July 27, 2009 Last night we said goodbye to our second little dog and a chapter of our life closed. We had 14 joy filled years with them and we can’t help but miss them even though it was their time to go.
Monthly Archives: July 2009
Being yourself: The stillness of pure consciousness
The following is a partial excerpt of an interview with Eckhart Tolle from a book called Dialogues With Emerging Spiritual Teachers by John W. Parker.
I also started reading on Buddhism and immediately understood the essence of Buddhism. I saw the simplicity of the original teaching of the Buddha compared to the complexity of subsequent additions, philosophy, all the baggage that over the centuries accumulated around Buddhism, and saw the essence of the original teaching. I have a great love for the teaching of the Buddha, a teaching of such power and sublime simplicity. I even spent time in Buddhist monasteries. During my time in England there were already several Buddhist monasteries.
I met and listened to some teachers that helped me understand my own state. In the beginning there was a Buddhist monk, Achan Sumedo, abbot of two or three monasteries in England. He’s a Western-born Buddhist. — Eckhart Tolle
Constructive aproaches to conquering fear of rejection
On one hand, all humans strongly want to be considered by others to be capable, competent and lovable. On the other hand, the greatest fears we humans have are the fear of abandonment (rejection) and fear of the unknown.
Fear of rejection is the fear that others will not accept you for who you are, what you believe, and how you act. In society this mindset helps us to maintain the inner checks and balances within our “selves” that lead us to become capable of forming healthy relationships with other independent equals.
If and only if, we are mature we can accept rejection and even learn from it. But if we remain immature we can’t — we are determined to “cling” to fear.
Rejection is like death and taxes: It’s unavoidable.
Don’t take rejection personally.
There are techniques that can be used to conquer the fear of rejection.
Worst case scenario
When a person fears rejection, they are not really not fearing the word “no”, they are fearing imagined or out of proportion consequences of the rejection. Asking the question, “What am I really fearing?” is a good start to overcoming fear of rejection.
So go ahead and imagine the worst case scenario that could take place if you are rejected. Feel all the feelings and then recognize the truth. What you have visualized is an exaggeration of what’s likely to happen.
The central nervous system is set up to protect us from danger and as children we have all been conditioned against making mistakes, including failing to secure approval from others. Since childhood we have labeled all mistakes and rejections as “dangerous” even though they aren’t.
Rather than seeing rejections as stumbling blocks, successful people see them as stepping stones that bring them closer to achieving their goals. They accept every failure as a lesson in how to succeed in the future, and then they make the adjustments required to achieve success. Consequently, willingness to change how we view failures or mistakes is a must for anyone who wishes to conquer the fear of rejection.
Desensitization
Desensitization is a powerful psychological technique. It basically means that you desensitize yourself psychologically to a particular situation by encountering it again and again. One way to overcome a fear of rejection is to deliberately put yourself into situations where you get rejected a lot. By proving to yourself that you can face up to your fears, you will be able to establish and/or regain your personal power, and such situations will no longer have power over you, unless you backslide and give your power away again.
NLP (Neuro-linguistic Programming)
Reframing is an NLP (Neuro-linguistic Programming) technique that also a powerful tool. There is a mechanism in your brain that can be used to make inflexible limiting beliefs or destructive thinking patterns and habits pliable and it’s known as brain plasticity. When your brain plasticity is increased you become able to adapt to new ideas. Once you have mentally detached yourself from the effects of rejection, you will even be able to visualize yourself being blown off without falling apart.
Fibromyalgia Updates 2009
ScienceDaily (June 18, 2009) — Previous studies have shown that fibromyalgia is associated with reductions in gray matter in parts of the brain, but the exact cause is not known. Using sophisticated brain imaging techniques, researchers from Louisiana State University, writing in The Journal of Pain, found that alterations in levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine might be responsible for gray matter reductions. — Fibromyalgia Patients Show Decreases In Gray Matter Intensity
Mindreading No: Thought Pattern Recognition Yes
In 2007 there were reports that a team of world-leading neuroscientists developed a powerful technique that allows them to look deep inside a person’s brain and read their intentions before they act. I decided to track down the media reports and discovered an excellent video as well.
This research broke controversial new ground in scientists’ ability to probe people’s thoughts, and raises serious ethical issues over how brain-reading technology may be used in the future.
The team used high-resolution brain scans to identify patterns of activity before translating them into meaningful thoughts, revealing what a person planned to do in the near future. It is the first time scientists have succeeded in reading intentions in this way.
In the experiment, the brain activity of two subjects (two of Gallant’s team members, Kendrick Kay and Thomas Naselaris) was monitored while they were shown 1,750 different pictures. The team then selected 120 novel images that the subjects hadn’t seen before, and used the previous results to predict their brain responses. When the test subjects were shown one of the images, the team could match the actual brain response to their predictions to accurately pick out which of the pictures they had been shown. With one of the participants they were correct 72% of the time, and with the other 92% of the time; on chance alone they would have been right only 0.8% of the time. – Neuroscience: How far has “mind reading” got?
