Karma Builder: Today's Karmic Workout – Smash A Mental Block
Karmic Muscle Group: Discipline
Today's Exercise: Smash A Mental Block
Spend 3 minutes identifying things that you know you should do but have put off and are likely to continue to put off. It may be calling your mother. It may be paying a bill. It may be cleaning your sock drawer.
Make a list of actions being thwarted by procrastination and mental blocks. You will know that this exercise is working because you will not even want to write down the items that represent true mental blocks. If you want a really good list, ask your spouse or significant other to make the list for you.
Pick the worst item on your list, but it needs to be something that can be done in an hour or two at most. Do not pick "paint my house". You can use the exercise again for that if you want to, but for now we are going to practice on something a bit less time consuming. Do not pick something that you were going to do anyway. That is would not be working through a true mental block. The uglier the mental block, the better.
Now call two of your closest friends and tell them about your mental block and ask them to check back with you by the end of the day. Give them open license to bug you as much as they want until you take the required action. Give them permission to to tweet, post or other wise broadcast your promise to complete the action, if you do not complete it by the end of the day.
Set up a penalty for failure. It has to be something painful such as buying your friends dinner if you fail or wearing a clown nose for week.
Notify your friends when your task is complete.
Notice what has changed in your thinking regarding the mental block you just cleared. Most people usually feel like a weight has been lifted off of their lives then they break through a mental block. But where was the weight that has not been lifted?
Review your entire mental block list after you have cleared one item from the list. Usually, overcoming one mental block gives you momentum to overcome others.
Training Note:
Mental blocks are more than a matter of not wanting to do something. Somewhere in our consideration of the actions that we need to take are ideas that we associate with some sort f pain or discomfort. Every time the action comes to mind, we immediately feel this pain or discomfort and in our haste to avoid pain, we avoid action. Often the discomfort is pure delusional.
Psychologists call this avoidance behavior. Avoidance behavior degrades the quality of lives because it has living with our heads in the sand. The purpose of this exercise is to smash through the block, but more importantly to study how we block ourselves in the first place. Yes, it is wonderful that we are getting past our procrastination, but it is even more wonderful when we can see how we set ourselves up to stall out and develop some skill in breaking through our mental log jams. What we are looking for is the meaning that we associated with the task that needed to be done. We can clear all mental blocks by simply changing the meaning that we have associated with the task that is creating the pain and discomfort. The process here, therefore, is to confront these negative interpretations of a task, distinguish the meaning and then change the meaning.
Consider something simple like the matter of someone not calling their mother. The meaning causing the resistance may not be the call itself, it may be some other thought that one might have related to talking to her mother. "She is just going to yell at me for …" "I will have to listen to her endless stories about …" "She always makes me feel like a five year old." The bottom line is in this person's mind talking to mom equals pain. Because the pain is vague and undefined, it has actually more strength then if it were distinguished.
The excuse is not the meaning we are looking for, but it is a byproduct of the meaning that we have assigned to the action. "She will make me feel guilty" is the excuse. "Talking to my mother makes me feel bad about myself" is the meaning that is actually causing the pain that is acting as a mental block. Ideas that give us pain usually very simple and straightforward statements of isolated logic, but get buried in mountains of internal narrative and are therefore often difficult to distinguish. "Calling mom hurts." "Making my bed hurts." "Doing my taxes hurts." This is the beginning of locating the meaning that we have assigned a task that keeps us from doing it. If we ask why this is so, we get our narrative, but a more direct method is to say "why have I made this painful – it is just a phone conversation, it is just filling out a form", etc. Seeing delusion as delusion destroys it. Without much additional effort.
Karmic Benefits:
Complaints Steal Your Motivation: complaining is a way of consciously asserting that something is problematic. When we whine about it, it gets worse because we have now attached emotional pain to our complaint. This means that every time we think about the subject, it is painful. Sticking to the facts helps. "All I have to do is wash the windows, I don't have to build a house" is the type of realization that puts tasks in perspective.
The Double Dilemma of Mental Blocks: we are usually feeling two distinct pains when we mental block. There is the emotional impulse causing the block and then there is the second layer of frustration with ourselves as we come to realize that the block is making things worse. Because this lives in our minds as a general sense of discomfort, our chances of breaking through get smaller the longer we let the matter go unattended. Confront the discomfort and you clear the path for action.
The Joke Is On You: the truth in the vast majority of cases is that we hold ourselves back by making up fantasies and delusions that we do not even realize that we were fabricating. When we confront real obstacles they are not nearly as frustrating as our imaginary ones. That is because they are tangible and we actually have great access to dealing with them. Ghosts are much scarier than real monsters because we are not sure what or where they are.
It May Be Fiction, But It Is One Heck Of A Karmic Workout.
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Today's Exercise: Smash A Mental Block
[Preparatory Note: for this exercise you are going to need the assistance of at least two friends. Mental blocks are nasty buggers. They can keep you from paying your taxes, getting your car registration renewed, getting critical health check-ups. They can even kill you. All of our of thoughts start out weak until we start to consider how we feel about them and start associating our emotions to our thinking. The juice of emotion can provide momentum or it can paralyze us. When we live in denial or when we are resisting something, our negative emotions act like wedges under the wheels of our car. Because we cannot get traction and momentum, we are stuck in an inert state completely paralyzed. The secret is to avoid associating tasks with meaning that creates pain and discomfort. Complaining about a task is a quick route to procrastination.]
Spend 3 minutes identifying things that you know you should do but have put off and are likely to continue to put off. It may be calling your mother. It may be paying a bill. It may be cleaning your sock drawer.
Make a list of actions being thwarted by procrastination and mental blocks. You will know that this exercise is working because you will not even want to write down the items that represent true mental blocks. If you want a really good list, ask your spouse or significant other to make the list for you.
Pick the worst item on your list, but it needs to be something that can be done in an hour or two at most. Do not pick "paint my house". You can use the exercise again for that if you want to, but for now we are going to practice on something a bit less time consuming. Do not pick something that you were going to do anyway. That is would not be working through a true mental block. The uglier the mental block, the better.
Now call two of your closest friends and tell them about your mental block and ask them to check back with you by the end of the day. Give them open license to bug you as much as they want until you take the required action. Give them permission to to tweet, post or other wise broadcast your promise to complete the action, if you do not complete it by the end of the day.
Set up a penalty for failure. It has to be something painful such as buying your friends dinner if you fail or wearing a clown nose for week.
Notify your friends when your task is complete.
Notice what has changed in your thinking regarding the mental block you just cleared. Most people usually feel like a weight has been lifted off of their lives then they break through a mental block. But where was the weight that has not been lifted?
Review your entire mental block list after you have cleared one item from the list. Usually, overcoming one mental block gives you momentum to overcome others.
Training Note:
Mental blocks are more than a matter of not wanting to do something. Somewhere in our consideration of the actions that we need to take are ideas that we associate with some sort f pain or discomfort. Every time the action comes to mind, we immediately feel this pain or discomfort and in our haste to avoid pain, we avoid action. Often the discomfort is pure delusional.
Psychologists call this avoidance behavior. Avoidance behavior degrades the quality of lives because it has living with our heads in the sand. The purpose of this exercise is to smash through the block, but more importantly to study how we block ourselves in the first place. Yes, it is wonderful that we are getting past our procrastination, but it is even more wonderful when we can see how we set ourselves up to stall out and develop some skill in breaking through our mental log jams. What we are looking for is the meaning that we associated with the task that needed to be done. We can clear all mental blocks by simply changing the meaning that we have associated with the task that is creating the pain and discomfort. The process here, therefore, is to confront these negative interpretations of a task, distinguish the meaning and then change the meaning.
Consider something simple like the matter of someone not calling their mother. The meaning causing the resistance may not be the call itself, it may be some other thought that one might have related to talking to her mother. "She is just going to yell at me for …" "I will have to listen to her endless stories about …" "She always makes me feel like a five year old." The bottom line is in this person's mind talking to mom equals pain. Because the pain is vague and undefined, it has actually more strength then if it were distinguished.
The excuse is not the meaning we are looking for, but it is a byproduct of the meaning that we have assigned to the action. "She will make me feel guilty" is the excuse. "Talking to my mother makes me feel bad about myself" is the meaning that is actually causing the pain that is acting as a mental block. Ideas that give us pain usually very simple and straightforward statements of isolated logic, but get buried in mountains of internal narrative and are therefore often difficult to distinguish. "Calling mom hurts." "Making my bed hurts." "Doing my taxes hurts." This is the beginning of locating the meaning that we have assigned a task that keeps us from doing it. If we ask why this is so, we get our narrative, but a more direct method is to say "why have I made this painful – it is just a phone conversation, it is just filling out a form", etc. Seeing delusion as delusion destroys it. Without much additional effort.
Karmic Benefits:
Complaints Steal Your Motivation: complaining is a way of consciously asserting that something is problematic. When we whine about it, it gets worse because we have now attached emotional pain to our complaint. This means that every time we think about the subject, it is painful. Sticking to the facts helps. "All I have to do is wash the windows, I don't have to build a house" is the type of realization that puts tasks in perspective.
The Double Dilemma of Mental Blocks: we are usually feeling two distinct pains when we mental block. There is the emotional impulse causing the block and then there is the second layer of frustration with ourselves as we come to realize that the block is making things worse. Because this lives in our minds as a general sense of discomfort, our chances of breaking through get smaller the longer we let the matter go unattended. Confront the discomfort and you clear the path for action.
The Joke Is On You: the truth in the vast majority of cases is that we hold ourselves back by making up fantasies and delusions that we do not even realize that we were fabricating. When we confront real obstacles they are not nearly as frustrating as our imaginary ones. That is because they are tangible and we actually have great access to dealing with them. Ghosts are much scarier than real monsters because we are not sure what or where they are.
It May Be Fiction, But It Is One Heck Of A Karmic Workout.
Read The Lotus Blossom, D. M. Kenyon's fictional account of a teenage girl who turns off her cellphone and enters the very real, but mystical world of Budo warriors. Humorous, irreverent and heart-wrenching, The Lotus Blossom is an unforgettable tale of a Midwestern teenage girl's transformation into a budo warrior in the midst of the turmoil of the Information Age. Available in all digital formats, paperback and soon to be released in hardcover.
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