Here's a sane, peaceful, trusting alternative to doership.
The idea of doership, or being the doer, is that you’re the one making things happen or getting things done—and when you’re in doership, you’re in illusion (uh, not to mention stress). You’re also prone to getting intense about how things go, in what timing, and with what outcome. Here’s a great sentence from an online dictionary explaining doership: “If there is no feeling of doership in the deed performed, then bondage will not result.” How do you get out of doership? (If you’re skimming or in get-in-get-out mode, drop down to bullet points below for sound things to tell yourself when you catch yourself being the doer.) First, simply notice when you’re believing you’re the one who makes it happen, or you have to get it done, or if you don’t do this, no one else will or it won’t get done right or all hell will break loose. Notice when you’re doing a task or moving from point A to point B between tasks in a way that’s tense, driven, anxious, frenetic. Notice the lack of peace [substitute ease, equanimity, joy, connection to magic] in do-do-do-do-do. Stop. If you can’t take a pause, then follow the next instructions while you’re carrying on with whatever you must do. Tune in to your breath and watch it go in and out. Follow the passage of the breath, right on its heels, experiencing exactly where it is in your body at any given moment. Feel the inevitable pause once the out-breath is spent. Come back to the core of yourself, back to center, by following the breath. This will also instantly serve to calm you, even a bit, and to elongate the breath—with no actual effort to do that. Just watch the breath—don’t slow it down; it will slow down on its own. Now find where you’re believing you’re the one who makes it happen. Notice you think you have to make it happen. Notice you’re believing that your doing is why you’re here, or your most important assignment, or at the very least what you must do right now. Consider the possibility that you’re in illusion. Tell yourself clearly, explicitly: I’m in doership right now, so I must be in illusion. Next tell yourself a number of things you can actually believe to counter this thought that you have to make it happen. I’ll list a bunch of possibilities, and you can adopt those that resonate and come up with more on your own. The point is to counter this potent belief with a good number of other things that you can also believe and that are closer to truth:
If any of that leaves you feeling more relaxed and more expansive, you’re on the right track. Use the contractions you feel to call you to a pause for breath and mental reset. On the physical level, notice clenched muscles, furrowed brow, frenetic motions—even irritated or bossy tones of voice. Catch yourself (kindly, without judgment) in needless intensity and tension. Come back to the breath, back to what’s truer and more aligned than forcing your way through as the doer. You really do get to live in alignment and flow—and you’ll function more effectively and even more efficiently when you’re there. Beyond doership is a great exhale and opening to magic! Note that part of living in everyday magic includes aligning with flow, connecting to your guidance system, living in the now. Show up for the journey, now and now and now, because that’s where the magic reveals itself. Love & blessings, Jaya
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Pulled from chapter 22 Never a Victim: Cultivate a Consciousness of Choice It's hard to be a victim if you're standing firm in choice. It's hard to focus on what someone else or life itself is visiting upon you or withholding from you, if you're standing firm in choice. My pep talks about choice over time have come to be distilled to five basic points:
Let's look at the December holidays as an example of how people lose track of choice and cause themselves all kinds of stress in so doing. “I have to go to the office party,” “I'll be expected to host my in-laws again,” “We need to make this super special,” “I have to buy more princess outfits for Muffy.” You don't have to do any of those things; you may certainly choose to do them—or not. If attendance at the party isn't or doesn't seem to be optional, then by all means, choose to go. Choose it because you value this job: it's worth it to you to attend the occasional required gathering. (You could just as well choose to quit your job, or to simply let your boss know you won't be attending and stay tuned for what happens next.) Choose to visit or host family members because you want to foster connection with these specific human beings, and this season looks like the best time to put that into action. (Do I need to say it's a valid option not to visit or host them?) Remember you have choice, and choose consciously. So many people automatically go by duty and tradition to plan their holidays. If this is you, consider this: You get to define duty. You get to follow, toss out, or recreate tradition. If you want to continue to visit certain people during this time of year, that's a fine choice. But it is a choice: embrace it as such. You're someone who wants to do your duty, who wants to follow tradition. Maybe other things motivate you: you don't want to be disowned, or you don't want to deal with disappointing your family or having them be mad at you. Any number of factors may inform your choice. (These factors can be questioned and challenged; they can also simply be noted.) All things considered, you're still in choice. Don't lose sight of this! It's an option to disappoint, or to anger, or even to be disowned. Do realistically note that you may equally disappoint or anger family members in your presence and participation! And if being disowned (or some less extreme family threat) is a land mine in your reality, then it probably represents a whole cluster of land mines that a whole lot more than the holidays could set off. You get to choose how and whether to let tricky or toxic issues inform your holiday choices. If you choose to host or visit family—whatever your reasons—get 100 percent behind your choice and stop talking about everything that's a pain about it. Remind yourself that you actually want to be with family for the holidays. Become a master of extracting from the experience all there is to enjoy. It may help to consider more deeply why you choose what you choose. How does it serve you to maintain good relations with those you work with? Can you best do that through sugar, alcohol, and tiresome conversation? What do you value or even love about being with family? What is it doing for you and yours to take a trip during vacation time in December? What's behind the choice? A very simple question to ask yourself is, What do I hope to get from this? A nice follow-up question would be, Is this the best way to get it? If you're out of touch with the underlying aim or value, you may sabotage the very thing you're after. For example, let's say you want your kids to have grandparent time. If you focus on everything your parents or in-laws do that makes you crazy, the kids may get grandparent time, but they may also get a confusing experience of divided loyalties; they may wonder if it's really okay for them to cozy up to these people you seem to despise. ... Choose clearly and consciously, and get behind your choice by connecting to, speaking about, and interacting with what you love and appreciate about these grandparent figures. When it's hard to get behind your choice, choose again. You can leave in the middle of a visit, or make a judicious note to self to do something else next year. But if you want to hold to your choice, in this instance or as a way of life, learn to pause to consider what supports you need in place to do that—to make the choice sustainable. It may even be a matter of making ongoing choices to support an important choice you've made. You might support a holiday choice by choosing to take excellent care of yourself while in someone else's home or while others are in yours: carve out alone time; eat in a way that doesn't throw you off or make you feel bad about yourself; tune in to your true yes/no on/off responses so you're not perpetually doing what you don't really want to do. Emotional support may be important too. Since you could get thrown off despite your best clear choice-making, have someone in place you can call or pull aside so you can vent to a kind listener who will love and support you. When I need an ear, I go to someone who can compassionately hear whatever I'm feeling but won't treat me like a victim or support me in vilifying someone else. (This is very important to me.) Taking such measures makes it possible for you to get 100 percent behind your choice by making sure your choice is humanly possible or sustainable. It also makes it possible for you to take full responsibility for your well-being during the holidays—victim no more. And why be a victim of the holidays? It's pretty absurd that as a culture we treat a time of vacation, sacred celebration, gift-giving, and downtime with loved ones as if it were a time of war. Love & blessings, Jaya Ever hear yourself say, as I heard a client say about a decision she and her spouse were making, “We were doing pretty well until we started talking to other people.” Ay, that'll muddle things every time. Another client choosing between two demanding jobs, as she gave me her best reckoning to date, included the statement, “All my friends think [job B] is a no-brainer.” To them, perhaps, but the more I questioned her, the more aligned she seemed to be with job A! What's wrong with getting advice? The right thing for you—you as you are right now, you at this point of becoming, you at this juncture, which may take you into new directions and new identity—can only come from your own inner guidance system. What you'll get from others is what they've come to at this point based on, at best, their own guidance system (which is all about them) or, at worst, their own fears, beliefs (often unquestioned), and projections. Sometimes I invite people to try going against tendency, because it's useful for anyone to counter any set defaults they have in place. Getting really simple with this: the person who rushes around may need to slow things down, while the person who moves too slowly may need to rev it up. Most people giving advice tell you to slow down because they've needed to do that (or still need to, so they're speaking it again to you to reinforce it for themselves). Byron Katie says you should always eavesdrop on yourself when you give others advice, because it's really all for you! So what if they tell you to slow things down when you need to rev it up? Well, this happens all the time. Helpful advisors will tell you to persevere when you need to let go and quit pushing the river; or they'll tell you to stop forcing it when you just need to hang in there a bit longer. They'll tell you to let the other come to you when it's right for you to reach out. They'll tell you to be more diplomatic when it's your moment to assert something no matter how it's received. Oh, the advice people give you when you're dating! They tell you to stay open when you need to have clear boundaries around what you will or won't have. They'll tell you to give someone a chance when you know the person is wrong for you (however adorable they may be—everyone deserves lots of chances, but not necessarily from you!). All this wrong advice serves no one—except perhaps the one who does eavesdrop on their own advice. How do you know when advice is bad advice? It may seem especially hard to evaluate advice when it sounds good and comes from intelligent people or perhaps from those who really know you. As to the latter, consider that they knew who you were a moment ago, and what you're on the cusp of now is very likely to be unknown to them—especially if you can't yet articulate it. Or they may even have known you so long that their stories of you are truly antiquated and have little or no bearing on your current reality, never mind your potential. Their advice sounds good? So does your best thinking on each side of the coin you're considering. That's why I tell people to stay away from pro-con lists—or at least use them initially just to look at the overview and sort it out a bit, but don't use them to decide. The right choice for you doesn't boil down to intelligent reasons to do or not do something. You could intelligently talk yourself in or out of most anything whether it's actually a good idea for you right now or not (now being the operative word here). So if you're going to look elsewhere for how to decide it, look away from others' smart reasoning as well. How do you know when even good advice is the wrong advice for you? It's so easy to tell:
Is all outer input worthless? I'm certainly not saying there's no place for talking to others as part of a decision-making process. Just listen with a hefty dose of take-what-you-like-and-leave-the-rest. Here's how you know when someone else's perspective actually applies to you and is being spoken for your benefit:
Great input that isn't advice At the end of coaching sessions, I almost always ask my clients, “How do you feel right now?” They almost always give answers like, much better, more clear, relieved, calm or peaceful, present, ready to go out there again. They feel better not because I gave them great advice. (It's been known to happen, but I seldom give clients a strong “do this” sort of directive.) They feel better because I've helped them come back to themselves. I've reflected back to them how they're thinking or operating unclearly, or how they've failed to get behind a choice. I've echoed what I heard them say that shows they're thinking out of fear or shame or obligation or some old concept about themselves (perhaps recently fed to them by an advisor who supposedly knows them well), and I've helped them deconstruct that thinking. They feel better because I redirected them to what they know and away from what others know. Perhaps I've shown them how they're not applying their own belief system, then we've looked at how they might do so here; or we've addressed the fear that has so far kept them from doing so. (And by addressed I don't mean cleared away: fear is tenacious, and you need to be able to keep moving in the direction you know or suspect is right for you even as fear keeps gripping until it's been along for the ride long enough to know it's okay, it's really, truly okay.) So ask people for the kind of input you want. Ask them what kind of input they'd like from you, and offer what matches what they want. Ask them to listen with no input and play with listening to them without offering yours. Say no (if no's the right answer) when they ask, Would you like to hear my thoughts on this? End the conversation if they keep proffering thoughts you don't want. When you start to notice their words are causing agitation inside you or getting you more muddle, ask their forgiveness for engaging them and tell them you've just remembered you're seeking to make a new habit of locating and following your own inner wisdom. Or change the subject. Ask if they knew that sea otters sometimes eat so many urchins that their teeth and bones turn purple. (It's okay if they look at you funny.) Byron Katie invites people to offer experience instead of advice, as others can benefit from your stories and apply to themselves what's actually applicable, but they may or may not benefit from your advice. I know my kids enjoy stories of my past wacky choices and their fascinating consequences much more than they enjoy any direct advice about how they should proceed or any predictions of the consequences of their current choices. I give less and less advice as I grow up in my parenting. I believe my job with my kids is to point them inward to their own guidance system. For that matter, that's also what I do with my clients and with anyone I'm in any kind of relationship with. May this writing support you to look inward, where all the right answers for you can be accessed. Love & blessings, Jaya |
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