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 question was from Fiona in Oceanside (Real names are never used):
Fiona: I’m always sacrificing my own welfare for the benefit of my husband and my parents, in order to make them happy. They seem to be so unhappy and have so many difficulties in their lives. And so I end up not doing what’s good for myself. I don’t know what to do about this.
Jane: You are not responsible for another person’s suffering. Each person is on their own personal path in life. And if they find themselves in the position of suffering, it’s because of an unhealed issue, a limiting decision that they made, not because of the nature of life. For instance a person might make the limiting decision that there’s not enough to go around, and as a result of having made that decision, they always find themselves in financial difficulty. The unconscious mind is invested in proving that our limiting decisions are true, which is the reason that people keep finding themselves in the same kind of life patterns over and over again, even when they know better. From what you’ve previously told me, your parents have locked themselves into a very limited and controlling way of living their lives, in which they don’t allow anything in that doesn’t fit what they are used to. And by doing this, they are holding in place their unhappiness. And then they are expecting their children to compensate for that.
This is most likely a pattern for your family that has been going on for generations, and keeps perpetrating the idea that suffering and sacrifice are necessary. It is representing a paradigm of reality that life is about suffering. And now, as an adult, you are attracting into your life similar kinds of people, so you can play the same role in relation to them. You taking on other people’s suffering, in order to relieve them of it, is reinforcing this mistaken idea. It is not helping. It’s coming from a limiting decision in you. But you coming into joy and working on your own life, and clearing these issues for yourself, and getting into a place of joy and happiness, and not taking on suffering — is representing a paradigm of reality that is helpful for all of those around you.
*Limiting decision: A 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.
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.
Transcript Excerpt of Jane’s Teachings during a
“Shifting into Your New Consciousness” group experience 2/12/09
(For information about this group click here.)
(Clients names are changed to protect privacy.)
(Aaron is saying that his life is a life of service to others, and that he feels it’s just outside of his reach right now.)“I think there’s a disconnect in you about what real service is.The way it seems you’re approaching it can’t really be of service, because you’re still avoiding who you are, and masking the vulnerability underneath.You have to be coming from where and who you are in order to give anyone anything. If when you’re helping other people, you’re not being vulnerable yourself, then you are hiding behind the act of helping them.
You don’t understand that the expression of who you are is a gift in itself.Just as I am telling Janet, when she expresses her emotions, when she is really present, it is an enormous gift to her family.Her standing there being logical and giving advice left and right does not do a thing.But when she is representing with her being how she contacts reality, what she knows to be true — she is representing a whole world that her family would be lacking if it weren’t for her, because she’s so different than they are.Logic can come in too, but that’s not what’s propelling it.It’s her passion and her emotions.
The persona that you present is that you’re the expert, you know everything, you’re perfect, masterful, the star, etc.But when you’re doing that, you’re not really showing up in life.The way you present yourself is a false self. If you were to become outstanding or a leader in some field, it would not look anything the way you present yourself now.The concept you have of being a star has nothing to do with truly being a leader, truly being out there representing something extraordinary.It wouldn’t look like that at all.What it is, is yet to be discovered.It would not be a good idea if I could precisely explain what it would look like, because then you’d figure out how to look that way.Your concept of being masterful, or being valuable, or someone for people to look up to, is a false persona.It’s not the real thing. The real thing has to start from who you truly are.And I’m guessing you have a real distain for who you really are, and that’s the problem. There are huge judgments you have against yourself.But you have to regain that part of you, to ever even approach true mastery or true leadership, true being out there as a shinning star.It doesn’t come from the outside in; it comes from the inside out.”
