Do you spend much of your time feeling unfulfilled, lonely, angry, anxious or depressed? Are you running on empty? Do you frequently find yourself with people who are not there for you, or do you cut yourself off for fear of being hurt? "5 Steps to Freedom" reveals a sustainable pathway out of suffering and into self-confidence and peace of mind. It is said that we must learn to emotionally stand on our own two feet before we can find fulfilment in our lives. This means knowing how to truly care for ourselves without depending on outside props that often trap us into unhealthy life-style choices or destructive relationships. This personal balance provides us with the confidence to step out into life and step in closer to other people without getting hurt. "5 Steps to Freedom" contains the key ingredients for emotional healing, inner peace, selfawareness and self-confidence. It introduces a set of clear and effective guidelines that show you how to take care of your own feelings and needs. It shows you how to create the life that you want. Fear and confusion can be transformed into a pathway to understanding and healing. You not only learn how to give to yourself, but you can have plenty left over to freely give to others. With the right understanding and the right approach, every situation, positive or negative, can be turned to your benefit. "5 Steps to Freedom" shows you how to claim your potential and live it.
Five Steps to Freedom
A Path to Inner Harmony and Personal GrowthBy Phil GoldingBalboa Press
Copyright © 2012 Phil Golding
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4525-0305-9Contents
Introduction............................................................................xiThe Right Approach to Healing...........................................................xiiiCHAPTER 1 Step 1. ACCEPTANCE...........................................................1CHAPTER 2 AWAKENING YOUR POTENTIAL FOR HEALING AND POSITIVE CHANGE.....................41CHAPTER 3 Step 2. PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY..............................................57CHAPTER 4 Step 3. LET GO &TUNE IN......................................................100CHAPTER 5 Step 4. LIVING IN THE NOW....................................................140CHAPTER 6 Step 5. LIVE THE PROCESS AS AWAY OF LIFE.....................................168Appendix One............................................................................171Appendix Two............................................................................175About the Author........................................................................179
Chapter One
STEP ONE ACCEPTANCE
WHERE OUR CONFUSION BEGINS
The opposite of self-acceptance is negative self-judgment or self-rejection. This form of self-judgment, more than anything else, blocks us in our efforts to work through and overcome emotional problems.
In my personal and professional experience, all destructive judgement stems from one fundamental belief, or rather misbelief, that becomes imbedded in our minds from an early age. This misbelief is:
I am unworthy because I am human.
By the term "human", I mean not perfect. For children in particular, the standard of perfect behaviour is measured by others such as parents, teachers, older siblings, social pressure from peers or the media, or any other form of perceived authority. Furthermore, there are invariably many different versions of what this perfect standard is, depending on who is giving out the discipline, or the pressure to conform. This standard can even change from moment to moment with one individual disciplinarian, depending on his or her changing moods. When we were children, we were often unable to live up to these standards. Sometimes this was because we weren't given the appropriate training and mentoring, and sometimes it was because we simply lacked ability in that area. Sometimes the standards set for us were actually impossible to comply with.
We are very vulnerable when we are children. We are dependent on our adult carers for our physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing. In relation to our mental and emotional wellbeing, as children, we depend on our carers for our sense of identity and worthiness. It is essential for our successful development into adulthood that we feel we belong and that we are loved unconditionally. When we don't receive this vital love and attention, we are liable to be adversely affected in a very deep way.
During our childhood, when we failed to live up to the standards set for us by our carers, some of us suffered abuse, ridicule, and rejection. We were deemed unworthy of love. As a result, we frequently felt sad, afraid, ashamed, abandoned, angry, and so on.
Often the problem is a lack of active mentoring by our carers. They were often pre-occupied and/or absent and not in tune with our essential needs. We felt unworthy of love in this situation as well—not important to our carers. Feelings of loss, abandonment, and loneliness would be particularly strong as a result of this.
Another problem many of us faced in childhood was too much involvement from our carers. As children, we need room to be ourselves—to develop our own unique identities according to our own special potential. When our carers are overbearing and inappropriately controlling, we end up feeling inadequate, incapable and helpless. We tend to remain dependent on others, overly compliant to the demands of others, and unaware of what is uniquely and essentially important for our own needs. Our creativity and self-confidence becomes stifled. Our sense of what love is becomes highly distorted. There is always an underlying dread that we will be deemed unworthy of love and even abandoned if we dare to think and act for ourselves.
Another situation we can encounter as children is a home environment that is chaotic and even dangerous. We may not have known what to expect from one moment to the next. A sense of all-pervading fear and anxiety known as random conditioning is often the result. One minute we may be stroked and the next we may be beaten, without knowing why. At other times, we may be inappropriately left alone to fend for ourselves for extended periods of time. With this sort of unpredictability, our primal defences have to be on all the time. We need love like everyone else, but we become afraid of it as well. Love, in this situation, becomes a confusing nightmare.
As children, due to our vulnerable, undeveloped minds and resultant deep dependency, we end up taking such negative experiences very personally. Without even realising it, we conclude that we must be fundamentally wrong in some way to be treated in such a manner. In many ways we conclude that we don't deserve love. We take on the beliefs of our main carers, not knowing anything else. As children, we are on a rapid learning and developmental path, but we can't yet discern the quality of what we are learning. We are just unconsciously soaking it all up. This is the root of childhood conditioning, positive and negative. This deep misbelief that we are unworthy simply because we are human becomes embedded into our minds.
Love is repeatedly withdrawn from us when we are children, often simply for being childish. As children, we are placed in an impossible dilemma. Being children means that we have little capacity to control our instinctual cravings and emotions. We simply can't help ourselves. We are doomed to fail when we are expected to be "good little adults" by well-meaning but confused carers, or carers who are plainly abusive.
When we take this misbelief into adulthood, no matter how we try to hide this deep confusion from the world around us, it nevertheless pervades and distorts every area of our lives. This condemnation, this withdrawal of love, I believe, is the main root of all continuing rejection of ourselves and others.
As children, we may have also had a character that was sensitive or difficult to manage, in many different ways, which can compound the situation. In other words, children often display strong personality traits and emotional dispositions seemingly from birth. We are not necessarily a blank slate before we start. Nevertheless, the weight of responsibility is on parents and other significant carers to equip themselves with the skills for the task of parenthood. It is the parents' challenge to constructively work with their child's negative traits to help the child reduce them or even overcome them. It is also an opportunity for the parents to help the child reach his or her highest potential. Children are children. They cannot be expected to successfully parent themselves.
As powerless, vulnerable children, we are so dependent on our carers that we are compelled to try to conform to their confusion no matter how impossible this may be to achieve. In the face of this dilemma, we feel so powerless and unworthy that we are inclined to believe negative judgments about ourselves, even though in our hearts it doesn't feel right.
Naturally, all children need guidance and discipline. This is how we learn to take control of our own emotions and needs. All discipline, however robust it may need to be at times, must be wise, loving and compassionate. Otherwise it contains elements of destructiveness.
Of course, the withdrawal of love is where the confusion starts for everyone, and we all then pass it down the line from generation to generation. Because we are all human, no-one is a perfect parent. Coming to terms with our humanness as parents is one of the real challenges of personal development. In reality, children don't need perfect parents. What children need are parents who are self-aware and who can take care of their own humanness, instead of projecting their fears and insecurities onto their children. Of course, as parents, we are going to frequently make mistakes. It is essential, therefore, to openly accept our mistakes, face them and learn from them. This then becomes the best example for our children. They learn to accept and care for their own humanness.
When we were children, we may not have had an appropriate example of self-care to relate to, so we grew to regard self-rejection as a normal way to think. Because of this "normalizing", these self-destructive judgments become embedded deep within our minds where they continue to control us beyond our awareness. Because of this "normalizing", negative subconscious thought-patterns gain a hold in the early stages of childhood development and grow into distorted beliefs that then control how we think, feel, and act. These misbeliefs then keep our emotional problems on a repetitive loop, creating ongoing difficulties such as conflict, when conflict wouldn't be present otherwise. Our perceptions of reality become distorted. We then continue to create a distorted reality for ourselves throughout our lives until we become aware of these self-defeating beliefs and change them. Until then, we may think that life is against us, but in actual fact it is our own negatively programmed minds that are causing our suffering.
As a result of this confusion, we think being mistreated by others is the cause of our suffering, as it was when we were children. However, as adults, it is our own self-rejection, emerging out of our own misbeliefs, that makes us so emotionally vulnerable to the perceived or actual mistreatment from others.
This fundamental insight can be very difficult to comprehend at first. We have been so conditioned to blame others for our emotional suffering. On the surface it appears so convincing that someone else or something else is the cause. We think that if only they would behave in the way we think they should, everything would be all right. Sometimes the other person's behaviour is destructive. More often than not though, we have misread the situation. More often than not we are over-reacting to someone's minor human imperfections. More often than not, people don't intend to hurt us, they are just a bit unskilful at times, just like you and I. Most often, the problem is not the other person. The problem lies in our inappropriate reactions to their humanness, and underneath that, to our own humanness.
As a result of our confusion, when it is time to deal with an issue that does need to be acted upon, we are not able to do this effectively. We either overreact or do not act at all. Caring for ourselves and being empowered is about learning to act appropriately. It is about consciously and confidently responding to life's challenges, rather than blindly and fearfully reacting in ways that just makes things worse.
Thinking that we are a victim and lashing out at others or ourselves or avoiding life's challenges altogether is self-defeating. This is the sort of thinking that is indicative of the confusion that keeps us believing we are powerless to control our own happiness and wellbeing.
THE KEY THAT FREES US FROM SUFFERING
In our confusion we are still relating to life from the position of being powerless children. In reality, an adult with a healthy self-esteem can shield his or herself from emotional suffering, or at least quickly recover, regardless of the negativity of the situation. Those with a healthy self-esteem carry a strong belief in their own self-worth. They are not dependent on others to give them permission to feel worthy. They do not need pats on the back before they can feel good about themselves. They already know they are worthy, even when they make human mistakes, which human beings inevitably do. Because of this strong belief in their essential worthiness, people who have a healthy self-esteem do not indulge in self-rejection and as a result, are less likely to be condemning of others. Those with a healthy self-esteem are psychologically protected by their own self-acceptance.
If we didn't first reject ourselves, acute emotional vulnerability in adulthood would not be there in the first place. Without this prior self-rejection, the condemnation from another would have little impact. We would simply know that the person doing the condemning is perhaps having a bad day and is obviously confused. We would know that no matter what mistakes we may happen to make, we do not deserve to be mistreated. We would know that we do not deserve to be condemned as unworthy.
We can't always have control over the behaviour of another. We can, however, take charge of what we accept into our own minds and hearts. We can shield ourselves with our own self-acceptance. Self-acceptance contains the power of love, which is far more powerful than most people realise.
An adult has the power of reasoning and the capacity of consciousness to know what feels right, and to trust that feeling. The only thing that feels right is love, along with all its qualities. As a result of our level of accumulated confusion, unfortunately for many of us, our ability to access this important adult capacity of conscious-awareness becomes impaired. We become so confused that we think we have to reject ourselves instead of love ourselves. This self-rejection locks us into a position of acute vulnerability. We become isolated from our own higher knowing. In our state of vulnerability, our limited survival instincts may then be inclined to condemn and attack as a form of "defence" in a blind reaction to the negative conditioning in our own minds.
Self-acceptance lifts us out of this unnecessary fight-or-flight reaction. Self-acceptance, lived in a consistent, dedicated way, inevitably dismantles and overcomes self-rejection and all its negative consequences.
A profound degree of self-acceptance is the key that frees us from suffering, whether your suffering comes in the form of depression, stress, anxiety, grief, anger, trauma—in fact any form of mental/emotional suffering—but there are many obstacles along the way to finally turning that key, and almost all of them are inside our own minds. This is why it can be so hard at first to see the true nature of these obstacles, and why it can be even harder to change them.
Don't be discouraged though. The fact that the obstacles are inside your own mind makes the situation easier, providing your healing journey is approached in the right way. It is made easier, because you don't have to waste your time trying to control or change other people. To find peace, happiness, and fulfilment, you only have to look within yourself. Almost all the changes you need to make are within your grasp. Furthermore, the unlimited power with which you need to make those changes is within you also.
The more we truly accept ourselves, the more we love ourselves unconditionally. The more we love ourselves unconditionally, the more we heal ourselves. The more we heal ourselves, the more self-aware and empowered we become and the more we are able to act in a way that is for our highest good.
EXERCISE 1: OPENING THE DOOR TO LOVE AND HEALING
Here is a contemplation exercise that may help you better comprehend the nature of self-acceptance, leading to unconditional love, and how to put it into practice in your life. (Fill in the blanks with the right gender for you to make it more personal.)
Imagine yourself as a newborn baby laying on a bed with you as your adult self looking down at this delicate, vulnerable, and precious being. Now as you are looking down at this beautiful little being, can you say in your heart that there is anything about this baby that is unworthy of Love? Can this baby do anything that makes it truly unworthy of Love? For instance,.... may frequently wake you up during the night by crying..... may also dirty.... nappy a number of times per day. Neither of these experiences is very pleasant to have to deal with as the carer of this baby. Is the baby still worthy of Unconditional Love even when.... acts this way? Some people actually get angry at this unconscious behaviour of a new born baby. Is the problem with the baby or the carer?
Now your child is one-year-old and crawling around, getting into whatever.... can reach. Sometimes this little toddler is difficult at meal times, and can still keep you up at night. Your toddler is just doing what a toddler does. Is there anything about.... that is unworthy of Unconditional Love?
Now your toddler is a delightful two-year-old and becoming a real handful..... is now walking and therefore getting into more things. There is a lot of boundary testing going on as your toddler exercises.... awakening self-will in fits of defiance. This little one is also starting to talk in the cute way that toddlers do. Is there anything about this child that is undeserving of Unconditional Love? Would anyone be justified in getting angry at and judging this toddler if.... accidentally knocked over and broke that prized porcelain jug that you got for your wedding? Again, this child is just doing what a two-year-old does. If the carer gets angry at the child, where does the problem lie—with the carer or the child?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Five Steps to Freedomby Phil Golding Copyright © 2012 by Phil Golding. Excerpted by permission of Balboa Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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