From the Life is Meant to Work Prepare yourself for a New Reality
teleseminar
A pivotal question at the bottom of how civilization has organized itself is “Is humanity inherently good, or is it bad, or is it simply weak and corruptible?” The bottom line way we define the answer to that has to do with what we believe people would do if they weren’t controlled. And that has to do with the issue of self-interest. If people are not controlled, or if they don’t control themselves, they will go toward their own self-interest. And so the issue then becomes how we perceive what self-interest is.
The idea that self-interest is bad, is based on the idea of original sin. In other words it is based on the idea that if people pursue what they desire, what really matters to them, including human desires, they will break Divine laws and will cause harm to others. But the problem here is not inherent in the nature of self-interest, but in how we conceive of what self-interest is.
When many religious perspectives or spiritual philosophies define human self-interest, they are actually defining human emotional defense systems, which get built up as a result of having made limiting decisions. And when they are advocating letting go of desires, this is also the framework they are referring to. People’s emotional defense systems result in them going toward substitutes for what they desire rather than the real thing. And these substitutes are generally harmful to oneself and others.
But humanity doesn’t live solely in their emotional defense systems, and we are in an evolutionary process through them. Desiring these symbolic substitutes is not the nature of humanity or human desire. People going toward these kinds of desires (that can often be addictive, and that we associate with shallowness, perversion or lacking in self-discipline) does not have to do with the inherent corruptibility or weakness of human beings, or the nature of human desires. Self-interest is inherent in any living creature. It’s not the self-interest that is the problem, it is the substitutes for it that are the problem. And the substitutes are created because of the denial of the real thing. The way to enlightenment is not a denial of our self-interest, or of our human experience, it is the recognition and embracing of the truth of what it is. It is coming into experience, not avoiding it — which means the difference between realizing that the nature of reality is positive, that if we come into what is true, it leads us to the highest good of all concerned.
On the one hand most of humanity doesn’t have any concept of the depth of the distortion of our perception of reality, and how much we are living and forming our perception of reality from an upside-down and insane perspective. But on the other hand, there is little concept of the inherent goodness of the human soul, that what the truth is about who we inherently are is total goodness, not in spite of our self-interest, but because of it. This is because what we really desire leads us to love, truth, connection, meaning, everything true and real. What it is human beings truly desire is a part of the truth of the universe. It is beyond any false persona or egoic self. It is what can bring us out of the perception of the limited physical world we were born into, in which we forgot who we are beyond the physical experience.
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.
Question from Fiona in Oceanside
From Laura in Del Mar
Laura: I’m in a really great relationship with a man now, and things are going really well. But I keep feeling afraid something will go wrong, and he will end up leaving. I’m concerned that because of that I’ll try to control things and that will actually cause him to leave. Any advice?
Jane: Many people in relationships believe their happiness and well-being depend on having that special person to fulfill their lives. They have this internal image of what he or she will look like and be like. And they have this belief that everything will be alright when they have this person. But this is not where the source of well-being is, and any form of trying to make something outside of yourself the source of anything that really matters to you is eventually doomed to fail.
So let’s look at what it is you really want. Perhaps it is love, emotional nourishment, connection, security… The source of those things is not specific people. If you don’t have those in your life it is because you don’t have the emotional channels open to receive them. Limiting decisions, such as you are not loved, you are not safe, you need a man to take care of you, you are not valuable, and so on, will cause you to have the channels closed to receiving love, a sense of your value, feeling safe in the world, etc.
The universe is filled with resources, but they may not come in the form or direction you expect them to come in or from. When you are receiving what really matters to you, you are receiving it from the universe, through some vehicle, such as a particular person in your life. The source is the universe (or Life, the Divine, or however you conceive of it).
When you try to make it a specific person, you are putting huge weight and pressure on that person, and basically end up trying to control them. This may give you a sense of panic, because the truth is you can’t control that person. And you also can’t control the universe. What you can control is finding out what channels in you are closed that are causing you not to receive what really matters to you, and finding a way to open them up. This means clearing the limiting decisions that are closing the channels. One method for doing that is the NLP TimeLine process.
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.
Our perception of reality is how we interpret our experiences in life, and how we have order in it. It is the foundation we build our life upon. It determines where we believe our source of safety, survival and well-being comes from. It is the basis on which we make decisions, determining the kind of life we live, and what the possibilities are for us. It affects whether we go toward or away from solutions, resources, survival and well-being. It’s the very ground we’re standing on.
There are certain cornerstones about the nature of reality that humanity in general holds in place that are out of alignment with larger truth. These cornerstones are what the problems humanity faces are based upon. And even many of those who have expanded their consciousness beyond that limited perspective — when it comes down to what their lives depend upon — are really standing on the old foundation for their reality.
To most people their perception of reality just is what is, and they don’t question the truth of it. But our perception of reality is, in fact, very subjective and changeable. There are many more bits of information that are bombarding our senses every moment than we can possibly take in. We filter out most of it. What bits of reality we take in, and what we filter out, is very subjective.
Perceptions of reality are held in place by individuals, by families and other kinds of groups, by countries, on up to the global human experience. The more people holding a perception of reality in place, the more real the perception appears to be. But that has nothing to do with the truth of the perception.
The thought system I will be teaching in the “Life is Meant to Work” webinar, shifts the old reality perceptions to be in alignment with larger truths.
The world as we know it is rapidly changing. The old structures and ways of participating, functioning, surviving, and prospering, that we have relied upon in the past, are rapidly becoming obsolete. This course will help you make sense of a world that no longer makes sense in the old frames-of-reference.
In this webinar Jane Ilene Cohen, Intuitive & Transformational Counselor, Author, Writer and Visionary unveils a totally positive thought system, developed through the work with her clients over the past 14 years. This thought system is what has enabled her to facilitate profound life changes, reversing their experience of life not working. At the center of it is the principle Life is Meant to Work. This thought system explains what causes your life to not work. It profoundly shifts your experience of reality, allowing your life to come into its full expression of abundance and well-being.
You’ll learn:
How your perceptions of reality get distorted, putting you out of alignment with larger universal truths, causing life to appear to not work.
How this relates to the individual and global crises we are in the midst of.
A new thought system that re-orients your experience of reality to be in alignment with life and universal truths, facilitating your awakening into a more conscious, creative, and abundant life of well-being .
How to become aligned with the evolutionary process, which is pushing humanity into a more evolved perception of reality — so that your personal transition into it will be an easier, more harmonious process.
This webinar is taught in three parts: the free introduction (begins 1/11), the pre-course (begins 1/19), and the main course (begins 2/2).Free Introduction:
Free Introduction:
In the free introduction, Jane will be interviewed by Mo Bailey about the positive new thought system she will be teaching in the Webinar. You’ll get an overview of what this course is about.
When you sign up for this free introduction, you’ll also receive Jane’s list of “The Top 10 Reasons Relationships Fail.”
This 2-week class on Tuesdays or Wednesdays is the prerequisite for the 12- week main course. In it you will learn how your perceptions of reality get distorted, putting you out of alignment with larger universal truths, causing life to appear to not work; and how this relates to the individual and global crises we are in the midst of.
When you register for the Pre-Course you will also receive Jane’s list of “The 10 Most Common Limiting Decisions People Make.”
This is the main 12-week course. See the above initial description for a summary of this course. When you sign up you will also receive Jane’s list of the “Top 10 Attributes of an Evolved Leader.”
The Pre-course is the prerequisite for taking this course. If you miss it, you can sign up for the audio recording, which will be available by Jan. 28th. If you miss the free introduction, the audio will be available by Jan. 14th.
Transcript Excerpt of Jane’s Teachings
during Janine’s NLP Timeline Session 10-27-09
(Client’s name is changed to protect her privacy)
(Janine is in a career transition. She’s been a nurse for a long time, and is exploring other possibilities. She enjoys doing energy healing with people, but hasn’t tried to earn a living doing it, because she’s had limited success with the results.)
“The heart of the matter is the issue here for anything you’re trying to do, healing, whatever. In order to come into the heart of the matter, it takes faith in reality. It takes faith that what is really true, works, that there is a solution that can be found in what is really true.
What I’m talking about is different than the usual paradigm about faith. It has to do with walking into the unknown and being willing to see/experience what’s there. In a sense it has to do with faith because, it takes courage to walk into the unknown if you don’t already know what’s there. So it’s faith that it will be positive. But then it is looking at what’s actually there. It is walking into the center of experience, and looking at, and listening to and feeling what it is. This is, perhaps, scarier than the traditional idea of faith, where you don’t necessarily find out how things actually are. You just trust they are or will be good. You hope and pray that they will work. It’s not about walking into the unknown and opening your eyes, and seeing what’s there.
In day-to-day life, people put emotional defense systems up so they can avoid present moment reality, because they’re afraid that the truth is somehow against them, as represented by the limiting decisions* they have made. In the group process**, we move through the defense systems, which puts a person smack dab in the middle of their limiting decision*, where they get to find out what the truth is. And of course limiting decisions* are never true, so that’s what shows up.
So the faith involved, in that case, is to let go of the control in order to find out what the truth is. But once you’re facing the truth, you see what’s there. So it is not blind faith. That’s what coming into the heart of the matter is. You find out what’s actually there.
So it’s a further evolutionary step beyond faith. The less evolved concept is to just have blind faith. This new paradigm about faith is more empowered. It is having the faith to look at what’s true, and then you experience what is actually there. Now, if it weren’t true that life is meant to work; if it weren’t true that it is a benign universe; if it weren’t true that the divine is for you, not against you; then, from the human perspective, it might not be a good idea to experience what is actually there. It might be better to stay in blind faith. But since the truth is it is a benign universe, it is limiting decisions* that keep people wanting to be in the lala land of blind faith, and not wanting to step into the heart of the matter, the present moment, and experience what’s actually there.”
(Janine is saying that she believes that the way God originally created His creations was meant to work. And then it got corrupted, because once the creations were created, they were then on their own. So God created a perfect world, and then left it up to nature and humanity, as to what happens next.)
“Getting to the heart of the matter is what the most obvious thing in any situation is, by definition. But it’s extraordinarily difficult to get to in a lot of cases. Something that would be so obvious, for some reason, is extremely difficult to get to. There’s a human block against doing that. And we need to get to the bottom of why you, in particular, don’t do that. You think in terms of theories and explanations of why this and why that.
Mental theories or concepts for understanding how things work are not the same thing as coming into present here-and-now experience, and seeing what’s actually there. Your concept that once a creation of God is created, it’s on its own — is of a creator that is limited. A limitless Creator is in every cell and every vibration and every aspect of all that is. That would be an all inclusive definition of Creator or Divine, which is not how you are conceiving of it.
What I’m trying to get to is what will enable you to know that it’s safe to come into the present moment, into the heart of the matter — rather than believing that when you actually get to the bottommost reality of things, it won’t work, which seems to be where you’re at. When it comes down to it, you believe it just doesn’t work. You believe that people (the creation) are on their own, that it’s like a crap shoot. Therefore you don’t want to see what’s really there, and that keeps you from being grounded in the present moment, which then limits your ability to be an effective healer.”
(The next step for Janine will be to clarify what the limiting decision is that is causing her to avoid the heart of the matter, and do a Timeline Process to clear it.)
* Limiting decisions are negative decisions made unconsciously in early childhood, such as “I am bad, not valuable, stupid…” For a more complete description of limiting decisions, click here.
** “Group Process” refers to the “Shifting into Your New Consciousness” transformational group. For more information about the group, click here.
(Participant’s name is changed to protect her privacy.)
(To Laura) “You have a distorted idea of what women’s relationship with men are, or women’s value in relation to men, or just the nature of how men are. It’s an old paradigm that has been pretty widespread, but it seems to be stronger in certain cultures. There is probably some impossibility that you see in relation to relationships with men, based on what your father was like, on what the whole male-female culture was like in your culture, the way your mother related to your father — the whole macho thing, the whole man is to be worshiped kind of thing. But it’s not something that’s really tolerable, especially to a woman who has outgrown it. You have outgrown that old paradigm. You can’t go backwards. You’re too much in your power. If you have limiting decisions holding that structure in place, then you wouldn’t have a concept that it’s possible to have a relationship with a man that’s different. There are men who don’t fall in that category that aren’t like that. There are men who are emotionally available. There are men that don’t demand to be treated like they’re the center of the universe. This is not inherent in the nature of men. This is the nature of your limiting decisions based on cultural limiting decisions. And so until you clear those, you’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. You know that it doesn’t work for you, but you don’t really know, on an unconscious level, that there’s an alternative.
This old paradigm is actually just as hard on men as it is on women, because it’s a huge burden the men have to carry. In this paradigm the man has to be the one in power, and has to be the strong one, and has to support everybody, and bring in the money, etc. I had a client who was from Italy and he told me, in the Italian culture, the father has to buy a house for each of his children. It’s just a huge burden. And if the man doesn’t do those things a man is supposed to do, he’s not considered a man, and he doesn’t feel good about himself. And the women think he’s not a man if he’s not this macho guy. So that puts you in a bind, because you think that men who act like this, you don’t really want to be with them on the one hand; but if they don’t act like this, you don’t have respect for them.
The whole paradigm is not in relation to truth. It’s not in relation to the way people really are. It’s not in relation to how men really are. It’s not in relation to how women really are. It’s not in relation to the real dynamics between them, so it doesn’t really work. It only works when people force themselves into a mold, which means they have to repress and disempower themselves. And eventually when people evolve past that, where they can’t stand it any more, that whole form of relationship starts falling apart. And you’re right in the midst of that, so you have to heal those issues in order for you to be able to be in a relationship with a man that will work for you, because you can’t force yourself into the old mold any more. You’ve gone too far.
If you have to be a lesser power in relation to men, that means you can’t be fully in your power. But you’re a powerful woman, and if you really stood where you are, that would be obvious. And you keep giving your power away, by trying to be something you think men will want. But when I look at you, I see so much value just in who you are, without you doing any of that stuff. And if you were to function out of that, you would be in your strength and you would be directly relating to life and to people from that direct experience. So there’s some switch in there that needs to happen, allowing yourself to be fully in your power.
Giving your power away is the same thing as giving yourself away. It means rather than you being there in your experience, defining your reality, you are forfeiting it to the other person. It’s you letting them define reality. So instead of you being out there seeing this, doing this, whatever — you now are looking at them as if they’re supposed to define reality for you, and they’re supposed to tell you whether you’re valuable or not. So rather than directly engaging in life, you let go of your perceptions. You let go of what’s important to you. You let go of what you value. And instead you’re valuing what they think of you, rather than valuing life, or whatever you’re engaged in.”
(Clients’ names are changed to protect their privacy.)
(Paul is describing his unusual work situation in which he works two weeks straight and then comes home for two weeks. During the work weeks, he lives and works with his fellow workers. Paul described that he tends to start saying all kind of emotionally vulnerable things when he’s at work, which he’d rather not do, as there can be all kinds of backlash from people, who will use it against him, i.e. “office politics.” There is one older man that he tends to talk to a lot and ends up saying way too much. He can tell that the man doesn’t approve of him doing that and that it makes him feel uncomfortable.)
“This work situation seems ripe for some shift that could make it livable, rather than ‘Now this is work and I have to cut off my feelings. I have to pretend I don’t need anything.’ This is half your life, and it’s half of their life too. To do that would require a change in paradigms, from an old paradigm to a new paradigm of what work is about. There’s particular construct about the way people are supposed to behave in this particular kind of situation, in terms of what they can reveal and what you are supposed to say. The fellow that you’re referring to that you bounce things off of — he holds a particular frame-of-reference of what he thinks is proper behavior, and you don’t fit too well into that behavior. And so you’re representing a different construct. And your construct is challenging him and making him feel uncomfortable. You’ve been thinking that means you shouldn’t do that, and that he’s right to disapprove. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that. Why do you think his perception of things is any more valid than yours? You may be participating in transforming the whole situation.
Before coming into the group, you mentioned that revealing your emotions in a group was a challenge for you, because the real stuff going on feels very private and you’re not used to sharing it with other people. There’s a limiting decision in there. We’ll get to it in the individual sessions, which will then change the whole framework of how you’re perceiving it when your emotions start coming out like that. It’s going to have a different meaning for you. It won’t be something that you feel you have to guard against. And then you’ll be even more participating in the positive transformation of that whole work situation, which seems really ripe for some good stuff to happen in that regard.
The whole office culture and the whole way people have defined what work is, what is appropriate and what is not appropriate, and the way bosses and workers are in relation to each other, is a human construct. And it’s been evolving from inhuman to more and more human, which actually translates to more and more productive.”
(Rita said maybe this particular place isn’t the first place to try this out on.)
(To Rita) “This is a perfect place to start, because when people are stuck in close quarters morning, noon and night, it’s a pressure cooker, in which it’s harder to repress your needs. It’s more likely to get changes happening there than when you only have to be at work for a few hours and then you can leave and go home. There are probably a lot more possibilities for transformation, for changing that construct, than people recognize.
You’ve often worked in male fields and you see the workplace as a men’s world. They’re the ones that get promoted, they’re the ones that get paid attention to, and they succeed before you do, because they are men. And so for you, the men have the power and are determining how things are. Now there’s something mistaken in there. And when you change, when the limiting decisions related to that get cleared in you, you’re going to not see the situation in such a powerless way, and you will be able to see how you can be there more fully with yourself, and with your worth.”
(To Paul) “When you’re in that work situation, it feels as though this is the world, this is the Universe, this is just the way it is, and these are the rules, and these are the roles, and these are the way things are supposed to be. But that is really just a construct. There is a larger reality outside of that that isn’t a construct and that represents truth. It represents the way things really are on a deeper level. Once you start accessing that larger reality, that starts opening the door to something beyond this controlled construct. If you start transforming the issues in you that are keeping you stuck in the way you relate to that situation, you will find that solutions emerge that you wouldn’t have thought of before, and you then can become a channel or a catalyst for bringing in a larger reality than this small limited construct. The fear is probably that if things aren’t in control in a certain way, they won’t work, or something will fall apart or something bad will happen. And that is not the way life really works. If you are allowing in truth, there is a way to make it better, beyond that limited way of looking at things.
There is some limiting decision that you have about revealing and expressing your emotions, and that is affecting the situations you find yourself in in your life, including your work situation. So as you start transforming, and the limiting decisions in you get cleared so they are no longer limiting you, then whatever situation you’re in, you’ll be in your emotions in a completely different way.
Our experience of reality is very malleable, and each person here is representing a particular paradigm of reality that you are broadcasting wherever you go. And so when you shift that relationship with your emotions, you’ll be having a completely different impact, you’ll be having a completely different influence on the world around you.”
Overview: Janine is struggling with frequent feelings of overwhelm when she tries to function at work or just daily life. It seems to come from an imagined pressure of a time constraint. On her mother’s side of the family, at least 3 generations back, the women had nervous breakdowns from having to do too much work.
Transcript Excerpt of Jane’s Teachings, in the process of getting to what the limiting decision was that needed to be cleared: “Part of the problem seems to be you feel very disconnected from the world that is external to you. If you’re disconnected, dealing with the world can feel overwhelming. It appears to me that you feel disconnected because you think there is no way to participate from your true self, so you have to be disconnected from yourself in order to relate to it. The limiting decision probably has to do with how you interpret this external structure that you feel disconnected from.”
(Janine was saying she has to come out of her inner world in order to be with it.)
“This is where the misconception is. This is not truth. The limiting decision may be that there is a separation between you and the external world. Believing that means that you are not having the influence that you’re meant to have on the common world that we’re all experiencing.”
(Janine is saying that’s been her experience that she doesn’t have much influence.)
“Perhaps this is about bringing the feminine as a presence into common experience. You and your mother, and grandmother, and generations of woman back, have not felt they had a right to exist in the world, to be a presence in this world, as if the world belonged to the male principle, and that the world couldn’t be influenced and configured and reshaped from the female influence. It is time for female influence to be integrated into the human experience. It’s time for your influence to be integrated into the human experience. The old paradigm is that the common world is men’s domain. They shape and they rule it, and they are supposed to protect the women, but it’s their world. In past eras woman couldn’t have too much impact or they’d be killed. They were considered to be witches. They were considered to be some blasphemous unnatural force. Your influence in the world will come when you are allowing your presence to be a creative force. This means that you are allowing yourself to enter into this very malleable, mutable common world — whatever this shared ether is that we are all in — in which every time a person moves they are influencing the shape of the whole. And this is what we need to get to the bottom of, why you don’t enter into this.
You think you are being present, and for some reason people just don’t respond to you. But people don’t respond to you because you are not being present. So now we have to get to why you’re not. Now we’re trying to figure out why you don’t enter into the mix and therefore don’t have influence.”
(Janine was saying that what resonates with her is that no one wants her there.)
“And the difference between that and how I’m seeing it is, and that you are there. It’s like someone saying this piece of the Divine, we’ll either welcome it or not — whereas it is I Am. We’re talking about I Am Presence. And the female principle is a part of the I Am Presence, but doesn’t know it, or has been withholding it for some reason, as if it is not really a part of it. It’s responding as though there’s a choice if it is not welcomed in. And so the mistaken idea is that the female presence is not a part of universal experience, that it is somehow separate from the common experience. The idea is that this is the territory of the male, that the male is supposed to influence this level of experience, and the female is supposed to be under the male, or supposed to be in a different realm. That the sky, or the ether, or the air, or the medium that we’re all living in is the male province, and that the female presence is not a part of the common experience. But the female presence is a part of the I Am, and so it’s not a matter of getting permission. She is there. But there’s a denial of that. There’s an ignoring of the truth of that. And why is that? That’s the question. Why is it that the female feels she has to ask permission to exist, and that she has to focus on the male, with the male being at the center of the universe? What is the decision that is perpetrating this misconception, ignoring the I Am Presence of the feminine? One of the long-standing male-female principles is that the male dominates and the woman is submissive, as a defining way of male-female, as a part of the sexual attraction.
From what you said, your father wanted to be in control and he wanted to shape things. He ruled the family. He wanted things to be in his own image, which is the old paradigm of God. God made things in his own image, and God is always thought of as male in mainstream religious thought. The whole religious frame-of-reference always is that the male dominates and is God. The male is the creator. And the male power should not be questioned. There’s no sense that the female is a part of the I Am Presence. Both male and female have held in place the old paradigm that the male is the I Am, not the idea that the male and female are the I Am. The female has to ask permission of the male.
So the issue is can a woman, living from the heart, shape the world. When you step out of your room in the morning, and you walk across the room, are you creating a heart-wake? And do you create the way things are supposed to be done, based on your female presence, your female heart presence? Are you being creator? And why not? There is no sense from you that it is your birth right. There’s no sense that you are I Am. That’s what we need to get to.
When you are in your heart out in the world, you are not standing in your presence. You are acting as if you are entering the presence of something else, as if you’re a visitor. There is some way that you don’t give yourself permission to be the ground, to be the air, to be the medium that we all live in. You don’t give yourself permission to be I Am. This is the evolutionary process we are engaged in.”
(Participants’ names are changed to protect their privacy.)
(Anita said at the beginning of the group that she is feeling lost. She doesn’t know where she is, and that this is very painful to her. When Jane asked why that was painful, Anita said you have to know what you’re doing at all times, and that’s how you steer the boat.)
“And that’s in a very specific old paradigm in which there is a very specific way that a responsible human being is supposed to go through this life — what they accomplish, what they’re responsible for, how they act, how they appear to others, their relationship with their job or career. There’s a whole set things, which is a complete construct, and has nothing to do with reality. It’s what causes people to go into despair in middle age. It’s called mid-life crisis when a person realizes that this whole construct they’ve devoted their life to is meaningless, and has nothing to do with reality.
Being lost is standing in the question. From that place you can find out what’s actually there. It has nothing to do with this whole scenario that you were just describing, because in that place where you think you know what you are doing — where you are steering the boat based on some construct passed down through the generations, having nothing to do with direct personal experience of life — you never find out truth. It’s a place where nothing meaningful can happen. You are in a much better place when you feel lost and are standing in the question than having mastery over an old construct. That’s really lost.
It’s perhaps the guilt or rebellion of feeling as though you have to be doing this old set way of doing things, but not doing it, that keeps you stuck in the power-struggle about it. That’s my guess, because one thing I’ve been noticing, is that even when you are in a place of pain, maybe especially when you’re in pain, you have an opposite expression on your face. You look like there’s an inner joke going on. My guess is that it’s almost like an adolescent rebelling against this external thing you’re supposed to be doing, and you’ll be damned if you will do it. You’re saying f-u. And that f-u is keeping you stuck. You don’t trust enough what you really want to do, and standing in the question and really looking and looking at your situation and following your inner guidance. You don’t trust that. You think it’s wrong and bad and something to feel guilty about. You’re always imagining this external voice that you’re supposed to be doing this or that, and you’re rebelling against it, and so you’re stuck. You can’t go one way or the other with it.
The old concepts and the old paradigms of how reality gets defined, has nothing to do with what’s true. It has to do with people imposing human constructs on their experience. And it’s people leaning on other people’s constructs to define reality. And that’s not how reality is defined at all. Reality has to do with truth, and it has to do with your own personal inner experience. And when you are out there with your own personal experience, that has a large effect on everyone around you — not because you’re imposing something or making someone be some way. It is the expression of what’s true. And what’s true rings true, and is extremely powerful. As soon as you’re aligned with anything that’s true, it then becomes aligned with a larger reality, and then you are adding to creation.”
