Quietly Work Out Your Own Salvation
What we do here at the Center For Common Sense Counseling is help people work through relationship and stress issues by teaching them how to become centered and flow from intuition.
Most of us are suppressed and inhibited because we are reactive, and thus outer directed. We react to situations and people, and then say or do the wrong thing. We become afraid of expressing our pent-up hostility, and we dread another round of error and failure. So we hide ourselves from others so as not to be embarrassed or make mistakes. We put on a phony facade to keep people at a distance. Our secret hostility and resentment make us feel empty and needy.
But instead of finding an inner rapport and wholeness, we reach out to the world. Feeling unworthy and yet needy, we clumsily claw for love, often settling for the most lowly and loathsome love offerings. When we can't bear the pain of reaching for love anymore, we settle for the comfort and false love of drugs, alcohol, and pills, or we stuff ourselves with food. All because in our distant past someone upset us or pulled on our heart strings, tempting us to step away from our center of dignity and love.
Objects or goals stand in for the people who upset us in the past. We get mad at things and struggle with them because they represent the original person who upset us, made us doubt ourselves or made us angry.
There is always frustration and futility involved in any goal because it is not really our own. It is a goal that others tempted us to have. No wonder our work, study, and our possessions, instead of bringing us joy or modest satisfaction, can become drudgery and negatively charged. Our emotional over-reactions and the unhealthy practices we employ to distract and comfort ourselves lead to health problems.
We reach out for help to pills and procedures, only to discover these are forms of false love which only relieve symptoms and often only permit us to get worse. What has really happened is that we have become separated from the spiritual roots from which our true personality could have flowered. We became separated through resenting others and through doubting what we have always known deep down.
Some of us continue to yearn for the good we have never known. But reaching out to worldly spiritual or religious organizations has brought us betrayal or led to cynicism. We love truth and goodness, but we haven't found the real thing. Those we trusted either betrayed us, used us, or revealed their own lack of understanding.
What we need is to refind the inner intuitive way of living and moving and having our being. We need the original perspective, the one we had before we were upset and sidetracked by authorities who themselves had been tempted away from reason and inner love. Fortunately we can find the love and understanding we have always been searching for by learning to become still.
We can refind the original perspective, and then moving unemotionally from this clear perspective, we will see our way back to a sensible, calm, inner directed way of life. A special simple meditation or centering exercise teaches us how to stand back from thought and emotion. It is not difficult or complicated. Perhaps the most difficult part of it is setting aside the intellectual analysis and second guessing, and just practicing the meditation in its sheer simplicity.
Calming down and beginning to see clearly, we begin to see things and people, including ourselves, as we really are. Going out into the world, we learn to be less reactive. We learn to be patient with people. We learn not to look to them for love, because once having found the inner light in which to see, wordless guidance by which to act, and inner warmth and rapport to seal us off from outer entanglements, we are free to express truth and be patient with others.
Family, relationship, work, and health issues begin to resolve themselves. When we have love instead of seeking love, and when we have patience instead of impatience, we develop a healthy disinterest concern for others, instead of needing something from them.
Spiritual and physical health is the natural state of the body and soul. By learning to give up the resentment, emotionality, and a misguided lifestyle that interferes with health, we recover in the Light. Visit commonsensecounseling.org to hear some of Roland's lectures or get a free introductory version of the meditation exercise.
