What if being fat, or a loser, hapless, never do well is mental illness? What if mental illness is lying?
I read this article on Medium this morning. The dude, Tim Denning recovered from anxiety of decades, debilitating anxiety by testing himself in situations where he had been anxious, and proved to himself that he wasn’t anxious as a law, as a rule, sometimes he wasn’t.
So he asked himself two questions: What if mental illness is lying? What if mental illness is simply conditioned thinking?
These two questions changed his reality.
Yesterday I wrote about learned helplessness… So, for example, if you have learned helplessness… and you know it is learned because maybe you can remember when you weren’t helpless, or stupid, or whatever your behavior says about you now.
So you can call what you have ‘mental illness’ and you would not be off… it is mental and it is illness… as in ‘not normal’, i.e. morbid. And you ask the same questions Tim asked…
The other way to go is to be precise, and call what you have astutely what you have… fearful, avoiding, belligerent, may way or the highway, ‘I don’t know how’, or whatever the goddamn thing you say to keep yourself in morbidity.
Like this: What is fearfulness is lying? What if fearfulness is simply conditioned thinking?
You can even be so precise as to label what you have even more precisely: wanting to be loved, wanting to be important, wanting to keep up appearances, faking it till I make it, wanting attention, wanting to look successful, avoiding pain, avoiding challenges, etc. etc. etc.
The job is to be arrested… slowed down… go from automatic to conscious.
I have a student whose soul correction is wanty… as in ‘I want it!’ add nagging inner voice.
But whenever she wants it and goes for it, she is rebuked, invokes anger, hate, and the two couples in her mind into a real mental illness: ‘I can get what I want’ plus shame. Guilt. Self-hatred.
The mind can’t tell the difference, it is a machine… mental illness.
Getting what you want doesn’t have to be sinful… you just need to know exactly what you want… and get present.
Another article I read today, and the two articles have an interesting synergistic connection, is about grazing, boredom eating, emotional eating.
I do that.
The Japanese call that ‘lonely mouth’… and don’t condemn it.
But what if you combine the two methods of not hate yourself for what you do, but saying ‘What if lonely mouth is lying? What if lonely mouth is simply conditioned thinking?’
Because believe me when I tell you, whatever that lonely mouth wants doesn’t go away with snacking! So it wasn’t food it wanted!
And just like with a baby that doesn’t stop crying, you ask it what it wants with actions… because the baby can’t talk yet… but even if it could, it may not know what it wants.
So you can experiment… Give the baby this, and give the baby that, and see what works.
The baby is feeling something… You are feeling something… Shoving food in your mouth doesn’t alleviate it… It is ‘mental illness’ in a way, an anxiety, a sense of lack, a discomfort, but you don’t quite know what.
Many people use my Heaven on Earth in these cases, and for the most part it works, because it has 48 energies in the remedy or in the audio.
But it is not always available. And, after all, if you could ‘diagnose’ what is missing, what the feeling is telling you, you wouldn’t need the Heaven on Earth, you would just do what the feeling is telling you to address.
As I am sitting here, the feeling is telling me that I am powerless, that I am alone, that I have a future that is dreadful, or something like that.
I don’t want to feel that, I have an article to write!
But if I stop and give it attention, just like you do with a two-year old, the felling goes away. It just wanted you to give it a minute or two of your time and attention.
Stop what you are doing, temporarily, and turn all your attention to the feeling, and ‘get it’.
And when peace comes back get back to doing what you were doing.
Of course when I am feeling someone else’s emotions or feelings, this does not work… What do I do? I simply say: this is not mine. Not my feeling. Not my body. And relax into it…
Sometimes I know whose feelings I feel, sometimes I don’t.
So if you are an empath or a sensitive, your most important job is to be able to tell if what you feel is yours or someone else’s…
And if you are not an empath or a sensitive, your most important job is to attend to the feeling, instead of trying to medicate it, run from it, or act on what you perceive the ‘need’ is…
I am going to test this out for myself with regards to eating. I have about 14 pounds I would love to drop. And not snacking would be just the thing to do to accomplish that.
I just figured out whose huge anxiety I feel. My next door neighbors are moving in a few days… Packing, planning must be very stressful. Unfortunately it probably won’t get better, but now that I know what it is I can just allow it… Nothing wrong, nothing to fix. If soldiers can march with 30 lbs of equipment on their back and live, I can carry a little anxiety from my next door neighbors and live… lol.
Now that I wrote that, the whole burden fell away…
Yeah, ‘mental illness’ is to listen to everything you feel, everything you think as if it were the truth, your stuff, and in urgent need of fixing.
Big sigh. It’s gone. Onto the next one that is sure to come… lying its ass off.
Now, what can you do?
Isn’t that always the question? And depending on who is answering the question, the ‘mental illness’ that always lies, or you, your behavior will be doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result, or something dramatic, like becoming free? Free of being a puppet on a string acting as if you had no power? No choice? No will?
Muscle test says that 10% of you who read this will at least consider that you can break the cycle, and you can claim your power back. Power you remember having, but haven’t experienced in some time, or maybe a long time.
For those of you, for the 10%, I offer you some assistance. I can’t do it for you, and truth be told, even the Heaven on Earth can’t do it for you, because you hold onto the ‘lies’ as if they were the truth, as if they were your protective armor, as if they were your friend.
I’ll do that on Saturdays… maybe one, maybe two, maybe three…
I’ll do it as a guided meditation… guiding you to let go of the lies and start feeling your power.
I’ll teach this also in the Inner Authority course, so if you are in that course, no need to come to the Saturday sessions as well, unless you consider yourself incurable… lol.
I am scheduling, for starters, two guided meditation sessions. What will we do? I’ll guide you to feel what you feel… the emptiness, the restlessness, the fear, the greed, the loneliness… Saturday July 24 and Saturday August 7, 2 pm EDT, New York time.
We’ll go through different feelings, and hopefully we’ll hit on what is the root of YOUR mental illness: overeating, worrying, anxiety, hiding, playing computer games, wanting to gobble up everything, arguing, oversexing, whatever it is.
If you want, I can have a 1-on-1 with you to help you pinpoint, so you can come to the session and trust that we catch what there is to catch.
Carl Jung said that the foundation of all mental illness is the avoidance of legitimate suffering. It is a translation. I would reword it. I would say that the foundation of all mental illness is the avoidance of feelings… unpleasant feelings. Or I could even say: the foundation of all mental illness is the low TLB… Twitchy Little Bastard behavior… avoidance, resistance, knee-jerk reactiveness.
So if you deal with anxiety, depression, addiction (to anything), avoidance, playing small, playing the victim, overeating, anger, etc. you are dealing with ‘mental illness’, the mental illness with the foundation of unwillingness to feel what you feel.
- The little boy who was left behind on the street corner felt that he is not omnipotent, and didn’t like it.
- The little girl who wanted to get everything like her pregnant mother, meals in bed, attention isn’t willing to feel that she is just normal and doesn’t deserve to be treated as special.
- The little girl who wanted to sleep in her parents bed doesn’t want to feel that she is not entitled to everything of everyone else…
- The dude who has to get up to pee in the middle of the night doesn’t like to feel that he is not in complete control over his body and his life
- The dude who wants to be loved doesn’t like to feel that he is not the most important thing in the universe
etc.etc.etc.
What is it that you don’t like to feel? We shall see.
I’ll use energies and words to put you in the state that you don’t like… So we can look to see how it lies… And how you have a choice if you are just willing to live in reality, not in a fantasy.
Let’s see how your avoidance can be eliminated
And that is all of us.
I am bringing my ‘lonely mouth’ to the call. I am also bringing my tendency to jump up in the middle of anything, and want to run away… writing, reading, leading a course, conversation… I am also barely willing to feel those bad feelings that are underneath that reaction. So yeah… I am both a ‘patient’ and a ‘doctor’… in this context.
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