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!

The Less You Resist Your Suffering…

The less your resist your suffering, the sooner it passes.

A simple truth, but a profoundly liberating one. Non-resistance forms the basis of the first step in the practice of freedom I teach. You have to accept what is happening if you want to be free of it. Ultimately, you have to welcome it because it is showing you where you are not yet free.

If you avoid, reject, or try to deny your suffering—whether it is anxiety, fear, resentment, anger, guilt, loneliness, or something else—you only make it worse. Or, as the old saying goes: “If you run away from a ghost it will chase you and haunt you for the rest of your life, but if you stop and turn and face it, it will disappear, because ghosts aren’t real.”

As an example of what I mean by non-resistance, I want to share an excerpt from a new book I am writing. I kept a meditation journal 28 years ago, at a time when I was in the process of selling my chiropractic practice in Santa Rosa, and getting ready for an extended trip through South East Asia, which was really spiritual journey for me. It was a time for me of great uncertainty, anxiety, and insecurity. I was still many years away from realizing my true nature,

The book’s tentative title is Before and After Awakening: An Old Meditation Journal and my Experience Now. This excerpt is from April 26, 1983. The journal itself is enclosed in quotation marks, and my comments today are in italics.

“Barb and I fought last night, a “you’re wrong and I’m right” clash as all fights are. I think I was the wrong one though, the instigator. My inner voice always tells me what’s so and yet I still persist in ignoring it, in being “right” anyway. Sometimes I just don’t want to hear the truth about myself. Sitting as I am now, just being here, feeling ever more light and free, all I feel is love for Barb. Now it doesn’t matter what she says or does. What happens at those other times then, when one or both of us falls apart?”

*

“Falling apart is the clue, perhaps? Here, now, I am not falling apart. On the contrary I am coming more and more together.”

*

“This is the quality of energy—whole, intact, indestructible—I want to experience more of in my daily life. Not just when I am sitting.”

*

I was still very attached to feeling good, whole, at ease in those days (as opposed to feeling contracted, uncomfortable, lousy), and it wasn’t till I let go of the attachment to how I felt, in my body and my psyche, that I finally began to taste true freedom. Of course, this is the ego at work, the “I” that wants to feel this particular way (whatever makes it feel “good”), and resists feeling that way (whatever makes it feel “bad”).

Basically, the ego is a judging machine. It is forever judging what is in its best interests—and the physical body that it deems an extension of “it.” But when the truth is realized—that we have an ego, but we are not our ego—then the whole body/mind relaxes, and we find ourselves in the natural state.

We are always, for the most part, relaxed, at ease, and in the flow. And when there is discomfort, or even a major health crisis, like the strokes I had at the end of 2003, we just deal with what’s so, and flow with it as best we can. But we always remain calm, clear, and present.

*

“When I am very still, as I am right now, there is an extraordinary sense of lightness and my awareness is unobstructed, translucent. There is nothing in the way. It is as if every cobweb of memory, every trace of thought, has been blown or swept away and there is just this refreshing clarity. How easy it is to “lose” it though, to drop back into the mind state with all its needs, desires, fears, regrets, hopes, doubts, obsessions. It that what the “fall from grace” really means?”

*

The “fall from grace” is actually the descent back into the ego, the “I” or “me.” The problem, I would eventually realize, is not the mind which, left to itself, is an amazingly brilliant instrument for reflection, creativity (everything made by humans began as an idea in someone’s mind!), and communication.

But it’s as “we,” as the ego-self, get identified with the mind that all “our” problems—and all suffering—begins. Freedom is seeing that we’re not this “I,” this “me,” but rather this ever-present, aware being that gives birth to the idea of “I” and “me.” This has to be seen again and again until we get it, realize it.

The Essence of Awakening

We are a story-telling people, but it is important to understand the connection between our stories, our thoughts, and the emotional states that result—especially those that cause suffering like anxiety, fear, guilt, shame, self-judgment, resentment, anger, and so on.

Making this connection is vital to freedom or liberation, and forms the basis of the inner, spiritual journey as we seek to discover who and what we really are beyond all our ideas about ourselves. Eventually, if we have the courage to journey deep enough and face our fears, we realize that we are in fact not our thoughts, beliefs, or stories. These—like the emotions they trigger—come and go, yet we, as the ever-present, conscious beings watching, witnessing, and experiencing life, are always here.

Understanding this is the essence of awakening, enlightenment, or self-realization. It happens through a perceptual shift, when we finally, after much self-inquiry, see the truth: that the “I,” the ego, the psychological and emotional “person” that we always believed we were only appears to exist, but we cannot actually find it anywhere! Like our beliefs and stories, it is not real—in the sense of being always here—and never was.

This realization produces great and enduring relief, a freedom (as free as any of us can be) from all inner conflict, fear, and suffering. Such a gift! Our endless seeking for who “we” are comes to an end. We now know who we are.

And what do we know? Essentially, that there is no separation, that we are One with everything, and only this present moment—right here, right now—exists. Our true nature, in other words—our true “I,” or Self—is pure, spacious, timeless consciousness expressing through these bodies, minds, and personalities know as “us.”

As we allow this realization to sink in, it’s like breathing pure oxygen. We feel exhilarated, rejuvenated, and empowered. We’ve reconnected to pure existence itself, our true, authentic nature. Our emotional state is one of ease, harmony, and flow—and an immense gratitude for life.

Now the outer journey begins in earnest, learning to embody this presence, wisdom, and love that is ours in the busy marketplace of daily life. We use the power of thought, of story, to ponder, communicate, create, and above all connect with others, with our community, in a deep, conscious, heartfelt way, so that we can collectively celebrate our joys and address the challenges facing us…