Last night we watched the second half of the Dr. Ryce lecture titled “Getting The Stress You Need”, (www.whyagain.com). The focus of this half of the lecture is the idea that each time we set a goal, it remains active in our minds and whenever it gets triggered it drives our behavior, even if the goal is many years old, our life situation has changed dramatically and the goal is no longer logical. For example if I set a goal as an eight year old for my father to love and accept me, and I was never able to achieve that to my satisfaction, then years later when someone reminds me of my father, this goal can become activated and I can behave in seemingly irrational ways in an effort to gain of the favor of the person who reminds me of my father.
Once I set a goal in my mind, it remains active until the goal is achieved, or the goal is actively cancelled.
The exercise in tonight’s lecture asked us to close our eyes, relax and feel the presence of love. Then visualize a series of people and situations in our past where we may have set goals that did not get achieved and consciously cancel all those goals. With the conscious cancelling of goals and a prayer to the higher consciousness to assist us in cancelling all un-necessary and unachieved goals, we relieve a tremendous amount of stress on our minds and bodies.
Once the unachieved goals have been cancelled and our mental and emotional resources have been freed up to handle our daily challenges, we can then frame, select, set and maintain goals which will be appropriate for each day. When we use this technique and tool, we will choose only those goals which we can accomplish within the next day. Then each night we will review the goals we had for the day and decide whether we accomplished them, choose to cancel them, or move them back into the category of plans or intentions which can then be elevated to a goal on another day when appropriate.
Dr. Ryce presents a tool for the framing, setting and evaluating of our goals on a daily basis, and we reviewed the how to use this tool and the benefits of using all the parts of the tool. Then the discussion in the group moved to review the work several members had done over the past week. The theme that emerged for several members was the difficulty keeping the focus on ourselves when we feel a strong negative emotion, which has been triggered by the words or actions of another person. One of the difficulties here is our need to overcome the decades of conditioning which have conspired to make us believe that others control our emotions and “Make” us feel sad, angry, shamed, guilty, afraid, etc.
We reviewed the process and observation that I can only feel the emotions which are in me, and that it is My thought which causes My emotions. If someone treats me “disrespectfully” and I feel anger, it is because there is a part of “me” that feels “I do not” deserve to be treated with respect and I am angry about that part of Me. What needs to be healed is the part of me, or the feelings and beliefs I hold, which believe that I don’t deserve to be treated with respect. If I am coming from a space of Love, and I feel completely comfortable with the fact that I am lovable and worthy of respect, I will probably not even notice if someone treats me “disrespectfully”. Or if I notice it I will not be offended and probably feel nothing more than compassion for the other person.
We come from Love, we are made of Love, we are Love! Everything else is false.