self-enhancing beliefs

I'm rereading Awake in the Heartland by Joan Tollifson - found it a few years ago in the awesome metaphsyical bookstore in Portland on NW 23rd, and have had a hankerin' to dip into it again. I'm staring down the barrel of my self-limiting beliefs, who's days are numbered, and Joan's words are like ambrosia for the process. Everything is a story, and when approached from that perspective, coupled with the feelings nudge I get from my inner being who just ain't goin' there when I believe those crazy things that loop over and over again in my head, well, it's a done deal.

Rather than play symbiotic footsie with self-limiting beliefs, I am now host to the self-enhancing kind. About a year ago I went through this process withering the power of lack in particular, so I'm looking forward to seeing what happens this time around.

Some choice passages from Joan:

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It is painful, and yet, there is always something I love about withdrawal. It is the stopping. YOu finally stop running, and you sink in. You meet what you've been running from. You don't move. And it feels like a huge relief. Like some enormous noise has stopped. And you're just here.

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To the mind, "nothing" is a terrifying idea....and so, we pull back from bare presence. We keep very busy. We avoid this terrifying nothingness that lurks just under the surface of everything. We avoid silence. We avoid gaps in the conversation. We turn on the radio or the TV. We read books. We have "meaningful" careers. We raise families. We go on vacations. We chase gurus. We drink. We smoke. We consume. We talk. Anything to avoid this dreadful nothing.

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I learned a lot from people's questions and my responses. It was easy to see, in the others, the absurdity of the stories, the flimsiness of the imaginary webs that seem to bind us. Whereas when it was my own story, its apparent reality had a greater hold. So everyone was a mirror in which I could see the emptiness of all beliefs, and the absolutely undeniable radiance that is always here.

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I want to emphasize again that these [suggestions] are not intended as a recipe for enlightenment or as guidelines for a spiritually correct life. These suggestions are merely pointers to what is. You won't acheive anything by following them. There is nothing to achieve.

If you have been meditating for many years, I encourage you to recognize what never comes and goes, and to stop pursuing it in any specific or exclusive experience. If you enjoy meditating, by all means meditate. But if you are separating meditation from the rest of life, recognize that every moment is meditation. Give up the whole concept of "meditation." Give up attaching importance to any particular state of consciousness, however "enlightened" or "unenlightened" it seems.

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Your suffering is your own activity. It is something that you are doing moment to moment. It is a completely voluntary activity....You will continue to pursue every kind of means until you realize that all you are doing is pinching yourself. When you realize that, you just take your hand away. There is nothing complicated at all about it. But previous to that, it is an immensely complicated problem.

--Da Free John