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…..

My mom had early onset Alzheimer’s Disease, really early, and way back before they really even knew what it was… I was 8 when she got sick and by the time I started driving she was mostly gone mentally most of the time. There were lots of things that went along with that that were really scary but the one that stands out most wasn’t scary because of her, it was scary because of me. She was standing in the middle of the grocery store very quietly urinating on the floor… and I was embarrassed, and then I was cruel, and what happened next haunted me for years even after she died.

Hi Everybody, this is Marta with the Talking Points Episode for Courage. For the last few weeks been working on using the first three Principles to build a strong Foundation for change. Today we’ll start on the next three and the process for Transformation. Most of what we’ve done so far has been about being in the present moment and hopefully by this point we’ve found a shift in perspective that will help us explore how we got here without getting lost in the past.

I always say the hardest part, for me, about working the Principles is Surrender, but Courage comes in as a close second. Most of the work we do with this Principle is centered on self-exploration through self-study. And even though it’s pretty easy for most of us to recognize the major events that brought us to this point, it’s fucking hard to look at what we’ve done. Most of us shy away from the idea of taking a rigorously honest moral inventory. Even if you’re here without anything major to work on, looking inside yourself deeply can be scary.

Courage is definitely not the opposite of fear. You can be scared shitless and still do something really brave. And it doesn’t have to be something that looks heroic to the outside world either. You don’t have to be running into a burning building to save someone. You might just be running around inside your head trying to figure out how to save yourself… and that can be terrifying. And sometimes you just have to keep walking through it in spite of the fear. Sometimes the only way out is through. Sometimes you really do have to study yourself and some of the scariest moments of your life to find your way out. And that takes Courage.

We’ve got six Talking Points to cover and all of them relate to self-study. I think you should know that what we’re about to do for this episode and the next one, is going to sound very 12 Steppy but as I’ve said you’ll see a process for some kind of self-assessment in nearly every spiritual tradition. I just like the way they do it best. It’s the best way I know to look back over your life and see the moments in your life that have led to some of these recurring patterns that we’ve been talking about. We’ll be using my story and looking back into my past as an example but by the time we’re done you’ll probably have some ideas about how it applies to you and your story. So that brings us to our first Talking Point…

TALKING POINT 1: LOOKING INTO THE PAST

Now if you’ve been following along, I’ve spent an awful lot of time talking about getting into the present moment and how so much of our painful emotions come from thoughts that keep us living in the past. But we did all that work practicing presence so that we can look at some of those painful events without losing our bearings. If you don’t feel like you’re ready for that yet keep listening. Maybe go back to what we’ve already done to keep working on grounding practice and starting rituals for creating a strong foundation to help you stay centered while we work on this… I know I was hanging on by my fingernails to get through this part. But it was worth it.

The scariest part of my original inventory, when I was actually working through the steps with a sponsor, was the stuff that came up about my mom. And just to catch you up if you’re new here, I thought I was in a 12 Step Program to support my kids and to address what I considered pretty normal parental Codependency but somewhere in the middle of self-study I realized I was working on Grief. I mean I think for most of us it’s all kind of mixed up together. I know there was some amount of childhood trauma in there, just from growing up in house with a very slowly dying parent. I think one of the worst things about early onset Alzheimer’s is that those people are still young enough to put up one hell of a fight.

When she was healthy my mom was the most lady-like, peaceful, loving person I’ve ever known. Seriously, I couldn’t have asked for a better mother or a better early childhood. She was kind and gentle and I honestly don’t know how she managed to handle her emotions so privately for as long as she did… But even though Alzheimer’s isn’t really a mental ILLNESS it is a catastrophic mental health issue. And I know I’m not the only one who has witnessed a complete change in personality before the person you love completely disappears. There was a time period, that lasted for several years, when her communication skills were mostly gone but she was still in there somewhere. You could tell by the look in her eyes. They were still alive and searching for a way to express what was going on inside. She didn’t have many words anymore at that point so her eyes were doing most of the talking. Most of the time what I saw was confusion, a lot of sadness, but mostly it was fear. You could tell she was scared in there and sometimes that overflowed in a kind of anger that I couldn’t understand. That part is still so bizarre to me, it was just so entirely against everything that defined her. I can only guess, and it might be a bad analogy but I think it’s kind of like a wild animal in a cage. I think she just felt so locked up inside her head and she didn’t have any other way to fight it.

I didn’t start my inventory looking for that kind of thing. I wasn’t even sure if I needed to do any step-work, we’ve talked about this before, I was one of those people who didn’t really think any of it applied to what I was going through. But I was going through the motions to try and figure out if I had played a part in what happened to my kids.

I already knew a lot about grounding practice so I was working hard to stay focused on the present and what I could do to make things right. But the first thing they ask you to look at is your resentments, and even though I had plenty of them that were current, every emotion that came up sucked me right back into the past. So I let go and I went back, to see what I could find.

TALKING POINT 2: RESENTMENTS

I probably sound like such an asshole when I talk about this… and I didn’t talk or think about it at all for a long time for that exact reason. But I don’t know any other way to really convey what I was feeling when I first started working the Principles in a structured way. I had already been very carefully burying most of the emotions that had anything to do with my mom for many years by that time. She died in my early 20’s, when my children were still just babies and the main thing I felt about it at that time was relief. I just wanted to feel normal. I didn’t think my husband, or my kids, needed any of what came up in me when I thought about her. So most of the time, I just didn’t. But when my well-adjusted, well-mannered church going angels were teenagers something evil came into our lives that made it all come rushing back. It came from a doctor. From a series of surgeries that my daughter had and almost 12 weeks on strong and regular doses of roxicet. That’s a pharmaceutical opiate. And that’s…

Resentment #1: Public service announcement that relates to my resentments, pharmaceutical companies don’t care about what opiates do to patients, doctors don’t pay enough attention to how they hand them out and how can they not know that you don’t to have what people call an addictive personality to get addicted to that shit.

Resentment #2: The supply chain. And every single person that plays a part in bringing that awful shit into our lives and neighborhoods. Somehow, kids especially, think they can play around with prescription drugs. But then most of them find out that street drugs are actually cheaper and easier to get. And somehow they don’t really know that you can’t play with that stuff… Somehow they don’t know addiction doesn’t play any favorites. That it can happen to them. It can happen to anybody.

Resentments #3, 4, 5 and 6: I resented my mom for being sick. I was so mad at my dad for leaving me alone with her so much.  I was so angry with both of them that I grew up so scared of living with people who were acting crazy and so totally disappointed in God for making me live in that kind of house twice.

Honestly, even now, I really don’t like the way any of that sounds coming out of my mouth. I’m talking about four of the people that I’ve loved most in this world, two of which are no longer alive, and then there’s of course God… and the doctors, and, well the pharmaceutical companies, but still, it’s not like any of them were actively trying to do anything to me personally. It’s not like my parents really knew how it would all affect me or that my kids were trying to hurt me. I don’t think they were even thinking about me at all. They were all doing their own thing, most of them going through their own painful thing. Some of them probably a lot worse than what I was going through. My resentments didn’t prove anything or change anything or do anything at all except hurt me. They were all just slightly different flavors of the same poison that I was very quietly drinking over and over again. 

I don’t know exactly how I made that jump in my head from the present moment to way back in the past but to me they were the same thing. And all that anger toward some of my most favorite people, some of the people who’ve loved me most throughout my life, all of those resentments, came with so much guilt. I can’t pretend I didn’t play a part in the whole thing. I did.

TALKING POINT 3: HARMS

My husband gets frustrated when I start talking about how any of this was my fault. He always says I shouldn’t “own” any of it, and he is absolutely right in that respect, it is pretty self-centered to think I could have really done anything to change any of it. None of it really belonged to me… But I can’t take anybody else’s inventory. I can only take mine. All I can do is try to figure out what I did to contribute to my own suffering and get honest about anything I’ve done to hurt anybody else along the way.

I know there’s a lot of talk about me today but we’re going back to my example from the intro… Still not my favorite place to go but I think it’s an example that most people can relate to in some way and it shines some light on how there are just certain moments in time that keep coming back up to the surface, refusing to fade until you’re brave enough to look them square in the face.

I had been doing everything I could to look away from that specific memory whenever it came up for years. Not so much because my mom peed on the floor in the grocery store, that part sucked too but, it was what came after… She stood there, in that puddle with that same blank look on her face. She hadn’t had any real life in her eyes for a while when this happened. She was way past the fighting part and just a ghostly, kind of scary and annoying presence in my life most of the time. So she just stood there, doing this weird thing she’d do with her mouth, staring into space and kind of rocking gently from side to side. And I said, very quietly, but very clearly and close to her face, “You. Make. Me. Sick.” I’m not sure about my tone but I know those were my exact words. And instead of standing there like she almost always did, or shuffling away in another direction, she snapped her head and she turned around and ran. And I mean she ran pretty fast and I was pissed… I chased her all the way out the sidewalk. She had her back turned to me and I put my hands on her shoulders and spun her around to see…. Her. Really her. Crying, sobbing really, and looking at me, crystal clear. She knew exactly what I just said. And I had just completely destroyed her in what was, as far as I know, one of the last moments of clarity that she ever had.

Now I know that may or may not sound like such a terrible thing to you, that depends totally on your frame of reference. But I’ve done plenty of other bad things in my life. I had other things on my inventory that you might think are worse. But the point is that’s the one that haunts me. If I could have looked into the future and known that was my last real moment with her or seen what carrying that kind of guilt could do, I’d like to think I would have done something differently… But I didn’t know, and it happened a long time ago, it’s not happening right now, there’s nothing I can do to change it and that’s just the way it was…

Maybe there’s something like that for you. Something that is understandable, maybe even totally justified in some cases, that you would have done differently if you had only known. Maybe even something painful like that, maybe something you’re ashamed of... We’ve talked some about the relationship between guilt and shame and I think for most of us there’s a little bit of both when it comes to memories like these. Even if they’re way back there in the past, those emotions can come up with even more intensity as we look back. But that is one of the best things about taking a purposeful moral inventory at this particular moment in time. Maybe right now we’ve got the foundation we need to see it for what it is without so many emotions involved, maybe we’re ready to see it from a different point of view. Maybe now, we can see it as information about how we got here and learn from it.

We’re gonna take a quick break here, I’ll be back in two minutes or less with more about my experience with the Principle of Courage and our challenge question for this week in just a moment.

We’re back and talking about Courage as it relates to self-study with Talking Point number four…

TALKING POINT 4: LOOKING INTO THE FUTURE

Now I know I told you that so much of our pain comes from looking into the past or the future and here we are talking about both of them in even more detail. But one of things I love about this method is that the Principles are all related and every bit of the work you do with each of them prepares you for the next. Most of us aren’t really ready to dive right into the heavy stuff at first and even if you don’t have a lot of heavy stuff to explore you can use what you learn here to see even the small challenges in life as opportunities to learn something about yourself and whether you’re working on something big or small the process is the same.

We talk about the importance of practice and the value of repetition to create new patterns of thought and behavior. Again, you’ll see this in most spiritual traditions. They almost never tell you to do anything just once and your done, they almost always tell you that it needs to be an ongoing process. It’s the same here with these 12 Principles no matter where you find them. In my mind they all kind of break down into groups of three. Once we’ve made our way through the first three to create a stable Foundation and a shift in perception. It’s almost like we start over and work our way through them again in more detail. In many ways Courage is just an extension of Truth. More detailed self-exploration is just the next step in the information seeking process.

The information that we find by looking into past can be used to start looking out for our future selves. If we had only known way back then what we know no we might have chosen differently. But if we’ve managed to find the origination point for a pattern we actually DO know something about the future. We can actually have a pretty good idea of how this cycle goes by the time it comes around again, and if we’re practicing with intention, we can use what we learn here to do something different this time. I had no idea that I had been raised in a perfect environment for codependency or that my fear and guilt as a child would come up so strongly again with my own children. I didn’t really know that almost everything that I was afraid of was in a different time zone and that the only thing I really had any control over was my time-traveling mind.

And that’s not to say that there’s nothing you can do to get ready for what comes next. When I say that you shouldn’t look into the future I’m not talking about practical things like making plans for something that needs to be done, or preparing for something important or difficult or getting excited about something that you want to see growing in the days ahead. Planning is very different from worrying and excitement doesn’t have to include anxiety. And none of that is to say that you won’t ever feel any of those things again. It’s meant to say that with practice you can start witnessing those thoughts and emotions when they come up without following them too far down the rabbit hole. We really don’t know just what the future holds. It all comes down to the fear of the unknown. And that leads to…

TALKING POINT 5: FEAR

Yogic philosophy gives my favorite explanation for why our minds work the way they do and a good way to explore the root cause of fear. It also points to specific mental patterns that not only increase the suffering in our lives but keep us from recognizing our true nature. If we’re serious about understanding and expressing this Higher Version of ourselves this is good tool for exploring all the ways that we’ve, unknowingly, contributed to increasing the pain in our lives. These afflictions are called the Kleshas, which quite literally means poison in Sanskrit. It gives us five reasons really for why our thoughts tend toward what we might call negative and how all of our thoughts are colored, or skewed or obscured by these five poisons. The first one is ignorance, and not ignorant like we’re stupid but ignorant as in we just don’t know… It’s almost as if we’ve forgotten who we are and everything that counts in the grand scheme of things. This ignorance or misconception is at the base, the root of all of the other afflictions and it leads to an ongoing misidentification, or another misconception, that translates as egoism. And again, that’s not egoic as in you think you’re so great, but more that we’re all naturally self-centered to some extent. Self-absorbed as in we’re caught up in our heads and our problems and that in some way because of that it really does feel like it’s all about me… even if I don’t really want it to be. The next two go together, aversion and attraction are really just two sides of the same coin, with attraction being something that I think is best described as the desire to repeat. Wanting to repeat experiences that have brought us pleasure or some form of relief is such a simple explanation for at least the beginnings of every addiction or habit. Aversion leads to the same place for many of us, only with patterns that we create to avoid painful emotions and unpleasant experiences. We’ll probably come back to talk about all of these in more detail in the future but the one I’m really trying to get at here is something called Abhinivesha and that’s the fear of death. And not just the fear of death but the root of all fear. The fear of the unknown, the fear of change and the source of all of our anxiety about the future. Somehow we forgot that we’re more than just this meat suit walking around destined to struggle. We forgot that part of us that really is something more, we stopped connecting with the part of us that knows everything and we bought into the lie that this is all there is and that this is all we were ever meant to be and that can be scary. If you think about it and you’re really honest with yourself, you’ll feel at least some amount of Truth in that. It’s a real problem. Unknowingly, we’ve all been living a lie.

TALKING POINT 6: LOOKING INTO THE PRESENT

Remember when I said the only way out is through? That’s the truth. In the Truth Talking Points Episode we talked about how the truly horrible moments in our lives really are just moments. We get attached to some of them and relive them over and over again. Just like mine from our example today, sometimes they aren’t even the worst of what we’ve been through but for some reason some of them stick. Well the same thing is true about the future. Most of us are not actually in a constant state of real crisis. We might act like we are and we might even feel like we are but if we took a step back and examined all the minutes in every day that were crisis free we’d see the truth of it. Most of our emergencies are out there in the future somewhere, pointing to whatever we’re afraid of… We don’t do ourselves any favors when we’re so wrapped up in worrying about tomorrow that we can’t appreciate what’s happening right now. I spent a lot of years living in fear, mainly the worrying variety, caught up in all the ways it could all go wrong and trying to figure out how to fix it. But the way out isn’t somewhere in the future, it’s here, in the middle of everything. Finding something good about what’s happening in the present, doing something right now to make a change for the better is the way through. And if you can start looking at the past as just a place to get information and the future only as something that you might be able to get prepared for you’ll be able to look into this moment more deeply and see what you can do right now, not wonder, not worry but really know what’s yours to change… That’s what we’ll work on tomorrow.

So let’s take one more look at the talking points:

·      Looking into the past can be useful for exploring the root cause of patterns that we’d like to break.

·      Resentments can show us how we’re hurting ourselves when we hold on to painful memories.

·      Harms can show us more about our patterns of behavior and the part we’ve played in where we are today.

·      Looking into the future commonly leads to fear.

·      Fear is something that we can find our way through.

·      Focus on what can be done in the present moment.

Right now it’s time for this week’s challenge question and how to play.

CHALLENGE QUESTION

“What needs to be explored more deeply?” Think about how self-study can play a part in finding the information that you need to interrupt any patterns that are keeping you stuck in the past or future. Is there something from the past that you might be able to learn from? Or anything in the future that you could stop worrying about if you just focused on today? How could you use the Courage Principle to start breaking the cycles? If you’re not quite ready to answer those questions come back tomorrow and we’ll work on it together.

If you’d like to play along you can find us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. We’d love to connect and hear about how this principle is working for you. Don’t forget to include the tags, #somethinghonest and #couragechallenge this time. 

Make sure you’re all set up to get notifications, next up, you’ll want to look for the Courage Study Journal Episode for more about why and how to practice self-study. Don’t forget to check out all THREE Courage episodes to start moving stagnant energy and exploring yourself to find out how you got here.

Thanks so much for listening. Check the description to find the links for show notes and details for how to enter the card deck drawing and 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 all the love and gratitude. Until next time, let’s get to work on being well.