Transformational Teachings from Counselor Jane Ilene Cohen

There is a difference between someone who is needy and trying to use you to make up for a lack in themselves — and someone who is coming from wholeness and love, and from really enjoying you. When a person is needy, they don’t have the channels open to receive what it is they need. You then become a symbol to them of what they need, rather than who you really are.

Following enlightened self-interest* is leading you down a path that we couldn’t have preconceive of. This shows how irrelevant our preconceptions are about how things are supposed to end up looking. The challenge is being willing to stand in the confusion and discomfort of the unknown until things become clear, rather than jumping into an immediate solution so you can stop dealing with it.

What people often associate with safety, stability and comfort is actually retreating from engaging in life, into a world they believe they can control.

The question is what you are committed to. From a shallow kind of perspective, people can be committed to what makes them feel good in the moment. And so when things get difficult they just leave. On the other side of the pendulum …

People often go along with what’s happening around them as if that’s just the way things are, not realizing that they are letting themselves be controlled by other people’s energy. That’s very, very different than going with the flow of life.

What’s more important than taking certain actions, or changing your behavior in relation to her, is changing your insides.

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.

Out of fear of losing this security, people lock themselves into a particular form, rather than paying attention to and evolving whatever is really true between them, as well as growing and evolving themselves.

…if you take a ridged stand on a judgment about what this means about his character, you have shut the door to a way forward.

“…so much divorce right now, because people have been trying to conform to some external ideal of what marriage is supposed to be…”