Transformational Teachings from Counselor Jane Ilene Cohen

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.

Jonathan: There is so much turmoil in the world these days…emotional roller coasters. My sense is that all will work out (as it always does) because optimistic solutions eventually prevail in the world. Plenty of people disagree with me.  Do you have any thoughts on this?

Jane: The world is going through a major shift now.  It is a shift in consciousness.  Humanity has been becoming increasingly more conscious, as a part of the human evolutionary process.  What I mean by that is we are increasingly more able to access personal, direct experience of reality, as opposed to having to be told what reality is from outside ourselves.  At the same time, we have been building up a distorted idea of what progress is, which is an avoidance of consciousness.

In order to address this, it’s important to understand what limiting decisions are because they are what lead to the distortion of our perception of reality and the avoidance of truth, which is what cause our experiences in life to not work well.  Limiting decisions are unconscious decisions locked in place in early childhood.   They are a misinterpretation of pivotal life events that cause you to decide, for example, that you are not valuable, lovable, safe; or that people can’t be trusted; or that there isn’t enough to go around; or that you are bad, a failure, powerless and so on.  You therefore shut off the channels for knowing your value, receiving love, etc. in reality.  And so each time you made a limiting decision, from that point on, instead of being present and engaging in life in that area of your life and moving toward what really matters to you, your focus became diverted into focusing on, and compensating for, what you believed to be a deficit in the nature of reality, other people, and/or in yourself.

The majority of people in the world don’t realize that transforming these distortions is the way forward in life.  Instead they are just focused on compensating for them, as if that is what making progress in life is about.  By compensating I mean going toward symbols that symbolize what you want, but don’t actually give it to you.  For example, the choices of food people eat, the kind of cars they buy, the career path they choose, the type of person they are attracted to in business and personal relationships, their choices of entertainment, the products they buy, the way government is organized, how financial institutions are structured, the way education is set up — all of these to greater or lesser extents (depending on how conscious the person is or the people are) are often used to compensate for lacks in well-being, empowerment, a sense of stability and safety, and so on, rather than deal with the internal source of those lacks and thereby making progress in reality.

The world is structured, to a large extent, on this faulty foundation.  And this has worked, more or less, for a very long time, with some corrective shifts in consciousness along the way.  But there is a larger evolutionary timing, which is evolving our overall reality forward whether we are ready or not.  Now is the time for a very major shift, because the old, unconscious, distorted ways of what has been conceived of as human progress have reached the end of their course, and they are falling apart.  The house of cards is falling down.

But there is something much more stable and true that is underlying all of experience that has been camouflaged by the unevolved avoidance of truth the world has been based on.  And actually there is quite a lot that has been built in the world that is based on the truth of the real world.  And that will begin to come much more to the fore, as the old dysfunctional structures fall away.  This underlying building up of consciousness, based on the essence of real experience (Universal Truth, Love, Principle, Life and Spirit) is what has really been sustaining us, and is where real stability, safety and well-being reside.  We are in the process of shifting survival systems, and it’s difficult for people to let go of the old one until it is no longer working.  That is why it is falling apart.  So, yes, I see a very optimistic way forward.

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.

Mitchell (a TimeLine client of mine) does not like being dependent on anyone.  And because he is extremely intelligent he has always been able to figure things out himself.  He’s now at a point in his life where he realizes he needs to expand his world beyond the limited home life he has created, but finds himself resistant to doing that.

Jane: Your life is confined to the limits of your intellect, and your personal experience from the perspective you’re standing on.  That is highly limiting.  You can’t expand your world if you can’t go beyond yourself.  To expand your world means there is something larger than you you’re dependent upon.

Mitchell: I don’t understand the concept of being dependent upon something greater than myself.

Jane: Most children start out viewing their parents basically as God, because they are physically and emotionally dependent on their parents for their well-being and survival.  But when children run into a conflict where something traumatic happens that shakes their perception of reality about themselves in relation to their parents, they then generally contract into making a generalized limiting decision* about those they are dependent on.

For example they might decide those they are dependent on can’t be trusted or that they are inadequate.  In this case they then build a defense system, such as relying on no one but themselves in life, which is what you have done.  This then limits your life to what you can personally conceive of and to what is in your control.

Or the child might make a limiting decision* that he can’t trust his own perception of reality because his perception caused him to be in conflict with his parents, or to get in trouble with them, or to be wrong.  This causes him to be dependent on authority figures and what other people think.

Or highly evolved souls, instead, basically shake the walls of heaven and demand to know what this experience means.  They then, instead of making a limiting decision*, expand to a more evolved perception of that situation, that expands their understanding.  They are then letting divine inspiration show them a greater truth than what they had understood before.  The child then is depending on a larger source.  As each person evolves he finds ways to tap into this larger source, whether he defines it in those terms or not.

People either rely on human authority, or their own defense systems, or a larger source, which then connects them with their own direct experience.

Limiting Decisions*: Unconscious decisions made in early childhood, such as “I am stupid,” “I am bad,” “People can’t be trusted.”

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.

(Previous dialogs with William are under the
“William & Terry” category in the right side bar.)

Continuing the journey of William (an NLP TimeLine client of mine) and his wife: As you may recall, a number of months ago William’s wife of nearly 30 years went off the deep end emotionally, recently ending up in a residential program at her therapist’s recommendation.  From William’s point-of-view, it was no longer possible to be in relationship with her, as she was relating to him increasingly more as if she were literally his child.  The longer she was living with him, the worse she seemed to get, and the more impossible the situation was for William to tolerate.

His wife always liked being in charge, and was very vocal and insistent on things being her way, according to what pleased her.  Although she was so non-functional she was totally dependent on him, William was letting her make her own decisions about how she spent her time and how she conducted her life. The result was she kept getting worse, and the situation kept getting increasingly more painful for him.

His wife has now just gotten home from the 5 week residential program, and William is determined to not let the situation with her revert to the way it was previously.  He was feeling depressed about her coming home, basically in the same emotional state she was in before, until it crystallized for him what he should do.  And that was that he should just take charge of everything about her life, telling her what she should do and making all of the decisions for her, as it has become clear she is incapable of making decisions for her own benefit.

William feels he can’t really move on with his own life until he’s take care of his responsibilities for her.  He’s trying to sort out what she is and isn’t capable of, and let the responsibility for what she is capable of fall on her.

Jane: People are always doing the best they can, from the position of where they’re standing.  So that is why one of the cornerstones of the Life is Meant to Work thought system is that it’s never about what the other person is doing.  You can’t judge them, as you’re not in their shoes.  You can’t take on that responsibility.  There are too many factors.  All you can know is your own experience.  Your only guidance for what to do is your own enlightened self-interest.  That’s why it’s so crucially important.

Enlightened self-interest is what truly benefits you and connects you to what is true.  Enlightened self-interest is what really matters to you.  It is a fact, not something that can be manufactured or manipulated.  It is not necessarily the easy path, as it often requires personal transformation.  It is very different than selfishness, which avoids what is true, causes separation between people, and is a part of an emotional defense system.

That’s why you felt better when you took a stand on making all of the decisions for your wife’s life yourself, as it has become clear to you that leaving it in her hands makes life for both of you impossible.  Your decision to do that was based on your own enlightened self-interest.  It has been a breakthrough for you to do that because you didn’t trust yourself.

For any relationship to work, each person must be coming from what truly matters to them, or there is no solid foundation for it.  Ultimately the only relationship we are in is between ourselves and a larger or Universal Truth.  If you try to make up for each other’s limiting decisions* to try to make things between you work on the surface, you just get mired in deeper and deeper untruths, which ultimately creates impossible situations where there is no way out, which is what you have been finding out.

On a soul level, your wife has made a decision to put herself in the difficult position she is currently in.  All you can do is be in reality the best you can in relation to yourself and her.

* Limiting Decision:  An unconscious decision made in early childhood that is some form of that life doesn’t work, and usually that there is something inherently wrong with you — such as “I am powerless,” “bad,” “without value;” or “The world is a dangerous place,” “People can’t be trusted,” and so on.

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.

As you may recall the last “Ask Jane” was a continuation of a dialog with William whose wife of nearly 30 years had become so emotionally out of touch with reality, it became impossible for him to live with her.  And the comfort and stability he had built up in his life with her for all of these years had been pretty much shattered.  The point of my answer to him had to do with the only thing that really happened is he learned that he was looking in the wrong direction for his source of well-being and stability.

In response to that “Ask Jane,” I received this request from a reader:  “Will you please expound next on what actually gives us stability?”

The answer to this is a large subject, beyond the scope of this newsletter, and goes to the heart of what the “Life is Meant to Work” Thought System Course I teach is about.  So, for this article, I’ll just touch on a piece of it:

The source of the deep feeling of instability for William was he had had more faith in his ability to control the outcomes in his life to result in his benefit, than he had in the inherent nature of how life works. Real stability has to do with coming into alignment with what is actually true, with what is real, the inherent principles and foundations of Life, Truth, Love, Consciousness, Intelligence — present-moment reality; and allowing it to transform your experience — and you — in the process.  It requires letting go of human control.

People generally don’t consciously relate to Life itself (or an overall Intelligence or Consciousness, or a Divine Presence….),  which is not in human control — unless perhaps when they’re in some sort of crisis that they see no solution to that they believe they can control.  This is based on the deeply ingrained, underlying belief that life doesn’t work — or that it’s just arbitrary, and not something that can be counted on.

And it is based on the idea that what is actually real is the physical world, and can be controlled by human beings.  It’s just a question of:  Who is controlling whom?  Who is the source of well-being for whom?  Who is defining reality for whom?  We either control them or they control us.

William had been trying to control the outcome of what is actually true in his life with his wife.  And he was assuming that this huge change that has been happening in their lives would end up being harmful for both of them, rather than trusting that if he followed what is actually true, the shifting and changing that would result from it would move both of them forward in their personal growth and life’s path.

Another way to put it is we generally believe truth is against us.  People often compromise themselves in relationships rather than revealing what is really true from their perspective, because they don’t believe it could possibly work out if everyone did that.  It means they don’t put themselves in a transformational — which is another way of saying “evolutionary” — process where the whole picture could shift and change in a way that they don’t control, and can’t foresee the outcome of.

From the human perspective, putting oneself in that position is counter-intuitive.  That is because it is switching survival systems.  It is relying on a whole different system for your safety, stability and well-being.  In order to be willing to do that it is crucial to really get that — when your experience of reality is not distorted by limiting decisions* — life inherently does work.  It is switching from what I call the “substitute world” to the “real world,” which is one way to describe what the shift in consciousness is that the world is in the midst of now.

* Limiting Decision:  An unconscious decision made in early childhood that is some form of that life doesn’t work, and usually that there is something inherently wrong with you — such as “I am powerless,” “bad,” “without value;” or “The world is a dangerous place,” “People can’t be trusted,” and so on.

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.

As you might recall from the last “Ask Jane,” William’s wife has been becoming increasingly more disconnected from reality, and her psychiatrist hasn’t been able to help her.  She has become increasingly more difficult to live with, basically using her relationship with William to remove herself even more out of reality, by obsessively focusing exclusively on him having to be with her and do things for her every moment.  William had hoped that this was just a temporary phase, but he is now having to face she has to go into a full time residential program.  And until he finds one for her, he has to move out of the house, for his own sanity (and hers).  He has spent his whole life building up a comfortable and stable life, which he has been very successful in achieving in his life with his wife.  And now his wife has gone off the deep end and is wrecking havoc on that stability.

Jane: When people are younger they have to make their way.  They have to engage in life and put effort into making things work.  They have to try new things, which may make them uncomfortable.  When people get older and get married, many have this expectation of comfort and stability, and they build their life around achieving that.  They “settle down” and basically give up moving forward in life. The idea is that each partner has committed to staying in that relationship no matter what, in order to maintain the stability of this unit.

William: Don’t you think the majority of people look for safety and stability and comfort as their ultimate goal?

Jane: What people often associate with safety, stability and comfort is actually retreating from engaging in life, into a world they believe they can control. For example, people often make their significant others the center of their universe, rather than Life itself.   You’ve been trying to get your sense of stability from your relationship with your wife and the physical life you’ve built together, rather than having those be a part of your relationship with life.  And now, the person you have been trying to create stability with is falling apart.  And so your life feels like it’s falling apart. Your real source of stability is not, cannot, be another person.  Your real source is a larger truth, a larger frame-of-reference.  And if you’re not relating to that, then your world is inherently very unstable.

When you retreated into the comfort and stability of your marriage and comfortable life, the problem is you were sinking into an unconscious state.  The roles people have generally relied upon in marriage, business, religious life, and so on — such as how a wife or husband acts, how to advance in business, who defines what being good is — that are supposed to create stability, have been based on a lack of individual consciousness.  That is why they require you to lean on something pre-defined and set.  What is happening right now in human experience is a major shift toward increasing consciousness.  It’s a significant evolutionary change.  This means the old forms that are based on being unconscious are falling apart.  They’re losing their relevance.

William: Wouldn’t this road block that’s come along be earth shattering for anyone?  Wouldn’t anyone be upset when they’re going along a road, whether it’s a wrong road or not, when their partner goes crazy and all of a sudden you have to switch roads?

Jane: It depends on what you’re leaning on for your stability, whether you’re going to experience it as debilitating or not.  There is a huge difference between when you’re conscious and connecting on your life’s path, to life the way it really is — and when you’re invested in something that buffers you against actually engaging in life.  That is inherently unstable, because it’s an avoidance of truth.  The only thing that has really happened to you is you found out that you were mistaken about where real stability in life can be found.  And rather than continue to invest yourself in a mistaken direction, you have the opportunity to switch gears, and move toward what will actually give you stability.

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 Jeffrey (written before recent events in Egypt)

Jeffrey: I’m wondering your perspective on increased human violence? …the Moscow airport, Tucson rampage, border fences, deranged individuals killing police.  Each successive day leads to another carnage event…then the next higher level of security. It’s never ending cat ‘n mouse. What might human society be unaware of that is resulting in such destructive behavior? Is there anything we can do to reverse or arrest this escalation effect?  Or maybe it’s all relative…bad apples just a part of civilization.

Jane: We are in a major transition period in terms of what it takes to create stability, well-being and survival.  In the past there were clearly spelled out ways of earning a living and moving ahead in your profession; there were spelled out ways of what it takes to be a good, moral person; there were clear roles you were supposed to take on to create a stable family — what a good husband, wife or child is; and so on.

But many of the definitions and structures holding these in place are falling apart or rapidly changing.  And this is on top of the more global challenges of financial instability, global warming, and so on.  What people leaned on for structuring their lives is serving them less and less well, and holding less and less meaning for them. People feel, in many ways, they no longer have a stable way to take care of their basic needs that they can count on.

These old structures and models and roles did give people stability, without people really having to be conscious or having to relate directly to life itself.  But the evolutionary process is one of moving toward greater and greater consciousness.  What works during one particular stage of evolution won’t necessarily work during another, as evolving forward is inherent in life.

And those who are invested in the old forms are having a hard time in this transition.  The more the investment is, the harder the transition.  And this can lead to varying degrees of social chaos and violence.

The solution is learning how to relate directly to life itself, rather than leaning on and being at the mercy of human constructs and definitions from those outside of you.  One way of putting this is it’s moving from leaning on some external, static, authoritative defining of how things should be — to something much more fluid and changeable, requiring much more personal responsibility.

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

(Names are changed to protect your privacy.)

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

This a continued dialog with Jered about the Australian Founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, who has been responsible for leaking sensitive secret government information out into the world.

Jered: My concern is the wisdom and consequences of these disclosures since there’s no way Assange read 250,000 sensitive documents.

Jane: What is the purpose of judging the wisdom and consequences of his disclosures?  I guess you’re wondering what the righteous thing to do is.  Should we allow government to keep certain things secret and who should be in control of that? Is that covering up things that should be known by the general population?  But if we don’t keep these things secret, is that causing even more harm?

Focusing on trying to control each other is a losing battle, and if we look out in the world that becomes pretty apparent.  We can’t control the terrorists, we can’t control which political party wins and the laws they end up passing or revoking.  Sometimes things go our way, and sometimes they don’t.  But that’s not the real playing field.  And the shift the world is undergoing right now is increasingly making that clearer.  We have been looking in the wrong direction for solutions. 

Whether Assange’s actions are wise or not is not the issue.  He did what he did, and apparently is going to continue doing it.  You could say he is in a dialog with the world, and the world is in dialog in response.  And how you relate to the dialog will be a learning experience for you.  The dialog itself is what opens up truth.  As I said in the previous post, the issue now is engaging rather than trying to control.  Engaging is where the resources, safety and well-being can be accessed, because it’s hooking into a larger truth, a larger framework beyond any individual person’s control.  It’s participating in life, rather than trying to control it.

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 (Real names are never used):

Jered: What is your thinking on the Wikileaks guy, Assange. Is there a balance in that mess or …?  I question the practical usefulness of disclosures and Assange’s seemingly righteous stance. The world is a delicate place at times.

Jane: It’s difficult to know the effect that Assange revealing these documents is having on the world.  A multitude of things are happening in the world on multiple levels, much of which isn’t being talked about.

And whether Assange is coming from a place of truth and reality inside himself, or it’s a part of his emotional defense systems, I don’t know.  Very likely it’s some of both.

There are many forces and dynamics happening in the world that are a part of a complex evolutionary process.  And all we can do is to play our part in this universal drama, from within our own personal perspective and experience.

The reason that someone like Assange, who is affecting things on a global level, has such a huge impact is because of the general human belief that our safety and well-being is dependent on what the people outside of ourselves do.  And so we live in a world based on trying to control each other. And in fact, one statement Assange seems to be trying to make is about letting go of the control.  Although, his emphasis seems to be on other people letting go of the control, rather than himself.

The world is in great flux right now, and getting ourselves in the position to ride with the flow of life seems to me vitally important.  And that means letting go of the control.  But we can’t let go of the control as long as we believe the source of our safety and well-being is at the mercy of the world outside ourselves.

It’s a good thing that the book and movie “The Secret” (which teaches how to manifest into your life what you desire) has been so popular.  Even though the majority of people don’t have a lot of success making it work, many people have enough success with it to pay attention to it.  This makes it more acceptable to conceive of the idea that the source of our survival and well-being has to do with an internal process, not something imposed externally.

It’s not about what other people do; it’s about what you do.  Each of us is a leader, because we are presenting a model of reality with every thought we think, and expression and movement we make.  We are in a transition period, moving into taking personal responsibility for the world each of us is creating.  We can no longer afford to blame it on what the other person is doing.

The world you experience depends on the vibrational stream you enter into, the kind of energy you tap into — whether it’s positive and loving, or fearful and hateful, or somewhere in between.  That’s the world you are entering into.  And that’s the reality you project out into the world.

As we approach the New Year we can see the transition we have been going through in these tumultuous times.  One way to describe it is we are shifting from striving to be in control, to engaging instead.  The business world is demonstrating this very graphically with social media revolutionizing the whole field.  Engaging requires letting go of our investment in having things take on the particular forms we are invested in, that we believe we are in control of.

Stock piling resources, and building empires, and creating “foolproof” strategies — only to have the stock market tumble, home values bottom out, and the financial world destabilize.  How many symbols of being in control have you lost this year?  Your house?  Your job?  Your retirement funds?  Your relationship?  Have you been trying to regain that control in order to lean on it again for your stability?  Or have you been allowing the loss of it to reshape you, to transform you, to shift how you are looking at and approaching life itself?

There is no safety or stability in being in control.  But that is not a lesson the world could learn as long as the old ways of doing things seemed to be working.  Really engaging is the opposite of control.  It is putting the truth out there to be seen.  It is a process of vulnerably being present with each other and life itself.  This is giving up the control to a larger truth and reality than human control, and finding out that this larger source is based in love.

The bottom line of what this transition requires is love.  It takes love to let go of trying to control our experience, and to engage in life instead.  It takes a recognition of the love that’s all around, which is the ultimate gift.

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

(Names are changed to protect your privacy.)

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

This “Ask Jane” is a continuation of one that came out a few weeks ago called “My wife has gone off the deep end.”  I’m describing the continuing journey of a client who is dealing with a very difficult situation at home.  (Real names are never used.)

William was saying his wife is more irrational than ever and it is a living hell for him, and nothing seems to help her.  He has no personal space in their home. Whenever she wants to ask or tell him something, she interrupts him or just starts talking.  It doesn’t matter if he’s sleeping in the middle of the night or if he’s working in his office.  She just barges right in.  She tries to hang up the phone when he’s talking with someone she doesn’t want him to talk with.  He’s making plans to work outside of his home so he can get some work done, but he feels bad for her spending the whole day alone by herself, probably in bed.  She keeps thinking she has everything wrong with her and gets into panics about it, such as thinking she has diabetes when she doesn’t; she believes she isn’t breathing, when she is.  And so he tries to demonstrate to her that she is in fact breathing, and so on.  At times when she gets more rational, he thinks things are getting better.  And then she goes off the wall again. He’s generally a person who is unemotional and never cries, but he’s been feeling so stressed he finds himself crying frequently.

William: I don’t know what a loving person is or does now.

Jane: This is not about doing the right behavior.  I make suggestions to you, but that’s not necessarily what you should do.  What’s more important than taking certain actions, or changing your behavior in relation to her, is changing your insides.  This situation is causing you to have to deal with your own unhealed issues, and is breaking through your own emotional defense systems.  I can’t necessarily tell you what the right thing to do is, because I’m not in your situation. But I can help you find where the emotional triggers and the limiting decisions are in you.  We clear them and things shift in you; and then the way forward becomes clear.

Right now you’re supporting your wife’s insanity to some degree. A good example of this is when she is convinced there is something wrong with her, when there clearly isn’t.  And then you get upset and try to convince her there isn’t.  When you’re trying to convince her or change her, it’s because you’re leaning on her to define what reality is.  You’re triggered by her irrationality, and are trying to get her to be rational.  Any place you’re emotionally triggered by her and therefore coming from that triggered place, you’re supporting her insanity.  You’re supporting the reality paradigm she’s living in.  She’s in a power-struggle with you, and you’re in a power-struggle back, and feeling controlled by her.  But what your power-struggle actually is against are the emotions that are coming up in you that are triggered by her.

The best thing you can do to help her is to come into reality yourself, and relate to her from that place.  As you clear the limiting decisions in you and come more into reality, you’re connecting from a real place, from your heart to her heart, in the real world in relation to her.  You’re holding the real truth of what’s really true between you and her, despite the way she’s acting, which is outside of the reality of what is true.  And then you’re not being controlled by the insanity that’s coming from her.  And you’re also coming from a compassionate place, which includes compassion for you.  It includes you in the picture. And so you’re no longer letting her insanity rule the situation between you.

Who knows — this could be the best thing anyone could do for your wife right now — to be actually going through the process with her, and coming into reality and relating to her more and more in reality.  It could perhaps bring her into reality.