INSPIRED Christopher Walker
Chris@ innerwealth.com
Tel +61 417 209636
By Chris Walker - Inner wealth Real Spirit
Evolving through Frustra
You have no doubt seen the growth rings of a tree. Nature is showing you something about your own life. You have growth rings too. When a tree grows to a certain diameter and the seasons change, a growth ring is placed to protect the tree. In this short season, the tree doesn't grow. It hunkers down and nourishes itself. Then, when the time is right, the tree begins to expand again. You do this too. It's called moving through Frustra.
Management Consulting With A Twist - Teacher, Coach, Consultant, Speaker, Writer
In life, whether it's work, home, health, money or spirit, stuff comes to us. Sometimes we like what we see, this is like the tree putting on the growth ring, growth stops nourishment happens. But sometimes we don't want what we see, feel, hear, learn, experience, think, taste. When we don't like what life dishes up we typically react by trying to get back, under a safe, happy growth ring. We do this using blame, playing victim, getting angry, judging, running, criticising, abusing, fearing, getting stressed, attacking, condemning, being jealous or even ignoring all together - in all, giving our power away in order to feel good and safe and strong again. But, reaction in all it's possible forms (and there are thousands) takes us way off track, loosens our resolve to our true vision, we stop being a loving individual and we stymie our growth. In simple terms: closes our heart and engages our mind. When that happens, we're seriously off track, even if it feels great. A closed heart lowers your mindset, exhausts your vitality, ages you, sends you toward the four substitutes and cuts off the flow of life from your work and love life. The primary person who gets hurt when we get stuck in a frustra, is ourselves but those we love and care for can also become contaminated by our subconscious and subliminal issues. It's like a nasty cold we simply unknowingly pass on. A closed heart is inevitable in a day, week, month and year. Don't create the expectation of yourself that isn't real. That's the role of religion and new age guru's. Real people do have trouble. Real people do have doubts. Real people hit frustras. Real people do close their heart frequently but the difference between real people and those living with false and fake unlovable and unrealistic expectations of themselves is that real people don't react. They know when they are off track and they don't spread the virus. They stop, process, get back on track and move on with the day with love and an open, happy, contented and fulfilled heart. So, we evolve between feeling on track and feeling off track. The only variable, whether you have high, false, real, no or delusional expectations of what it is to be human is how long you stay off and how quickly you get back on, track. Therapy, for example is the slow road, meditation even slower, reading self help books is the slowest and talking to friends about it is a non event. You evolve by being confronted and for that you need an independent life coach who isn't commercially hooked into your reaction, expectation or abuse. In other words, a healer, and I am one such individual.
Management Consulting With A Twist - Teacher, Coach, Consultant, Speaker, Writer
Earlier in the programme I explained that we all, every human being, must evolve through realms of frustra. Because of this we can never go backward, evolution is nature's reason for being. We can revisit and we do revisit the same old feelings that made us feel like hell before we learned some self-mastery technique, but the issue that provokes that feeling will be an escalation of the previous trigger. I went through a divorce and my wife left with my three young kids. I went to hell. Really suicidal. It took 5 years of serious selfexploration to get out of that funk. Mostly that length of time was because I wasted 90% of it, thinking I was fixed, going back for six months of life before recognising that I was not fixed. Then returning for more help. The point is two fold: one is that since then I have, in spite of 5 years of serious self-examination and counselling, returned to that suicidal thought many times since and the second is, now that I know how to deal with a suicidal thought, I don't panic, I sit, be a friend to myself and then process that thought back on track. This suicidal thought is deeply embedded. It's not a rare thing. Most people think it when times are tough. If we beat ourselves up about it, things just escalate, maybe even cancer or car accidents. But if we accept that this is just a memory, a thought we've been having, and we learn to accept, thank and process it, we grow from it. Can you see the big difference between what I'm saying here and what therapists, doctors, guru's, religions, selfhelp books, psychologist and HR departments must offer you? The difference is that they promise you that the negative thought you hate will go away... never return. I say, it's there for life and all you can do is become a friend with that thought, appreciate it and process it to learn - or better said - evolve and re open your heart. As we age we can accumulate a lot of feelings that we say "I never ever want to feel like that again" which is a huge mistake. It's like painting ourselves into a corner. We can say "I don't want to work with someone like that, and I don't want to be married to someone like that and I don't want to see the news with things like that and I don't want friends who behave like that ..." do you know anyone who has boxed themselves in like this? As that person gets longer in years, their options close, their heart shuts, their vision of the future is shrinking, their value to the universe is diminishing. They will die old and crabby. But there's an alternative. That alternative is to see that there's nothing we can't love and that every trait we see in others is inside of us and that nobody treats us worse than we treat ourselves. You follow that evolving, expanding path and you get younger not older as time goes on because every event becomes a chance to be more light hearted, more hopeful, more inspired, more visionary. In this way, the longer you live, the younger you get. With life extension medicine we are living longer but the quality of that life after 50 is completely hemmed in by self help books which are really religious books repackaged, selfhelp guru's, yoga classes and meditation. All this is raging ageing material. It closes people down into a them and us, a conscious group, an environmentally friendly group, a wealthy group. All this comparative self help is toxic because it is based on a devolution, a shrinking definition of the self that's worthy of love and life.
Management Consulting With A Twist - Teacher, Coach, Consultant, Speaker, Writer
Using the four substitutes we can have spurts of happiness, spurts of energy, spurts of good sex, spurts of success, but none of it is sustainable. If we do not expand the definition of our true nature to become inclusive of what we judge in others, we age, become irrelevant, start grasping for straws of identity and sink into old age, miserable and lonely. Simply, we either evolve or die. So the situation can become dire. If we react, and therefore fight rather than work through a situation, we set in train an ever increasing intensity of warnings. We might just start with feeling tired (emotion costs huge energy) but then we might start getting attacked at work (nobody treats us worse than we treat ourselves) then we might start thinking that we are not happy, getting a bit depressed (self righteousness the essence of reaction will cause depression eventually). It's the difference between a tap on the shoulder and a whack on the head with a 4*2 timber. We must grow. It's not spiritual. It's universal. Everything is expanding. Everything grows. Evolves toward some place. Nature knows that place. Humans don't understand it. Some people try to stop evolving. They want to save specie, protect the whale. Some people would rather think they are in control, or at least have the power, to determine evolution. But we don't. Tsunamis, earthquakes, ice storms, draughts and not random - they are nature evolving nature. So, what about us? How do we evolve? We evolve, like it or not, at the border of order (gee I like this) and chaos (gee I hate this). Those fluctuations from order to chaos are inevitable in our lives. In fact they happen on a daily basis. We evolve from "Got to" to "Love to" then become incompetent again, and then evolve from "got to" to "love to" and that's life. Good, bad, evolve, incompetent, competent, good - bad, evolve, incompetent competent. So, you can see what causes most people's pain. It's resisting their evolution because they hate their incompetence. All the great masters of business, spirituality, life, social, government, history have been great students. They learned and they learned and they applied and then they learned some more. They were great leaders but they were great learners. Steve Jobs was a great learner. He learned from experts, from trial and error, from others. He learned and never stopped learning. To be a great learner is to be a great leader. To do so, you must embrace your incompetence. Instead of saying "look how clever I am, look what I know," you can say, "look what I don't know and how can I learn?" The more you know, the more you know you don't know. This is the opportunity of life. If you are wishing to hold a vision, an incorruptible vision, a vision that is indestructible, sustainable and actionable you will need to understand the concept of frustra. If your day is not your idea of perfect, ask "how is this frustra showing me my blocks?"
Management Consulting With A Twist - Teacher, Coach, Consultant, Speaker, Writer
