Don’t Take Your Emotions Personally

What becomes clear on this path of awakening is the more you hold onto the need to have things be a certain way, the more you insist this isn’t right, or that should not be allowed, the more emotional charge you are storing up.

Then, when expectations are not met, there is pain and suffering. If your position is exposed as being hollow or false, you might experience sadness or embarrassment. If someone belittles you, puts you down in some way, or betrays you it may express as resentment or anger.

So the work is to welcome, or at least accept your suffering, and then look at what you are inwardly holding onto, the beliefs, expectations, pictures, and ideas. Look at the story you are telling yourself about who you are and what you need to be happy. Begin to see it is only a story, a story you are making up. It is a story entirely of your own creation.

Realize you are not the story, but the luminous ever-present consciousness which looks at the story, which creates the story, and you’ll have a genuine experience, a taste, of freedom.

After all, the story you tell yourself keeps the emotions in a volatile state of readiness. As I said, when you cling to any point of view or psychological position, you are generating an emotional charge.

Freedom comes as you see the story for what it is: a figment of your own creation. When you’re not holding onto any idea or image of yourself, there’s no build-up of emotional energy. You are simply open to life in the present. The secret is in emphasizing awareness itself, having all your senses alert, and not getting lost in thinking. Then your head will be clear, and you will feel the deeper energy, the deeper beauty and power of creation itself, and it will nourish you. Then your emotions will come into balance. They will arise spontaneously and authentically.

You will feel sadness at the loss of a loved one, or perhaps in a moment of being confronted with the tremendous suffering of so many innocent people in our world. Or you might feel anger whenever you are reminded of the terrible injustices still taking place, the brutality, the subjugation of one group of people by another.

But none of these feelings will be taken too personally. The “I” won’t jump in and make some new kind of story out of them, such as a victim story, as in, “Woe is me, the world is too awful and I am too sensitive to live in it.” People who really believe they are victims are always telling their tale of suffering to anyone who will listen, and this constant reinforcement of their story just keeps them stuck.

As you grasp this teaching and let go of the attachment to and identification with your own story, you begin to know yourself as awareness, the pure consciousness behind everything. You start to free yourself. Emotions still arise and pass, but now they happen more spontaneously. The paradox of awakening or enlightenment is that while you feel very deeply, you don’t take your feelings personally. Once you let go of the identification with your own story, you learn to let go of the attachment to other peoples’ stories as well.

Then, in the clarity of your true nature, you see what action, if any, needs to be taken. If something needs to be done about the situation triggering the emotional response, you’ll know what to do, and you’ll do it. But you won’t make a big drama out of it.

From End Your Story, Begin Your Life, Chapter 6, by Jim Dreaver

Getting the Message Out There

As a teacher committed to getting my message of true inner freedom out there, I am always on the lookout for new ways of doing it. As a writer, one of the ways I use is through writing fiction.

Even though the essence of my message is seeing that we are not our thoughts or stories, which—like the unsettling emotions they trigger, come and go—but rather the awareness or consciousness that is always here, we are nevertheless as story-telling people. As such, our stories are important. In fact, the whole word runs on stories in one form or another, and the whole of history is one vast, complex ‘story.’

I maintain that the freer you are of your story, the better story-teller you become. With that in mind, let me tell you about my new novel, The Unexpected Goddess. A female friend told me over 25 years ago that I should write a spiritual-erotic novel, that it was sure to be a best-seller. Well, the best-seller part remains to be seen, but I kept her idea at the back of my mind, and even made a few attempts at starting such a book.

Then, when I was in Manila last summer, visiting an old friend who happens to be Jewish (my own heritage is WASP), an idea began to form: I would make my main character (me) a Jew. I wanted to get into the Jewish mind. I had already researched the main female character and her Mormon background, and over the rest of the year, a story gradually developed. I wrote the novel in just a few months, at the beginning of this year, got feedback from friends who read it, made revisions, and voila…!

The Unexpected Goddess is set in northern California in the summer of 2008, and tells the story of how the narrator, Steven Bergman, a successful writer and teacher of the art of awakening to spiritual freedom, met and fell in love with the beautiful Annie Morgan.

As Bergman writes in Chapter One: “Like any good story, it has elements of drama to it, because Annie was in the last stages of recovering from a broken heart and shattered trust when I met her. So, in many ways, this is a story of healing and redemption, but it is also a story of self-discovery and self-realization, of sexual awakening and spiritual liberation, because Annie was living out of a very confining story when we met, a story that had been programmed into since before she came into this world.”

In the italicized pages between the book’s chapters, Bergman also tells his own story: how he was born to Jewish parents in New York; how his mother, the sole survivor of her family in the Holocaust, lived with her own inner demons, and eventually, when Bergman is away at college in California, commits suicide; and how he then joins the army, goes to Vietnam, and experiences the ‘baptism by fire’ he wanted there.

He then returns to the U.S. attends Chiropractic College, gets married, and becomes a successful chiropractor in Sebastopol, California. During this time he embarks on his own spiritual journey, to which he dedicates himself, with the result that he finally becomes enlightened, or free. But then he suffers a major stroke, which turns his life upside down. How he handles this event is lesson for anyone experiencing a crisis.

The “story” that was programmed into Annie was the Mormon story. She was raised a fourth-generation, very devout Mormon woman. She graduated from Brigham Young University, where she met her husband, Warren. They had a sealed marriage in the Provo temple, and set about starting a big family. But although Annie had three pregnancies, she also had three miscarriages. Because she cannot give him any children, Warren, after ten years, demands and gets a divorce. Annie is devastated by this turn of events.

Now, a year after her divorce, she has decided to come to northern California to find herself. She is questioning everything she has ever been taught, including all her religious beliefs. As part of this questioning, she is reading a book she bought at a spiritual bookstore in Sebastopol—You Are Not Your Story, by Steven Bergman.

When the novel begins, it is this book, his book, that Bergman finds her reading when he walks into Lucas Wharf Restaurant in Bodega Bay for lunch on a mid-week afternoon, and sees her there, sitting in the lounge area.

Thus begins their tale…

The novel is short, 118 PDF pages, and is available for purchase for $9.95 at www.unexpectedgoddess.com.

One reader, Ken Dvoren of Santa Monica, CA, said this about it:

"A great story and the only one I've read that so daringly combines the spiritual with the explicitly erotic… The sex scenes are hot! "

So, that’s how I got the message out on this occasion!