Archive for May, 2009
A change is as good as a rest
Posted by: | CommentsWe had our first budget in New Zealand yesterday since the government changed, (9 years of way left of centre, new government centre right).
It was incredible to hear such resposible steps being taken, even though they will be unpopular. Basically they said: “We are not going to keep giving money away to everybody because we can’t afford it and we are going to have to not do some of the things we promised because it will cost a fortune. We will do them when we can afford to do so”.
Doing the right thing is often not popular but it is a sound way to live your life, run your business, or in this case run a country. Prime Ministers comments on the budget JohnKey
“Living within our means” is a phrase most of us hate if we were really honest. I hate it. I don’t want to live within my means, I want unlimited means so I can live how I like. And as an educator of others I think that is a great goal to have, absolutely. However unless we learn to live within our means now we will never have the discipline to ever achieve the goal of great wealth.
And for many of us our unbearable feeling is either a feeling of being constrained/denied or a fear of a lack of money. And we tend to avoid both feelings and comfort ourselves by impulse buying and bad money management.
So think about this. Are you willing to learn to live within your means as part of a strategy to increase your wealth and your mental health. It will require learning how to budget, how to deny yourself and how to plan. Or are you resigned to feeling lack, living in financial chaos and always regretting what you can’t have or do?
The fruit of the first will be a life worth living with less stress, more joy and a growing ability to dream, plan and execute bigger goals!! The second, well you can figure that out.
I know which one I’d pick, what about you?
Stay Safe ~ Dean Letfus @ www.MassiveAction.tv
Is the answer really 42?
Posted by: | CommentsI know I’m showing my age but I still remember how clever I thought Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy was when on the last pages of the book I discovered the answer to the question what is the meaning of life was “42″.
I guess it was the authors way of saying how impossible answering that question genuinely is.
I mention it today in the context of pursuing our unbearable feeling because hopelessness/meaningless is a huge issue in our society.
As you may know 25% of the population is depressed at any given time and 50% of people will have at least 1 clinicaly diagnosable depressive season in their lives. And one of the primary causes of real depression is meaninglessness.
If this feeling is unbearable then what we do is make sure our lives are never still or quiet, EVER!!.
Kids sports, craft clubs, dinner parties, endless travel or holidays, you will fill your life with anything to ensure you never have a moment to think about what your life is actually for. This is why depression is the common cold of the West, but relatively unheard of in developing nations. The developing world still believes in spiritual things therefore generally they can find meaning in God, whatever form that may be for their culture.
Also they find hope and meaning in achieving the great western dream of abundance, financial security and freedom.
And THAT is why we are so depressed and suicidal as a society because we have achieved the great dream and found it……
Our kids have their mid-life crisis at 18 now because they don’t have to wait till they are 40 to see that western life is empty, they can see it in their parents eyes and watch it in their lifestyles.
So can I suggest to you to day my friend that pursuing genuine meaning in your life is both the most important thing you will ever do AND the best thing you could ever do to achieve good mental health.
You will find meaning if you look for it and keep your heart open to things you may have given up on before. It is there, so you don’t have to fear this unbearable feeling, you can slay it with truth and hope!! Will you make this a priority in your life, do you care about yourself enough to start this journey?
(For more on how my journey ended click HERE)
Till tomorrow, stay safe ~ Dean Letfus @ www.MassiveAction.tv
Would you like more unbearable with that?
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Unbearable feelings!! Like parents, you’ve got at least one most likely.
The things we do to avoid them never fix the problem, so if we ever want to really grow up we have to learn how to bear and befriend these feelings. You are not psychotic because you want to avoid these feelings, the problem is simply that avoiding them is destructive for you and those around you in many cases.
Here is a list of common unbearable feelings
- Disappointment, despair of grief of any kind
- Feeling unfairly treated; the victim of injustice
- Feeling humiliated, exposed, embarrassed, laughed at or ridiculed
- Feeling cruel, hard, unfeeling or unsympathetic
- Feeling controlled, bullied or restrained
- Feeling used, taken for granted, obligated or trapped
- Feeling unheard, distrusted, doubted, misunderstood, disbelieved, misjudged
- Feeling of futility, (it’s all for nothing)
- Feeling bored or depressed
- Feeling ill-equipped, unprepared or caught out
- Feeling uprooted or dislocated
- Feeling unwanted, rejected, excluded, abandoned, shut out or left behind
- Feeling shouted at or abused, especially by one particular sex
- Feeling powerless, helpless, out of control, uncertain or in danger
- Feeling lost or disoriented
- Feeling disobeyed, despised or disrespected
- Feeling around being in debt or unable to pay
- Feeling overloaded or swamped by “must-do’s”
- Feeling lied to, sucked in, cheated, betrayed or deceived
- Being held up, running late or left behind
- Feeling dumb, inadequate, stupid, a loser, incompetent
- Feeling interrogated, nagged or lectured
- Feeling interrupted, prevented from completing a task etc.
- Feeling exhausted or lying awake alone at night
- Feeling to cold or too hot
- Cold, grey, bleak or windy weather
- Being around drunk people, smell of alcohol
- Forgetting or losing something
- Feeling like you have disappointed others or let them down in some way
- Anticipation of fear and dread
- Forgetting or losing something
- Feeling of regret or missing out on something better
- Being a nuisance, a bludger or a burden
- Silence or silent tension
- Feeling full of food or bloated
- Feeling guilty, ashamed or condemned
- Following through
- Deep water, the beach and the sharks
If you seriously want to identify your unbearable feeling then start by printing this list off and mark off any on the list that you feel regularly.
Because we are looking for your unbearable feeling, which you NEVER FEEL, the ones you have marked are definitely not your feeling.
So lok at what are left, do any of them trigger anything in you. For example if you are anorexic or bulimic your unbearbale feeling may well be feeling full.
What about feeling to hot or too cold. It sounds silly but I know destroyed marriages because one partner would go ballistic over a room or a bed or a conference being at the wrong temperature. You see if this is unbearable it is unbearable.
People who can’t bear to be late either go everywhere 2 hours early or they avoid appointments to the point of reclusion.
Tomorrow we’ll look at this from one more angle to help you identify if you have an issue here. But you should be getting an inkling by now if this is maybe something you need to work on!!
Stay Safe ~ Dean Letfus @ www.MassiveAction.tv
The feeling you never feel
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Here’s something you may never have thought of before. It is a feeling you have never felt, not for a long time anyway. David Riddell aptly described it as your “unbearable feeling”. One unbearable feeling operating in your life can cripple you completely. Prisons are full of people who are there because they were avoiding their unbearable feeling. Domestic violence, drug addiction, divorce, you name it; you can often fin an unbearable feeling at the root of the problem.
Many of us know who “presses our buttons” right? But have we ever asked ourselves “Why do I keep providing such big easy to press buttons?” You see we are often, in fact I would say almost always having a feeling triggered that we must avoid. That’s why we react, clam up, lash out, yell, drink, drive like a maniac, punish our loved ones. Over a feeling?? Come on, how can a feeling have that much power. Well it has power because we never learn to deal with it.
We’re not talking about an unpleasant feeling here, or something you feel all the time. No this is an unbearable feeling. When we take a magnifying glass to the dysfunctional parts of our lives we discover that we have developed reactions and mindsets to protect the damage done to our hearts, the emotional damage that 99% of us have incurred throughout our lives.
We avoid the hideous feelings associated with that damage by using anger, abuse or shutting down to make sure we don’t feel our unbearable feeling. The term unbearable is critical here. This is something you so want to avoid that you literally will do anything to avoid the feeling. A father will bury his children before he will feel this feeling. A woman will abandon her family, a child will take his or her own life before they will feel their unbearable feeling.
When I started to see how this operated in my own life it literally changed my whole world view. Suddenly things that were bizarre made sense. One of my unbearable feelings is shame. So when I was younger the thought of failing at a job was unthinkable. ( This is all operating subconsciously of course, I never “thought” about the shame of failing at a job). So I had several occasions in my 20′s and early 30′s where I was promoted very quickly and was on the edge of a major promotion. Suddenly the risk of feeling shame through being promoted above the level of my own competence became a reality.
So on 3 separate occasions in 3 different companies I started behaving in ways that resulted ultimately in me getting fired!!
You see the feelings of rejection and being thought badly of I could handle, but the shame of failing at my new positions was literally unbearable. I am now at 46 years old pursuing things I should have done all my life as I make friends with my unbearable feeling.
What about you my friend? What have you not done because of your unbearable feeling?? Never pursued university because feeling dumb was unbearable? never married because fear of rejection or commitment was unbearable?
I may never have net you but I would say there is a 99% chance that you are not living the life of your dreams at least in part due to your unbearable feeling.
Tomorrow we’ll start to look at how to identify your UBF!!
Stay Safe ~ Dean Letfus @ www.MassiveAction.tv
Narcissistic personality disorder anyone?
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In studying emotional and mental health I have recently been learning about NPD.
I was briefly involved in a business with someone on the extreme end of this disease so I have always been interested in it ever since. Because NPD is so destructive there has been much research undertaken on it and the results are scary and fascinating.
You’ll know it if you’ve interacted with a narcissist in business. They are charming and ruthless, totally without ethics or morals, using people like things, sexually preverted and usually collecting women and toys which they love to display to the world.
What is not so well known is that these people are totally oblivious to what they are doing. It’s like their consciences and morals have been surgically removed. This makes it very easy to identify them but very hard to understand or empathise with. You see they have no idea they are using people, they are just doing what they do. They genuinely believe that they are honest, trustworthy and doing the very best for others that they can, when in fact the opposite is true.
Narcissism has its roots in early childhood. Generally at around 3 years old we are meant ot be discovering that we are both magnificent and limited.
Our mothers tell us how limited we are by protecting us and our fathers teach us to be magnificent by getting us to try new things and expand. Bad parenting results in some of us learning how magnificent we are but never realising that we are limited. And this the roots of NPD are sown.
The sad thing about NPD is that it is so difficult to heal. Narcissists are basically stunted little children inside an adults body. My trainer described them as “no one being home”, and subsequently reaching inside their magnificent fantasy to try and minister to the hurt child is very difficult.
The other thing he said was to issue a stern warning to any new counsellors to keep as far away as possible from NPD sufferers. Their illnes creates havoc in a counselling relationship because they are so clever, manipulative and moral less that they will destroy any well meaning but ill equipped person trying to help them. I could relate to this through my own experience with a classic NPD sufferer. It took me years to unentangle myself and nearly cost me everything. And I had only entered into the relationship to try and help them.
We all are somewhere on a range between sane and crazy so I don’t ever judge people for being ill, however it is good to keep in the back of our minds that some people are dangerous even though they don’t appear so and if we see certain tell tale signs of severe illness, sometimes running is the best course of action.
Of course we can’t run from ourselves adn that’s why we are looking at how to deal with our own stuff. More on that tomorrow!!
Stay Safe ~ Dean Letfus @ www.MassiveAction.tv
Why change??
Posted by: | CommentsIn thinking about our emotional well being another thought to think 
is:
Do I need to change? Is there any reason for me to be different?
Now if your answer is no that is fantastic, incredibly good news, because it means that you are pretty well “together”.
However, (there’s always a however), what I would suggest is this. Instead of asking yourself if you nede to change anything, why not ask your boss, your partner, your kids or your pastor if you need to change anything in your emotional make up.
You see because our feelings can lie to us we often don’t recognise the need to change in ourselves.
I was thinking about this very point the other day when someone was attacking me publicly for absolutely no reason. I know the person a little bit and I iwould consider them if anything, a friend.
When I had some information that could have benefit them they were very friendly to me also. I took this at face value, genuine. Now for some reason they had a day of publishing lies about me and being both weird and bizarrely aggressive for no reason.
If you asked them if their emotional make up needed changing they would say no probably, but it was obvious from my recent experience that there is great pain in their lives that needs healing.
We’re all like it aren’t we if we are honest. Who wants to admit we have a problem. Millions of marriages have failed because one partner says to themselves, “THEY are the problem, they need to change”
Even when that is true, if the wounded party would work on their own stuff a different result could often be found.
So when you get 2 minutes today just sit for a sec and think about what you might need to change, whether it’s to be less depressed, more honest, less judgmental. How would you like to make your feelings your friends where they are curently enemies?
Till tomorrow, ( more tools then) Stay Safe ~ Dean Letfus @ www.MassiveAction.tv
What is truth??
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Well yesterdays blog certainly created a flurry of responses via email of people agreeing/disagreeing or offering their own slant on what they thought spirituality was.
I appreciate the time and thought given by you all and always enjoy looking at other people’s opinions. In the case of spirituality however it does require us to answer the above question, “What is truth?”.
If we don’t start by answering this question then everything we decide is relative and kind of meaningless.
For example if gravity is truth then we are compelled to obey the rules around gravity. And the fact is that even those people who don’t believe in gravity are subject to its reality, whether they like it or not.
I am yet to see anybody float upwards spontaneously because they decided gravity “wasn’t for them”.
Now the problem with spirituality is that we are dealing with a mostly unseen realm and relying on people’s experiences making the whole subject, well, subjective if you know what I mean.
So how do we answer the question from a spiritual perspective, just what is truth?
Well I can only tell you what my 30 years of pursuing truth has discovered and that is this:
There is absolute truth, our postmodern society embraces relativism and pragmatism both of which basically encourage us to find our own truth, the truth within.
The problem with that is that I am pretty messed up within. There is as much lust, hatred, selfishness and worry inside of me as wisdom so my truth would be quite sick, as would yours.
When my mum had her brain tumor removed I was entirely reliant on the absolute truth that certain parts of her brain could be removed without affecting her badly. I wasn’t relying on the truth found within the surgeon because that is relative. He went to medical school for 15 years to learn absolute truth about the human body.
So because there is absolute truth I searched for absolute spiritual truth and found it in God. Not some vague force but in the person of Jesus Christ. A God who loves me and relates to me personally. More on my story HERE.
So based on 30 years of finding God’s truth to be absolute and infallible I can say that we are spirit, as I explained yesterday. And some things only can be fixed by applying spiritual solutions.
And this is the reason I speak out about the falsehood of things like the law of attraction. A month or 2 back Bob Proctor started promoting a second level of The Secret because as he said “The law of attraction isn’t working”. And just today I received an email from Stephen Pierce saying exactly the same thing. Both these guys are trying to sell you into more stuff to try and get the secret working.
This is tragically sad because the absolute truth is that the law of attraction and The Secret are deceptions, designed to make them a fortune and keep you from genuine spiritual truth. The solution to our ills lies in getting our physical, financial, emotional and spiritual lives in order and at peace, not following the next spiritual sounding sales pitch. You my friend are way too special to have to put your future into your own hands or that of some non existent creative force.
I leave you with the words of a song I wrote many years ago now.
SPECIAL
Before you were born I knew you
I created every wrinkle, every line
Before you were formed I loved you
You’re not one in a million
You’re one for all time
Cause I made you special
And I made you specially for me
Yes I made you special
Cause you’re a reflection of me
Before you could walk I held you
I saw you sleep, I watched you play
And as you grew oh I wept over you
Cause you stopped believing you were
what I’d made you to be
Cause I made you special
And I made you specially for me
Yes just as you are you’re special
Cause you’re a reflection
A precious reflection
My child I made you for me.
Believe it, you are special ~ Stay Safe ~ Dean Letfus @ www.MassiveAction.tv
