bunch of personal problems. Or, at least, the one collective answer to a bunch of separate issues.

Playing the game insists we need to feel so many shades and variations of a spectrum of negative things. Nothing healed from childhood – each period of time in each period of growth bringing a set of problems and issues needed to be addressed and healed – none of them addressed and healed, and instead, suppressed and buried because we had no other way of dealing with it.

No one to talk to, show us, guide us, protect us. Nothing and nobody. And so they just kept building up, one on another until we could stand it no longer, until we capitulated, and gave up the struggle, and with that, the whole thing fused together.

All we have left is the shame and self-hatred we have felt ever since.
As long as we remain static, mute and docile, in terms of who we actually are, then we are doing exactly what is expected and demanded of us by those who taught us the game.

What we do, in effect, is to while our lives away by living in a mode of self-enforced, suspended animation – we mustn’t ever bust out of the small circle drawn around us – the small circle carved into our memories of how it is supposed to be in the world for us.

And every time we make a move against the game, another one of the layers which was previously marbled into the whole is now released, and brought to closure. Another aspect of our true self is released, and another small piece of poison is released from our hearts, bodies and minds.

It is very sobering to realize we have been wearing an emotional straight-jacket our whole life through.

Playing the game is also a way of managing large blocks of free time, the time when we are not busy doing for someone else. We begin to clue into the fact that the simple act of playing the game is the cover for some other huge agenda on our part, involving hopelessness, helplessness, isolation, powerlessness and fear.

By admitting we play the game, we start feeling “less powerless” – I’m not sure if this is the same as feeling “more powerful.” By the simple act of admittance, something seems to leave, even as something else is arriving, surfacing, returning or becoming active. Whatever it is that we’ve been doing to ourselves, it is huge.

The realization comes that we need to begin doing stuff for ourselves. Internally, we have been living the life of an abandoned child. We have been stuck in the place of being an infant, being unable to do or be anything other than a helpless infant, dependent on other people for anything and everything.
This feels like a lump of rock, such as marble, with whole striations and patterns running through every element and aspect of itself and themselves – all separate while all one. Admittance of playing the game lets us feel the helplessness.
It is not paralysis and it is not an unwillingness to take responsibility – it is just all about not ever having grown up to that place and level. I don’t know how to explain this better – it all feels so “young” to me.

So it becomes time to grow up. It becomes time to expand into our true size in all ways. It slowly dawns on us that we have been living a life of hard core survival, and acting internally as if it is all so real outside of us. We start to become aware that we have been massively living inside our own heads and so avoiding the actual world outside of our skins.

We do this primarily emotionally and creatively, isolating ourselves, our inner child and actual self from contact with outside life in every respect. The only way we can achieve this is to live as an emotional recluse, cut off from our feelings. All very painful and disempowering, which after all was the corner stone of the whole issue right from the beginning, was it not?

Once we face the fact we are playing the game, we begin to realize that our present attitudes demand the perception and presence of a huge drama in order to “prove” and so justify their existence. We discover that a very fundamental part of us has not grown up yet, and needs to do so urgently.

Giving up the game means we will be open to the world, and maybe even torn to shreds by all the conflicting demands that will be put on our time, attention and focus. What did we do before we played the game as adults? We did other, just as childish and magical routines.

The game works for us as adults whereas all the other stuff wouldn’t, just as the game wouldn’t have worked when we were still children. It all has to stop, and the living has to start. It’s been a big cover-up for some reason. All some big deal. For some fear-filled, terror driven reason we make a mountain out of a molehill sized issue.

Stopping the game means facing the very things we fear the most. Usually we fear feeling the most, so this what we run away from the most. We have become terrified of our own feelings, and therefore feel terrified of ourselves.

It is the feelings we have locked away – the wondering, the waiting, the absolute unknowing of what the next moment will bring. The blow that never lands, the screaming that never comes, the one thousand and one events that never happen.

We are free, we are grown and adult and now need to touch these feelings that beforehand we kept bottled up and hidden away. All the huge things we want to run away from are only memories, thoughts and feelings.

They sit right behind the belly button – right behind it – a mass of knotted up feelings such as fear, confusion, anger and self-hatred. It is fascinating to experience how that with which we terrify ourselves calms us, really calms us, as soon as we begin listening to what it has to say.

On the spiritual level, we already love ourselves enough to carry this forward and see it through – this much I know. There isn’t even a need to know how to proceed further, beyond the fact of keep putting one foot in front of the other. Keep doing this, and any terror in us will turn into confusion because suddenly we feel lost within the vastness of ourselves. Our inner selves.

It is stunning to become aware that there is all this inside of us. The biggest thing about admitting to ourselves that we play the game is to discover we have to figure out and energize ourselves, to learn to be here for ourselves, instead of for everyone else and their dog. We learn about boundaries and about our importance in the world.

It is disconcerting, even while it is fascinating, to suddenly realize that our lives have worth, value, meaning and direction. There becomes so much to let go of, so much to change and so much to pick up. We discover there is a huge emptiness inside us, along with a fear and reluctance to look at it, into it, a fear and reluctance to touch it, to find out what it feels like, looks, sounds like.

We come to learn about our childishness when it comes to learning, boundaries and results. We learn about the feelings of powerlessness in us, and about the belief in our own helplessness and impotence. Yes, we were helpless, impotent and powerless in those days of being a child.

The trouble is, that emotionally we have remained as a child, believing and investing in the magical thinking that we have remained impotent, helpless defenseless, weak and without resources.

Once we start confronting the game, we begin to experience a clarity of mind we just didn’t have before. An edge of fear disappears. It seems as though we start zooming up through the years. On the one hand, there is a sadness we cannot even begin to recount, while on the other hand there is a beginning excitement that is startling in its intensity.

Again, until we confront the game, the odds are against us all the way, and until we make that confrontation a cornerstone and benchmark for how we proceed in life, and perceive ourselves in life, not much will change.

By admitting the game to ourselves, we walk through a huge doorway into another world. We become of age – we go through a huge amount of growing up. Beforehand, we were locked into a shadow-world of make belief, where we so mightily pretended we were not the strong, clever, capable people we really are.

Walking though that doorway lets us start looking at the effects, symptoms and results of playing the game. We begin to touch the emptiness inside us – the hollowness, the structure of pain, isolation and separation. We see how we chopped off the warm points of genuine human contact as soon as the reality of them began to encroach upon the dream we have been living.

To begin facing the game, we need some help. Some spiritual help. We need to admit some things, need to surrender some things, let go of some things. We need to let go of some pretends, some denials and some assumptions, such as “I’ll never grow old,” or that the status quo will never change.

We need to let go of believing we don’t have any problems even while we need to let go of believing we have no opportunities. The awareness builds up that we have been filled with an exhausted sadness, or is it a feeling of sad exhaustion?

Either way, the awareness also builds up of a conclusion that has long been inside us – it is time to move on from this place of playing the game, of acting small and powerless.

Some of the things we are forced to do as a result of side-stepping our own unique existence are – we could not really have:

• Dreams of our own
• Plans of our own
• Needs of our own
• Ambitions of our own

We couldn’t have stuff, money, power, friends, family, and the realization comes like a bolt out of the blue. We couldn’t have any real sort of recognition for, and as a result of, who we really are. Well, if it’s okay to be ourselves, then it’s okay to be ourselves and to do and have that which being alive as ourselves entails, holds and implies. Once we start dismantling the game as the basis for a complete way of life, things suddenly start to matter.

By playing the game, we wind up busily buying that which we have a natural, fundamental human right to, anyway. We all have a right to a relationship, to earn decent money, to have our own home. We have the right to walk, talk, speak, be heard, seen, and experienced for the unique human being we are. We have this right. And we can only exercise this right by accepting ourselves as we naturally are.

. Other wise, we achieve nothing except to come from a pain-filled place. It isn’t very pleasant touch touching this stuff and yet it is even more unpleasant to be keeping ourselves impotent, lonely, broke and isolated by turning ourselves into someone we aren’t, and so cutting ourselves off from the outside world.

So the game is just something we have always done. It is no different than putting a loaded gun into a toddler’s hand, show him or her how to put the muzzle in the mouth and say “okay, now just pull the trigger like I showed you.” it grows in us and with us as we grow, and have grown. It evolves with us as we evolve. It becomes as much a part of us as the wrinkles on our faces.

It has been so deep in us it has been the thing to do without question. It has been the natural way to think, feel and see ourselves. At the bottom of it, we are naturally to blame, and so it’s naturally our fault, therefore we are useless, worthless, unwanted, broken and to blame.

The game evolves from the showdown between our natural, childhood pride and strength, which was never honored anyway, and the evidence of our senses, which supported the message instilled into us. Finally, we had to choose, or rather decide which one was correct. Naturally, as children we pick the one supported by everything we heard, saw and experienced.