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.
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 Jered in Mission Valley
Jered: It occurs to me that the failure of big companies — such as General Motors that received bailouts — are not so much an example of limiting decision, as they are of “broken” organizations. GM had to break before old methods were discarded for new. It makes me think of change with people. Clearing decisions are baby steps. But traumatic events have outsized consequences – huge steps.
Jane: This is a complex subject that can’t be explained, so that it’s easily understood, in a few paragraphs. I will be going into this more fully in my upcoming “Life is Meant to Work” webinar as part of explaining how our experience of reality gets out of alignment with Universal Truths. But here is a brief explanation that I hope is helpful.
The failure of big companies, such as General Motors, is most likely based on perspectives of self-interest that are out of alignment with reality. Whenever there are perceptions that are out of alignment with reality, there are limiting decisions* at the root of it.
People with similar limiting decisions* come together and hold in place a collective perspective on reality. People are very invested in the particular way they perceive what reality is, which represents their source of stability, survival and well-being. It is the ground they are standing on. That perception of reality is often greatly distorted by limiting decisions* they have made. In general people are not willing to give up that ground unless forced to. That’s why it sometimes takes a major crisis before individuals — and especially a group of people, such as a major organization or company — are willing to restructure their perception of reality. They have to perceive that it is in their self-interest to make a change. The process of evolution occurs as what people perceive of as self-interest becomes increasingly more in alignment with what actually benefits them.
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.
(Participant’s names are changed to protect their privacy.)
To Rita: When people don’t receive what they need from their parents, they tend to make a limiting decision that they’re not going to get what they need. Now, the limiting decision can be in the form of ‘Oh, gosh, I can’t get what I need.’ Or it can become a power-struggle in which you dig in your heels and say, ‘If I don’t get it from them, I won’t get it from anyone else,’ which means ‘I’m not going to accept it from anyone except from those people, because they’re suppose to give it to me because they’re the parents.’ But your parents are just bumbling souls like everyone else. They don’t necessarily have the tools to be parents. They’re just in that position. And they’re not necessarily more advanced than you are. In fact they’re usually less advanced because that’s the way evolution works. The children are more evolved than the parents. The universe is filled with resources, with everything you could possibly need. But it may not come in the form you decided it should come in. So if you get into a power-struggle that it has to come from your parents or you’re not going to receive it, you are then holding that limiting decision in place with that power-struggle. Then you have the channels closed and the universe can’t give you what you need, because you won’t accept it from any place but that person. In this case it is your mother who has to give it to you. And if she doesn’t, you decide, ‘That means, I’m not loved.’ Or ‘That means, ‘I’m not cared for.’ No that’s not what it means. It means that, for whatever reason, your mother is on her own path, and just can’t do it, or won’t do it, or whatever. But you’re not dependent on her. You’re dependent on a larger reality than her. And the universe has exactly what you need, if you don’t get into a power-struggle and make a limiting decision. You’re a perfectly capable woman, and you’ve proven that to yourself. And it appears to me, that you may be causing yourself to be incapable in order to make her take care of you. And she’s not cooperating. You’re trying to get her to play a role that she cannot play. For whatever reason, whatever her unhealed issues are, she can’t do it. And when you try to get her to do it, she freaks out. So it’s not going to be solved through her. Perhaps you are focused on getting her to take care of you, rather than getting out there and getting a job. I don’t think you’re consciously doing this, but you may be undermining yourself. And we keep clearing stuff that is undermining your ability to function and so you’re functioning a lot better now. But you may be, on an unconscious level, undermining your efforts in order to get her to do what she’s ’supposed to do.’ And we can get to what that is, because it should be cleared.”
(Ren said she’d just have to accept not having a mother.)
“It’s not that you have to accept not getting what you need. You don’t have to accept not having a mother. The bottom line is life is meant to work. That means you have everything you need. You don’t have to accept not having enough. But there’s a decision inside that you don’t have what you need, or a decision, in some form that boils down to that life is not meant to work. That’s what needs to be changed. It’s definitely not that you have to accept anything less than everything. But you won’t necessarily get it from your mother. You’re never dependent on another person to get what you need. The Universe is filled with resources. The source for what you need is not out there. The source for what you need is inside of you and your internal connection with the Divine. That means if you are in alignment, then whatever it is you need will show up in some form. It may come from this person or that person or that person. But you’re not dependent on the person through which it shows up. They are just the vehicle through which the Divine is giving you what you need. And if it doesn’t come from this person, it will come from someone else.
This is really important because this is what often happens when people who are more evolved get born into either a whole social context or to a family, who is less evolved. And sometimes the gap between the parent (or social context) and the child is really large. And the child often doesn’t realize that they’re more evolved. They think the parent is older so they’re supposed to know more, they’re supposed to be wiser. And ‘Why can’t they see what I see? It’s perfectly obvious. What’s wrong with you?’ So they are trying to lean on this less evolved person as if they should be able to support and help them. And they can’t, and the pressure that the child puts on them to support them is more than the parent can handle, because it’s like trying to expand something that’s really tiny, and they can’t do it. And some parents are really upset by this.”
Rita: That’s how my mom acts.
“You’re trying to force her to be bigger than she is. She’s too small to expand to where you’re coming from. On a soul level, she cannot be your parent. She is biologically your parent, and she fed you, etc. But on a soul, spiritual level, she cannot do it. She is too unevolved. You can’t get it from her. The child trying to make the parent expand to where they are is too much for the parent. So it’s not that she doesn’t love you. It’s not that she doesn’t care about you. She’s just not big enough. She’s not expanded enough.
And this goes back to the big shift that humanity is going through right now, which is that the source of what we need, the source of our safety and well-being is not out there. We think it’s got to be the parent, it has to be the government, it has to be the banks, it has to be all of those different sources of safety. That’s not where it comes from. The real source is larger than all of us. It’s the Universe, and we access it internally. The source in inside not outside. You can take comfort in the fact that this is the big shift that humanity is going through right now, so if you haven’t really gotten it, that’s because none of us have totally gotten it yet. This is a huge transformation. This is a really, really big deal.”
(Client’s name has been changed to protect her privacy.)
Overview:
Several other things occurred in the past couple of days that left her feeling melancholy, almost depressed in relation to her survival. She saw a TV show about two young kids who committed suicide. She felt shook up at her core by how easily two little boys could take their own lives. She also saw a psychic who said something was going to come to light about her boyfriend, Louis, that would make her feel differently about him. This caused Cherrie to question if she continuously creates fantasy about relationship. The psychic also said that her mother (who has recently passed on) was with her, wanting her to understand that there could be a reality beyond her perceptions.
Cherrie ended up feeling not so good about spirituality and life existence. She has been having random crazy thoughts, questioning life, the existence of life on a spiritual plane. It brought up unknown fears that relate to her childhood when she had very fearful beliefs in relation to the devil. And even though she has had a near death experience, so she knows there is something beyond this life, she has been having fears that there is nothing else but this physical life.
Somehow as a result, she started taking stock of things to see how she could make a plan for the next 5-10 years, to get a sense of her reality situation. She’s realizing she either has to sell her house or sell the condo she owns with her x-husband and some property in Florida, because there is no way she can earn enough money to pay for her mortgage and other expenses as they stand now. She has lived a level of lifestyle beyond what she was making. She created a situation that in reality she can’t sustain. It’s an overbearing financial burden. So she has been going over her records and computing how much she needs to sustain where she is, in order to make realistic decisions about what she should do.”
Transcript excerpts of Jane’s Teachings:
“We’ve been working to get you more and more in reality and out of fantasy, and you are getting more in reality. You’ve had a number of different defense systems keeping you out of reality and in fantasy, as a way of feeling a sense of well-being. And when the fantasy gets knocked over, you feel panicked.
And this is also significant on an evolutionary level at this particular point in time. When the illusion of reality that most people live in, that they think is what is really supporting them, when they go past it, it seems to be a really big transition. It is about shifting survival systems. And it can feel terrifying, because you don’t know what you can count on. At some point we recognize that the things we have been relying on to support us, such as how we bring money in — that we really can’t rely on it. You realize that this thing that to you has kept you alive — the things you really need — it has been an illusion that it’s something you could count on as your source. And who knows, maybe the Divine or the larger Intelligence holds this illusion in place, for as long as the person really needs it, until they’re ready to transition into a higher level of being. It’s sort of like a trick in a sense, or like training wheels. Somehow they make it work to whatever level you need it to work, even though it’s not really reality. It’s not the thing that is really supporting you. But as you’re ready, it’s like experience thins out and reality becomes more transparent, and you’re between the two worlds. And you begin to realize that your present world reality cannot really be relied upon as you’re ready to let go of it and move into the new one. So I think that’s where you’re at.
The issue is, you have not trusted truth and reality to support you. That’s been the problem and you have made up an alternative world that you depended upon that has to do with fantasy. I believe that is what your panic is about, because your fantasy world is crumbling for various reasons. And it’s causing you to be face to face with life without fantasy, which is the reality that you have been avoiding because you don’t trust it. And today we’re going to clear at least of chunk of that, and we’ll keep working on it until we clear the whole thing, because the reality is what is really supporting you, not the fantasy. The fantasy has been causing you to make decisions which have not been supporting you.
(Cherrie was saying, she always knew she could make money before.)
The way you’ve earned money before has been based on you functioning in a way that was against yourself. There were a number of things you were sacrificing in order to make this work. You were relating in certain ways to men, in which you were giving yourself away, and allowing yourself to be used. You were putting out huge amounts of energy to psych yourself up. You were creating fantasies all over the place. So in order to make this work you were paying a big price, and you were also being unrealistic financially. You were building a house of cards that eventually had to fall apart. So you were making money on a shaky basis, and on the basis that you were against yourself in a number of different ways. And so now when that whole system is breaking down, it is putting you in a panic, because you don’t think there is an alternative. And that has to do with limiting decisions. And when we clear them you will be able to live in abundance in a place that’s totally congruent with yourself, in which you don’t have to sacrifice a thing.”
The limiting decision Cherrie cleared with the TimeLine process:“She can’t survive on her own.”
The first event in which she made this decision: One generation ago. She was a young girl and lived in a mountain town. Her arms were run over by a wagon. She survived the accident, but lost the use of her arms from her elbows down. She had to depend on other people to take care of her.
Transcript Excerpt of Jane’s teaching during the TimeLine process:
“No one ever survives on their own. It’s always by the grace of God, whether you’re whole in body or not. In truth you were no less dependent in your handicapped state than you would otherwise have been, because our circumstances can change at any moment. The apparent physical circumstances are never what really sustains and supports you. You’re always being sustained and supported by a larger force than the human experience, regardless of what state you happen to be in at any particular moment.
The Universe is filled with resources, but limiting decisions can get in the way of you receiving them. So when you made the decision that you cannot survive on your own in reality, from that point on, you caused yourself to be dependent on others in a dysfunctional way. So then you felt as though you had to survive by putting yourself under others, so they would take care of you — or by manipulating them. Either way you were acting as if other people had the power over you. But if you look at it from the perspective that they are simply instruments of the Divine, then you don’t have to be other than who you are. You don’t have to distort yourself. You don’t have to give yourself away. You don’t have to create fantasies. You don’t have to do anything that’s out of reality, because it’s not other human ego selves that are in control of you. One way or another, the Universe will support you, through whatever means it chooses to. And so you don’t have to cave in to human ego demands in order to keep yourself surviving, because it’s not people who are supporting you.”
The limiting decision was cleared, and then the whole dynamic shifted for Cherrie.
