I am left with just one thing from the article: in Scientology they train you to have no feelings, no expression.
I remember being in a Landmark program, years ago, that railed against the 3 R’s… regret, resentment, and I don’t remember the third. But they were wrong.
I have more time nowadays. I have more room for bad feelings too. And I don’t think they shouldn’t be.
If you are like me: you want compassion. Especially for your mistakes, your failings. You want understanding. And guess what: it is not easy to come by.
People judge you, like you judge them. People ignore you like you ignore them.
Compassion: you can’t ask for it, you can’t teach it. You can’t mandate it. You’ll find that do-good-ing and pity masquerade as compassion in the world.
But you want to be treated by others as a person, you want to be treated fairly… but but but…
Compassion is only possible if you can fully place yourself into the other person’s shoes and see that if you had the same gender, the same upbringing, the same history, you would be feeling and doing the exact same things that other person feels and does.
To be able to have compassion for another, you have to consider yourself a person, and you need to have compassion for yourself… See all the past and see that how you are and what you do is an of course… a consequence of your upbringing, your past, your gender, your worldview… And of-course…
Why mention it? Because feeling good about myself is not as frequent as one would think… I could say: I felt better about myself than normal.
Feeling good about yourself is the basis of self-love… that being at home feeling we all crave, but most of us have no idea how to get.
It was, that craving, expressed yesterday by the participants of my workshop 1 to ferret out the issues of the self and brainstorm about a direction that could pull you out of the issue.
Direction, pull you out? Yeah.
Some 16 years ago I was doing a course in New York City, and I was commuting there from Syracuse NY, every week. It was the snowiest winter in my memory. One time I drove down during the day… normally I drove at night when the traffic was sparse. A drive faster and more confidently in snow that others.
I like to call the phenomenon of not being able to see what doesn’t agree with your theory of life: theory induced blindness. A more popular and better known label for it is “confirmation bias”.