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In This Edition Of Mystical Scuttlebutt:
Upcoming Events
Practical Tip
Dilemma Of The Month
Reflection Of The Month
Clues For When You're Stressing Out
Testimonial
You Are Invited To Participate In One of These Trainings.
They Are Designed To Significantly Change The Way You Relate To Life
And Foster The Presence Of Inner Peace On Our Planet
May 29th - No More This Or That
This workshop is required for all participants in the Paradox Management Certification Training – as an introduction to the model and/or as a review – and is covered by the Certification Training fee. This one-day seminar is also open to others who wish to get a basic understanding of Facticity as the missing link in practical spirituality before enrolling in the Certification program. Fee: for Non-Certification Training Participants: $160 – Early Bird Discount: $130 if paid in full by May 1, 2007. Time: 9 to 5:30 – Location: Seattle , Washington , USA. To register, click here.
May 29th through June 4th 2007 Paradox Management Practitioner Certification Training - for Therapists, Coaches, and Organizational Development Consultants.
Polarized thinking is but a stage in the evolution of human understanding. Paradox Management delivers you to the next stage for your personal and professional growth. This training fills an important gap in the professional and spiritual training of Coaches, Corporate Consultants, Business Leaders, Educators, Therapists, and Spiritual Teachers. An absolute must for anyone interested in the conscious co-creation of a different kind of world. Please visit our website for additional information - Led by Ragini Elizabeth Michaels, Consciousness Teacher, Marketplace Mystic, and originator of Paradox Management. - 7 Days – Fee: $2,700 – Early Bird Discount: $2,400 if paid in full by April 1, 2007 - $2,550 if paid in full by May 1, 2007. Location: Seattle, Washington, USA – Times: 9 to 5:30. Registration closes on May 1st, 2007. Click here to register.
"The absolute best training I have ever attended. I now feel qualified to handle my client’s dilemmas that aren’t responding to traditional conflict resolution! A great find!” - Lainie West, Consultant, Seattle, Wa.
When you find yourself losing your calm or becoming annoyed with the way things are unfolding, take a moment and begin to just walk. Place your attention purposefully and carefully on the sensations of your body as it moves. Whether you’re moving fast or slow, notice each step. Attend to how each foot lifts up off the ground, moves through the air, and then returns to the solidity of the earth. Pay attention to how the body shifts your weight back and forth, again and again, in order to keep your balance and allow the movement to continue smoothly. When your mind starts to drift back to the events of the situation, just gently bring it back to your movements. This will begin to slow down your mind, give you a bit of distance from its musings about the circumstance upsetting you, and free you to breathe and come back to yourself and the reality of the moment and how it is unfolding outside the interpretation of your mind. Give it a try. I guarantee it will take the sting out of the upsetting scenario and help you reconnect with the accepting power that rests inside each and every moment when it is perceived for exactly what it is before your version of it comes into being.
Dilemma of the Month: Acceptance Vs. Rejection
Should you accept or reject what is unfolding in this moment? The possibility of inner peace and happiness actually rests in your answer to this reoccurring human dilemma. For most of us, both acceptance and rejection are tied to feelings of self-esteem, worth, value, and identity. Consequently, when presented with this conundrum, it is not just about letting things be as they are. It is also about determining who you think you are.
Whether acceptance arrives as approval, agreement, recognition, tolerance, an acknowledgement, or simply acquiescence, most of us feel it gives us credibility and authority. It makes us feel confident and, at some important level, an embraced member of the tribe.
Rejection also comes in many different costumes. We can feel rebuffed, denounced, dismissed, refuted, refused, or the extreme of eliminated, shunned, banished, or exiled. For most of us, the primitive drive to be part of a community and deemed ‘a member of the tribe’, forces us to move away from rejection with great speed. We fear rejection because we unconsciously believe it places us on the verge of experiencing a most heinous form of censure – expulsion from the group – whether that group is two, three, a hundred, thousands, or more.
Managing The Dilemma
From the mystical perspective, acceptance and rejection, from another or from oneself, can never be about the essence of who you are. The essence of our humanity remains our divinity regardless of our actions. Acceptance and rejection are always about behaviors. They are an essential tool for creating and sustaining social order and thus culture and a ‘civilized’ world. Because acceptance and rejection are interdependent and actually define each other, you cannot have one without the other. They actually work in partnership to establish and maintain the boundaries of productive human interaction for the purpose of creating together and living together – be it in a village, a city, a country, or on the planet itself.
Once acceptance and rejection are unhooked from the belief that they are statements reflecting your basic ‘goodness’ or ‘badness’, they simply become feedback as to how aligned, or out of kilter you are with the goals of the whole. In the context of social order, we are in fact both independent and dependent. Thus, acceptance and rejection are best held as assessments of your own positioning within the movement of the whole. These assessments may be correct or incorrect from your point of view, but they give you the view from another perspective. Embracing acceptance and rejection as views on your behavior as it fits into the needs of the whole, and not as truths about who you are, frees you to move in the world without being internally thrown out of alignment with your own spiritual core. Once we give our sense of self over to another’s rejection or acceptance, we have given away the key to loving ourselves as we are – even as we paradoxically follow our inner urge to become more. I invite you to explore this shift in understanding acceptance and rejection, and discover how it feels to keep that sense of inner peace rooted in knowing who you truly are beyond your behaviors.
To visit this month’s new Reflection highlighting A.H. Almaas, please click here.
1) When you’re angry because someone did not acknowledge your input or contribution
2) When you’re hurt because you feel rejected by someone’s negative comments on your actions
3) When you’re feeling entitled and better than everyone else.
Remedy:
These are all signs that you are perceiving some form of rejection coming your way and it is more than likely that your sense of self as separated from the whole has gotten involved and feels at stake. This is an excellent time to remember that although the feelings are real and valid, the story that is generating them is not the final reality about what is unfolding. The story you are telling yourself about the situation is generating the feelings of not being ok, of somehow being personally maligned. Separating the story about what is happening from what is actually happening is one of the most direct and efficient ways to come back to your sense of your deepest and most valuable self. Once back to yourself, you can assess the rejection with an eye for any constructive criticism and then let go of the rest. Give it a try and discover the freedom and joy of recognizing your story for the single point of view that it is.
"This training has given me what I’ve been looking for to live comfortably with compassion and inner happiness in a chaotic world.”
Lisa Matzke, Artist, Graphic Designer, & Mother
To visit this month’s new Reflection, please click here.
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