See what this is before you commit to anything

By Floris Odding · on core beliefs

Control + Alt + Delete

New car, bigger house, the perfect partner. Nothing brings us the peace we hope for. The new stuff becomes the new normal, and the perfect partner seems to have the same imperfections as the previous ones.

The reason for this is that what we try to find outside of ourselves is just a mirror of what we think is broken from the inside. We don't seem to be too different from computers. We are running the software that does exactly what we programmed it for a long time ago.

The software is our beliefs that we have taken to be true during our childhood. We give meaning to big, but also to apparently small events that are untrue. For example, praise for good grades in school can mean that love must be earned.

When a computer crashes, you can press Control + Alt + Delete. The task manager pops up and you can see which processes are currently running on the computer. We can do the same when we have the feeling our lives crash. With which beliefs have we programmed ourselves that keep us from living a more happy and freer life?

True freedom is cleaning up the old programs and forgive ourselves for the falsehoods we believed were true. An interesting fact is that the famous Windows XP background with the green pastures is called 'bliss'. When we clean out the mess, bliss remains.

Warm regards,
Floris

By Gad Sprukt · on emotional pain

The warning light on the dashboard

My usual way of dealing with pain was to suppress or repress it. Faced with emotional suffering, I tried to push the uncomfortable feelings into the dark corners of my mind. From those corners, the pain would eventually find its way into the body, appearing as disease.

When I rejected my emotional pain, I was rejecting a natural response from my mind that was calling me to healing. Emotional pain is, in fact, an expression of an intelligent inbuilt mechanism that tells me — "hey buddy, there is an issue in your thought-system. Please pay attention".

But somehow this message gets misunderstood. Instead of relating to the pain as a natural, healthy function of my mind, the experience of pain is occluded by the idea that "I should not be feeling this way."

Let's say I'm Elon Musk, driving along in my Tesla on a sunny day. Suddenly a signal appears on the control panel — a problem in the battery system. Now imagine Elon, upon seeing the signal, stopping and getting out of the car. Through his flowing tears he screams to the heavens: "Woe is me! I'm so bad! I'm so broken!"

Desperate, with shaking hands, he takes a wrench from the boot. "Bad signal!" barks Elon, as he smashes the control panel into tiny toxic smithereens. "Bad, bad signal! Don't you ever come back!"

The point I am ever so subtly trying to make is that I used to be like this mad Elon, but without the money. I used to believe that the pain I was feeling meant there is something wrong with me. What a relief to discover that emotional pain means nothing about me. So now, when pain comes up, instead of pushing it away I simply open the hood of my mind and look.

Love,
Gad