ArchivesAwareness and Consciousness Podcast

#17: Self Judgment

on April 7, 2008 January 17, 2022 573 Views

Awareness and Consciousness Podcast

#17: Self Judgment

00:00 / 31:23

Self Judgment is the most common type of abuse. It’s self-abuse. No one is more critical of you than the voice in your head. If anyone else talked to you the way the Judge in your mind spoke to you, you would fight back or walk away from them. We can’t stop what other people think and say about us, but we can change what we think and say about our self. However, this is easier said than done.

I cover all this in detail in this episode on Self Judgment.

We can tell ourselves we won’t be so hard on our selves, but that rarely changes the dynamic. In actuality, that bit of advice is very often a condemnation of behavior we don’t like. When the self judgment in laced in the advice and good intention, it is like having poison in the medicine.

What does it take to stop being hard your self? In this audio, I break down the belief system behind self-judgment. You’ll be able to see why those negative thoughts keep coming back. In the Self Mastery program I provide a series of exercises that allow you to let go of self-judgment permanently. The first few exercises are free.

#16: Faith and personal power

on January 24, 2008 January 17, 2022 397 Views

Awareness and Consciousness Podcast

#16: Faith and personal power

00:00 / 29:43

The Importance of Keeping Your Faith

What is Faith? What is a Belief? What is the relationship between your emotions and what you believe? Do thoughts have power? Why it’s not that important to stop your negative thoughts. How can you recover your personal power? How do you heal a broken heart? These are all issues that I address in this episode on Faith.

Faith is a force. It is part of your life force. When you express your faith you are expressing part of your personal power. If you are seeking to develop more personal power, one of the fastest ways is to recover your faith from all the beliefs in your mind you have invested it in. You will find exercises and practices in how to recover the personal power of your faith in the Self Mastery Audio Series. The first several sessions are free.

#15: Finding your self

on August 20, 2007 January 17, 2022 168 Views

Awareness and Consciousness Podcast

#15: Finding your self

00:00 / 26:55

Finding your self or figuring out who you are is one of those eternal questions. We often struggle with it as teenagers, then again in our thirties, or during a mid-life crisis. The struggle to know thy Self is as old as spiritual traditions that attempted to answer the question.

And get a lay of the land of the different worlds to be explored and some areas of illusion that get in the way of knowing your self.

It is this quest for personal integrity that forms the journey of the mythological hero. When you become self-aware and conscious you realize that you are a multi-dimensional being and you live in a multidimensional world. It can appear complicated and confusing at the start, but when you have awareness, life becomes clear and simple.

To know your self does not mean to define your self. Being completely authentic is not a process of declaration or creating your self in any way. Finding your self is more a process of discovery. In that process of discovery, you peel away all the layers of illusion and false self-images that interfere with knowing and feeling authentic.

#14: Free will

on July 1, 2007 January 17, 2022 214 Views

Awareness and Consciousness Podcast

#14: Free will

00:00 / 29:28

Do you have free will? Is there even such a thing as free will? It is true that we are to some degree products of our environment. Our minds get filled with ideas, beliefs and emotional patterns as we grow up. We are socialized to become a collection of habits and behavior that correspond to the culture we grew up in.

Just how much does this make us live by an automatic program and how much of our own free choice remains? More importantly, can you regain your ability to choose and recover your personal will power so you can choose to be happy.

In this podcast I explore what free will is and whether a person has it. I also identify how people often delude themselves with the idea that they have free will.

For a quick measurement of your free will pick an emotion of happiness, gratitude, joy, or any other emotional state based in love. Then decide how long you want to feel that way. I suggest starting with a short period of time like one day. When you have an emotional reaction you will have either lost control over your choice, or lost control over your will power.

If you are going to recover your free will you are going to first have to admit when you don’t have it. This is a humbling step. However it is those with humility that shall inherit a new world of power.

For more on steps to take to recover and develop will power and create happiness in your life, download and listen to the free sessions in the Self Mastery Audio Program.

#13: How to tell if a relationship will work

on April 11, 2007 January 17, 2022 311 Views

Awareness and Consciousness Podcast

#13: How to tell if a relationship will work

00:00 / 38:11

How can you tell if a relationship will work out? There are specific indicators to tell if your relationship will run into trouble down the road. The signs aren’t found in how much love, romance, or physical attraction there is. Two people can have great chemistry but still not be compatible.

How can you tell if your relationship will work out? You have to learn what the critical factors are and then develop a level of awareness to notice those factors. Many people will say that communication is the key to a healthy relationship. This is true. However there are fundamental elements that form the basis for good communication. If you don’t have the elements to support sharing and listening it will fall apart down the road.

At the same time two people who haven’t studied relationship communication may think that they communicate well. However they may not know what they don’t know. Important steps to improving your relationship skills is to first admit what you don’t know and be willing to learn more.

In the best selling book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking author Malcolm Gladwell shares insights on determining how a relationship will turn out. Researcher John Gottman can predict with 95% accuracy whether a couple will be together in 15 years or not. What is impressive is that he can do that with only about 30 minutes of information. If you know what to look for, and have the awareness to see it when it is in front of you, you can tell a lot about a person and their relationships. Probably the most important place that we can use this awareness and insight is in our own relationships.

In this episode I share my perspective on important ingredients in a healthy relationship. How to tell if a relationship will work out or whether it is headed for the rocks. I had recorded it before I read Gladwell’s book and it was interesting to note some of the similar themes.

What Gladwell doesn’t cover in the book is how to go about changing the sabotaging behaviors that destroy relationships. Robert Gottman might know how to do this. However he might have spent all his time learning the indicators that he hasn’t spent time developing a cure for relationship drama.

If you are interested in cleaning up the emotional drama and conflict from your relationship I suggest listening to and practicing the activities in the Self Mastery Audio Course.

It will help you identify and become aware of those tell tale signs that make a relationship work, and the signs that help determine if you should be looking elsewhere. More importantly it will give you the tools to change the attitudes, emotions, and behaviors you may not have been aware of before.

#12: Don’t take anything personally

on February 23, 2007 January 17, 2022 375 Views

Awareness and Consciousness Podcast

#12: Don't take anything personally

00:00 / 23:56

In the book, The Four Agreements, Miguel Ruiz outlines a code of conduct for creating love and happiness in your life. One of his Four Agreements is “Don’t Take Anything Personally”. In this episode, I describe some of the hidden assumptions that cause us to take things personally. I then explain how to stop taking things personally by shifting these interpretations. The first step is to identify these automatic assumptions and then by replacing them with new assumptions closer to the truth.

It isn’t as easy as it seems. We have been conditioned over years to react emotionally in certain patterns. This is particularly true of people that we perceive to be of authority.

Listening to this podcast won’t give you immunity from emotional reactions. It will tell you what specific issues in the mental and emotional programming of the mind to be changed. I share an alternative interpretation of how to perceive critical comments that will help.

If you are seriously interested in how to stop taking things personally and stop unwanted emotional reactions begin by practicing the exercises in the Self Mastery Course.

#11: The ego mind and consciousness

on January 28, 2007 January 17, 2022 1,406 Views

Awareness and Consciousness Podcast

#11: The ego mind and consciousness

00:00 / 54:15

The ego definition, mind, and consciousness

In a Four Agreements workshop I shared a model for understanding consciousness and the ego mind. I recorded the workshop and part of it makes up this episode.

Understanding the ego mind and understanding consciousness means becoming aware of the way our mind dreams. The ego mind has more than just thoughts and beliefs; it has emotions, memories, visual images and a life of its own. When we believe what our imagination dreams we can get lost in a world of illusions and emotions that have no basis in reality. This is what happens if we don’t have self awareness. We lose our happiness.

What You’ll Find In This Episode on The Ego Definition, Mind, and Consciousness:

In this episode, I touch upon fear and how we create resistance and obstacles to change and why some self help approaches don’t work. How your mind sabotages efforts for self improvement. However, because this is only a podcast and not a video cast you don’t get my wonderful illustrations and pictures of the mind to help with your understanding.
I also cover how we can go from one emotional reaction to another very quickly in our mind. How we end up judging our self for judging our self. I cover the importance of being the observer in stopping emotional reactions of the mind and how awareness is the key to awakening this observer consciousness.

When you understand this, being a Spiritual Warrior and their quest to be free of the mind and emotional reactions makes a lot more sense. I even touch upon the topic of death and how we can use a ceremony to free ourselves from the ego mind and from its’ chatter and emotional reactions.

An Ego Definition example:

As consciousness we can perceive so many things in our mind from so many points of view. Understanding this capacity as consciousness to perceive in multiple dimensions is a helpful step in dealing with our thoughts, beliefs, and emotional reactions. It can help to realize that we are not going crazy as our consciousness expands through our personal and spiritual growth.

Miguel Ruiz mentions in the back of the Four Agreements that the next steps to take are awareness and to make an inventory of your core beliefs. These are important undertakings if one is to really live the principles of the Four Agreements. Exercises for increasing awareness and how to effectively make an inventory of beliefs are two of the items you will learn in the Self Mastery online course. These are two steps that people usually ignore, and is why they continue to struggle with emotional reactions and taking this personally.

What I cover about the ego mind and consciousness isn’t new. It has been taught by many teachers in many traditions. I’ve only attempted to repackage it here in a language of common sense. Living a life of happiness is simple. We don’t need a lot of knowledge. We just need to dissolve the sabotaging stories and false beliefs in the mind so that we can focus our attention where and how we choose.

May happiness fill all the days of your life.

#10: Can you change your life

on January 1, 2007 January 17, 2022 181 Views

Awareness and Consciousness Podcast

#10: Can you change your life

00:00 / 34:34

I often get asked if people can really change their life. They want to known if they can overcome fears, stop the judgments, and quiet the voice in their head. The answer is yes. However, when people ask, they usually ask with such fear and doubt that almost no amount of words will suffice. Perhaps this interview will help overcome some of those doubts. When you hear about other people making changes in their life, it can help you not believe some of the doubts and fears in the mind.

In this episode I interview one of my self mastery audio course subscribers, Holly, who went to work making changes in her emotional state. She not only wanted to rid her self of fear and judgments, she also wanted to get rid of old coping and compensating strategies that she spent so much energy on. Holly call those energy draining strategies “Murphy-Proofing”. Holly was about 8 1/2 months into taking real action when we did this interview. I think you will agree that it is possible to change your self and your life. If Holly can do it, then you can do it.

To some people it might sound as if I am podcasting an infomercial. It just turned out that we ended up talking about a process that worked for her. I didn’t do the podcast to claim that my program will work for everyone or that everyone should do it and how great it is. I did this show because I so often get asked questions from people in fear and doubt about whether they can really make changes in their life. Is it really possible to be happy? It might take some effort and some actions that are unfamiliar, and maybe even uncomfortable, but it can be done. It is possible to change the emotional quality of your life and your relationships. It’s possible to be happy.

#09: Fear of love and happiness

on December 1, 2006 January 17, 2022 247 Views

Awareness and Consciousness Podcast

#09: Fear of love and happiness

00:00 / 29:07

It might be hard to believe that we fear love and happiness, but it is a real dynamic that happens in the mind. It is easier to understand if we consider the mind to be a living being with many different aspects. If we attempt to change our beliefs and behavior, then we are making changes to our personality. We are essentially killing off false self images of our personality. These aspects and self images have a life of their own like any living being. They might very well respond with resistance and objection as any living being would to death.

Those habits that we seek to let go of fight to stay alive in our personality. When they react with fear to their impending end, we often mistake that fear as our own fear. We might feel as if we are somehow going to die and that is uncomfortable. In this way we resist change, even if the change will lead us to greater love and happiness.

Spiritual and religious traditions have often created ceremony and rituals around the death of false self images to help people move through this process. The bottom line is that if we wish to make changes in our behavior and happiness, we will need to let go of aspects of our personality and be willing to let them die. That process brings up a fear that we may be uncomfortable with. In order to make real change towards happiness and love in our lives we will need the skills to deal with this fear of change. This begins with awareness of what we are dealing with.

#08: Fear and overcoming fear

on November 15, 2006 January 17, 2022 286 Views

Awareness and Consciousness Podcast

#08: Fear and overcoming fear

00:00 / 29:07

Overcome fear by gaining mastery over your core beliefs

Fear is that emotional force that drives us in a direction away from joy, happiness, and love. Fear can paralyze us to the point that we feel helpless and suffocated. Often fear appears irrational, but it only looks this way at the surface. When you scrutinize the stories and agreements you generally find a logical dynamic in the mind. The trouble is that while the fearful logic is rational, the core beliefs at their foundation are not logical at all. It is the core beliefs that are irrational.

If you have a desire to permanently overcome fear, then you will need to address the false core beliefs at their foundation.

Fear of public speaking isn’t about speaking in public. It isn’t even about fear of failing, looking like an idiot, or other people judging you. Failing, performing poorly, or other people’s opinion of us doesn’t hurt. There is no emotional pain in any of these aspects. However these events often trigger us to judge and reject ourselves. It is self rejection that is emotionally painful. The pain we seek to avoid is the pain of self rejection. The fear of public speaking is really a fear of triggering our own self rejection.

Self rejection is an act based on core beliefs about a false self image.

When you gain mastery over your beliefs you no longer believe stories of self rejection that occur in your imagination. With Self Mastery you accept and love yourself just the way you are, no matter what. With self acceptance you have immunity from emotional pain. Without the threat of emotional pain you no longer have a reason to fear. By practicing self acceptance you are no longer afraid of expressing yourself or failing. You give your self permission to try something new. You are not afraid of what others think about you. You are not even afraid of what you will think of yourself. No matter what happens you will not reject yourself. When you no longer hurt your self in this way many of your fears go away.

Complete acceptance and unconditional love for your self will allow you to overcome your fears.

#07: Identify and change core beliefs

on October 31, 2006 January 17, 2022 534 Views

Awareness and Consciousness Podcast

#07: Identify and change core beliefs

00:00 / 22:28

What are core beliefs and how do you identify them? That’s what many people are realizing they need to do to change their emotional reactions. The problem is where do you look to find core beliefs? They are in the mind but can be hard to pin down, particularly when it is the mind that we use to go looking for them. The mind has difficulty identifying and recognizing itself much the same way that the eye doesn’t see itself.

If you want to find and change your core beliefs begin with the internal dialogue. That’s the stuff you think and hear in your mind when you are all by yourself. Pay particular attention to the comments and stories that have a lot of emotional charge around them. You are likely to find the bigger core beliefs in the topics that have more emotional reactions.

Once you write down the internal dialogue you then go back and decipher the structure and meanings behind those words. A comment as simple as “I’m disappointed with my performance” has a number of imbedded beliefs beyond just the obvious.

There are criteria in the mind that we hold of how well we “should” have performed. Call these expectations. In the beginning they are often hidden until we have an emotional reaction and go looking for them.
The comparison of our self against this imaginary image is grounds for self rejection. This comparison is what the inner judge does.
We also have the belief that we deserve the self rejection that our inner judge is placing on us. This is a victim interpretation. If we didn’t at some level agree we wouldn’t accept this self judgment.
We might also hold the belief that emotional self rejection will somehow make us “better.” The idea that punishment will help us avoid a bad behavior in the future is usually learned very young. Motivation through self punishment is the dynamic the beliefs are dictating.
By this logic the more unhappy we become the successful we will be. Pretty twisted the mind is in creating unhappiness. The term “No Pain, No Gain” may work in the gym, but it is not a healthy way to exercise the mind.

In the process of identifying core beliefs it is prudent to include the characters of the judge and victim that create interpretations. They are a big part of how these core beliefs determine our emotional reactions, what we feel, and the actions we take.

When you really notice the logic of the belief system it’s any wonder why you would allow your mind to go making decisions and having emotional reactions without your oversight.

In this episode I introduce you to the idea of looking beyond the internal dialogue to find core beliefs that are at the source of emotional reactions and drama in relationships. But that is only part of the process. The real transformation happens when you change them.

How do you change core beliefs? I’ve managed to break that down into a simple process of many simple steps. It takes a little effort to learn and practice but once you know how to do it, it is simple. You can learn how to inventory and change core beliefs in the self mastery audio program . The first few sessions can be downloaded free just by signing up with an email address.

#06: Love relationships part II

on October 11, 2006 January 17, 2022 265 Views

Awareness and Consciousness Podcast

#06: Love relationships part II

00:00 / 22:07

Understanding Conflicting Desires

Our body has physical desires, our emotions have a desire to express love and our mind has a desire to have its beliefs and expectations met. This can create some internal conflict that gets more complicated when we add another person’s desires to the mix. The desires from the body and emotions are natural and intrinsic. The needs of the mind are artificial and often put limitations and unnecessary criteria on our emotions.

How do we deal with conflicts between what our mind says and what our emotions desire? Being aware and conscious of the desires of the body, the emotions and the mind create an opportunity to eliminate conflicts and make better choices.

People often make a list in their mind of what they want in a partner or a relationship in order to satisfy their desires. They have in their mind what the relationship should look like, how they are supposed to be and how their partner is supposed to be. This list is what the mind assumes will satisfy the emotional and physical wants. This list is usually filled with expectations and beliefs of what the mind wants. When this happens the mind becomes the master and the emotions become secondary. This is a recipe for conflict in relationships because the mind doesn’t usually have good information on satisfying our emotional needs.

When the emotions of love and respect are given priority and the mind becomes the servant we have an opportunity for harmony. By placing the emotional quality of the relationship as the priority we become aware of how we want to feel in our relationships. How we feel becomes more important than what it looks like. Our expectations and what it is supposed to look like become secondary. Our mind then becomes the servant to make agreements and manage expectations in order to honor the quality of love and respect. The way we communicate becomes more respectful of how we feel and how our partner feels. We address differences with the emotions of respect and kindness instead of with emotions of frustration and anger. We may still have disagreements to dissolve but we do it with a completely different approach.

When the agenda in the relationship is to meet the expectations and agreements in the mind it is with the hope and desire to satisfy our emotional and physical desires. We might as well recognize that the emotions are the priority and stop letting the mind place the expectations first.

You can listen to the previous episode: Love Relationships Part 1 here

#05: Love relationships part I

on September 30, 2006 January 17, 2022 227 Views

Awareness and Consciousness Podcast

#05: Love relationships part I

00:00 / 32:10

Understanding desire and yearning in relationships

Desires for a relationship come from deep within us. They aren’t desires for a specific person so much as a need for expression and experience of connection and feeling that we can have with another person. Those desires include the emotion of love, physical affection and sexual satisfaction. It is by satisfying our desires that we experience pleasure. An intimate partner is a fabulous way to satisfy these desires, but not the only way. The strength of these desires can be so strong when they are not met that they fee like yearning, or even painful aches. The mind often seeks out relationship interactions to relieve us of these aches.

In a conscious aware relationship it is not just important to be present with our emotions and our desires. We also need to manage the stories, expectations, and illusions in the mind that can create so much misunderstanding. In this audio I outline some of the desires we have for relationships, and how the mind is programmed to create answers about satisfying those desires. Of course the mind’s solution may not be the best one possible. It can only choose the best one it sees within its limited paradigm of experience and beliefs. This can lead to some unhappy and painful experiences in our relationships.

Understanding relationships includes awareness of our physical and emotional desires, as well as the mental constructs and expectations our mind creates. Our mind often interprets that a partner, soul mate, or some special match will be the answer to our needs. This is an exaggerated responsibility to place on our partner for our happiness and leads to emotional drama and reactions.

Our yearning is satisfied by the expression of our love, not by receiving it from someone else. It is the mind that makes assumptions about how our deep feelings will be satisfied and those assumptions, learned from an emotionally dramatic society, are usually wrong. In a truly conscious and aware relationship you will have to manage the beliefs and expectations in the mind to enjoy happiness all the time.

You can listen to the second part of Love Relationships here

#04: Happiness as choice

on September 12, 2006 January 17, 2022 164 Views

Awareness and Consciousness Podcast

#04: Happiness as choice

00:00 / 31:17

Most people spend their whole lives looking for some measure of happiness. Why is it so elusive? What creates happiness? People will tell you that material things or other people won’t make you happy. Experts will advise you that in order to be happy you first have to make yourself happy. What they usually can’t explain is how to make your self happy. What I try to uncover in my work and in this audio is some of the mystery that surrounds an individual’s happiness.

Happiness is simply an emotional state. It is created by expressing emotions based in love. If you express love, gratitude, and joy, you feel happy. If you create and express the emotions of fear, anger, or sadness, then you will experience fear, anger and sadness. There are no hidden secrets to be revealed in order to live a joyful life. Express love and you are on your way.

You are the creator of your emotions, and then you feel the emotions you create. We aren’t used to looking at our emotions with this sense of responsibility so it might seem a bit foreign. It was a long time before I understood things this simply. What can make it difficult to grasp is that we are used to having an intermediate step to our emotions.

Some of the required criteria the mind sets up might look like: “I will be so happy to lose 10 lbs”, “It will be so nice to get away for the weekend”. Through years of patterning we set ourselves up to express love only when certain criteria are met. When this criteria isn’t met we deny ourselves the joy of expressing love and remain unhappy instead.

We often don’t notice the mental criteria we use to determine the expression of our emotions. Because we overlook these mental factors, it appears that the source of our happiness is external. More about this in my article on the Pursuit of Happiness.

When you gain mastery over your mental criteria you can choose when to express love without needing the world meet your mental construct. Your mind can create some pretty complex criteria before allowing you to express love. And that can be a big roadblock to living in a state of joy.

Why is happiness so elusive? How we feel emotionally is determined by what we express and that can change moment to moment. Our expression can change as fast as our mind changes a thought. We can have a reaction to image in our imagination. That emotional reaction is our expression that we then feel. When our imagination goes uncontrolled our expressions are uncontrolled. Without the ability to direct our mind and imagination, our ability to maintain happiness is elusive.

When you develop mastery over your thoughts, beliefs, and imagination you will have mastery over your expression. In this way, happiness is no longer something you pursue. Happiness is something that you exude and share.

#03: Emotional reactions

on August 22, 2006 January 17, 2022 288 Views

Awareness and Consciousness Podcast

#03: Emotional reactions

00:00 / 28:50

When it comes to stopping or changing emotional reactions people often approach the problem like they are fixing a car. They ask, “How can I change this reaction?” or “How can I stop my jealousy, anger, frustration etc?”. The assumption seems to be that if we change one thing the whole problem will go away. People are looking for a fix as if it were like changing a spark plug. In my experience this approach and attitude to change emotional reaction does more harm than good.

Our desire to be free of emotional suffering and pain is real and authentic. However, when we express our desire for change with an attitude laced with judgment, rejection, disdain, or frustration, it now becomes another emotional reaction. We are now having emotional reactions about our emotional reactions.

To change emotional reactions we would be better served to think of our mind and emotions as a garden. It is a living growing field of emotional energy that we plant seeds in, water, nurture, and bring to life. We want to nurture the fruit that bears emotions of joy and gratitude and we want to pluck out the weeds of fear and anger. Every expression we make goes into that emotional field. When you express judgments about emotional reactions you are planting and watering another weed in your mind.

We can’t get rid of the weeds by throwing weeds of judgment at them. We are going to need a different approach in order to be effective.

Some people choose denial as a way to stop their emotional reactions. I personally did emotional denial for a long time. Growing up as a male in this society, I was unknowingly encouraged. Fortunately I was so good at denying my emotions that I never felt guilty about it. Think of this as spraying weed killer on the whole garden. You kill the weeds, but you also kill the fruit. You don’t feel much anger and pain, but you don’t feel any love, joy or happiness either. Numb is the word.

Behaviors, perspectives, and beliefs that create happiness will take some time to grow strong roots. You don’t expect trees to bear fruit in one week or one month. You invest some effort and action in the beginning so that you can feed your self emotionally thereafter. This is a garden approach that bears fruit.

You can fix a car in a hurry, but you have to grow an emotional field of joy and happiness with attention and patience.

At the same time there needs to be a continual weeding out of the beliefs and assumptions that create emotional reactions. Keep an eye out for the interpretations in the mind that create reactions. The seeds behind these emotionally harmful beliefs are archetype attitudes of the victim and the inner judge. When we eliminate the seeds of the judge and victim point of view all our energy goes directly to the roots of love, gratitude, and happiness.

Each person has their own personal field of emotional energy that they have grown. I am not saying this as a metaphorical statement. It is a literal statement. I’ll say it again. Each person has grown their own personal field of emotional energy. When we have an emotional reaction, that field gets agitated and we perceive its intensity. In the book The Four Agreements, don Miguel Ruiz refers to this field as a parasite that steals our energy. Ekhart Tolle refers to this field as the Pain Body. Just because you haven’t seen it doesn’t mean that it isn’t real. We don’t see emotions, but they can be powerful factors affecting our choices in life.

Even if you don’t believe each person has an emotional field, it may help to think of issues using this model. It will cause you to change the kind of question you ask. It won’t be about fixing something that is wrong. The questions will shift to, “How do I create and grow love and happiness in this situation?”. When you ask a different question your mind opens to different possibilities. It is also helpful to understand that you can completely transform this emotional field.

One of the reasons that stopping emotional reactions is challenging is that we haven’t been introduced to ways to deal with our own emotional field. It doesn’t respond the way we might think. We might be attacking it like a car when it behaves more like a garden. With the wrong approach our efforts to change emotions only agitate them further. When you become more aware of how your emotional field operates, practice what to do, and what not to do, you can completely change your emotional reactions.

In this episode I discuss how this emotional field behaves, both with an individual, and in relationships. Most importantly I cover what not to do, and why, when trying to change emotional reactions. When you stop doing the things that agitate your emotional field, your emotional reactions dissolve all by themselves. Learning to shift certain expressions is like not watering the weeds in the garden anymore. When you don’t water weeds anymore they die.

Topics covered in this audio are

Field of emotional energy and how it reacts
The Four Agreements: Impeccability
Judgment and rejection
Changing or fixing emotional reactions
What not to do
How the emotional field creates emotional reactions in relationships
Being the witness observer and why it is so important
Happiness
Archetypes of victim, judge, and hero

Understand more about how the Self Mastery Course sessions guide you to change emotional reactions located on my website.

#02: The Four Agreements and hidden assumptions

on August 15, 2006 January 17, 2022 346 Views

Awareness and Consciousness Podcast

#02: The Four Agreements and hidden assumptions

00:00 / 22:29

What are your beliefs and values?

Of don Miguel Ruiz’s Four Agreements most people will say that the hardest one to keep is Don’t Take Anything Personally. I don’t agree.

The most challenging agreement is actually Being Impeccable with Your Word. In taking something personal you take what someone said and express an interpretation that makes it personal. We invest our faith in the belief that what someone says about us is accurate. Your interpretation is the expression of your own word and it is a distortion of the truth. Expressing your faith in your false interpretation is off the mark of impeccability. Our interpretation also often has a component from the inner judge and victim voices’ in our head.

Basically, if you are taking something personally you are not being impeccable as well. It also means we are making false assumptions about our self image. It appears that not taking things personally is the agreement we most often break because it is the one we notice because of the emotions. We don’t usually have emotional reactions when we make assumptions, but we set ourselves up for them.

The interpretation we make has the assumption that what someone says really applies to us. We don’t usually see this assumption because we are often busy in an emotional reaction by then. The assumption might seem to be hidden but it is not. It is out there plain as day but we aren’t use to noticing them. In the same way we aren’t use to noticing the windshield of our car as we drive. We train ourselves not to notice by looking right past what is filtering our vision.

How often do we make false assumptions even with our different beliefs and values?

If you are taking something personally you can be sure that you have some false assumptions in your perception and interpretation.

How do you stop making assumptions that are the set up to emotional reactions? The first step is always awareness. You can’t change a behavior pattern until you realize and accept responsibility for doing it. That includes patterns in the mind.

In this episode, I cover some places that assumptions hide. I do a little poking around to show you what they look like. I also show how they lead us down dark alleys chasing illusions in our minds. Becoming aware of those dark alleys of mental illusions will make it easier to get out.

Some of the beliefs and values stories I cover in this episode are:

What kind of parent am I?
Am I a bad mother?
Am I a good dad?
Ever wonder if you are a good lover?
What is my life purpose?
Do you want to know what God knows?
Do you want to be like God?

#01: Feeling not good enough – beliefs

on August 11, 2006 January 17, 2022 324 Views

Awareness and Consciousness Podcast

#01: Feeling not good enough - beliefs

00:00 / 32:20

A big component of feeling insecure is the image of perfection that we create in our mind. When the voice in our head compares us to that image of perfection it concludes that we are not good enough. Buying into this comparison with an imagined self is what creates the feeling of not being good enough.

It’s kind of silly to determine that we are not good enough based on an imaginary image in our mind but that is what we do with our beliefs. I battled this myself. When I unraveled the core beliefs structure behind the not good enough agreements a whole world of duality was exposed. When it was exposed to common sense awareness it fell apart because it was made of non-sense.

The feeling of not being good enough is created because we believe in stories and images in our mind that are not true. If I can change it, then you can change it too.