Talking truth about "self-improvement" as it relates to health, overall wellness and expressing the truest version of you. This is Marta Mrotek with Something Honest…

Most of us have moments that stand out as turning points. They might be lots of little memories all wrapped up together or just one really big one that comes up over and over again. Some of them take us back to experiences that we’d like to forget. But there are other moments, like this one, where we have an opportunity to look at how we got here with new eyes and start turning things around. If we’re in agreement that we can’t change anything that’s already happened, let’s see if we can learn something from it and change how we feel about what’s happening right now.

Hey Everybody, this is Marta and we are going deep today with the Courage Study Journal. For the last three Principles we’ve been focused on creating starting rituals that help get us ready to explore areas where we might feel stuck. Every three episodes you’ll see some changes in the format so that we can study ourselves more deeply. This really is the self-study episode about self-study. We’ll spend a little less time on indications and benefits for this one and more time on the prompts for reflection as we get to work on an inventory with an in depth assessment that can provide valuable information about how you got here and breaking patterns from the past by moving energy in places where it might be stagnant.

If you haven’t listened to the Courage Talking Points Episode yet you might want to go back for an introduction and a whole lot of my experience with self-study. If you’re ready to get into it be sure to stick around until the end for my answer to our challenge question for this week and some ideas for getting the most out of your experience.

We’ll start by looking at some of the emotions that can help pinpoint places where you might be caught in a cycle of unhealthy energy and a few benefits of working with Courage as it relates to self-exploration. One of the most common indications, or feelings, that come up is…

Indications for Practice

Resentment. We’ve already talked about this a lot so we don’t have to spend too much time talking about it now, but it is worth repeating the basic premise that your resentments are only hurting you. This feeling often leads to anger, which we’ll talk about more in future episodes. But unlike resentment, anger can and often does spill out into our relationships and sometimes even cause physical harm. The result can be painfully obvious for all parties but it’s important to know that when it comes to holding a grudge or harboring quiet resentments there is still damage being done but most of it is just affecting you. Resentment is most often held in silence, and it keeps growing because we get more and more frustrated that no one is doing anything to make it right. We feel like people should just know when they’ve hurt us and do the right thing but for so many reasons that just isn’t always the case. Sometimes the other party never even knows that you’re out there somewhere quietly intensifying the emotions from the initial event. And that usually makes us resent them even more. Just remember that when it comes to resentment, you’re the one drinking the poison and we’ve got some tools that point to the cure. Two more emotions that we’ve talked about before are…

Guilt and Shame. Because all of the Principles are working together and most our emotions are connected we’re coming back to guilt and shame but hopefully with a new point of view from the work we’ve already done with Surrender and learning to let go. Guilt and Shame play a part, even in our resentments,  as they relate to the part that we’ve played and any harms that we may have caused. Sometimes shame comes from the ways that we’ve been hurt but for most us the deepest shame comes from the hurt we’ve caused. Guilt in small doses can be useful if it helps us take responsibility for what we’ve done. But shame is only useful for recognizing something that needs to be explored further and released. Sometimes we call this one of the toxic emotions because it rarely serves any other purpose than intensifying already existing pain and driving us even further away from anything that feels positive. For me shame was the primary factor in that feeling that I wanted to hide, and not just hiding my emotions but hiding big parts of myself that I was afraid for other people to see.

Fear and Worry can come from past experiences but we’re almost always applying them to what might happen in the future. Of course there are moments of real fear in the present moment, but again, for most of us, most of the time there’s really nothing to be so afraid of right now. If we can bravely explore these emotions, especially the worry part, as a way to change what we can and let go of the rest, we’ll have a valuable tool for creating a practical plan to prepare for the future, with more positive thoughts about what might happen next and more positive results. One more, often more subtle emotion that can keep us from anything that feels like a solution is…   

Discouragement. It is literally the opposite of encouragement and worth our time as we take a look at the root word for both of them. Encourage really just means to add courage and discourage really just means to take it away. In the Challenge Episode this week we’ll work on practicing with Courage very specifically and how it adds the right kind of energy to any of those areas where we might feel stuck. Discouragement really is well defined as feeling stuck and we’re gonna get serious about moving that energy around. So here are a few benefits that come from Exploration Practice.

Benefits of Exploration Practice

Encouraged. We just talked about the meaning of this work and the primary benefit of adding Courage to any challenge is having more of that energy for the task at hand. This applies to even small tasks and worries in life but it is especially useful when we’re working on something that is truly scary. Which leads us to talking about…

Bravery. That extra energy that people find to run into burning buildings or lift heavy objects way beyond their own strength comes from a sudden and strong belief that fear isn’t a concrete thing and that we do have access to more energy and more power than we ever imagined. People don’t usually do brave things because they’re not afraid. Bravery comes in when we decide that fear isn’t going to control what happens next. When we strengthen our connection with the Source of all Power fear starts to fade and a feeling of protection takes its place.

Protected. Some of that feeling comes from being able to look at what scares us, that’s a big part of self-study, most of us have made a habit of looking away. It’s like the monster under the bed that only disappears if you turn on the lights and go looking for it. And that usually doesn’t happen until we’ve got someone who makes us feel safe telling us that it’s okay to go ahead and look. That person can be you. This is what I mean about giving yourself the best advice. If you can tap into that Higher Version of you there’s a constant Source of Wisdom and Stable Energy that is more reliable than anything that you could ever get from another person. Once you’ve made that connection you can take it even further and start to get curious about what you might really be able to do. And that’s our final benefit for today, curiosity.

Curiosity. If we can get to the point where we’re actually curious and even excited to find out what we can do to make a change for the better life will surely change. This is how we find true clarity and a better understanding of what is actually in our circle of control. I mean, wouldn’t you like to know? Wouldn’t it actually be an incredible shift if you really could start looking at this whole thing, and don’t just mean this whole thing I mean your whole life, as something to be explored. What if it really could be an experiment? What if even the worst of it could turn into massive clues to figuring out your own private puzzle?  Curiosity gives us the right kind of energy for a rigorously honest inventory of ourselves.

We’re gonna start getting ready for that in just a moment. You can always just listen along but if you haven’t started a study journal yet I’m begging you to go get one. Get a piece of random paper and a crayon if you have to, or maybe give this a listen straight through and then listen again when you have time to write, but then I encourage you to do it soon. Sometimes this kind of thing can be even more useful when you really take your time to listen first and then go back and concentrate on the writing part. But there’s no way around it, our exercise for today is an inventory that works best in written form. That’s the way it was taught to me and that’s always what I recommend whenever possible. You will need to pause from time to time. Just do it, it’s not that hard to rewind, and if you want to go through it again later you can to go to the Something Honest Podcast Page and check out the Show Notes using the transcription for this episode to guide you or check out the YouTube clip for this and I’ll make sure to add a couple of visuals there if that helps. But this first time see if you can follow along by listening and pausing if needed as you go. We’re going to take a quick break. Get your stuff together and we’ll back in 60 seconds or less with more on how to use the Principle of Courage for Self-Study.

We’re back and it’s time to get serious about taking a look inside. Before we start, I want you to know that you’re not alone if any of this feels uncomfortable. Some people love this kind of thing but there are many, seriously you wouldn’t believe how many, who get discouraged when it comes to this part of the process. I know that’s ironic since we’re working on Courage. But I want to remind you that if you’ve been following along you already have a strong Foundation in place and if you’ve been practicing you’ve got some reliable tools to make a connection with stable energy and start seeing things from a different point of view.

Timeline Exercise

We’re going to go through something that we call the Timelin Exercise. You’ll want to start with two blank pages in your notebook that are facing each other, and at the top you’ll write something like Inventory Timeline and the date, just for posterity’s sake. I like to have both of those pages blank on both sides just in case you decide to trash the whole thing and start over, and for that very reason you might want to use a pencil on this first part. If you’re not weird in that way like I am, go ahead use a pen and cross stuff out if you need to or rip out the page and start again.

On the first page, the one on the left side, draw a long line right down the center, with a dot or an x to mark the spot at the very top labeled “the past” and one all the down at the very bottom labeled “right now” or anything else that clearly defines those two points in time. Then I want you to put me on pause and start at the top with the day you were born and go straight down the line adding marks and labels for anything that stands out as a major event. These don’t necessarily have to be positive or negative and you’re not trying to chronicle every little thing, you really don’t want to overthink. Move through it pretty quickly, you already know what needs to be on there, I know you do. We’re just trying to get a quick snapshot that we can use as an overview of the really big things that stand out most. Okay go. Pause me.

Once you feel like you’re done, knowing that you can always add more to your timeline if something big comes to mind. I usually tell people that they don’t need to sit back and look at this for too long or study it. We’re just using it as a factual reference point for the rest of your inventory.

Now you’ll do almost exactly the same thing on the next page. A line all the way down the middle. A dot or an x to mark the top and the bottom but this time at the top you’ll have “right now” or “the present” or whatever you called it at the bottom of the first page, and the very bottom you’ll write “the future” or “the unknown” or whatever you want to call the rest of your physical experience here. You’ll start at the top with this very moment and work your way down with, again not positive or negative, but whatever really big events you’re planning for, afraid of, or excited for… Okay, pause and go.

So if you actually just did both of those exercises in written form I would imagine, at least for most people, the second one, looking into the future was a lot harder to do than the first. I know when I did it I didn’t really know what to write, except for a few things that I was really afraid of and I didn’t know where to put them because I really didn’t have any way to say when they would happen. If that’s kind of how it went for you too that’s the point. Even if you have big exciting plans, major deadlines or what you consider exact dates for things that are about to happen, anybody who’s been living in 2020 has proof that you really don’t know how it’ll all pan out. Again, I don’t want you to look at this forever or think about it too much but no matter what you wrote, a lot, a little or almost nothing, it is still a good way to get a visual reference for just a way to look at your life. Everything that we’re about to do, everything that you ever can do and everything that really counts is always moving on that timeline, but it’s never really moving in your life because it’s always in that one little spot that we’re calling right now. That leads to the…

Inventory for Assessment, Information Seeking and Self-Study

The basic structure for this next part is extremely similar to what people to for the 4th Step in 12 Step Programs but we’re going to add in some of the work we’ve been doing with using your Emotions for Guidance and some prompts that tend a little more toward Yogic Study. We’ll be using all of them together, none really holding more weight or value than the others so even if you’ve done, or regularly do, something similar this should still bring new insights to your process. One final disclaimer, if you’re working on alcoholism or addiction this really is best done with a sponsor so you can work on all of the steps together with someone that can give you more personalized guidance. But if you’re here to work on what we’ve been calling “self-improvement” this can easily be done on your own and maybe this will be some motivation to join our Facebook Group or to reach out to a friend or mentor that you trust to talk about any of the bigger stuff that might come up.

Okay, if you’ve still got your journal ready, we’ll start at the top of another blank set of two pages and write the title across both pages this time. We want Resentments Inventory all the way across the top. There are lots of ways that you can do this but my favorite is to make four columns across these two pages. There’s a heading at the top of each column, so you’ll write the word, Who at the top of the first one, then What at the top of the second, the third one is How and the fourth column write the word Truth. Still with me? Okay, so don’t pause me just yet, maybe just listen for a few minutes and you’ll be set up to write when we’re done. You’ll fill this in addressing one resentment at a time and moving across all four columns before you move down to start on the next. You can work in chronological order and start with whatever happened first in your life but I usually say just go with whatever comes into your mind and don’t worry so much about the order, you know what it is... The who column is usually a person but it can sometimes be a place or an institution of some kind, so you’re always naming a physical entity in this first column. Then you’ll move to the second column and write what you think happened, this deals with your mental perception of how you were wronged. The third column is for how it made you feel, and this is a great place to consider how your emotions might have been showing up over time to remind you that something needed to change. And the Truth column is traditionally used for a more spiritual type of reflection as you consider the truth about really happened in the most objective terms. You can explore that a little more by considering the ways that our thoughts can be colored, those five afflictions of the mind that we talked about yesterday, and using them to notice the beginning of a pattern that may have kept you from seeing the full Truth about what really happened. How could ignorance, just not knowing what was going on behind the scenes or what was happening with the other person have played a part in your emotional response? Consider the ego, that part of you that is self-involved by nature and maybe wrapped up in your own experience, how could that have played a part? Did any of it have something to do with an attraction or an aversion on your part that made it feel even worse than the initial insult on its own? And finally you’ll consider the fear of death, fear of change and the unknown and how that might have contributed to the pattern. I will say that sometimes all of these apply to some extent and in some rare cases none of them do, especially for those who have been truly victimized or physically assaulted somehow, sometimes it really just doesn’t make sense. It’s never a good excuse but sometimes hurt people really do hurt people and even though what was done to you was wrong you might not ever know the whole story about why it happened. For most of us though, most of the time this is a helpful tool for looking at the actual event and what’s true from a more objective point of view.

So we’ll use my example of grocery store incident from the talking points just so we’re clear on the process. We’re use my dad for the who, even though he wasn’t there, he really is the one who left me alone with her so much and even though it took me literally decades to realize it, that was actually the source of most of my resentment. And that’s what I’d write for the what. I’d write for leaving me alone with mom. For the how it made me feel, I could have a whole slew of things for this one and that’s okay, I’d at least write scared, sad and confused, for sure. And for the truth I’d think about the really strong fear of death and change before I wrote anything there, that’s what usually scared me most when I was with her... This is the only part where you really have to sit back and think… What is really true? And I’d write, my dad loved me, and it was a hard situation for all of us.

Then I’d draw a line there and in my original inventory I had something similar about my mom but just for being sick, for everything that brought into our lives. I resented being embarrassed, I resented having to take care of her, even though it wasn’t even her fault, it still counts. The how, the feelings and the Truth for that one are almost exactly the same as what I wrote for the first one about my dad. And that’s just to show that you might end up writing something that’s almost the same and that’s okay. I’d go on to write a few colorful words about the pharmaceutical companies and the doctors. And each time drawing a line under what you wrote and going to the next resentment just underneath and work your way across again. If you run out of space just turn the page, make your columns and keep going until you think you’ve got them all.

When you’re done with your resentments, you’ll do the exact same thing turning to the next two blank pages, writing Harms Inventory at the top. Make those four columns with who, what, how and Truth and make your way across until you feel like your finshed. This is where you list the harms that you’ve caused and where I’d focus on my part in the grocery store incident. That’s why we used my mom for the resentment but that doesn’t tell the whole story and in my case the harm is really the one that stands out most. So sometimes you really might have something that shows up on more than one list. Again you can’t really do it wrong, you’ll know what feels right and you’ll know when you’re done, you can always come back to it and add on if you need to.

Turn the page and do the same thing for fears in exactly the same way. If there really isn’t a person or entity related to a fear you can leave it blank but usually there’s something. At that point some would say that you’re done with you’re inventory but I like to make one more chart to list positive characteristics. Who first noticed this good thing in you, even if it was you! What is that characteristic just list it simply? Maybe it’s I like to help. How does it make you feel when you do display that quality? Happy and fulfilled. And in the Truth column right a short affirmation that’s basically a summary of the last two columns like, “It makes me feel happy and fulfilled to help other people.”

Make sense? Whew, I know that’s a lot and it might even be a weird thing to do on a podcast but I think it’s so helpful and it makes such a difference when you’re creating an energy moving practice and that’s what we’ll work on next time. You’ve got a day in between here, I say if you’re all set to go don’t put it off, it usually doesn’t take all that long to do once you actually sit down to do it and you know, now is always the time for everything. If you’re unclear about any of the instruction go to the Facebook Group, go to our website for the transcription or YouTube for the clip from this episode.

We’ve got just one more thing to do and that’s going back to the Challenge Question.

Challenge Question

We’ve been asking, “What needs to explored more deeply?” Thinking about how self-study can play a part in finding what you need to interrupt any patterns that are keeping you from being who you were meant to be. Is there something from the past that you might be able to learn from? Or anything in the future that’s creating more fear in your life today? How could you use the Courage Principle to start breaking those cycles?

My answer to that question is almost always the same. Now that I finally understand my patterns from the past I know where to start looking when fear or resentment crops up.  No matter what’s coming up in my everyday life, I know that I’ve made it through so many challenges by being able to look at them with rigorous honesty. It’s so strange that after all these years I almost always have to go back to explore how fear is related to guilt or shame. That’s my pattern and being able to recognize it has made all the difference. Moving that old stuck energy around always helps me let go of the past and what’s not mine to change so I can get busy exploring what’s happening right now.

If you’re looking for ways to play along and help us create a supportive community, we’d love to have you join the Something Honest Facebook Group. Don’t forget everybody who joins the group will be entered in this season’s drawing for the Principle Intentions Card Deck and Guide. You can get more details in the group or on our website.

So many thanks to all of you for listening. Make sure you’re set to get notifications, come back for the Courage Challenge Episode and don’t forget to check out all THREE Courage episodes for more on how to start moving energy in places where it might feel stuck and exploring the patterns of past to break the cycle of fear.

Check the links in the description to find show notes on podcast page. Go to wellnessmeetings.com for more about the Wellness Meetings Method….. Something Honest is a Wellness Meetings production with original music composed and produced by James Mrotek at Mrotek Media.

This is Marta Mrotek sending out so much love and gratitude to each and every one of you. Until next time, let’s get to work on being well.