Transformational Teachings from Counselor Jane Ilene Cohen

Transcript Excerpt of Jane’s Teachings
during the “Shifting into your New Consciousness” group 7-30-09

(Participants’ names are changed to protect their privacy.)

(To Chas) “The way it works is after you made the limiting decision that who you are is unacceptable, you then built up a false persona that is what you considered to be acceptable to the people you wanted to be acceptable to.  These will be people similar to the original significant people in your life you made the liming decision in relation to.  Those are then the kind of people who you will attract.  You will attract people who are attracted to the false persona, not who you really are.  And then if you try to relate to those people with your real self, they’re probably not going to have a positive response to you, because they fit a whole scenario in which the real you is not acceptable, so that’s how they’re going to respond to you. You’re selecting people who will respond positively, perhaps, to the substitute persona that you set up, depending upon what the structure is that the limiting decision is formed around.  So as you start changing, and becoming more of who you are, you are very likely to find that the people you attracted with the false persona don’t fit you any more. But you’re also more likely to be open to people who actually like you.  I think everybody in this group really likes you.”

… “It’s similar to what I have said to Janet many times before, because both of you are very emotionally vulnerable.  Your real strength probably has to do with you coming into your vulnerable emotions and accepting them, stepping into them. And this is a foundation from which to build whatever you want to build, whether it’s your law practice, or your relationships with you family, or whatever it is.  It’s where your gifts and strengths are.  You probably don’t realize the power of your vulnerable emotions.

(To Janet) To you, if it comes from male logic, you think that’s the only way you’ll have the right to make waves, or the only way you’ll be taken seriously.  Then you have the right to have an influence in the world.  But that’s not the way you’re going to make waves.  You are going to make waves with the power of your emotions, because that’s where your strength is.  Emotions are very powerful, and you may be afraid of that.  And it will have an influence, and you may be afraid of that.  What you just said is you’ll be held to a higher level of conduct, and I think that’s what you could be afraid of.  You have said before that once you start getting into your passion, what it is that you want, you’re afraid you going to be like a dictator, and make things all the way you want.  And this perhaps relates in some indirect way, to a higher standard of conduct.  There’s some misconception that’s in the mix of this, that’s confusing the matter for you.

What is also the mix, which it might also be important to you, Chas, is enlightened self-interest.  It’s a very important concept.  When we’re talking about power and we’re talking about what matters to you. When we’re taking about your passion, and about really getting out there in your power — then the issue of self-interest comes into the picture.  It’s important to understand the distinction between self-interest as a defense system, which is what selfishness is — and enlightened self-interest, which is what really matters to you, and which is in alignment with life, the universe.  If it really matters to you, then that is the truth.  It either matters to you, or it doesn’t matter to you. That’s just a fact.  So that makes it a part of larger truth.  If you make the limiting decision that you can’t have what matters to you, whether it’s love, or acceptance, or being valuable, that’s where things get confused.  Generally before you make the limiting decision having these things are not an issue.  You just go toward what makes you happy, what matters to you. But after you make the limiting decision, for instance, that you’re not valuable, then being valuable becomes an issue.  Since you then don’t think you’re valuable, then you do symbolic things that make you feel you are valuable, such as buy an expensive house or car, whether or not you can really afford it.  So people go for these symbolic things.  But these symbolic things are not what really matters to you.  People think, ‘Oh I want this, I want that, I want that, and that’s self-interest.’  But that’s not what enlightened self-interest is.  Enlightened self-interest is the real thing, not the symbol.  If you’re going for the real thing, then it can only have a positive influence on everyone and every thing, because it’s in Divine order.  It is truth. It is the way things really are.  But when you’re going for something that is a symbolic substitute, and not what you really want, then it comes from a blocked and distorted perspective, and that puts you out of alignment with truth. And then somewhere down the line, it’s going to not turn out well, because it’s not in alignment with truth.”

From Highlights of Cherrie’s NLP TimeLine Therapy Session 7-17-09

Overview:
Cherrie has been going back and forth about whether she should sell her house or not for the past several months. She hasn’t wanted to let it go, but she really can’t afford to keep it. It is a very large, beautiful house in Solana Beach. She’s gone over the pros and cons many times. Selling it has felt to her like going backwards, as she felt it was a great accomplishment for her to have been able to buy it in the first place. But she’s in debt and the house payments are a huge burden that’s causing her a lot of stress to come up with the payments each month. She’s concerned she may eventually end up losing her house to foreclosure. She’s also having difficulty in her business. Things aren’t going well with her business partner, and she’s not wanting the stress of keeping on coming up with the funds to fulfill orders for her business, on top of her other financial burdens. She’d much rather work for other distributors and let go of his burden. If she sold her house, she could pay off all her debts and get back on her feet.

Cherrie said she was afraid of the new identity of not having her house and business. They make her feel successful. They give her the status of being successful. Without them she feels not confident, insecure.

Transcript Excerpt of Jane’s Teachings: “The different back and forth arguments about whether you should sell your house or not — such as maybe you’ll never find another house like it — all of those different things that are maybe and maybe not, you could keep going back and forth about, but it’s hard to get a sense of what you really should do. The thing about your fear of foreclosure and your other worries, those are all human reasonings and human machinations. Depending on your perspective, selling the house could be a good idea, it could not be a good idea.

But when we get to the core, as we’ve just gotten to, then it gets much clearer what the real purpose and meaning of the house is, and therefore what you should do. We are finally seeing what the symbolism of the house is for you. And it is detrimental to you. It is holding in place a façade of status. It is holding in place an untruth, and that is why it ends up being a burden. It is something that is going against your higher self. It is pulling your energy and your resources, and holding together something that is really not benefiting you. That makes it much clearer that you really should give it up. You can always in the future buy another house, if that’s what you want to do, once you get yourself in the flow of life again, so that you are truly successful, from a good basis. But now that it’s become clear that the reason you’re holding on to the house is for a reason that doesn’t benefit you, it makes it clear that you should take action about giving it up.

About the subject of status: I’ve done many TimeLines, going into past lives with people. Often what happens is that generations of people find themselves in very poor circumstances, in which they are looked down upon by other people, and they feel not worthy of respect. Basically they feel like trash, like they are no good, and they make the limiting decision that they are worthless. And then somehow through the generations they start making more money and they can afford the symbols of status, which then to them means they have risen above their roots. But there is still the limiting decision in there that they are trash. So then they are leaning on the outward trappings to hide behind as the façade. And then they use it as a wall to separate themselves from other people so they’ll never be seen through as the trash that they believe themselves to be. And then they use their status to put other people down, and separate themselves from others that they view as trash, who symbolize themselves.”

(Cherrie said she came from a blue collar social position, and she succeeded and got all of the way up to owning a house in Solana Beach, and now she’s fallen back.)

“And the reason is you still believe you’re not as good as other people. And having the house won’t change that. Therefore it takes huge, massive energy, to keep pumping yourself up to get and maintain a house in Solana Beach, because you really believe you’re not good enough to have something like that. You’re fighting against an unconscious decision about who you really are. And so we’ve got to change the unconscious decision.

In this dysfunctional framework, what’s considered to be a valuable person is to have a good façade, and then you have to hold that façade up. So if you come from a family where the real thing doesn’t seem to be possible, the best you can do is get the façade of status. And then you convince yourself that the façade is who you are. And then you feel obliged to hold it in place, and do all of the things that that symbol would do. You grow up thinking you ought to be able to maintain that. So then what’s considered as an accomplished person is a person who can hold up the symbols of status. Then there are so many machinations around that, such as putting all kinds of weight on appearance — you have to always appear this way and this way in public. And this is the way you are supposed to act when you have company, and if you don’t, it’s really horrible. It means you’ve really failed in your duty to uphold this façade, and you just don’t make it as a human being. As a child, if you didn’t do the façade correctly, then it brought shame to the whole family, because it would reveal what your real roots were. And so it’s your duty to uphold this façade, and to succeed at it. And so there are generations upon generations upholding this façade, in order to uphold the honor of the family.

But there’s no thought of the possibility of actually being a worthy person accomplishing what really matters to you out in the world, because there is a limiting decision underneath it that you’re simply not as good as other people. That’s just the ground basis that’s underneath the whole thing.”

The limiting decision Cherrie cleared in the TimeLine process: “She’s not as good as other people.”
The first event in which she made the decisions: Two lifetimes ago. She is a beautiful woman. She is not going to be able to go to a big event because she is a peasant. It was an event celebrating the castle’s victory over another castle they had fought a war with. So she dressed up like royalty and snuck in. But she was caught and they burned her face, so that she was no longer beautiful. She then felt she had lost everything, because she didn’t even have her beauty left, because she had tried to get into a place that she wasn’t good enough for.

Transcript Excerpt of Jane’s teachings during the TimeLine Process: “What I see is there’s a drama being played out here, a human construct about what constitutes value. The whole purpose of the event was it was a victory event of one group of people having a victory over another, as if that’s what the human relationship is supposed to be. ‘Me against you, my needs against your needs. I’m better than you, I have more power than you.’ It’s against true human nature, it’s against love, it’s against coming together and really enjoying each other, and really being nourished and loved. It’s a human construct, one of the different machinations that humanity goes through in it’s evolutionary process. If you look at that situation from a larger perspective, you can see that none of it had to do with any real value or any real benefit. If you were included in this scene, in which people were gloating over having won over other people, and in which people were in the costumes of their status, and pretending to be this and pretending to be that — what value is there really? What benefit do you really get from a scene like that, except to try to pretend that you’re something that you don’t believe you are. So that goal, instead of building value, is building a façade that is not feeding your actual value. You’re abandoning your value, and so therefore you can’t build on or evolve it to develop the magnificence that’s actually you, because you’re walking in the wrong direction.”

Transcript Excerpt of Jane’s Teaching after the TimeLine Process: “You selling your house at this point has nothing to do with any kind of failure on your part. It has to do with you being ready for another step in your soul development. You are ready now to give up the symbolism the house held for you that has been holding you back. You selling your house is a step forward, not a step backwards. You weren’t ready for this to be a step forward before. Your vision has been clouded by the wrong focus, just like the girl in the past lifetime. Rather than building a true life for herself, based on her inner qualities, and rather than building on something that really mattered to her, she was focusing on this fantasy out there, with the king and princes and dukes and all of these different things, as if that would somehow give her something. And it had nothing to do with her actual life, or any real value or anything that she could build in reality. And so up until now, you’ve been focusing on status and doing things for the wrong reason, which the universe has not been supporting. It supported you for a while under certain circumstances that served you for a period of time. But it couldn’t last because the basis wasn’t on solid ground. It was headed in the wrong direction.

The fact that you’re a very talented, intelligent, resourceful woman, and a very good business person — you haven’t lost any of those things. And now those attributes are freed to move you toward what really does matter to you.”

Transcript Excerpts of Jane’s Teachings
during a “Shifting into Your New Consciousness” group 7-2-09

(Participants’ names are changed to protect their privacy.)

(Fiona was saying she plans to get Botox injected in her face tomorrow so people can’t see what she’s feeling so easily.)

“There is something very magical about you. And unless you completely make your face catatonic, you can’t hide the truly uniqueness of who you are, and you wouldn’t really want to if you were in your right mind. I can understand why it would be a challenge for you being you, because you are truly unique. You are really an amazing, magical person. You have difficulty hiding it because it is so noticeable in you, and that is an amazing gift. And who knows the directions your life’s work may take in alignment with that gift of who you are. You are not meant to look like other people, thank God. There is something very amazing and special about you. You are so present in some way, so vulnerably true to who you are. Don’t hide that. That is an amazing gift. There are limiting decisions there, and that’s the only reason why you’re trying to hide yourself. There is no reality reason to do it. So we’ll just clear them in your TimeLine sessions. But don’t do anything to yourself in the meanwhile.”

Transcript Excerpts of Jane’s Teachings during the
“Shifting into Your New Consciousness group experience 5-14-09

(Participants’ names have been changed to protect their privacy.)

To Anita: … “I think you often think when you blurt something it’s a mistake, whereas what you’re really doing is revealing something about yourself, which you probably try not to do. Sometimes you are trying to reveal something about yourself, but other times you are trying to cover your tracks, as if you haven’t done it the right way. This thing you have about doing it right is a big issue for you, and it’s a big misunderstanding of what this process is. It’s come up before. It has to do with you thinking that who you are is not OK. But whatever you do is fine, because the transformational process is about revealing deeper levels of where you are at. What really makes this group work at a top level is when people are revealing on deeper and deeper levels what’s really going on inside of themselves. It’s not about being appropriate, because being appropriate isn’t revealing where you really are. If you wait until you can do it ‘right,’ then nothing real happens, and there’s is no possibility for transformation.

This is similar to the process we’ve been having with Janet, who has this idea about a persona that will make other people respect her, and not get too close to where she’s really at, so she doesn’t have to engage too much about where she really is because her real self may show. And then people may have judgments about it. But what keeps coming up for Janet is when she’s out there with that real her, that she can’t hide, that real self is full of life. That real self contains the nugget of the gold that is her. And you can see “the essence of Janet,” and we feel deprived when we don’t get it. And when we get, instead, her very clipped, logical, factual information-tank persona, we feel deprived of her, because the real her, that she’s been trying to skirt around, is amazing.”

(Anita said something about an interaction she had had, and Janet asked her a question about it. Anita rebuffed it.)

(To Anita) “My take on this is that what Janet said to you was an invitation to you to go deeper, to what was underneath that initial interaction. But your first response when people approach you is someone is criticizing and judging you. You think, “OK she’s judging me. We’re done.” And the group isn’t about that. It’s about transformation. It’s about going deeper. And if someone does get offended, then we go deeper into that because there is something underneath that. What’s underneath the defense systems, and the judgments, and the criticisms, and whatever happens to come up — it is all glorious because it is all living material. And underneath it is always something positive. But you don’t yet know that.”

…

“Renee is saying that she feels very triggered by something you said, fully knowing that she is not leaving. She is saying it, but she is still engaged. And there really is no danger in reality. The only danger is if you jump off of the merry-go-round, which is live interaction. But if you stick in there and you stay communicating and interacting and you go deeper, then you get beyond the defense system, which is not about reality. Then you can find out the positive truth underneath the surface of what’s going on. But if you disconnect yourself because of your fears, then you end up being stuck wherever you’re stuck. You don’t go deeper into getting to the positive territory. So the issue is really understanding that there is a bottommost positive truth. When you explore things underneath the defense systems, that’s what you find. Most people do not believe that. That’s the problem. Most people don’t believe that life is meant to work. They don’t believe that what’s really true between people, underneath their defense systems, is love. But the fact that this is true makes it safe to go deeper and deeper, because that’s what you’ll end up finding. And in the more than 13 years of doing this work, I’ve always found that to be true.

What I’m seeing right now is that you won’t let anyone love you. You won’t let anybody near to where you really are at, so that they can find out who you are and love you. That’s the result of this defense system. As soon as anyone shows any interest in seeing who you really are, where you’re really at — anytime someone shows curiosity or interest toward you, which would then allow them the chance to know you, and then to love you — you take it as a negative thing and push them away.”

(Anita said she doesn’t know where Janet is coming from.)

“It’s true you don’t know where she is coming from. You don’t know where any person who is being truthful is going to be coming from. And where they’re going to be coming from may trigger you. So the issue of safety is not about real safety, it’s about whether you get triggered or not. That’s what you’re concerned about, and the trigger for you is that you’re not safe. But it has nothing to do with actual safety. It has to do with your fears being brought up. What you’re afraid of has to do with you being seen where you are at. And there is a limiting decision there, and if you would allow yourself to be seen, eventually you would get to a place where you will discover that the truth about you is not what you are afraid that it is. People do accept the real you and they are not going to crucify it. But it takes some going into this deeper place and allowing the process to happen, so that you, for one second, stop defending the real you so you can find out that people love you.”

(Janet asked how does her blocking the real connection between her and other people relate to her needing to be liked.)

“If you were really allowing a connection to occur, you probably wouldn’t need to have that symbolism of people liking you. That’s what you do instead, because when you do that it’s a substitute for a real connection. I think this thing that came up between you and Renee is extremely important for you. And you keep on blocking out what the actual issue is. The actual issue means the difference between whether you actually will connect with someone or you won’t. And that’s where the bottom line is, that’s where the defense system is. That’s where you’re blocking the connection, right at that point. And that’s what I saw happening between you and Renee. This was very symbolic for you. Right at this point of you having forgotten something, and emotionally you couldn’t be present with Renee to admit that you forgot, and just stand in that and apologize. If you had said, ‘I’m really sorry. I forgot. I feel really terrible,’ that would have been connecting with her, being affected on a heart level. But you just skipped out and made an excuse — and you were gone. And it was hard and impersonal, and it was breaking the connection. So there’s a potential for a real heart connection there that you were breaking off because you weren’t appearing perfect. But the being imperfect — as people are — and revealing it, and relating in relation to that, actually builds deeper connection. If you mixed it up and allowed your emotions to come out and admitted that you messed up and that you felt bad, then you’d be emotionally available and there would be actual contact. And that would be much better, ultimately, than if you had remembered, and everything had gone smoothly, in the first place.

We’re talking about the mechanism that keeps people separated from each other, keeps real emotional bonds from happen. Now we’re down to the nitty gritty. That’s what people want — to be able to really connect with other people. And that’s the major human defense system — to keep oneself separated. That is just it. That’s where it is at. Are you going to be able to really heart-connect, really be together with other people? Or can’t you — or won’t you?”

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.)

(To Anita) “What it keeps turning out that this group is about, is uncovering the masks and defense systems, in order to get to the real self. And the real self is gold, totally gold. My job seems to be to ferret out that wonderful self that is being hidden behind the defense systems. So this isn’t about tearing you down at all. It’s not something like, ‘Well, how do I fix this horrible defense system that people have this response to.’ That’s not what it’s about. It’s about penetrating through it to get to the real you. Now, if your defense system is pushing people away, then you, like many others, are defending against your real self being seen because of negative limiting decisions you’ve made about your real self. So the process unmasks your real self, and then you get to find out that people really, really like your real self. And that is transformational. That’s what I’m trying to get across to Janet. She thinks this persona of knowing everything is far more acceptable than the very, very vulnerable, emotional person she really is. And she’s totally mistaken about that.

It’s the same thing with Aaron. He thinks coming across as perfect, and an expert at everything, and never getting anything wrong, makes him worthy; and that being touched and moved and eccentric and different and not fitting in, is completely unacceptable.”

Transcript Excerpts of Jane’s Teaching during the
“Shifting into Your New Consciousness” group experience 4/23/09
(Participant’s name has been changed to protect their privacy.)

(Janet said her mind went blank when Jane was talking.)

“That’s what generally happens when I’m revealing the ground a person is standing on, which is the way they form what reality is. I’m causing a reframe right at that point, which feels like I’ve pulled the ground out from under you reality.

You are a totally amazing person. The reason I’m saying these things to you, and really pinpointing it as hard as I do is because I see the distinction between your defense system and who you are. I’m getting to where you really are, the real you, the part of you that you have been masking over with a false persona — not letting people see the real, tender, vulnerable, emotional, true self underneath that.”