When a Problem Won't Go Away

Here where I live, on the island of Kauai, we have coaches and counselors and Reiki Masters and craniosacral therapists and Deeksha givers and channelers in abundance, as well as practitioners of every other possible healing modality you can imagine. Although many of my local clients have sampled generously from this extensive smorgasbord of therapies, trying one treatment approach after another, they still suffer terribly from problems that won’t clear. They still need help getting over anxiety, they still need help for low self-esteem, they still need help with trauma recovery, they still need help moving on.

These people are sincere, and they are motivated. They really want to change. They are trying so hard, paying so much money to all the practitioners they see, dedicating so much time to healing, and still, they have an issue that just doesn’t budge. They may get some relief from the various treatments they undergo, and that is most welcome, but the core problem still lingers so they try another practitioner, another method, or they read another book, and then another, and another.

But it isn’t just my clients in this boat. In fact, most of us have at least one problem or challenge that won’t disappear. Why is it that these issues just won’t go away no matter what we do, who we see, how much we pray, how hard we try? Why don’t the healing modalities ultimately deliver on the promise of transforming the agony, erasing the distress, changing the habits or addictions or beliefs or circumstances?

I believe it’s because most healing methods—including alternative methods--deal with symptoms, rather than root causes. Just as practitioners of Western medicine tend to give pills and prescriptions to alleviate patient ailments while failing to examine what caused the ailment in the first place, alternative healing, too, often focuses on alleviating the manifestation of distress—the anxiety, the headache, the insomnia, the depression, the addiction, the low-self-esteem, the fight with the spouse or the job now lost. When the manifestation of distress lessens—the insomnia stops, for instance--the client feels better for a while, but then the problem comes back because the root cause was never eradicated.

On the other hand, sometimes the healing method focuses on the antidote to the problem—the visualization, the affirmation, the meditation, the placing of hands or needles or the tapping on the right spot, finding the right crystal, taking the right supplement, gazing upon the right Master. Again, this approach can offer some wonderful relief, but ultimately the problem resurfaces because the root cause still lives.

You may think you’ve addressed the root cause, but if the problem persists—you probably haven’t, not really. And there always is a root cause, or maybe several root causes, whenever a problem won’t go away. That root cause may be buried ten layers down from where you think the root cause resides. So you work on what you suppose is the root cause, and still you have the problem. You probably just haven’t gone deep enough yet.

A huge part of healing involves discovering what’s way underneath the surface of your problem. And very often, the thing that’s at the root of the root is some misguided belief. Even more central than the trauma that originally caused your distress may be some distorted belief that the trauma spawned. And the thing about the belief is that it’s invisible to you. It’s so deep, so much a part of your consciousness, that you can’t even see it. So, for instance, you might think the root of your problem is your father’s cruelty. You might remember a particularly traumatic episode with your father, and you assume this is where your anxiety stems from. Maybe your therapist agrees. You work on reducing the stress associated with that memory, on disrupting the energy field associated with that memory, but still you have the anxiety. That’s because beneath that memory is buried your belief--which was born at the time of the original incident—your belief that you are shameful and inadequate.

No matter how much trauma-clearing you do, you won’t eradicate the distress as long as your misguided beliefs persist. These beliefs can cause inordinate fear, shame, anger, pain. They can make you feel that you are hopeless, helpless, shameful. They can totally sabotage your healing.

So you have to be willing to do the work, the real work, of drilling down deep to see what belief resides behind the manifestation of your problem. No matter how many massages you get, how many times you tap your acupressure points, no matter how many affirmations you chant—you won’t heal until you get beyond the symptoms.  If you still aren’t healing, you need to be very brave and very persistent, asking yourself over and over, “And what belief is behind this? And behind that? And then, behind that?”

To heal your stubborn issues, use any method of self-inquiry that works for you. This can be difficult to do without help, so if you don’t have success healing yourself, reach out! I suggest you find a professional who works with uncovering distorted beliefs and can offer a method like Tapas Acupressure technique or another energy healing modality that disrupts old patterns of belief and allows you to invite healing energy in to establish new beliefs.

Blessings, Hiyaguha, The Life-Change Coach

Dr. Hiyaguha Cohen is a Ph.D. life coach certified in Tapas Acupressure Technique. She works with clients by telephone, Skype, and sees Hawaii counseling clients in person.

How to Stop Judging Others

Last night at dinner, several of my friends started discussing the book, The Education of Little Tree. If you haven’t read it, the story tells about an innocent young Cherokee boy growing up with loving grandparents in a world unsympathetic to Native Americans. It’s a magnificent, lyrical, wise and sensitive story, perhaps one of the most beautiful books ever written, but ironically, the author, a man named Forrest Carter, was a white supremist who founded a paramilitary chapter of the Ku Klux Klan and wrote speeches for the racist governor of Alabama, George Wallace. He authored the famous, “Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” ditty. He also shot two people in a dispute over money, ran for governor on a white supremist ticket, and lied about his identity, even when being interviewed on the Barbara Walters show.

Certainly it’s happened before in history that scoundrels have produced transcendent art, that nasty people have contributed great things to the world. In the case of Forrest Carter, the contradictions between his exquisite art and his malevolent life seem almost unfathomable. But is it really that unusual for we humans to house such extremes within ourselves—to be so amazingly sensitive and wise on the one hand, and so profoundly wicked on the other?

That’s the question that another friend at the table raised. He’s a psychiatrist who is one of the nicest people on the planet, but he said that when stuck in traffic, he feels a genuine urge to murder someone—anyone, in fact. He suggested that we all embrace the same dichotomy—the divine angel within, and the evil devil, too. His profound honesty jolted me into self-inventory, and I had to admit that I have met the monster within myself.

Okay, so we all know we have a dark side, and that the secret to being good is to choose the light within instead of the gremlin. There’s plenty of spiritual guidance out there telling us how to handle all that insecurity, anger, fear, sadness, and so on and flush it down the cosmic toilet. The idea is that by living right and cultivating light, we can, in fact, completely transcend our ugly side.

But there’s a danger inherent in the quest to embrace our higher nature, and sometimes the self-actualization tomes forget to mention this. It is so easy to judge human darkness in others, and so easy to forget about it in ourselves. This is so obvious that it’s almost embarrassing—but it’s essential to remember. There is a treacherous place we all can step into in trying to “be spiritual”—a place where we not only judge others for manifesting what we have simply stopped paying attention to in ourselves, but where we delude ourselves into thinking we are entirely different from them. And while we might have overcome certain tendencies in ourselves, while we might embrace more light than the typical criminal, for instance—the second we think, “Oh, how could anybody do what he did?” we step into the land of denial. By mentally separating ourselves from those who act badly, we create more delusion, more ignorance, less compassion, less honesty within, less integrity and humility, and ultimately, more darkness.

The next time you find yourself amazed at somebody’s ignorance or violence, immediately turn your attention to self-reflection. Ask yourself when you had your last ignorant or violent thought. Offer gratitude that you have found a way to move past such thoughts instead of acting upon them. Offer love to yourself for being such an amazing complex of various energies, for the beauty of the light and the dark all mixed together within you—for being a human. And then recognize that the “bad” person is a fellow traveler, not that different from you, and mentally offer compassion that the burden he or she currently carries is so dark and heavy.

Blessings,Dr. Hiyaguha Cohen,
www.thelifechangecoach.com

The Virtue in Just Giving Up

One of my former teachers was a big fan of the idea of never giving up. No matter the challenge, no matter the odds, he said that we should just keep trying, because “there is nothing in this entire world that is irrevocably unchangeable.” It’s an incredibly inspiring philosophy, this belief that with enough effort and determination, any goal can be reached. For many years I lived by this credo, and because of it, I achieved many things that otherwise I never would have dreamed of.

But the other day as I stood in the shower, I had a mini-epiphany of a different ilk. I had been worrying about whether a friend of mine was annoyed with me. He had been acting withdrawn, and I was trying to figure out whether I had done anything to irritate him, or if I could do anything to make him feel better. Suddenly, I had a flash of all the times in my life I had experienced similar worries. I saw a long line of anxieties and concern of a similar nature extending back years and years.

And then I saw a million other anxieties that I had carried at various times in my life. In my mind’s eye, I perceived an endless line of concerns that I had been trying to correct or control through changing myself or modifying circumstances. I had been trying to change all those things so there would be nothing to worry about, so that everything would be good and right and virtuous. But then, in that moment, I saw that the universe has a life of its own and no matter how much I tried, the flow of the universe would continue in it’s own way, carrying me with it. Right there in the shower, I said aloud, “I give up.”

When I said, “I give up,” I meant that I would stop fighting to patch things up, to correct reality. It was as if my entire being made a choice at that moment to completely and absolutely accept what is. I was accepting the intelligence of the universe, feeling that it was perfect, even in its imperfection. I was accepting myself, accepting that my basic nature was gifted to me at birth, and while I can strive to be the best me I can be, I’m always going to be me. Being me may involve some blunders, some clumsiness, some bad choices and even bad actions, but I realized I’m better off accepting that I’m imperfect me than desperately trying to be someone better and constantly failing. Better to just accept everything inside and outside than to constantly be in “fix-it” mode, because trying to fix things takes too much energy, and we have limited time here and limited energy with which to live our lives. Even if others don’t like me as I am, the universe seems to accept me completely, as it hasn’t booted me out of existence yet, and that’s a wonderful thing.

I felt such a relief, as if I could breathe deeply from the soles of my feet to the top of my head. I was no longer fighting anything. I was no longer trying to hold back the dam. I was surrendering to the river of life, and it felt exhilarating, wonderful, liberating. So much of my life energy was being zapped right out of me with worries and the feeling that I needed to improve, but when I gave up, that energy was restored.

I’m NOT saying here that it’s okay to let cruelty and injustice run wild on the planet or to act with disregard for others or to just live with terrible dysfunction. I’m also not saying we should be happy with intolerable circumstances. Rather, I’m saying we can surrender to those circumstances inwardly, so that we can then find a new calm and inner peace that allows us to make choices for change, if need be. Attacking problems head-on sometimes just creates more problems and causes so much inner strife. But accepting that you have this problem in your life, trusting that the universe has given you this problem as part of its perfection, gives you your dignity and faith back, and the clarity and serenity with which to choose a course of action.

I do think there’s a place for the “Never give up” credo, for consciously trying to bring harmony and beauty to the world and to our own psyches, but I think surrender has to come first. I have a feeling that until we really surrender to how things are and how we are, with our eyes wide open, not pretending to be better than we are, nothing will really change. Until we accept what is, until we stop fighting reality, how can we change it? Only by embracing reality do we have any power over it, and the power that we gain by surrendering is the power of love. What greater power can there be?

What's Your Crowd Tolerance?

Do you hate when the beach fills up, when your favorite store is mobbed, when the restaurant has no breathing room between tables? Do you turn anxious or ugly when the crowd closes in on you, when you get jostled?

I remember reading, years ago, that the poet Walt Whitman loved being in crowds, squished so that he could enjoy the press of flesh around him. In “The Body Electric,” he says, “To be surrounded by beautiful curious breathing laughing flesh is enough.” He talks of the “bath of multitudes,” of “the turbulent musical chorus of the boisterous crowds of New York City.”

I loved Whitman’s writing, and his attitude deeply affected me. It amazed me. After all, he was a poet—one of the sensitive types. I had always attributed my dislike of crowds to my poetic nature, but how could I justify sneering at the multitudes if the big bearded poetic genius exulted in them? Thanks to Whitman, I tried an attitude adjustment. I tried loving being among throngs of people. Amazingly, I discovered that I could change my outlook; I could enjoy "the press of flesh" all around me.

Can you really learn to love being in a crowd? To paraphrase one of our presidential hopefuls, “Yes You Can!” You simply need to make a conscious effort to change your mind-set.

Here are a few attitude-adjustment techniques:

Reframe. Instead of resenting the encroachment upon “your space,” concentrate on letting love flow directly from your heart outwards into the crowd, touching each individual.

Open up. Instead of shutting yourself down, open your heart and feel that everyone who passes you is divine.

Revel in the pulse of life. Feel the excitement of energy buzzing all around you. Breathe it into yourself.

May we smile at each other in a crowd in the future,

Blessings,

Hiyaguha, The Life Change Coach

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