Reply To A Friend: Seeing A Pattern (audio)

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Seeing and sharing your behavioural patterns weakens them.


Transcript:

When you catch one of your patterns, one level is to realize it and just stop. Another level is to declare it. If you just stop, it stays inside the mind. But if you’re around people who are capable of listening, ready to listen, people who you’ve already told that you’re experimenting with a new way, if you say it out loud, it gives it another perspective. It reduces its power.

What happens with a lot of teachers and leaders of anything, even companies–and it’s even taught to the police–is “Don’t let anybody give you feedback, because that weakens your position. Stay in control.” And often, the more successful the leader, the more impervious they become, the more stuck they become. Because they don’t want to lose the control, lose their adoration. Or lose their income! So, they stay impervious. They don’t let anything come back. And then, what tends to happen is, they stay stuck in a cycle of behavior.

We need feedback. We need to hear what people say. It doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not. Nobody’s 100%. So whatever they say to you, it can’t be 100% wrong. And even if there’s only 1% in there, listen. “Does that connect? Do I need to hear that?” If not, let it go. And if it touches something in some way– either you feel elated or contracted–it means something’s been touched, and that’s a gift for you to be with. So, the more successful you become in being a leader or a teacher in some way, the more isolated you become, and usually, the more stuck you become.

When you see something, where you’ve gone unconscious, you’ve done a pattern, gone into behavior, one essential ingredient to dissolve it, is: don’t be serious. Make it funny. Exaggerate it! Do something not to be SERIOUS about it. ‘Cause it’s not serious! You are that. Underneath all that stuff, you’re already that, you’re already free. It’s just your particular process has built this on top, and now, you’re ready to let layer after layer dissolve and fly away and drift away, till you come back to the realization of the unnamed state.