Dreams For Peace

When I first started doing NLP training during the time that I lived in Alberta working on the Cree Reserve,  one of the things that I noticed was that it was extremely difficult for me to do one of the basic submodalities around internal visual processes.    The premise of NLP that is so powerful is that experience has a structure and is stored in the mind with the way that your being has structured it.  So for instance,  fear is often stored by the submodality of size.  When we are fearful of something like fearful of being overpowered, then the object of the fear appears very large in our minds.   The purpose of structuring the fear in your mind in such a way is protective in nature.    Once the fear has been learned, it just stays in place until another higher and more effective one can replace it.     It is sort of like correcting a bad habit in a sport.   If your swing is not very level in baseball, you are going to have problems.    To overcome the bad swing, you simply need to learn a new way of swinging and practice it enough so that you can drop the old way.     The problem with the old way is that it is such a habit that you don’t even realize that you are swinging incorrectly.      So the first step is being aware of the bad pattern, analyzing its structure, and then replacing it with a new pattern.

So for instance, you may be fearful of heights and have just accepted that that is who you are and you will always be afraid of them.  This is what most people do.    But if you analyze the fear internally, if usually has something to do with enthusiasm (the quality of being up).    The fear is developed because enthusiasm is somehow a threat to our being.    So you can develop upness,  by understanding the structure of the fear at its origin and then replacing it with a new pattern.    If the new pattern works, your being will prefer it, and then the protection can be dropped.

So, a few days ago I started dreaming about cats.   Cats are symbols of independence and detachment because they go their own way and really don’t care about you like a dog does.   Anyway in my dream there were these three shriveled up squashed kittens on the stairs leading to what was my house.    There were also a couple of cats taken away in a car.    So immediately when I woke up, I knew that the quality of independence, of detachment, was calling me and it was giving me some information on the origins of the problem.

Last night when I was out for a run on Bukit Kiara I realized that the problem I was having with detachment and independence was that I was blaming someone else for squashing the catness in me.     So I could identify the origin of when the cats got squashed, but I kept putting it on someone else.    As long as I was doing that which is a number of years now,  I couldn’t develop detachment in a good way, that is, I couldn’t develop a new internal pattern to replace the old one.

So one of the things that I knew from NLP was something called seeing an image internally in a dissociated manner.   You can either process in an associate manner which means seeing through your eyes while you are in your body which allows you to see and feel strongly at the same time, or you can process dissociated which is the ability to see yourself out there doing something.   This is the essence of detachment because whatever happens in a negative manner toward you is not felt.   It is extremely useful in dealing with situations where the environment is very critical, that is, where people use criticism as a tool to advance themselves.   Criticism is a tool that many people use to get to the top.   It is the tool of choice by political parties.     I tend to be on the end of a lot of criticism because I like to go for new and untried ideas that are mistake ridden in the first applications.   So people who use criticism to maintain conservative positions and move up the ladder like to go after me.

The problem I seem to have, according to the dream, is that I let them pounce on me, and get rid of my independence.   I don’t think I can control the criticism or the critical environment that well, but I can learn how to have the quality of detachment, the NLP process of dissociation, which is seeing myself being criticized but not allowing it to affect me in a negative way.   Right now, I going through the process.    It is very rewarding.  More in Day 2.

The other day I was doing a workshop for a group of people who are trying to improve themselves as teachers of Baha’i children’s classes.  They knew that I had a certain amount of competence in how to teach games so they invited me to share my expertise.

I almost always start all of my workshops or talks, regardless of the topic, with a simple, but extremely profound frame around which everything else seems to revolve.  The frame is that human beings are dual-natured in that we have an ego, which is our more selfish, materially oriented side, and we have a true self which is the positive one filled with all kinds of positive capacities and spiritual attributes that do a lot of positive in the world.

Anyway,  in doing the games workshop as in doing games that teach trust, cooperation, perception, determination, etc., I told the group that when children or youth or adults come to a game, they always bring two selves, the ego and the true self.   Any lesson plan or curriculum guide that you read in almost any book will give you the information about what part of the true self the game is attempting to develop.   However, no one really writes lesson plans for the ego unless you are a terrorist, a politician. or a CEO.

The ego is run on the engine of negative emotions.   Its over-arching feeling is fear and the greatest fear that people have is the fear of being excluded.  This is because the core value of all humanity is inclusion and participation.   When  I introduce an activity to a group of 5-6 year olds that requires attention and cooperation,  I almost always get one or two children who want to steal the attention off of the activity and onto themselves.  It is as if they say, “Look at me, I’m so funny.”   In the meantime, they have managed to make a train wreck out of an activity designed to push the true self to new levels.   So what are they responding to when they do this?

At some level they are feeling the fear that they could be excluded if they don’t do well so their coping mechanism is to get an overwhelming amount of inappropriate, undue attention so that they feel included for a short time.    It can be really annoying to be doing a lesson and have a 5 year take over with his own agenda, but as a teacher I have to say to myself that it is just his ego, he is feeling some fear, and that his true self really wants to to do the activity properly.   There are a number of options that I could with a child feeling this fear and then trying to steal attention, but the first and most important thing is to recognize that it is the ego that has entered the class when I was hoping to develop the true self’s ability to cooperate.

What is really interesting is that I may have another child in the same class who has the same fear, but instead of acting with attention seeking, acts with reluctance,  refusing to participate.  Both children have the same problem in that both bring the fear of exclusion because they may not achieve well in the class.    Now if I use the formula discipline approach to teaching, I am probably going to miss developing the true self, the virtue of cooperation, so the first thing I do is remind myself that the goal is cooperation.  I can easily slip into anger and impatience especially when the formula discipline doesn’t work.   I remind myself that I can keep a loving and connected relationship to the child even when they are messing up my perfect lesson plan and still deal with the ego.

If my class has a performance in front of large group where they have to sing and dance on the same day as my lesson,  I just know that they will be under so much stress to do well that any attempt on my part to teach a normal class on that day is going to be an exercise in frustration so I can just simply take the pressure off and do some low stress fun things that don’t require a lot of attention.   Their egos have already been put through the ringer so I don’t need to do more.

If I know the goal of the true self, such as developing courage through climbing, then I know also that there is going to be pressure from the ego in the form of fear.   My job as a teacher is to see how far I can push the fear so that more courage is developed.   At some point the fear is just going to be too much and then I know I can back off, but sometimes when the reluctance is more at the beginning, then I know I can really push the fear really hard.

I had a little boy come to my class this year who at home was waited on by more than one nanny, had never been outdoors to do a single bit of exercise, and was frightened to death of dropping six inches to the ground when handing from a bar.   I knew that his ego was trying to get me to free him from the possibility of suffering any type of pain whatsoever.  He wanted me to hold him so that he could drop the six inches with my help, so he just wouldn’t let go.  He cried and cried and held on for a long time.  Fortunately for the child’s ego, i was much more stubborn than him.   After awhile he dropped.  He was so mad at me, but the next day he came to class with a lot more energy and enthusiasm to try new things.    I knew that his true self wanted to be more courageous, but the way he was being raised at home was causing him to be extremely fearful.

So the key that I am trying communicate here is that the thing that is stopping the child from developing all of his capacities is the ego.   Sometimes the ego can just be ignored, sometimes it takes a slight intervention, and sometimes it requires being really strict.  But as soon as the true self is fully engaged in an environment where it is being challenged and learning, it just gets wildly enthusiastic in anticipation of the next activity.    And when you as the teacher name the true self as it is developing the capacity and are smiling and happy about its progress, then the children feel validated about what they are doing.   If you are trying to develop a strong kick in the swimming pool, the children are going to need a lot of determination.  They are going to get tired and want to quit because of the pain. So when they push through the pain and do a lot of work, they feel validated when you name it.   I can say to my class that I really pushed them  because I wanted to see them get strong, and I could see that they really are much stronger.

If you push children too far beyond their stretching point, then they are responding to your ego which is your fear that they won’t achieve.    When that happens, they won’t be able to find the drive of their own true self because they will only be interested in things like recognition and power which is really what the teacher is teaching.

So, in whatever activity you are doing  or guiding you can be aware that there are always two selves there, the ego and the true self.

Consider not the present condition, but rather foresee the future and the end. A seed in the beginning is very small, but in the end a great tree. One should not consider the seed, but the tree and its abundance of blossoms, leaves and fruits.

Baha’u’llah

“We are going to Vancouver.”

It is 5:00 PM the day before the last day of school, the day of anticipation of the long awaited and deserved rest period.  I have just arrived in my apartment and am about to lie down on the living room couch to get a few moments of rest.  The phone rings.  It is the executive secretary of the acting director.  She tells me that I have a meeting with the executive committee of the school council the next morning.  I fear the worst in the same manner that any of the 750 students do when an administrator suddenly pulls them out of the middle of a class.  It must be bad, but I quickly dismiss it with a host of other reasons for the meeting.  When I mention the call to my wife, she is certain that my fear will be realized. She calls our children in Vancouver to say that we may be spending the next year with them.  Then we sit down at the dining room table to consult about our options should the worst actually occur.  Should we stay or should we go?   That is the question.  We both agree to return to Vancouver if it happens. Our children are already leading cheers for the worst in hopes that our bad is their gain.   We also talk about going to the Pantanal, a huge watershed in Brazil, known for wildlife observing if the worst does not happen.   My wife begins to pack and make a list of all the household items we should sell.   She is certain.

Before the meeting I tell her that in an hour I will tell her whether we are going to the Pantanal or to Vancouver. I walk into the meeting and realize that the end has come. They tell me that I am disconnected from the school.  It is a strange word for me even in Portuguese to be disconnected as if I had ever been connected to them.   They give a few reasons. I ask them why I haven’t been informed previously about the perceived weaknesses.  They tell me that they have been giving me signs, but I haven’t been reading them correctly.  At that point I know that any chance for justice is impossible.  I arise from my chair, turn, and walk away.

From the meeting room to my wife’s classroom is about a 30-meter walk.  I move slowly and deliberately trying not be noticed.  The reality has not fully set in.   I approach her door, gaze at her, and say,  “We are going to Vancouver.”  The words now spoken make the decision of the Council suddenly feel real.  My voice cracks, tears begin to flow.

I am not expecting to make such a radical departure from Brazil, but it happens.  The executive committee changes my life in a flash.   It is traumatic.  Like most traumas the first moments of shock seem rather unreal as in the death of a relative or close friend.   It is a radical change, but not the one that I had planned for.   Being fired as abruptly as I was alters everything, or does it?

As in previous traumas when I am suddenly forced to make a change, I begin by searching through the inspirational writings of my faith, the Baha’i Faith.   In one of the mystical writings I find some solace.   It recounts a story of a lover who is ready to end his life because he has lost his lover.  He leaves his house in the middle of the night ready to be finished with his weariness, when, on a sudden, a watchman sees him and begins to chase after him.    The weary lover begins his frantic attempt to escape by running as fast as he can.  After awhile other watchmen enter the chase, and it seems as if his life will be ended not by his own hands, but by the guards.   He comes to a dead end where the only choice he has to survive is to scale a huge wall.  With all of the effort he can muster, he climbs the wall and leaps down to the other side.   There he finds himself in a beautiful garden and before him is his lover holding a ring.

The writing goes on to say that if he had known his end in the beginning, he would have paid the watchmen a big sum of money, but as he was blinded, he could only moan and complain.   He had been stuck in his grief, but the seeming injustice of the watchman became the cause of him finding his heart’s desire.

Since I am newly fired, my ears want no thought of paying riches to the executive committee for firing me as if it will be the cause of finding what I am truly looking for like in the story of weary lover, but this is the change I must make if I am to have a bright future.   How is it possible to think positively when I have just been thrown out?   I want revenge.   My temporary solace is that all of my staff are angry, crying, and shocked.   Their evaluation of me is 180 degrees opposite of the executive committee.   A new leaf is about to turn over in the book of my life, full of bright and new opportunities and wonder, but right now I am sitting in huge pool of grief and anger.

I read the story of the weary lover again and again hoping that the brightness of the future will burn away the pain of the current moment.   The pain lingers.   I am worn out.  I retreat to the living room couch and turn the TV on hoping it will dull the pain and let me forget for a little while.

How to get the bright lights of the future to turn back on again after having had such a dark thing happen is what ‘radical change’ is all about.   Being fired, losing a loved one, having a devastating illness, or having all of your money stolen are tough.  Imagine the difficulties of a child survivor of the great tsunami of 2004 who has lost his parents and all of his brothers and sisters.   How is his light ever going to be bright again?   Who wants to be hopeful about a future where the possibility of things being taken away is so great?

Lesson one in change is the belief that the future is bright; that there are unlimited possibilities ahead and that the greatest source of learning is the book of your own life, especially the dark chapters.  No one wants painful difficulties, but everyone has them.  It is part of being human.   It is where the great learning is, the rich reference libraries from which you can do great research.    A life without much negative experience has less potential for positive things to happen.

Lesson two is that lesson one about the future being bright is not a guarantee.   Everyone learns his way to a bright future.   There is no such a thing as a positive future that is just given to you.   World peace is something that humanity is going to have to learn.   It is not coming down from the clouds.   If it were going to come down from the clouds, it would have already come.   We need difficulties and challenges so that the future can keep growing in brightness.  But just having difficulties is no guarantee that you will deal with them in the right way.   Most people don’t.  Most people are overcome by them.

Lesson three about having a brighter future is that the brighter it is, the brighter it can become.  We used to think that a person’s potential was fixed.  Now we understand that every time you actualize a new capability, you open the door for more positive capabilities that make things better.   Therefore, change is done best, when it is done everyday.  Don’t try to change all at once nor expect that world peace is going to come in one moment.   The future is made better by making positive change habitual.   Monumental change is done by changing everyday.

If I want to have big change in your life, then what I can do is just change everyday.  I don’t have to have some great restructuring scheme or magical plan.  What I need is the ability to make key changes everyday and when I consistently do that, they become huge.  It seems to me that the great majority of us are trying to change by hitting the jackpot.  We are hoping that one day we will win the lottery so that our whole life will be better.  Executives often try to do a whole restructuring of companies or organizations to try to make their companies a lot of profit in a short period.   It is certain that winning a large sum of money will change some things from one day to the next and that a company may get some short term growth by restructuring, but if a couple was fighting a lot as a way of resolving problems before they won the money, the money isn’t going to stop the fighting nor will restructuring solve the reason a company had the problems in the first place.

I am not against restructuring as a concept even though, like most of the people who are reading this book, I have lived through some really horrendous restructurings.   I wish that restructuring or winning the jackpot worked, but the premise just doesn’t make common sense to me.  You can help the grass grow with fertilizer and sunshine and water, but you just can’t yank the plant out of the seed.   When you make a physical restructuring of a company or win a big sum of money, you still basically have the same people running and working the company who haven’t yet made very many personal changes.  The people who have won a large sum of money usually have the same bad strategies that kept them from having money before; so getting lots of it will just mean that they will use the same bad strategies with a lot more money.  If they were used to losing their money very quickly before, now they will just lose a lot of it very quickly.   Change, first and foremost, is about changing our own selves and the way we do things.   When we change ourselves, the restructurings and the jackpots follow more naturally and actually work.

What should make you suspicious about restructuring, if you are not so already, is the fact that the people at the top keep getting wealthier while the people at the bottom become fewer.   Now if a company would cut wages at the very top that would be radical change, but for the most part companies just replace one person with someone else who has been reared with basically the same strategies.  Real change rarely occurs because you can’t get top executives who think that what they are making in comparison to the bottom is ludicrous.   If you compare the growth of salary for someone, who is at the top, like a television anchorperson on major networks in the United States with the growth of salary of reporters or camera operators since the 1980s, you will see that the people at the top have grown in salary maybe 1000 times what they were getting in the 1970s.   The camera operators maybe have raised their salaries 1 time.   If that doesn’t make you suspicious about the people at the top and their motives, I don’t know what will.

To keep myself honest about change I like to do an honest activity to practice change work that is almost entirely dependent on me alone.  So what I like to do is train for long distance running races like marathons.   It is the greatest proof to me that change is best done by doing it continuously everyday.  No matter what supplement I take, or what training regimen I am in, or what shoes I wear, or what cool running clothes I have, I can not finish the marathon without a lot of training.    I start by running some short distances which has the effect of increasing my endurance.  As my endurance grows, my body will say, at some point, that it is time to increase the distance. Then I add some kilometers into the weekly plan.  Over the course of a few months my running potential rises substantially.  Whenever I try to do the “jackpot approach” or the “restructuring approach” which is trying to do a huge change in a very short period, I end up getting injured and delay the change by some months.   I actually adore the idea of the jackpot approach, because it would be really nice to accomplish the change overnight.   It not only doesn’t work, but you miss all of the beautiful runs in nature and great feelings attained from the training sessions.

The idea of restructuring is that you can gain a lot of physical reward, by making sudden shifts in the physical structure.   It is the same reason so many athletes want to take a drug to help their performance.  Restructuring is like trying to take drugs to improve your life.   At its best it gives short-term benefits.   At its worst it kills us.  It is a form of cheating; taking the easy way out and it just doesn’t work in the long term.  If we attack a country to have a change of government believing that the change of government is going to greatly benefit the country overnight, we are in for a rude awakening.   If the old government was characterized by cheating and corruption, restructuring is not going to change what is essentially a systemic process issue.

I wish I could just point a finger at the re-structurers in the world and tell them that they need to change, but the truth is, that as a member of the culture that created restructuring and lotteries, I am quite vulnerable to its way of thinking as well.   I just want change right now really fast with a huge share of the rewards so that my life will be better and happier.  I wish that I could say that I was completely free of restructuring thinking, but the truth is I am not and it would be difficult to find even one person who is not at least partially infected by its curse.

We are living in a time when two strategies of change, the jackpot-restructuring approach and the consistent process approach, are in a competitive struggle with each other.   I have participated in many sports in my life and was in highly competitive sports all through high school.   What we all worshipped was being number one, the winner, and we didn’t want to be second place, so when my high school football team came in second place in the state playoffs, it was extremely painful for me even though I can remember that it was one of the best games of my life and that we had had the best team in the history of the school.   I was in playing very hard and doing some things that I hadn’t been able to do before, but because we lost, I felt dejected and heart-broken. I wanted the game to be the jackpot, to have it give me a lot of rewards, but we lost the game and I missed the point.   Fortunately, in the 1970s a huge new movement of physical activity began in the world, a movement based upon the value of participation over the value winning or losing.   One of the manifestations of the movement was road running.   Whereas before there were only a few crazy cross country runners, suddenly large numbers of people began training to run huge distances like 5 kilometers.   With 1000 people in a race the chances of winning were very slim, but the joy of participating and winning a participation shirt drew large numbers into a field where before there had only been a handful.  Although we still had the super athletes, the participation movement gave rise to the idea that every ordinary person was capable of changing their lives for the better.   You could finish in the middle of the pack and feel fantastic because you made a huge effort and maybe set a personal best.

Although the 1980s saw the jackpot theory reappear more viciously with such ideas as trickle-down economics where the rich made a lot more money than ever before and where they were suddenly supposed to give it to everyone else, but to no one’s surprise kept it, participation as a dynamic since the late 90s has resurged as a powerful force.   People have taken to the streets in larger numbers than ever to improve themselves.

We have, on the one hand, a culture that rewards the best athletes, the top executives, the big stars with huge amounts of money.  A person playing baseball can earn $10,000 just for playing one game for a couple of hours.  A soccer player in Europe can earn $150,000 per week.  On the other hand we have millions of people participating in sports like never before without the hope of any financial reward.  They do it because they love it and the participation brings a lot of satisfaction about the growth they are experiencing.

I love to watch the Olympic games and I love to watch professional sports, and it is amazing for me to see excellence at such a high level.   But I also very much enjoy watching a local game of young children playing sports such as a karate tournament or a soccer game.   The difference in the joy I experience isn’t anywhere near to the difference in the remuneration for the participation.   A young child may go away with a ribbon or a trophy or a t-shirt and a professional athlete with several thousand dollars, but the excitement can be just as great watching an 8 year old in a karate tournament as watching a professional soccer player score a spectacular goal.   When it is your own 8 year old, the excitement is even greater.

A few people, on the one hand, have really hit the jackpot financially in the sports world or other financial worlds, and at the same time, millions and millions of people are hitting the participation jackpot as well, that is, they are reaping the rewards of change through constant participation.

We could argue for a long time about the justice of whether or not a player or company executive doing restructuring should earn so many 1000 times more financially than the ordinary participant.   It hardly seems fair especially since the amount of effort isn’t a 1000 times more, but the purpose in writing about change is not to focus on justice or the need for it.  The world is obviously in a state of extreme injustice.  We have all probably been treated unjustly and been hurt in horrific ways by it.  I don’t doubt that it will continue for some time to come.      I am not interested at this point in history in restructuring the way we pay people especially how much more we pay a few people.   What I am interested in is encouraging the movement that has already begun in the rest of us, the daily change movement.   At some point, I am sure that the injustice will right itself because the force of the daily change movement, which is based in participation, will be just too large for the jack potters to resist and it is just so much more rewarding than the physical rewards.

We now stand on the threshold of creating a new culture, one where change is a constant and daily and where we all take over the world and participate in it fully.

I made a discovery quite a number of years that has been quite revolutionary, but not many people have caught onto it.   That big discovery is that God wants us to have peace in the world.  He wants for us to be one human family living in unity and harmony.   That is the priority of God for us.    There is no other greater priority than peace.

And then I made another discovery after working with dreams, that they are a spiritual world, a spiritual phenomenon, not a physical one.    Spiritual means that they are not controlled by us.  Our brains don’t make up the dreams at night.   They are just too perfect to be our inventions.   Our minds are fraught with horrible thinking errors on a daily basis, but the dreams that we get come from the worlds of God and so they are perfect for us.

So do the math.   If dreams are truly a spiritual reality, they come from worlds of God, and He wants us above all else to have peace and oneness,  then all of our dreams are going to lead us to that purpose.  I have heard thousands of dreams and I have yet to hear one where the solution didn’t lead the person more toward creating a better, more peaceful world.

I think what is maybe really extremely difficult for people who have grown up in the western scientific materialistic world is to believe that a force outside of one’s own control could possible know what is best for us.   A lot of people have been so hurt by religion’s superstitious and controlling elements that they just want to turn away from the idea that a higher being could be guiding us in an amazing ways.   We are culturally fearful of being controlled and manipulated by religious authority figures who would have us go to hell unless we believe like them.    The truth is God always has your back and is gently trying to guide you to greater truths about yourself.

When you pay attention to your dreams and then change them for the better, then the world becomes more peaceful.  Give it a try.    Anyway, if you have a dream that you don’t think is about peace, write me.    You will change your mind.

Try reading the dream about Godzilla in the free read part of the blog.

Last week as I am reluctantly going to my weekly meeting with my  supervisor I find myself wrapped in yet another distressing hour with someone who does not know where I want to go.   It is such a huge disaster and to make things worse the next day I find a letter on my desk calling me insubordinate.    What can I do?  Will this never end?  Aarggg.

It was Thursday morning when I got the letter, but I was only 40+ hours away from planning a huge running event with over 600 runners.   I had to try to put the distress aside.

A light bulb went on somewhere after the huge racing event and the meeting on encouragement as reported earlier.   I change my strategy.   Instead of trying to protect my program from my boss which seemed to be ending in catastrophe I decided that she could be a part of it.   Since this person is the head of school, I made a list of all the people who had helped in my event along with what they had done.   Then I asked her if she would write a thank you note to each person which was about 25.    To my wonderful surprise she had written all the notes by Monday a.m. and delivered them.     So then I asked her to do a few more things for me and she did them.   Could this really be happening?

Just figured out that maybe her life issue is about being left out.  All I need to do is include.  Well my weekly meeting comes up tomorrow.   Let’s see, How can I include her? Ideas anyone?

Will, our youngest grandson, just turned one last week and so I thought I would honour him on his birthday.

Will already has a six pack at one year.  I guess Shane has found a way to train the core strength early.

Will is ready to go for it under any circumstances.  He just seems to really love action.

Like I said, Will is ready for any kind of action at any time.

Will loves his cousin, Fiona.   I think Will loves everyone.   I just feel better when I am around Will.

Will is really intelligent.  Here he is trying to teach me some new stuff on the computer.   Will I am very happy that you have come into our lives from the Invisible World.   You have made such a big impact and you are only one.  I look forward to lots of years of great fun and adventures together.

Happy Birthday.

Not long ago at the Baha’i 19 Day Feast in my children’s home, my daughter asked me to tell a story.    So I went to one of the children’s books and found an interesting story about Abdu’l Baha, the son of Baha’u’llah.     He spent most of his life in exile and some of the time in prison or in great restrictions on travel and movement.      When He arrived in one prison, the guards put shackles on him,  an act that you would think would cause Him to react in anger and dismay (like the way Hollywood portrays Jesus when he is persecuted),  but He did the unexpected and acted in the opposite way.    Abdu’l Baha began to laugh and joke and it wasn’t long after that that the guards became really great friends with him.

This is Isabela, my granddaughter, helping with telling the story.

I love this story for a lot of reasons, but the big one for me is that it gives me a model of how to act in today’s world.  My ego’s reaction to being mistreated is to feel really incensed by the injustice and the pattern that I want to act out is to fight.    Abdu’l Baha didn’t act that way.  He didn’t allow the conditions around him to dictate his emotional response.  Instead He acted in the opposite manner.  He brought joy and laughter, and then the people that were His persecutors, the prison guards, changed and became His best friends.

I am constantly tested by this reality.   I feel shackled by the way others act and then I feel angry and want to fight.  But Abdu’l Baha’s teaching is that the shackles don’t cause dismay,  our reaction to the shackles is what brings it on.   He used the shackles as a way to make friends.    So when I am feeling shackled by a rule or policy or injustice,  I can think of it as an opportunity rather than a limitation.   I can laugh instead of dismay.

I have an extraordinary family I am happy to say.    This year, when I was visiting with my daughters and their families, they introduced me to the work of Byron Katie.   So, early on in the visit with them I asked them to help me work through some long standing issues.     One of the nice concepts I learned about was about minding my own business, not in a negative attitudinal way, but realizing that when someone else has a problem, it is their issue and not mine.      You may think that minding your own business is an easy process,   but when a problem belongs to someone else to solve in their lives for their own growth, it is so tempting to want to intervene and make them change.

This is one of the great mysteries of life, because if God created us in His own image,  it means that we have a will, that when used properly can create some pretty phenomenal things.    The problem about will is that it is a key ingredient to all change.   You can’t make other people change because all change requires an act of will.  This is how God created us.     Maybe this is one of the reasons that so many people have turned away from spiritual things and are so easily seduced by materialism.    It is much more tempting to try to change everyone else and forget about our own issues.

My issue with letting others have their own issues has always seemed to center itself on the leadership.  I think that if the leadership would change, then everything would change for the better.   So when I started doing The Work,  I realized that the concept of everything will change if the leadership changes for the positive is just not true.

What I discovered in doing my NLP work on the concept was that when I try to make the leader’s issues with change, my issue, i.e., taking their issue on as if it were my own and trying to solve it so that they would change and then everything would get better,  I found that their issues take up a lot of space in my life.      This is, no doubt, why my mind has persisted with the belief for so long.    In my mind,  the leader’s bad qualities or ego just take up a huge amount of space.   It is like they have moved into my house and given me a small corner in the garage to live.

BUT I HAVE DONE THIS TO MY SELF.  They haven’t done it to me.

Whatever their problem is takes an act of will on their part,  but as long as I am taking it on for them, it seems to transfer the problem from themselves to my Self.   Their problem takes over my mind so I really feel as if I am squeezed out of my space.    I want them to change because I believe that if they change, then they will get out of my space and let me be free to have my own space.     It always ends up as a disaster, but the big disaster is that they have taken over my house (my self).

When I analyze how much time and space they actually take up in my life in the real world, it is actually extremely small,  but because I have taken on their issues, my mind and even my body is swollen in size, that is, I have made them a lot bigger in my life than they are and that wastes a huge amount of energy for me.

So here I am making their egos swell up inside of me and then that makes me want to try to change them.  When I try to change them,  they just naturally put up a lot of resistance because their egos are so protective by nature.   So then the desire to change them turns into a fight and then the fight causes negative consequences to myself and others.   They usually end up winning the fight because they have more authority and have no problem abusing power.     But all I really ever had to do was to realize that their change was their business.

If I just let them have their issues,   then the space in my mind that was swollen up and taken over by them can be taken up with my own true self and what it desires to do.     I can have a bigger space for my own true self and do a lot more of what it wants to do.    One of the first things that opens up to me as I am doing this work is that the space in life that is taken up with work that earns money can just be a very small one.   It doesn’t have to be that big.  I can do a lot of other things.

Hmmmm.  Think I will go out for a run.

What to do.

My daughters have recently introduced me to a book called “Holding On To Your Kids” which is about how to maintain a close relationship with your children as they make their way through life.   The author, Dr. Gordon Neufeld, has described the process as attachment parenting.     So as I am thinking about the process of attachment parenting and attachment thinking,  the question that comes into my mind about being close to someone is this.   If I am no longer close to a colleague or a family member or neighbor, then who moved?     Did they move away from me or did I move away from them?     Well I notice that when I ask the question,  I can’t help but feeling the emotion of hurt at some place in the relationship.      So I think, well at some point in the that relationship,  the other person hurt me and then I moved away.

What seems to be even worse for me is that when I feel hurt from one person like a colleague, then I have this huge tendency to not only move away from that person, but also to generalize the behavior so that I start moving away from everyone    I have moved away and now I can blame someone else so that I am protected.     In the old days before email, cell phones, and instant worldwide communication,  it could take several weeks for a letter to reach someone else around the world which insured that we could hold onto our hurts forever.     Nowadays a person in Mumbai knows what their friends in Paris have for breakfast while they are eating it so it seems to me that if I want to keep being close to someone, what I need to do is get out of the blame frame, decide that I am the one who has moved, get over the hurt, and into closeness.

I start moving away from others when I expect them to act in a certain way and then they do the opposite.  When I expect someone to be supportive and gentle and helpful,  they might be critical,  harsh, and self-serving.   So in my mind I have an imaginary picture of them being supportive, but when I interact with them in reality I get judgment or criticism or something else and then I feel hurt, and then I move away and start generalizing the protection to others.    The movement away begins with the imaginary expectation and then I feel hurt.

In Dr. Neufeld’s book, he describes how hurt parents feel when their children feel embarrassed about being around them in front of their peers.  So I thought that if a child feels embarrassed and I feel hurt because of it,  then it is just going to compound the situation.   I am the one moving away by being hurt.    So how do I get over the hurt and start moving toward others instead of away from them?    This is the big question.

All of my hurt seems to be centered around expectation of someone acting in a certain way toward me.   When I have no expectation because I don’t need them to act in a certain way toward me, then I am free to be close to them.  How much I would love to keep them responsible for my pain so I can stay distant?  Closeness for me is really about removing expectation and being in relationship with where the person really is rather than in my imagined expectations of something they will give me.   Yikes!!!!!!!!

I think I need their support.   As Byron Katie would ask in The Work, “Is this true? ”       Do I need their support or even my own support?   Well I realize that with my students what I do best is to understand who they are at a particular age,  what are their current issues and challenges,  and then just plan for them and act on the plans.   When I do those simple steps of analyzing who they are and where they are currently in their lives,  the classes are like magic.   It is only when I get needy for some support, that things go haywire.

The woman who cleans our apartment every week did an extraordinary act of support today.   While she was cleaning she received a call from one of her Filipino friends to come quickly to the police station to help her out.  So she left the cleaning and quickly made her way there.   It seems that her friend was caught by the police without a driver’s license and also being illegal in the country.     There are a lot of people like this in Malaysia because it is relatively wealthy in comparison to other SE Asian countries.    So our maid went there and spoke to the police for about 30 minutes and then they settled on a fee so that her friend would not be sent back to her country.     It is easy enough to be judgmental about the fact that she was illegal and that the police were also acting illegally, but then we might miss the extraordinary act of support from our maid.

What I found in the last decade about a great many leaders in the world in corporations and in government is that they are often chosen because they have the ability to sacrifice their friends and relatives.    They can give up their families and fire their friends and this makes them fit to be a leader.  It is even seen as a virtue,  but it seems to me that when you sacrifice for your friends and family, then you are being your true self.

I have seen a lot of leadership make their up and coming junior administrators literally give up their families to the company so that the company can achieve more profits, but I think that most of us are yearning for leaders that are more like our maid, that is, when our friends and family are in trouble, that we support them, find out what they need, and give them some assistance.

What we have come to see as virtue such as the ambition of leadership is actually a quality of the ego, not the true self.   The quality of the true self is the ability to stand up for principles,  to support and encourage your friends and family, and to find out how you can be of service to others.   This is true leadership.

Have we ever been more backwards in human history?  Maybe, but probably not on such a grand scale.  How many times have you said well I really like the people in the company I work for, but the leaders are way out to lunch or this would be a great country if it had some decent leaders?     Our world has come to be led by egos, not by people acting from their true selves.

So what does it take to have a world with the true self at the helm?    Today I saw it in my maid.  I vote for her.

Recently my son-in-law sent me this dream about from his oldest son, Olee who is now 3 and 1/2 years old so I am sharing it because it is what we can all learn from Diego, who is the same age as Olee but has a very special gift.

I dreamed the roof on the dying house was on fire.

I asked: what’s a dying house?

It’s a special place where where people go to die. And I wanted to be a fireman like Diego, so I could put out the fire on the roof.

A house in a dream is about the self and a roof is the top of the house so it signifies the head or the mind usually.   When a roof is on fire, it a symbol for  the mind is overheated, which means that it is working too hard.   Most schools make the mistake of doing things exactly the opposite of what comes natural to children which is to first act in one’s body kinesthetically and with tactile experiences and then to think and discuss from your head.     If you have a child, make the numbers with cookie dough and then eat them,  their love for math will multiply immensely, but our tendency is to show them the number, make them repeat it, and then write it, and if the teacher is creative, then to make cookies as a culminating experience.    But this cooks the brains instead of the cookies.

The place where children to go to die is school because instead of school being a place that starts in action and then goes to the mind, it starts in the mind and then occasionally goes to the body.  If you know Diego, you know that he starts in his body and loves the sand and dirt.  If you go to play with Diego in the dirt, you are not only his lifelong friend, but you just may never get out of the dirt because his learning all starts from a tactile experience.

In Olee’s dream he wants to be like a fireman like Diego because Diego’s learning style is exactly the balance people need in order to keep their minds cool and functioning.   An overheated mind tenses the body and then tires people out, and Diego’s learning style puts out the fire.    Most people look at something like physical education as a minor subject rather than a core subject because they value the mind over the body,   but we know from research that experience is the best and first teacher, while book learning is second hand.     It is so obvious.

Are you going to learn more about Brazil by reading about it in a book or by going there and living in the culture?   This does not mean that secondhand knowledge is bad or should be avoided because it is a huge source of learning,  but the mind loves experience as a first teacher and books as secondary and not the other way around.