CAME TO SEE THAT OUR BEING IS MORE POWERFUL THAN OUR SELF DEFEATING BELIEFS

CAME TO SEE THAT OUR BEING IS MORE POWERFUL THAN OUR SELF DEFEATING BELIEFS

There are many beliefs we my have about ourselves that limit our power to achieve the sort of life that really matters to us. Every belief we maintain is another limiting condition we have placed on our human experience. Lets take a look at LOVE. We have all heard the expression "Unconditional Love" before but what exactly is unconditional love? To understand we must first define the word CONDITION. A Condition is a restricting, limiting or modifying circumstance. Therefore unconditional simply means not limited by restricting, limiting or modifying circumstances. Any belief that we uphold in our mind is in FACT a condition we have placed upon our ability to love. If we BELIEVE we are not worthy of love we must ask ourselves why this is so? Is it LOVE or is it our BELIEF that we are unworthy that has placed limitation and restriction on our human experience? For now we pose one question to the reader: Are you aligned with your "BEING" which transmits love or your "SELF" which places CONDITIONS on love by upholding ITS OWN DEFEATING BELIEF that it is unworthy?

Mariposa The Cat: My Spiritual Teacher

As sure as our own pet sits in our lap while we watch a movie or read a book late at night we can disprove the BELIEF that we are not worthy of love. Our domesticated furry friends have a very important job on earth. Many of us have sought out a pet as a way of sharing intimacy and love with another living thing. We know that these cats and dogs will not turn on us, break our hearts or hurt us in the many ways we have been CONDITIONED to believe our fellow humans could. Animals are a safe bet for the most part.

Sometimes, as those of you who have rescued your pets from shelters already know, many such animals have been severely abused and traumatized and the effects of this trauma are very evident in the way they interact with us and other animals. Many of us have been affected the the very same sort of experiences and those experiences have conditioned our response to love. Members of our own Alliance have rescued their pets from the animal equivalent of jails and orphanages. It has been our experience that it takes quite some time to UNDO the trauma their pets have had to endure and in some cases their pets, even after many years of consistent love and nurturing still have aversions to the love of their human companion. The author of this book would like to share a personal story to better illustrate his point.

When I was newly sober and in transition I lived at a recovery house in east Hollywood for about a year. This was a grand old house built around the turn of the century. It was, and still is the home to about 25 men who are all newly sober and in transition themselves. Among the human residents was one female of the four legged and furry variety. She was a young cat maybe a year in age named Mariposa. Her and I instantly hit it off and over the course of my year long stay there developed quite a fondness for one another.

That was a particularly creative period for me in which I developed much of the foundation for my work today. I can recall countless times that I would be pecking away at my keyboard writing my thoughts on life when suddenly out of nowhere Mariposa would enter the room and literally jump on my lap and want to sit on my key board as I worked. I was very connected to my own being and conscious of the grand design of things during that time and because of this awareness I began to take notice of the times when she would pay me a visit. Invariably, in hindsight, she would engage in this odd affection with me when I was formulating my most fundamental points. As if we were connected by an invisible thread of consciousness, she came to me like like I was one of Pavlov's dogs to validate and reward my efforts.

After a while I actually began to take cues and silent advice from Mariposa. As you could imagine, I was very unsure of what I was working on and had little understanding of why I felt so compelled to sit at a desk every day for hours upon end and put my thoughts on paper. I was not motivated to publish a book or be the next self proclaimed guru of self help. I was merely co creating with the powers of love and truth because I was willing and open to doing so.

Mariposa honestly got me through some serious moments of self doubt and resistance. She affectionately and unconditionally nudged me along and helped me through these dark periods. After about a year and 364 pages of material the creative well had indeed run dry. I was not yet experienced enough to honor the process and wait for the next logical step to revile itself to me. I began doing what we all have done from time to time in our lives. I started to UNCONSCIOUSLY find some sort of validation for myself.

My mind turned this creative process into an escape and a drug that I had to have more of. I arrogantly envisioned myself as the next STAR of Oprah's book of the month club and set off in a fear driven frenzy to GET what was owed to me for MY WORK. I will share the details of that painful process in another section but needless to say that it did not take long before I was out the door and back on drugs trying to invalidate the beautiful process I had just had. In doing so I left the house and my good friend Mariposa in the dust.

I never once considered how this sudden abandonment would effect her. She is just a cat right? She is not going to even notice my absence right? It would be a very long time until her and I would cross paths again but as fate would have it that day did indeed come and I once again found myself newly recovered and living under her roof again. Five years had passed since our time together and needless to say I was over come with joy to be in her life again. She was older now and fatter as she should be. Fat cats are happy cats I thought to myself. But, as I soon discovered, she was not nearly as happy to see me as I was to see her. She was in fact very distant and withdrawn to the extent that I had to ask the house manager if she was the same cat. She looked like the same cat but her demeanor and openness had shifted. At first I took this personally. I considered one of two things were happening here. Either she surely DID not remember who I was of she had become effected by her surroundings.

This is when I removed myself from the situation and examined it objectively. I assessed the real issues at hand in her environment. I put myself in her paws if you will. I then realized that there were probably more than 100 other men who had abruptly abandoned Mariposa since I had left over five yeas ago. The effects of these sudden detachments from the Men in her life had manifested in her a belief that to get close was to get hurt because it was only a matter of time till she would in fact be left in the dust once more.

In this particular case this belief of hers is totally valid because of the unique environment she is a part of. It would be like a woman serving life behind bars who would have to accept her own limiting environment. This woman would surely be effected by the inmates coming and going and after a while simply withdraw from the painful process of growing close only to be ABANDONED again. She would however, still welcome the visits of her loved ones even though she knew the visit would enevitably end and they too would leave her. The difference is that those who visited her and whom she knew loved her would always be connected with her on a level of consciousness. Mariposa, like our friend behind bars, had seen so many come and then go that she too had been CONDITIONED to accept her reality.

We have similar experiences as humans but often times these experiences turn into fixed beliefs that we unconsciously uphold in our relations with others. We are accepting the conditions that ARE WITHIN OUR CONTROL as if the were NOT and protecting our hearts to limit the pain of the vicious cycle that Mariposa HAS to endure. She, I have come to discover is one SMART and spiritually connected cat. Over the three months that we have been back in each others life I have made it a point to TRANSMIT my love to her and make a conscious effort to give her the process of decided for herself if she wants to be my buddy again. She KNOWS that I will leave again and she will not have me around forever. But what is important to me was that I acknowledged her situation and did not impose my will on her out of a need for closeness NOW.

There is an organic unfoldment to all intimate relationships which must be honored to ever be intimate. I understood this in my own consciousness and transmitted this awareness to her. Before long she was back to her old ways and would run up to me while in the back yard meditating and sit under my chair. Then shortly there after she would come sleep with me like she used to. I made it a point to keep my door open so she was always free to go as she pleased. Over time she began to trust that I understood and more and more came to rest on my perch. These days she can be found fast asleep on my bed all day long more often than not. This is not because I am some super human magical individual although there are many times that my ego has run with this in the past, almost always to my own detriment. The reason she has grown close to me once more is because I took the time to understand and to let her know this with my own consciousness.

Copyright 2012 Retrocollective Publishing Group. All Rights Reserved