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 question is from Jered in San Diego, CA (Real names are never used.)
Jered: As we all know, the head of BP Oil is being crucified in the press. From my perspective, his personal comments to the public and Congress are the sincere truth. His people are working around the clock to solve the problem. He goes home to the UK for personal family time and to get a few hours of fresh air. Certainly, his mind is preoccupied. Yet no matter what he does or says that is truthful – the public is unsatisfied. How does one handle these situations? It’s as though the truth is insufficient as compared to a carefully postured response.
Jane: We don’t really know the character of Tony Hayward, the CEO of BP, or really what responsibility he does or doesn’t hold for what occurred. But I agree that he may very well be saying the sincere truth, but that many people want a scapegoat. They want someone to emotionally pay for their suffering, as if that would make them feel better.
The whole idea of sharing the suffering seems to be very strong in people. If I am suffering, then you ought to be suffering also — or you don’t care, you are selfish, you are a bad person. But this has nothing to do with any real solutions, or any easing of human pain.
This is a triggered kind of emotional response, and not reality-based. Whether Mr. Hayward is outwardly suffering or not, has no actual benefit to anyone who is suffering because of the oil spill. It won’t have any effect on solutions being found any faster, or people getting compensated any faster.
People who are invested in finding scapegoats for their suffering are looking in the wrong direction for any real solutions, and are invested in holding in place vibrations of misery, hatred and pain. As a result, I would guess, this is only one of many sources of misery in their lives, as this is what they would attract.
To answer your question more directly, about how to handle this kind of situation: Rather than the focus being on how other people might respond to us, as if that is the source of our well-being, and trying to cater to them, the real dialog is between oneself and a larger perspective, beyond the limited human scope of things. In other words, specifically in relation to Mr. Hayward, I’m sure there are lessons for him to learn, or he wouldn’t have found himself in this kind of situation in the first place. For example it is possible that he might have an emotional defense system of keeping himself at a distance from getting emotionally or personally involved in general, believing that that will keep him safe. This experience could rock that defense system, and be a huge wake-up call for him. Perhaps if he had been more personally involved, he may have prevented what happened.
* Limiting Decisions: Unconscious decisions, usually made before the age of 6 or 7, such as “I am bad,” “I am not good enough.” “People can’t be trusted.” They are always some form of deciding that life doesn’t work, and usually that there is something inherently wrong with you.
If, when you are a child, a bucket falls and hits you on the head, it may physically hurt just the same as a sadistic school bully punching you in the face. The bucket scenario is just a physical event involving an inanimate object, with no trauma involved. Once it’s over it doesn’t exist anymore for you.
But, in the scenario with the bully, if this is the first event in which you have been confronted with this kind of experience, you may have made a limiting decision* (see definition below). And if you did, you have now locked in the fearful and disempowered interpretation of reality you have just made, based on how the bully’s sadistic emotions and intent affected you. Your feeling of disempowerment is based on taking on the bully’s defining of reality, the emotional energy he is putting out. This is what causes the trauma you end up feeling. You are letting another person define your experience of reality, rather than interpret your experience from within yourself, standing in your own present moment experience. You are confusing his physical impact on you, with his emotional influence. His physical power in relation to you is minor in comparison with the emotional power you have now given him.
The real danger is not the physical action someone might take that would be harmful to us, but it is the distorting of reality that is transferred, like a computer virus hidden within a Trojan horse. It is a defining of reality that represents for example — fear, hatred, division, conflict, pain, deception — everything that is the opposite of spiritual truth. And because this distorting of reality is non-physical, we always have the choice of whether to take it on or not. But it takes making the distinction between what is actually physically happening, and the emotional interpretation that we are attaching to it. It is the emotional interpretation that causes us to give our power away, and blind ourselves to what really is happening, and therefore walk toward harm. What I mean by walking toward harm, is putting yourself in energetic alignment with being a weak victim. Our emotional interpretation is what is doing the real damage.
*Limiting decision: A decision made in early childhood that is some form of that life doesn’t work, and usually that there is something inherently wrong with you — such as “I am powerless,” “bad,” “without value;” or “The world is a dangerous place,” “People can’t be trusted,” and so on.
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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.
(Names are changed to protect participants’ privacy.)
1/15/09
“A major focus coming up is that each person, as demonstrated by the particular people in this group, has particular gifts through which they can directly access what reality is. We are exploring what the particular avenues of expression are for each person. These are often areas that people have blocked, resulting in them leaning on other people to define what reality is.”
1/22/09 To Janet: “Just because I’m pointing out that you’re still not coming from your inner source, and we’re still working on it, doesn’t mean that you aren’t doing well. Where I’m trying to move you to is something that is a very high level of functioning.You could say it’s the main shift that humanity is moving toward.It’s moving from having your sense of reality defined by something outside of you, by a perceived authority as if it defines what is true — versus direct experience, directly coming from an internal plumb line, a place of being present and available in the present moment, and knowing what is true, which comes from, you could say, an open channel.When I know something is truth, it’s because I’m experiencing a channel that is open.
To Group in general: Anytime you think that anyone external to you can do something to you… for instance, all of you were seeing the fellow from Renee’s group as harming Renee.That’s a victim frame-of-reference.He was simply being him, displaying his (what appears to be) mostly unhealed issues.But the problem is you were taking his response as defining reality.
When you’re coming from your internal source, there’s a sense of grounding.If you’re feeling off-kilter, then you are probably not present in your experience.If you’re not present in your experience, then you don’t have any way to tell what’s true or not.
By definition Renee has to go off her center to get love because she has a limiting decision having to do with not being loveable.So she doesn’t have the channel open to receive love.If you have the channel open, you stay in your center and you receive it.But you’ve got that channel closed, you have to go outside of reality for love, and that’s where you’re trying to find it, outside of reality.You’re going outside of truth to get love, because you don’t think the truth is love.You think that love for you is not the truth.That’s the problem.
To Janet: (Janet had just described an interaction with her daughter in which her daughter had asked her to do something at the last minute that interfered with something else Janet had already planned to do.)
When you realized that you were going to be resentful if you did what your daughter asked of you, and you stood on that, knowing that that represented truth for you — you were doing a bigger favor to your daughter than if you had done the thing she had asked you to do, because you were representing reality to her.You were following the emotions in you that you knew to be true, that you knew you had to take seriously, because it represented truth for you, and you told that to her.Now she knows that she’s got a structure.You represented a structure that defines truth.That’s what I mean by your emotions being a vehicle for you to know what reality is.It’s a way that you have of accessing reality, so that when you get a true emotion coming through you, that you know is a defining signal for how you should respond, you’re giving every person that you are connected with in that moment, the gift of you, which helps them, (especially your child) orient and structure their life so they know what’s true.Rather than a child saying, “Oh I want this,” and then the mother jumping up and doing it, regardless of any reality foundation — if the mother does that, the child has no idea of what the real reality structure is.
To Group in general: It’s like there is an energetic flow that is happening outside of any person’s whim, or immediate response.There’s something that represents truth, that if you’re in tune with, you’ll listen to.It’s basically a guidance system.And then if you do what is indicated by it, that then makes you a leader.A leader is someone who is out there expressing his/her experience of reality, and people around them go “Boingggg!Look at that!I want more of that.”It’s like someone becomes a shinning star, expressing something, and people get attracted to them, because people are attracted to truth.“Oh, this person is representing something solid, something true, something that makes sense of things.What a gift, what a contribution!”
Each of you has something true, that represents your unique fix on reality and it comes out in whatever way it comes out.
To Janet: I was using you as the example because you’re so attuned to your emotions when you allow yourself to be.You fought them through your life, because you’ve seen them as putting you out of sync with other people.Whereas what your emotions were doing, really, was, representing what’s really reality.You were tuning in to something real.You didn’t know how to interpret it.And part of the healing process has been to get that clear for you.
To Group in general: And so each person has their own gift, their own piece of the puzzle that you are tuned in to.It seems that often people are resisting it.It’s an area in which people often are blocking because they think it makes them not fit in, or there’s something wrong with them.Your expressions and experiences are not the same as everyone else’s.But it is your personal and unique relationship with All-That-Is, the Divine, Truth… whatever you want to call it.Something you’re plugged into.”
