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.
William: “My wife has gone off the deep end. She’s become very anxious, and is not willing to do the things that would help her. She has become completely reliant on me for everything, and needs constant reassurance. She is upset if I do anything without her. I am reaching the end of my rope. What should I do? I’m afraid she might harm herself if I don’t do whatever she wants me to do that she feels reassured by. I only see two choices: Either go along with her — or don’t and feel responsible for the state she gets into as a result, including that she might harm herself.”
Jane: “The bottom-line is if your life is appearing to not work, there are one or more limiting decisions you have that are distorting your experience of reality. And when they are cleared, the way you are looking at things will shift and a way forward will become apparent. The reason you see only those two choices is because the ground you are standing on is limited and structured by limiting decisions that filter in only the information that supports the limiting decisions, and not anything that doesn’t.”
When we discussed it further it turned out that how William was experiencing his wife was virtually identical with how he felt with his mother when he was a child. His mother was very anxious about life and felt to him to be very unstable. He felt responsible for her emotional state, and that what he did or didn’t do determined whether she felt OK or not. He thought he had married someone who was strong and the opposite of her, but now it turns out that underneath that apparent strength was someone who was actually very weak, and now he is right in the middle of the very thing he thought he had escaped.
After we cleared the limiting decision “he is responsible for the existence of the woman he’s dependent on,” William said he felt a huge weight had been lifted off of his shoulders.
He was standing on the new ground of realizing that he really didn’t have the power to determine his mother’s well-being and stability, no matter what he did or didn’t do; and so he was also now realizing that about his wife as well. He realized that he doesn’t have the power to personally solve the problem for his wife, and that nothing he can do will make any difference about it, as the source of it is only in her; and that he’s been enabling her to not find a real solution. And therefore he is no longer feeling hostage to her, or that her life depends on what he does or doesn’t do.
And so, because of this, he realized that there were, in fact, other options than the unacceptable ones he had felt locked in by. He can now relate compassionately to her, from standing on this new ground, making clear to her what he can and can’t do, and therefore no longer being co-dependent with her. He had felt imprisoned by his wife’s dysfunction, but what he had really been imprisoned by was his own.
As I mentioned in my newsletter last week, these are challenging times for many people. And the question of whether humanity is moving forward or backward is not necessarily obvious. We have clearly made huge advances in many areas of human experience, but are also facing potentially disastrous outcomes from directions humanity has gone in, and continues to go in.
A couple of people responded to the invitation I gave last week for dialog. And their responses are in the previous blog post. My own perspective on this actually requires far more space than I can use in a newsletter article, and is in fact a major focus of my 12-week “Life is Meant to Work” tele-seminar. And so, in my below article, I’ll give you an overview of some of where I’m coming from, which as always is based on the principle that life is meant to work.
I invite you to participate in further dialog about this or any other topic that seems important to you, by going to my contact form — click here.
I look forward to hearing from you,
Jane Ilene Cohen
Intuitive & Transformational Counselor
(760) 753-0733
The Challenge in Front of Us
An Overview by Jane Ilene Cohen
Up until now, in the human evolutionary process, we have been making progress toward increasingly more consciousness, intelligence, truth and love. And now we are being faced with a shift that is a quantum leap beyond where we have been before. It seems clear to me we are in the midst of a transition period, in which there is increasingly more pressure to make this shift. And eventually the shift is going to just happen, ready or not. For those who have not prepared themselves for it, it will probably be a much rougher transition.
Up until a certain point, humanity’s idea of progress was more or less working, as we hadn’t yet reached a tilting point. But it has been based on some fundamentally false premises. These are that the physical world is the basis of actual reality and is the source of real power, and that the source of our well-being and survival therefore is the physical world and people outside of ourselves. And therefore we believe that they are also the sources of our individual and collective problems. And so this is where we are focusing our efforts for solutions. We have been using our considerable resources to gain increasingly more control of the world around us, and to amass more and more power and resources based on this. Our goal becomes having more and controlling more, as if that will give us what really matters to us. But the result is actually the opposite.
It appears to me that it takes us having pushed this old paradigm to its limits (so that there is nowhere further to go with it), and getting to the point where the disastrous outcomes of doing so are so apparent that we can no longer ignore them — before we are willing to make this shift that feels to us like jumping off of a cliff. It’s giving up the idea that our safety lies in our human control, and instead relying on something we have no control over, based on the recognition of the totally benevolent nature of reality (the Universe, Life….).
It is making the shift into a new survival system, as radically different as shifting from breathing water, to breathing air. Rather than, from within a limited human perspective, relying on controlling the world and people external to ourselves for our safety and well-being — it’s coming into a co-creative relationship with a larger non-physical source, which can only be accessed from inside of each individual soul. It is a recognition that the nature of reality works wonderfully well, when it isn’t distorted by human control.
The bottom line is that none of us is at the mercy of what others of us do or don’t do. We can’t rely on other people to do what is good for them, or for us, or for our ecosystem; and we also can’t force them. Putting our energy and focus in that direction is not moving toward actual solutions, but in the opposite direction. It is standing on the ground that caused the problem in the first place. The basis of greed and corruption is believing the physical is the source, which is inherently a framework of limits, leading to power-struggles or sacrifice.
Where I believe the solutions lie is in each of us moving toward recognizing how we are using our own individual, non-physical power. (By non-physical I mean what motivates or gives life to the physical, such as love, truth, spirit, intelligence, consciousness — or the unhealed, unevolved aspect of it, such as manipulation, lies, fear, avoidance, and so on.) And it takes recognizing where the source of our well-being and survival really comes from, and moving toward a co-creative process with that larger source. This requires letting go of the control.
What is in the way of this is a fundamental power-struggle that humanity is engaged in. And it has to do with us focusing on substitutes for what really matters to us, and building up substitute worlds as a part of this power-struggle. It also keeps us from accessing our real power. (This last paragraph, in particular, is a large subject that I only have just touched on.)
To learn more about the “Life is Meant to Work: Prepare Yourself for a New Reality” 12-week Tele-seminar, click here.
Jane Ilene Cohen will be interviewed by
Kalon Women Community’s Founder, Sandra Levitin
August 4th at 6:30pm Eastern Time / 3:30pm Pacific Time
Suppose you could… Change your perspective of reality in a way that would deeply empower you to take charge of your life no matter what is going on in your outside world and no longer struggle at trying to make life work.
Intuitive & Transformational Counselor, Teacher and Author, Jane Ilene Cohen, will share the personal journey that brought her to a totally positive new thought system, based on the principle “Life is Meant to Work.” This thought system, combined with her NLP training, is what has enabled her to facilitate profound life-changing results for her clients for the past 14 years.
Other Topics include:
“Limiting Decisions: How Your Perception of Reality Gets Distorted”
“Is Life Meant to Work or Is It Not?”
“Self-Interest vs. Enlightened Self-Interest”
To hear the show and/or ask any questions call (347-884-8656)
The preview call audio for my upcoming
“Life is Meant to Work” 12-week Tele-seminar — is now here.
In this preview I share the personal journey that brought me to a totally positive new thought system, based on the principle “Life is Meant to Work.” This thought system, combined with my NLP training, is what has enabled me to facilitate profound life-changing results for my clients for the past 14 years.
I also describe some of the basic ideas from this thought system, addressing these 3 topics:
“Limiting Decisions: How Your Perception of Reality Gets Distorted”
“Is Life Meant to Work, or Is It Not?”
“Self-interest vs. Enlightened Self-Interest”
In addition you’ll get the main details of what is included in the “Life is Meant to Work” program.
I hope you enjoy the audio, and I welcome any comments, responses or questions you might have.
Warmly,
Jane Ilene Cohen
(760) 753-0733
Excerpts from the Preview Call
“When I took a stand on life is meant to work, it’s like I walked through a portal or a gateway in which a whole other landscape was now visible or available to me.And I started tapping into a whole body of knowledge that I had no idea of before.”
____________
“The reason ‘The Secret’ and the Law of Attraction has become so popular is it is about being able to manifest into our lives what we desire, rather than feeling at the mercy of forces outside of ourselves. But many people have difficulty in making this work for themselves, or have success with it only in specific and limited areas of their lives. Really understanding how to effectively use the Law of Attraction requires much more than what is generally taught, and represents a step forward in the human evolutionary process. The meaning of this goes way beyond being able to manifest a certain number of dollars per month, or buying the fancy new sports car. It is a shift in where we understand our source of safety and well-being comes from.”
____________
“From the very individual perspective to the larger global perspective, many people experience life as not working. But they don’t understand how we are participating in creating this, just believing it to be the nature of how life is. And therefore we are looking in the wrong direction for solutions.”
________
“We experience reality as something objective that is external to us, and that imposes itself on us. But our perception of reality is, in fact, very subjective and changeable, because we are never experiencing reality directly. We are only experiencing a model of reality. There are thousands of bits of information that are bombarding our senses every moment, and it would be impossible to take all of it in. So we filter in a very small percentage of it, and filter out most of it. What we decide to filter in or out is very subjective and changeable. This means, to a large degree, we are choosing our experience of reality, as opposed to reality imposing itself on us.”
______
“Our internal state is caused by our interpretation of what is happening out in the world, rather than something objective that is happening to us. And we don’t realize that our interpretations are very often a result of projecting our limiting decisions onto something or someone outside of ourselves.”
“It’s crucial to understand how subjective, changeable and effectible our experience or perception of reality is, in order to have a choice about what to do about it. Most people believe this instability has to do the nature of reality, and don’t realize that it’s actually internal to themselves. And since the internal process causing it is generally very unconscious, what we end up doing about it is also an unconscious process, which often doesn’t end up serving us.”
Life is Meant to Work
Prepare Yourself for a New Reality
Tele-Seminar
Underneath everything in human experience — the pain, the tragedy, the heartache, the perceived unfairness — the bottom line always turns out to reveal love.
This is because the only thing that really exists between people, underneath their emotional defense systems, is love. Our defense systems are a way to shield us from the pain of believing we don’t have it. Think about the last time you got angry at someone. Perhaps you felt they were inconsiderate of you, or were disrespectful of you, or took something that mattered to you away from you. If you really knew, in that moment, that you are fully loved and cared about, wouldn’t that change that angry feeling? And if, because of knowing that you are fully loved and cared for, you began relating to your friend or significant other out of love and compassion, instead of anger, do you think that would change either their behavior toward you, or your perception of their behavior?
Underneath pain is love. When you are grieving because someone you love has died, what is underneath the grieving is love for them. When people rose up as a community after 9-11 occurred, what they were feeling was love for all of the people who died. The strange thing about that is why does it take a catastrophe for us to feel love for each other? Often we don’t really acknowledge how much we love someone until they are seriously ill and/or die. Why is that?
The feeling of love is very intense, when we really acknowledge the fullness of how we feel. Being able to feel the intensity of how much we actually love is an evolving process, as it seems to be too much for us to feel its full impact in our present vibrational state. It is generally in direct opposition to aspects of our defended self. In fact, it can split it open. The full intensity of our love can feel like an expansion of the self that goes further out than we have the ability to stretch. And so mostly we divert that feeling into our defenses, rather than admit what it really is.
It can also feel like a breaking open, when the vulnerable emotions break through the defenses, dissolving us into tears. You could say that is the meaning of a broken heart. The heart breaks open, so that the emotions that have been trapped by the rigidity of the defenses can rush out. When a loved one dies, we cry for the pain and loss, rather than embrace the intense love we feel for them, right now, even with their passing. The depth and intensity of our feelings are often more easily diverted to hate or pain than to opening ourselves up to the intense vulnerability of love, which cuts through all of our defenses, false personas and worlds.
To listen to the Preview audio for the next “Life is Meant to Work” Tele-seminar, click here.
For the info page with all of the details about the upcoming “Life is Meant to Work” Tele-seminar, click here.
Transcript Excerpts of Jane’s Teaching during the
“Shifting into Your New Consciousness” group experience 4/23/09 (Participants’ names have been changed to protect their privacy.)
(Anita said she doesn’t feel safe in the group because, when she reveals her real responses, someone in the group often has a defensive response to it.)
(To Anita)“The reason you feel it’s not safe is because, like Aaron– and maybe you (Aaron) can help Anita in this if you can see it in relation to her — you think that you have to get it right, or something bad will happen.This isn’t about getting it right.Aaron has been trying for a long time to get it right.And doing that is the problem, not the solution.Being who you are and showing who you are is perfect.There’s no right way to do it.So if you show up and your defense system is showing, so what.If you show up and you say a word that someone takes offense to, so what.If something is uncovered about you, that’s perfectly fine.It’s part of a process for getting deeper.There isn’t a right way to do it.This is not about you figuring out how to do it right.And that’s what you are trying to do, and it’s a losing battle, because that’s not where this is going. You think you being able to figure out how to get it right is the only way to have it be safe.And that’s a mistaken idea.That’s a limiting decision that has nothing to do with reality.You’re perfectly safe here, even if your defense systems are showing all over the place, and you keep on getting it ‘not right.’This is about transformation, not about getting it right.
Perhaps the issue is actually more about engaging and interacting.For you, disengaging may be what feels safe.And this group is about engaging.And that’s why ‘getting it right’ has no relevance, because ‘getting it right’ doesn’t have to do with engaging.In the process of engaging, ‘getting it right’ is irrelevant. “
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.”
