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Guilt, Shame

9/24/2017

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If you suffer or have suffered from either guilt or shame, read my recent post, “Healing the Inner Child - Healing Your Wounded Heart.”  And if you don’t think you feel or have felt guilt or shame, as was the case with me, believe me you have; read the post as well.

Guilt and shame are two of most powerful and destructive emotions that we have.  They are the root cause of much suffering,  

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And yet of all the emotions, they are the most likely to be the subject of denial because the actions or thoughts that stimulated those emotions within us are ones we would just as soon not recall because they raise these emotions.  And so we do not work with our guilt and shame; these emotions are not resolved. And we continue to suffer.


I am not writing this post to explain or discuss guilt and shame.  There is not really much to say.  They are formed by our conditioning either at the hands of our family or the broader culture.   These emotions are thrust upon us.  They are a product of our mind.

What makes it even more perverse is that not only is the reaction of guilt and shame thrust upon us, but the actions the bring up guilt and shame are themselves the product of our conditioning.  Truly a double whammy.

As regards criminal guilt, really one should speak in terms of criminal responsibility, not guilt.  Because to be guilty you have to choose to do something of your own free will.   But no one chooses to be bad or evil; they are programmed that way by their life experiences.  The area of free will within which we operate is very small, contrary to the assumptions of our moral and legal systems.

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Almost every, if not every, child experiences guilt or shame.  And that emotion remains part of the inner child and so impacts how the adult that has grown out of the child reacts to experiences in the present.  Read the post.
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Survival - The Force That Controls Our Life

9/10/2017

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In the neighborhood where I live, there are lots of children, so I have the opportunity of watching them at play and seeing them with their parents.  The other day, it struck me that children are always trying to prove themselves … prove they can do something, prove that they know something.  Whether they’re with peers or parents.

And I sensed this is not just culture-fostered competition or attempting to please parents.  Something far more elemental is going on … their actions are a function of the primal force of survival.  Children know instinctively that their survival depends upon their gaining certain skills and bettering their peers.   This is not learned.

I remembered then a post I wrote a few years ago, “It’s All About Survival - Or Is It?”  That post posited that the reason why feelings of insecurity have such power over us is that it connects with the primal force of survival.  If we are insecure, we fear we will not survive.  Which is also why fear is such a powerful force.  Everything we fear ultimately threatens our need to survive in a broad sense.

Even though our insecurity or fear does not usually involve a life or death situation, it still evokes this primal force.  As I have written previously, our ego-mind has taken the biological/evolutionary forces that are an inherent part of us and has morphed those forces into a perverse mental straightjacket that threatens us rather than protects us.

There is only one antidote to this exaggerated survival instinct … to know that your true self is your heart, your true Buddha nature, and to have faith that regardless what life throws your way all will be well because you will always return home to your unborn Buddha mind and so be at peace and happy.

This even applies, or perhaps I should say “especially” applies, to our eventual death.  If there is one thing certain, it is that we will all die.  The ultimate immovable barrier faced by the survival force.

Sogyal Rinpoche said in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying that we don’t know how to live because we don’t know how to die.  Because we fear death, because we fear our impermanence, our ultimate inability to survive, we cannot live in peace and happiness because our every action and thought is impacted by this fear.

The Buddha taught the truth of the impermanence of all things, that all things that rise eventually fall.  Death is a natural part of life.  Regardless that we have been taught to fear death, death is not to be feared because it is a natural part of life.  And you will be prepared for death if, beyond accepting its inevitability, you know that you have lived your life well … you have brought others joy, you have made a difference in other people’s life.  And so even when death approaches, you will return home to your true Buddha nature, have compassion for yourself, and be at peace and happy.

The overwhelming majority of mankind has no knowledge of or even exposure to the lessons of spirituality, as opposed to religion, and so is hopelessly lost in their samsara.  Even for those who are walking the path, whether of Buddhism or the various mystical traditions, the hold of our ego-mind on us is very strong; breaking free of its control requires great discipline, perseverance, and faith.

But the lesson of Buddhism is that it is possible to free oneself of the control of the ego-mind, to be free of the quest for survival, to be free of suffering.  It’s within one’s power; it is within one’s choice.  The choice is not an easy one, but it is there, waiting for us.
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Healing Your Inner Child - Healing Your Wounded Heart

9/4/2017

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We have learned that when we are young, we are wounded by life experiences.  Either we have been hurt in some way or we have been made to feel guilt or shame.  And in response our ego-mind develops a variety of emotions (including denial), judgments, cravings, and attachments to “protect” us.  Which instead just cause us endless frustration and suffering.

Over the years, those feelings have remained bottled up within us, festering, because as a child we had no one to talk to about these feelings.  It's a rare parent who says to their child, “I want you to talk to me about anything that upsets you. It doesn’t matter what it is. I am here for you. I love you. I will help you.” When parents do ask what's wrong, it's often with an inquisitional tone, not a caring one.  And so the child feels he or she cannot tell their parents what they feel because they think the parent will be hurt, disappointed, or disgusted.

To end our suffering, we learn the ways to connect to our true self, our heart, and to disown our ego-mind and its feelings and perceptions as not being our true self.  And we learn a variety of techniques to use to free ourselves from the control of our ego-mind.  And so if we are disciplined we make progress on the path and experience more peace and happiness, less suffering.  

But as I've previously related, despite this work and experiencing peace on a consistent basis, I have not experienced happiness on a consistent basis.  Often I experience a grayness, a blahness, which I effectively counter by conjuring up the image of the smiling toddler that I see as my true Buddha self. But I sensed that all is still not quite right.


Recently I learned of a technique I had never heard of before … healing your inner child. From listening to others and from my own initial experience, I believe this practice is key to removing the last barrier to experiencing both inner peace and happiness.

Why is this necessary after all the other things you’ve been taught to do to free yourself from the control of your ego mind? Because you were wounded as a child, or as an adolescent. The work you have done so far is about how you as an adult relate to yourself and the world around you.

That is huge. But it doesn’t heal your inner child, heal your wounded heart, and thus you still suffer … sometimes in a quiet way as I have or it can be in a very powerful way; it depends on how bad the wound was.


The process starts with sitting with your inner child and calling on the spiritual mother and father to come and nurture the child and give it the love and understanding that was missing in his childhood.  Feel the love and warmth radiating from them to your inner child.  And feel your inner child respond to the love and warmth.

This part of the process is very important.  Some of us grew up in very dysfunctional homes where we experienced no love or understanding.  Even when there seemed to be an expression of love, it often really wasn’t.  But even for those of us, and I would include myself, who grew up in generally very loving homes, our parents were not there for us in the way that we needed because our needs were greater than really any parent can provide.

Parents after all have their own problems and lives to deal with, which makes it impossible for them to be there for their child 100%.  They have no intent to neglect or harm, but they are a product of and programmed by their life experiences just like everyone else.   But each of us deserves total love, unconditional love, and so we now call on our spiritual parents to fill that void.

Next, ask your inner child what is wrong, what he's feeling.  And let him or her speak whatever he comes up with; do not censor it.  It will be the truth, regardless how painful. 


When the child speaks, say that it’s ok to feel what he’s feeling; it’s natural, understandable.   If he feels guilt or shame ... whether it's because of something he's done, what's been done to him, or his feeling complicit because he did not fight against it or tell his parents ... tell him that he's done nothing wrong. Guilt and shame have been thrust on him by our culture,

Tell him that if he was acted upon it was all about them and not him. He was a victim. Nor should he now question why he didn’t protect himself, why he didn’t run away, why he didn’t speak up. He was a child who wanted to be loved and was in denial about the nature of what was happening to him. His response was natural. A child reacts to events very differently than an adult would because children have a very narrow frame of reference; they're not aware of options. Being hard on yourself is an ego-mind game. Your heart has nothing but compassion for you.

In these healing exercises, the critical point is that you open your heart to embrace your inner child and provide him/her with unconditional love. Give yourself a hug. This is what was missing from your life as a child. And this can only come from your heart. Your ego-mind will seek justice, revenge, which may be seductive, but no healing will come from these emotions or actions taken in response to these emotions.

If he feels guilt or shame because of something he did, again tell him that he has nothing to feel guilty or shameful about; that what he did was a child’s natural reaction to events.
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Tell him or her that you are there for him, always.  He is not alone.  That you love him unconditionally.  And that regardless what happened in the past, all will be well now because he is in a safe place surrounded by a loving you and by loving spiritual parents.  This may not sound like much, but it’s amazing the healing power of knowing that you are loved unconditionally and that someone will always be there for you.

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What you hear may surprise you; it may scare you.  But what you will hear is the truth. It was something which needed to come out, be spoken, in order for the healing process to take place.
​

One of the common experiences of children is that they are not treated as people; they are not respected as human beings.  Thus parents rarely ask children what they are thinking; what is wrong.  And when they do, children often won’t speak the truth; they are desperate for the love of their parenets and won’t risk offending the parent.  Regardless how the child responds, parents typically don’t have the spiritual background to answer in a truly helpful way, and instead provide the tried and true responses that come from their own upbringing and our culture.

But it is not just your inner child that needs healing.  When you grew up and passed through adolescence to young adulthood, you continued to be consumed with the negative images of yourself, the false core beliefs, that were impressed upon you as a child.  And that young person suffered mightily.  Go through the same process with him or her and the healing process will begin.

I have now gone through this exercise myself and sat with both my inner child and my inner young man.  This is just the start of the process, but already it feels transformative.  Let me share my experience with you to give you a better understanding of the dynamic.

After calling down my spiritual mother and father and their expressing their unconditional love and understanding, my inner child first told me that he didn’t feel loved; he felt there was something wrong with him.  Later he went deeper and said he felt insecure. 

I hugged him and said it was ok to feel those things, natural, understandable given what he experienced. But there is nothing wrong with him; he is a normal human, with strengths and weaknesses and deep within his true self is his Buddha nature.  And everyone feels insecure because of their life experiences.  But I told him he was in a safe place now where he is loved unconditionally.


These feelings were not a surprise to me and I have processed them previously, as I’ve written, using various techniques after understanding the truth that my true self was my heart, not my ego-mind.  But clearly none of this impacted my inner child who was still hurting, and so I still hurt.  And so this phase of the healing process has now begun.

But when I sat with my inner young man (a teenager and college student), he spoke much to my surprise of the shame he felt regarding his same-sex sexual feelings and the secretive way he explored them in his mind.  I say “surprised” because when I finally came out, I felt no shame, felt no internalized homophobia because I was raised in home where that was not present, where I knew my parents had had homosexual friends; I knew they would be accepting, and were.

Obviously when I was younger and had not come to terms with this, I felt very different.  And this had affected me greatly.  And so again, I hugged him and said that there was no reason to feel shameful about those sexual feelings.  That was just the message from our culture.  But it’s all natural.  And that I love him unconditionally and was there for him.

Really what I was doing in both cases was being there for myself in a way I had never been before.   

The next few times I sat with my inner child, although I wasn't expecting anything knew (I had after all engaged in much introspection about my childhood), I was surprised by his telling me about the guilt and shame he felt about various things.  Sometimes because of his complicity in not telling his parents about what happened.  

I had never been aware of myself having feelings of guilt or shame.  I was not brought up with those feelings. I was aware of the experiences/situations he mentioned ... for example sometimes I was aware I was in taboo situations ... but I was not aware of having those negative feelings.  They were suppressed and I was in denial.  And so again I said to him that while it was natural for him to feel guilt and shame given the way children are conditioned, there was no reason for him to feel guilt or shame.  He had done nothing wrong.  I told him I loved him unconditionally and gave him a hug; and I encouraged him to hug himself.  Also I encouraged him to open his heart and embrace his feelings of guilt and shame so that the internal struggle ceases.

It is too soon for me to feel the full benefits of this practice, but I sense that it will be transformative because I have opened myself up to being aware of feelings deep inside me.  And that will change both the way I relate to myself and to those around me.

For example, when I meditated the morning after my initial inner child encounter,
when I was at that part of my morning affirmations/mantras where I’m grateful for the love I’ve received in the past, including from my mother and father, and picture them and hear their voice, the experience went beyond mouthing the words, reminding myself.  I felt love energy flowing from both of them.

The experience really struck me and I wondered, why now.  And I realized that by saying it was ok for me to feel as I felt, I was saying to everyone, including my parents, that it was ok to feel as they felt when they were growing up and that I therefore had compassion for the persons they had become.  I always knew my mother loved me and I knew later in life that my father had always loved me.  But I never felt this particular energy flowing to me from them.  I was now seeing them as they were, not as I wanted them to be and disappointed.

The challenges we face walking the path are many and daily.  We are complex people with many parts of our ego-mind and memory impacting how we feel and the actions we take.  I have now learned of one more aspect of myself which needs tending so that I can move further on the path of experiencing peace and happiness and freeing myself from suffering.  I am very grateful.
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    Sex - Misused And Abused - A Different Perspective
    Shall We Dance? - An Invitation To The Dance Of Death
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    Starving The Ego
    Step #10: Continued To Be Mindful Of The Arising Of Cravings And Desires And When They Arose Did Not Attach To Them And Allowed Them To Subside.
    Step #11: Sought Through Meditation To Constantly Improve Our Conscious Contact With Our True Buddha Nature
    Step #1: Admitted Our Cravings Cause Us Suffering And That We Are Powerless Over Them
    Step #2: Came To Believe That Our True Buddha Nature Could Restore Us To Peace And Created A Platform Of Serenity
    Step #3: Committed Ourselves To The Path By Practicing The Five Precepts And The Six Paramitas
    Step #4 Came To Believe That All Our Perceptions Are Learned - That They Are Just A Product Of Our Ego-mind - And That Our Ego-mind Is Not Our True Self - Instead We Knew That Our True Self Is Our Heart.
    Step #5: Were Ready And Willing And Made A Decision To Surrender Our Ego And Turn Our Will And Our Lives Over To The Care Of Our True Buddha Nature Opening Our Heart To Embrace All Aspects Of Our Being.
    Step #6: Came To Believe That We Have Everything We Need Within Ourselves To Be At Peace And Happy
    Step #7: Came To Be Free Of Our Cravings
    Step #8: Were Entirely Ready To Love Ourselves Unconditionally And Have Compassion For Ourselves And To Accept Ourselves And The World Around Us As Being The Way They Are Because It's Just The Way It Is.
    Step #9: Made A List Of Persons We Had Harmed And Made Amends To Them
    Stopping Self-Sabotage
    Strength Not Courage
    Suffering Is Universal - But Why?
    Survival - The Force That Controls Our Life
    Taking Pleasure In Each Passing Moment
    Taking Refuge In Yourself
    Taking Responsibility Is Not Blame
    Teaching Only Points The Way
    Test The Wisdom Of What You’re Doing Or Thinking Of Doing
    The 3-legged Stool Of Spirituality
    The Art Of Self-Nurturing
    The Challenge Of Staying Aware
    The Coexistence Of Ego And Buddha Nature
    The Devil Is Alive And Well
    The Distinction Between Pain And Suffering
    The Divine And Man
    The Ego As Saboteur
    The Emptiness Of Intrinsic Existence And Its Relevance To Global Warming
    The Felt Need For Acknowledgment
    The Five Precepts
    The Four Bodhisattva Vows
    The Fourfold Path To Freedom
    The Four Noble Truths
    The Freedom Of Focusing On Someone Or Something Outside Yourself
    The Heart/Mind Divide
    The Heart’s Embrace - More On Freeing Ourselves
    The Heart's Embrace - Updated
    The Hurt Of Rejection - Its Enduring Impact
    The Illusion Of Control
    The Imperative Of Self-Preservation
    The Lessons Of Siddhartha
    The Light Within You
    The Limits Of Rational Thought
    The Meaning And Power Of Selflessness
    The Middle Way - A Way Back From The Breach
    The Mind And The Wounded Inner Child
    The Mind And Your Inner Child - II
    The Mind Is Sneaky - Surrender It
    The Mind's Deep State
    The Mind - Suffering Connection
    The Miracle That Is You
    The Misleading Teaching Of No Self
    The Missing Noble Truth
    The Myanmar Situation
    The Mystery Of The Ego - An Answer
    The New Me - I Not I
    The Noble Eightfold Path
    The Original Trauma - Birth
    The Parable Of The Raft
    The Path As Tightrope
    The Path From Peace To Joy
    The Path Is Never-Ending
    The Power Of Affirmations - Use Carefully
    The Power Of Giving Voice To Thoughts
    The Present Beyond Us
    The Purpose Of Life
    The Purpose Of Meditation
    The Push/Pull Of Ego-Mind
    The Question Is Not Whether The Glass Is Half Empty Or Half Full
    There Are No Bad Persons
    There Is Nothing Wrong With You
    The Remnants Of The Ego
    The Serenity Prayer
    The Soul’s Yearning And How Best To Fulfill It
    The Stages Of Acceptance
    The Stages Of Man’s Spirit
    The Subconscious
    The Three Stages Of Embrace
    The Truth – Seeing It And Speaking It
    The Unaware Consumer
    The Wisdom Of Chickens
    The Wisdom Of Now
    This Is Not Me This Is Not My Self
    Thought Objects
    To Free Yourself From Cravings You Must Free Yourself Of Fear
    To Love Unconditionally = Loving-Kindness
    Tonglen - How To Approach Its Practice
    To Observe Free Of Mind - To Experience Joy
    To See Opportunity You Must Be Free Of Fear
    To Thine Own Self Be True
    Trauma
    Trauma Begets Trauma
    Trauma Denied No Longer
    Trauma - Healing It Is Critical
    Trauma - It’s Release
    Turning Your Will Over To Your True Buddha Nature
    Waking Up
    Walking Away From Modernity
    Walking On The Beach
    Walking The Path - It’s A Lot Of Work But It’s Well Worth It
    Wealth Poverty And Buddhism
    We Are All One
    We Are Not Meant To Suffer
    We Have Everything We Need To Be At Peace And Happy Inside Ourselves
    We Have Lost Our Sense Of Place
    We Make Our Own Mental Environment
    We Never Stop Healing
    What Activates The Ego-Mind?
    What Are We Celebrating On July 4th?
    What Blocks Me From Being Truly Present And Radiating My Inner Energy 24/7?
    What If The Present Is Bad?
    What Is Joy? What Is Happiness?
    What Is Life Without Emotion?
    What Is Most Important To You?
    What Is Your Task In Life?
    What Lies Behind Our Good Deeds?
    What Nourishes My Soul?
    What Price Peace And Happiness?
    What's In A Name?
    What's Real And What’s Not Real?
    What’s The Real Challenge - Life Or The Ego?
    What To Do When You Lose Faith?
    What Use Fame Power Fortune?
    What You Can’t Will And What You Can
    When A Heart’s Desire Is Commandeered By The Ego
    When Joy Is Not Joy
    When Love Is Not Love ...
    When Nothing Offends
    When Really Bad Things Happen
    When Smiling Toddlers Cry
    When The Mind Intervenes
    Who Am I?
    Who Are You?
    Who/What Is Your True Self?
    Why Diets Fail - A Buddhist Perspective
    Why Do We Crave?
    Why Is Being Grateful Such A Challenge?
    Why Is It So Hard To Be Free Of Your Ego?
    Why Is Mankind Trapped In A Box?
    Why Point The Compass Towards Tomorrow?
    Why We Take Offense
    Wisdom - What Is It?
    Wounded Our Ego-Mind Becomes The Devil
    Yes Virginia There Is A True Buddha Nature
    Yet Another Past Attachment
    You Are Not Alone
    You As Observer
    You Can Be In Control
    You Don't Need To Be Liked
    Your True Self And The Irrelevance Of The Min

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