Transformational Teachings from Counselor Jane Ilene Cohen

Selected from the “Life is Meant to Work” Webinar,
and emailed-in questions people sent.

To listen to this webinar introduction, click here.

(People’s names are changed to protect their privacy.)

Sally: Jane, excellent synthesis and conclusions of this complex topic. Will each session be one hour?

Jane: Yes, each class in the 12-week Course will be an hour.

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Randy: Are you going to be teaching A Course in Miracles in this course?

Jane: No. I absorbed what was meaningful to me to absorb from A Course in Miracles. I studied it very intensely and it brought me to new ground in which I was seeing things from a different perspective.  And from standing on that perspective, I tapped into a whole other thought system from my own direct experience.

I got the idea from A Course in Miracles that life is meant to work.  And when I started seeing clients I started holding that in place.  I didn’t really know that it was true.  But I was holding it in place, and I was insistent on holding that in place.  I think I was born to do that, as I can’t figure out any other reason why I have held onto it with such strong intention. So whatever happened, I interpreted it from the frame-or-reference that life is meant to work.  And as a result, I started tapping into a whole body of work, which has kept unfolding and has made the work I do very effective.  Because TimeLine is such a fast process, I could almost immediately see the result of holding “life is meant to work” in place.  So it has been like a living laboratory over these past 14 years, seeing the results of standing on that premise, and finding that it is true over and over again.  We clear the limiting decision, and the person’s life reconfigures itself and proves that it has nothing to do with the way life works, or the external circumstance.

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Jean: It sounds like by the time a person is 50 they might have made hundreds or thousands of limiting decisions.  So how long do you think it might take someone, an average person whose life isn’t working, to release enough limiting decisions so their life could work?

Jane: First of all you don’t keep making limiting decisions until you’re 50 years old.  Limiting decisions are made before the age of 6 or 7, sometimes in adolescence.  It’s rare that you make any limiting decisions beyond that age.

The number of limiting decisions and the length of time it takes to clear them depends on the soul’s path. Some people have a lot of stuff going on — by which I mean a lot of limiting decisions that surface — and they just have to deal with them.  They’re set up to make a lot of progress in this lifetime.  Other people seem to have an easier path, with less limiting decisions to deal with.  And it seems to vary from lifetime to lifetime. It depends on a combination of your soul’s particular path, and how much progress it decides to make in this lifetime.  It also has to do with the evolutionary process of your particular soul and of humanity in general.  At a certain point a more evolved level of functioning is expected of you in order for your life to work well.

In general when a person works with me, they work for a while and arrive at a place that works for them, at the particular stage in life they are at.  I had one woman who cleared the issues she needed to clear in relation to her husband, and their relationship now works wonderfully well, and she was finished.  And I haven’t heard from her since.  For some people, we clear the issues that were currently of concern to them, and I don’t hear from them for a year or two.  And then they come back to clear more, according to what’s up for them in their current life experience.

But that’s about the TimeLine sessions, and that’s different from what I’m doing in the “Life is Meant to Work” program, which has to do with the larger perspective, it shifts how you are experiencing life, and your perspective on what reality is. It’s working with getting you in alignment with the evolutionary process.

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Anita: If life is meant to work, what about catastrophes such as what happened in Haiti, the death and destruction wasn’t the result of their limiting decisions.  It might be the result of limiting decisions of those that are causing global climate change.  We’re making decisions and other people are making decisions.  So possibly what happened is other people’s limiting decisions can have a limiting effect on us. Some people’s decisions can change the world.  They affect everybody. To take an attitude that everything one endures is as a result of one’s limiting belief is to imply that we are islands unto ourselves and are unaffected by what takes place around us.

A baby born with an arm protruding out of its back because of the depleted uranium dumped in Iraq by the Americans, has not created its own reality.  A 7 point earthquake that kills and harms huge numbers of people is not created by the limiting beliefs of those people.  The fact that the over-population, pathetic housing conditions, poverty and ignorance of the people is a condition of American foreign policy conditions … (Anita wrote a very long question, too long to include here, so this is just a small excerpt.)

Jane: You’ve asked a lot of good questions.  This is a large subject and central to the teachings in this 12-week course and can’t be comprehensively explained in this brief Q & A format.  So I’ll just answer some pieces of it.

Your limiting decisions only have to do with you.  And other people’s limiting decisions only have to do with them.  You are never controlled by someone outside of yourself. When you clear the limiting decision, you find that your life shifts, no matter what it is that others are doing.

The alternative perspective to this is a judgmental good-versus-evil perspective, which is one of the causes of the problem — not a solution.  This is the perspective that causes people to be in fear, feel they have to control each other, to believe that what they really want will be damaging to others, and all kinds of misconceptions that leads to people attacking each other in the name of defending themselves.  It causes people to be afraid of being who they really are, in their full power.

I know this can be hard to grasp.  That’s why it’s a 12-week course, because you have to really get into the specifics of how experience is formed in order to untangle this whole thing.

Even on a very direct, relatively benign personal level, limiting decisions appear to make life impossible, and so without really understanding how that works, it’s hard to understand it for more extreme and global situations.  The examples I gave in my introduction, about clients’ whose lives turned around from appearing to be impossible to being possible, give some insight into that.

The amazing thing to me is that, whatever the situation is, when you clear the limiting decisions that are at the root of the painful emotions that come up in the situation — when you clear them, your experience of reality does shift.

Yes, we are all affected by each other, but whether our response is an emotionally triggered one or not, is the issue.  A trigger means that your experience of reality is distorted because of limiting decisions in that area of life.  You can tell whether it’s a trigger or not according to whether your response is empowered and resourceful or not.

What your mind does with each piece of experience, the way it interprets the meaning of it determines whether you go toward solutions or in the opposite direction, regardless of what is happening in your external environment.

It’s probably not possible to understand events and circumstances such as the current disaster in Haiti, or a child being born deformed, outside of the perspective of a soul’s journey.  Facilitating, and therefore experiencing, the TimeLine process (a hypnotic NLP process) with many people who have gone back into past lifetimes has given me a valuable perspective on the human process in relation to these kinds of events.

I’ll give you a typical kind of example, of which I have had many similar ones.  Let’s say the limiting decision we’re working on is that the person is defective.  And in the person’s present here-and-now life, he has a learning disability, which has been limiting his possibilities in life.

In order to clear a limiting decision it’s necessary to go back to the very first event in which it was made.  So let’s say we are brought back to a past lifetime, to an event that even I can’t reframe into life is meant to work, because it appears completely impossible — such as being born without legs, and the only means of survival is to do work that requires walking.  I have learned that when that kind of thing occurs, it’s not the very first event in which the limiting decision was made.  And when we do get to the originating event, you can see where the person’s interpretation was flawed or limited in scope.  So, with the cooperation of his unconscious mind, we go back to an earlier lifetime, when he was a 2 year old child, and his parent expected him to be able to do a chore way beyond his development, and when he couldn’t, was abusive to him.  So we can see here the problem is the child believing the parent represented reality, not the actual circumstance.  And that can easily be reframed with help from me and their present-moment adult perspective.

The reason the person continued that limiting decision into following lifetimes — sometimes even escalating it, such as being born without legs — is because after the limiting decision is made in the originating event, the unconscious mind is invested in proving that it is true, and structures the person’s life experiences in order to prove it.  This affects what happens in following lifetimes.

However, when this limiting decision gets cleared, the person’s unconscious mind reconfigures itself and solutions to their present moment life dilemmas become apparent.  I’ve seen it happen over and over again.

Now the person going through these different experiences — sometimes extremely painful experiences — is a part of that person’s soul path.  But the evolutionary process is to move into increasingly greater alignment with universal truths and with life, in order to move each person toward empowerment, happiness and well-being — toward a state of enlightenment.  It’s a process based on love.  A major purpose of the 12-week course is to facilitate people moving into this greater alignment.

So this is just a brief response, with much left unexplained, to a deep, complex subject that the “Life is Meant to Work” course is set up to address in depth.

For information about the 12-week Life is Meant to Work Main Course,
and to Register, click here.

This is a part of the “Ask Jane” Series,
in which Jane answers questions
you email to her that of concern to you.

(Names are changed to protect your privacy.)

Just go to the “Contact Jane” page
and ask your question in the contact form.

(This was from Fellow Healer in New York who made this comment in the context of his description of an ex-girlfriend’s treatment of him, and also the way he observes people, including new age-type people, acting toward others.)

Fellow Healer: “… ACIM says the only sane response to our brother, even when they act out, is to love him. No holy book says lecture, scold, and runaway. No heart would say that either…. True self needs love too. It’s all one. When we love all in the trinity, then all flows. Now is the time to return to love. Love. Just love. Love is the secret!!!”

Jane: Yes, of course, the answer always comes down to love.  It’s certainly an important place to focus our attention, and it would be great if everyone could just decide on love and be there.  But getting to love is an evolutionary process (both on a personal, individual level, as well as on a human evolutionary level).  The path to love isn’t always obvious or straightforward.  Many things people think they do out of love are not really about love.

For instance, in your earlier email about you being “loyal” to the first girlfriend, therefore staying with that relationship (even though you knew it wasn’t right for you), and saying “no” to the second girlfriend (who you really wanted to be with) — it appears you felt you were doing this out of love or kindness to the first girlfriend.  But since it was not in truth, it was not in Divine order.  And it was not following enlightened self-interest.  And enlightened self-interest is an extremely necessary ingredient in order to be moving toward love.  (But that’s another whole subject altogether.) So it’s not necessarily that obvious or straightforward.  There are a lot of elements potentially involved.

The way to solve human hurt is to move toward clarity about what is really happening in reality.  Therefore there’s no getting around the fact that in order to eliminate your emotional pain, your personal transformation is required.  There is no short cut that will have a lasting result.

What questions or comments do you have?
Send it to “ASK JANE”
(Names are changed to protect your privacy.)

Just go to the “Contact Jane” page
and ask your question in the contact form.

Excerpts of comments from a fellow healer in New York, as a continuation of our dialogue:

“The core of the issue of trauma is that there are different levels of truth. On the cosmic level we are all responsible, we chose it, its our thoughts with the Law of Attraction, we are one with God and there are no victims and perpetrators, only love. … Yet, On the human level there are most definitely perpetrators and victims, and mental health professional, parole offices, probation officers, prison professionals, law enforcement, and a host of others deal with it every day to support order in our communities and to protect us from those so hurt and insane they are seeking to damage others. Trust, let go, and it all works out doesn’t work so well in the inner city. …Yes life is supposed to work, and God is good and there is beauty and angels everywhere. Yet, meanwhile back at the ranch, people like [my boyhood friend] by the millions are suffering and insane… And we need to support the new birth of the world of love. …Who really is so omnipotent that they can accurately assess someone’s dysfunctions, defense mechanisms, love the person, and take them back to their highest empowered self?  Even the finest PhD assessment experts I know can’t get it right, never mind you or I, or others using intuition, etc.  The whole army of mental health professionals do all they can to stop the bleeding but what really heals?  …  So what I have learned is … Is it not arrogant, narcissistic, and playing God to think we can truly do anything for another? … To me, ACIM work, shamanic-yoga energy work, 12 steps have been my best friends to clear the emotions and get my mind back on track.  The commonality is I let God or the Holy Spirit heal me.”

Jane’s Response:

“Even though you make reference to a new world that is being born, it seems to me you speak as if the human dilemma or condition is fixed, and always will be that way, rather than understanding we’re in an evolutionary process. And this process is requiring some radical reframes. It’s about a major paradigm shift for humanity — from life is not meant to work (which limiting decisions are all about), to life is meant to work — and from we are at the mercy of things external to us, to the source of our experience is internal and has to do with our alignment with divine truth.

And this is not happening on a separate plane from practical, physical reality. It’s what you find when you come into present moment experience, underneath the confusing camouflage of the emotional triggers. It appears to me you are really saying that the physical human experience is the true human reality, and it is separate from spiritual experience and truth. But there is only one reality experience when we are present in the here-and-now moment, which is where the dysfunction can be untangled, so that the unconscious mind can reconfigure itself and divine truth experience can be accessed. This is not new age pie in the sky. I agree there are many people in the new age community that are living in an illusion and are not grounded in truth. It’s very possibly a dynamic of avoiding what is really true, because of a belief that what is really true is negative.

What causes A Course in Miracles to be effective is that it causes a reframe of what reality is. That’s what the daily lessons are all about and why they are so transformational. In my experience the NLP TimeLine Therapy process is effective also because it causes a reframe of what reality is. It’s moving a person from holding in place a distorted experience of reality, to releasing that, and allowing what is actually true to reconfigure the unconscious mind, which then extends to conscious every day experience. But in order to facilitate the level of reframe necessary for significant change it’s necessary to hold in place a consistent spiritual knowing about the positive nature of life. When I was doing my NLP training with Tad James, I had already studied A Course in Miracles extensively, and I noticed NLP was amazingly congruent with A Course. And I asked Tad about it, and he said that to him NLP is a practical application of A Course in Miracles.

I have noticed in doing the TimeLine Therapy process, that with many people (whose limiting decisions originated in past lives or past generations), what often happens is it’s pretty apparent why the limiting decision the person made in that event was not in alignment with what was really happening at that moment. But then because the unconscious mind is invested in proving the limiting decision is true (which is just the way the unconscious mind works), the person continues to make choices and go down paths in that same or in following life times that dig them deeper and deeper into experiences that become overwhelming proofs to them that life is not meant to work, so that they become lost in it. This is why it’s necessary to get back to the very first event in which the decision was made, in order to clear it.

I have found that the very act of holding in place the foundational principle that life is meant to work, and reframing the interpretation of whatever the issue or problem or circumstance is from that perspective, allows information to come in that facilitates an untwisting of the dysfunctional dynamic, and it then becomes clear how life is, indeed, meant to work. I have followed that principle even when I personally couldn’t see how clearing a particular limiting decision, that represented the impossibility of life working for someone, could result in their life working in that area. And I’ve gone by that faith enough times, with consistently positive results, so that now I personally know this to be true.

Different people are called to contribute to humanity in whatever way they are most aligned, and they will attract those whom they can benefit. And what works for one person may not work for another. There is no right method. It’s a matter of finding the person or process that is in alignment with what you need and what your unconscious mind will cooperate with. I don’t claim to heal people, but I do claim to facilitate the clearing of limiting decisions, which prevent people from being in Divine truth. Facilitating clearing limiting decisions is a co-creative process between the client, myself, and a larger source (Life, the Divine, God, Spirit …). What heals is truth. What causes pain is the distortion of our experience of reality. There is no question in my mind and in the minds of the many people who have had significant life changes through this work, that removing the obstacles and distortions of experience does facilitate profound personal transformation and does release great pain that was being held in place by a distorted perception of reality.”

What questions do you have?
Send it to “ASK JANE”
(Names are changed to protect your privacy.)

Just go to the “Contact Jane” page and ask your question in the contact form.

Below is a comment from a fellow healer in New York about Jane’s response to Susan about healing past trauma’s.  For Susan’s original questions and Jane’s response, click here.

To me I would question the point that ‘trauma originates in limiting decisions’.  Child abuse and all forms of trauma abuse, kidnapping, rape, soldiers post traumatic stress, holocaust survivors etc. are not decisions.  Even though some come through these horrors better than others.  Traumas are insane unconscious behaviors of others causing shocking emotional disturbance in others that just plain hurt terribly.  Its a wound of heart and soul.  So, your answers feel sound to what you teach, but not very empathetic to the terrible hurt people have endured, karma, intrusions and other possibilities.  Eventually isn’t it the Holy Spirit, Empathy and love from God heals them, yes?  This is what ACIM, 12 step programs and most sound healing methods advocate.  At least this is my view.  Yours?  And possibly, to me at least, if the woman wants to press charges, if that is her truth, why discourage her.  I have found making amends and fighting, suing someone when needed, for what is right to be truly wonderful, when it my truth to do, Yes?

Jane’s Response:

Thanks for your response. You are representing a perspective that I’m sure many people share, and needs to be addressed.

Certainly we can empathize with the challenges human beings go through in their personal journeys in life. I’m all in favor of being loving and compassionate, but I believe it to be vitally important what aspect of the self is being supported. Are you supporting the truth of who the person really is, or are you supporting their limiting decisions, i.e. the mistaken idea of there being something inherently wrong with them and/or with the nature of life?

When I relate to Susan — in the immediate example — from a place of love, I am relating to the truth of who she really is. If she is holding in place a limiting decision, which is disempowering her — to the degree she’s doing that, her real self is being blocked from receiving the love. If I send the love to an unhealed issue in her, in the way she has it formed and locked in place, I’m upholding a dysfunctional construction she has of herself. I can compassionately understand and help untangle the dysfunctional structure, which is the construct of the self she has built up — and at the same time hold onto what I can grasp to be the true, empowered God-self I know that she must be. That is what my intention and focus is.

I’m not discouraging Susan from taking empowered action. I’m really not addressing what action she should take at all — although I realize that that was the focus of her question — because I don’t believe the action, in itself, to be the issue; and it shouldn’t be the focus. The action is only important in relation to the underlying impetus that is fueling it. If the impetus is dysfunctional, or serving a distorted or disempowered purpose, then it will probably not turn out well. And of course the same is true in the reverse.

Anything a person does from within a dysfunctional frame-of-reference only increases the reality of it. So if you fight somebody from within that negative frame-of-reference, then you are not healing it. You are just entrenching yourself further into it.

My perspective on what A Course in Miracles says is what enables the Holy Spirit and God (which I think of as a vibration) to heal is that that vibration holds in place the Divine truth of reality, as opposed to the illusion of the human experience in the physical world.

For clarity, I’ll call the person who is perceived as the victim, “the recipient,” and the person who is perceived as causing the trauma to the recipient as the “aggressor.” What causes the real harm in these traumatic events is the recipient taking on the distorted reality of the aggressor, as if the reality the aggressor brings with him/her describes the truth of reality. And from that point on, the recipient lives in that distorted reality. The recipient then carries that horrific reality on with him/her until she/he can break through to the untruth of it, into Divine truth, which is what A Course in Miracles would describe as a miracle. When a person is able to do that it is an amazing personal triumph and evolution of their soul.

Transcript Excerpts of Jane’s Teachings during the

“Shifting into Your New Consciousness” group experience 4/23/09
(Participants’ names have been changed to protect their privacy.)

(Janet said she has difficulty accepting what “A Course in Miracles” says about the world being meaningless.)

(To Janet) “It’s not that there isn’t any meaning. It’s that the meaning we generally give things has nothing to do with what they actually are. The way I interpret what the Course is talking about is basically when you’re in everyday life, for instance walking down the street and looking at another person — what people mostly do is make an assumption about what they are seeing before they actually see it. They decide what truth is before they experience it. And you can’t really know anything that way. You have to enter into a situation with your awareness open, allowing space to take in something new. In this case, you are opening a space for that person’s being to tell you who or what she/he is. And that’s what those exercises in the Course are about. I found them to be very transformational.

I think this is particularly difficult for you, because you are uncomfortable about not knowing in the first place, because it makes you feel perhaps stupid, or not respected, or not an authority, or not worthy, or whatever it is. There’s a very significant limiting decision in there that is causing you to not allow things to be what they are. And I think it’s also blocking you from a big gift you have. You have a quality of innocence. You come into a situation not knowing, which is exactly what the Course is asking you to do. You have the potential to understand things in a very new and unique way. That means you have something to offer from your beingness. But you don’t value that. Rather than allowing yourself to be in the position of not knowing, you try to get rid of that experience as if there is something wrong with it. This then causes you not to know, because you’re blocking the potential for knowing the depth of what’s really there that aligns with something larger than your limited egoic human self.

You could say each person has the potential to be a channel for specific vibrations, or knowledge, or possibilities in the universe, because of just the nature of who they are, or maybe because of what’s really important to them on a soul level. If you come into the situation with your channels open, you can receive information that other people can’t receive, because of who you are. But if you are trying to fill in the space right and left by giving opinions and asking questions and doing all of these things which you tend to do that controls things — if you impose something on what is external to you, without allowing it to speak to you, to tell you what is there — then you’re blocking yourself from receiving your connection with the divine, or your connection with the universe, or your connection with a larger source of knowing that can come just through you.”