The Astral Sh*t - Jamie in The Elephant Journal

We have all come to earth to have an experience as an individual.

There is an amazing breadth of experiences on this planet. We were born incredibly open. Then we have a series of experiences that shut us down in a unique way. We chose to edit parts of ourselves off that people didn’t like.

Debbie Ford says that when you are born you are a castle with a thousand rooms. Then we start boarding rooms up to please others. Most people end up as grownups thinking they are a three bedroom flat that needs some work.

We decide to shut ourselves down in different ways until we are a lot smaller, less open to each other unconditionally, fearful, “once bitten twice shy,” weary, cautious, grasping about things that we think are scarce.

We have edited ourselves down to uniquely freaky, wounded shapes. We are not tolerant, or unconditionally open to how we are—to those parts of ourselves that people didn’t like.

Ram Dass tells a story about one winter when there was much less light on the tree and so it grew this way and that way to find the light. We come and see that tree and we say, “What a beautiful tree.” Yet, we are so not like that with one another and ourselves.

We don’t say, “Wow, what a beautiful twisted shape.” That creates a huge amount of hiding from each other. We want to look our best. That hurts just to say that. Anything less than my best will result in rejection.

There is a violence in that.

There is a violence I feel in myself when I want to improve. There is improvement that comes from excitement. I don’t think there is violence in that.

There is a beautiful side to an exciting challenge and then there is an idea that you are not lovable just as you are right now. I can not love myself fully as I am. This is violence, and it stops us from loving each other fully.

If God came into the room right now and said, “You are not going to evolve or grow one more millimeter than you are today. You are not going any further than this. You wont be any more wise, free or enlightened.” Could you still love yourself 100% fully? If the answer is “no,” then we need to clean your tubes.

We want to sign a contract that says, if you see my less sexy bites: my neediness, my drama queen, my greed, my sexual perversion, my dark parts then you won’t want to hang out with me. We are hiding from each other so much. Hiding is the opposite of intimacy. When you get close to someone they let you see your dark spots. You get to see their broken mask. Then you can fall in love with someone.

Who ever fell in love with someone for being appropriate?

Part of the admission fee for this theme park, Earth World, is you have to be an individual. What comes with that is loneliness, alienation, competition and heartbreak. Will they like me? Where did everyone go? Am I ugly?

All the head trips come with being an individual. It is a big challenge being an individual. No wonder all those spiritual teachers we spend so much money on tell us:

“Don’t worry it is an illusion we are all one.”

“Whew, I thought I was an individual and it really did my head in.”

I find it tough being an individual. When we come across something that breaks the spell of being an individual, that gives us a hint that we’re not one. When the actor on screen makes us all sob, and break down together, then we give them all our money. The big money goes to the stuff that melts the feeling of being an individual.

The thing that is great about this is that which melts the idea of being an individual: our family, children and loved ones. When we melt that feeling of being an individual then life feels good. We are in this funny paradox where we have every reason to do things to cut off from everyone, to hide and go to the job interview and say, “I’ll be anything you want me to be.” Yet, what we all want is intimacy and to feel deeply connected.

I want to be more intimate with everybody.

In my film I interview an Indian who says, “I like to talk to people as if I already know them.” That is the world that I want to live in. I have to elect myself as the mayor of everywhere.

Some activists made a spoof with stickers on the trains in London, “Please avoid eye contact at all times. Respect public solitude.” I don’t respect public solitude. I want to be intimate with everyone. I want to dare to show up in all my light, and all my darkness. I want to be a walking permission slip. When I allow myself to be fully seen it automatically liberates others to be seen. You create a culture of visibility and less hiding and more bravery.

I want to know how I feel. I want more intimacy with myself. If I am a more ‘dropped in’ person I am going to be more honest about my boundaries and give myself what I need in any given situation. The parenting ends when you are an adult (often before). It is no ones job to account for what you need. No matter what your husband or wife promised you at the altar it is not their job to telepathically know what you need.

We would rather not ask for what we want and get pissed off for not getting it, or look upset until someone notices. When we are intimate with ourselves we get what we need much quicker. We take space when we need it. We have the permission slip to pause and ask ourselves, “What do I want right now?”

My deep belief is we have suppressed and amputated ourselves into crippled brochures that we think will be loved and accepted. We have made ourselves much smaller than the big, unapologetic, juicy version of ourselves. There are so many “should” and “should nots.”

Yet, the body is the most incredible self-mending machine. It is hard wired to mend itself. And it is also mending the screwed up way we edit ourselves. However, manicured or brilliant you think you are life is inviting us to stretch ourselves into the big, juicy, unedited version of ourselves. You spend the first half of life editing yourself and then the second half opening up.

Difficult people, difficult situations, are all part of some beautiful way life is beckoning me back to unedit myself to this big, humble genius you see before you.

A symptom of the weird way we shut ourselves down is the huge accumulation of ‘ick’ that lives here in the solarplexes. We have a huge accumulation in the pain body. When someone upsets us we feel a disproportionate, huge overreaction. I believe our lives’ genius is the self-mending, self-cleaning body. The self cleaning body does not want to carry all that stuff.

The body knows we are carrying a huge accumulation of traumas. The tears we did not cry. The huge accumulation of volcanic ‘blah’ that is ready like a time bomb to get triggered by an asshole. Your body creates, and magnetizes, and invites an asshole so that if you are skillful you can do a little astral shit at that moment.

There is something more deep, creative and ‘warrior like’ when you turn your attention to feeling deeply. We have to turn everything around so you can, instead of escaping feeling, participate in this incredible self mending being. We become fascinated with feeling. What happens is we melt, and move, and that constipation releases.

Many of you are used to thinking your chakras are for pumping your energy, and there for your meditation. That is only half the story. The other half is that your seven chakras are astral anuses to shit out the accumulation of everything that happens to you. If every time someone pisses you off, you take an astral shit and love it, it will start to turn into laughing and wisdom.

Welcome and be friendly with every annoying person. Even when it hurts a bit, become fascinated with what hurts. Become fascinated with the way you are feeling and the way life is impacting you.

The one tool to cultivate, that I want to share, to navigate the self-love trip is Full Body Listening. Not just when you are doing your practice, but always to be in a state of Full Body Listening. That means feeling everything in my body from my toes to my crown—to be a Nasa space station, a sophisticated listening device.

Turn your body on right now.

www.jamiecatto.com

http://www.elephantjournal.com/2014/04/the-astral-sht-full-body-listening-intimacy-jamie-catto/

…but what about starving African children?

I recently, in a moment of faux-spiritual overload at the Bali Spirit Festival wrote: 'Enlightenment?? How about let's just start with not having reactive tantrums day after day - or enjoying 24 hours of the luxurious abundance we've been born into without ruining it with endless worrying and complaining? Could you? Let's try a week of never once painting our predicament as some victim scenario or focusing on the 'version' of the events where we frame life as unfair or unjust to us?

Could we maintain a perspective of gratitude and optimism for 7 full days?

Enlightenment?? Give me a break'

Yes, I was feeling a bit self-righteous. But I also mean it.

Someone wrote underneath:

'Nice idea. Abundance? How can a dying,starving child in Africa consider his abundance?????'

Well...I wouldn't challenge such a child to be grateful for their abundance, only us pampered Westerners on facebook...but...

...one possible answer is that the experience of being a human is two-fold - we might be both a 'soul' and a 'human ego' which is having a finite life at the same time. Both could be happening at once. From this perspective, when a human suffers, from the earthy ego place it is pain but from the simultaneous soul place it is learning, even grace. There seem to be (at least) 2 planes of reality running alongside each other. Duality, upstairs and downstairs. This doesn't mean that in the face of terrible suffering you only run upstairs and say 'that's perfect!' - that would be escaping and denying the simultaneous suffering which is going on for the human but neither do we stay only downstairs and say "no no no this is totally wrong!" - although faced with much of the World's suffering it's an understandable response - the skilful and brave human life is lived with the intention of existing in both planes simultaneously, where we can feel our heart break for the child, feel compassion and a call to action, and even help and give and try and ease suffering down below while at the same time acknowledging that from the soul's perspective this suffering might be grace, it might be learning, it might be processing karma (not punishment) it might be part of a bigger pattern that we can't always tune into from our incredibly limited human letterbox view of existence. The above 'Nice idea. Abundance? How can a dying,starving child in Africa consider his abundance?????' comment is written from a perspective that can only perceive reality from the lower, letterbox perspective - and yes, when reality is only viewed from that one place, and when the human has never been educated or lucky enough to have a glimpse of another possible plane or frame of existence, it's the only comment you can make, and what I've written here will seem like an obscenity.

Ram Dass inspired me when he said (paraphrasing) 'Right now in this moment there's a starving child taking it's last breath, so do I feel sad? Yes. Also in this moment there is a baby being born into a joyful family. Do I feel happy? Yes. Can I hold the fact that both these realities exist in the same moment?'

Could there be more going on that just the human experience of suffering?

www.jamiecatto.com

Are You A Sex Object?

I was reading a post about women not wanting to be objectified sexually today and I've always wondered about this. Clearly, reducing women to the only sexually visual, tarted-up, arousing male sexual impulses role is way out of balance in our culture. The percentage of women on TV, on billboards and in print media which are photoshopped to conform to a thin, homogenised, sexually-appealing, over-groomed value system is very high and this can subliminally brainwash us over time and consistency of impact to expect that all women should look like this. This clearly goes nowhere good either for the men or the women. But also, the visually astounding qualities of Woman, her beauty, deep power, grace, and yes, even sexiness are among the most wonderful ingredients of planet Earth available. They've triggered most music, poetry, art, and the devotional aspirations of men and the masculine principle since the beginning of time. You could even argue that the whole of the abundance and continuation of nature itself depends upon this principle from women to men and from flowers to bees....

To me, women can be any combination of deep souls, great minds, sex bombs, fragile flowers, wise hags, destructive typhoons, confusing conundrums, ecstatic volcanos of bliss - there's not room on this page to complete the ever evolving list of my experience.... and yet I don't believe women don't want to be seen as sex objects. The beauty/sex industry thrives and always has, and did so long before darkly manipulative advertising and marketing evils of today. Many, not all, women (and maybe most men too) want to be found attractive, desired, even lusted after and that includes their visual, physical sexiness, no? I think the problem we have in our culture is how imbalanced the weight of that focus is. Women certainly don't want to be ONLY a sex object. They rightly want to be enjoyed and valued for being many things, and not all of it feminine. But to remove the sexy appreciation is also a mistake. This issue, for me, is about balance of appreciation not stopping lusting after sexy buns.

Please let's not place an ignorant cultural taboo on celebrating sexiness in all it's forms and please let's broaden our appreciation for all that we men and women are. Let's become fascinated with each other, immersing ourselves deeply in all our qualities, mutual and diverse. When we do this, we WE OURSELVES open up our excitements and fascinations, the covers of all the magazines will change and the occasional wolf-whistle in the street might even be welcomed.

www.jamiecatto.com

Being A Guru

Inevitably, when I devise workshops about creativity, about getting people’s projects together, and bringing their generosity into the world, the first and most important thing to focus on is where am I creating ‘from’? How am I feeling? What is my true rooted excitement? Because this is the deciding factor on whether anything brilliant or touching is going to get made, whether it be a piece of art, a new company or just who I am in the world. So on these weekends, before we get into the masculine practicalities of A’s and B’s and C’s of actually doing a project, I’m first most interested in us all coming back to our inspiration, coming back to our unedited, unapologetic versions of ourselves; less addicted to approval, less addicted to appropriateness. Those addictions are massively in the way of any Masterpiece, whether it be a Masterpiece of art, a Masterpiece of parenting, or a Masterpiece of making love.

A lot of the processes and games we get into in the workshops are about coming back to ourselves and inevitably, we begin to touch on issues of intimacy, issues of personal freedom, issues of who I am, even issues of looking at the wounds that have shaped me into the strange, unique creature that I am with my unique needs and edges. Am I listening to myself enough to hear those needs? All that stuff becomes fascinating and fundamental to the whole journey of ‘doing a project’ and 'being an artist' and vulnerably releasing your gifts into the world.

Everybody has their own, uniquely, personal ideas of what the facilitator should be like in a group so it’s very important for me to start the process by saying, “Please take a moment to dissolve any ideas you have about what a workshop facilitator should be like because I am here as an artist to explore the routes to making Masterpieces with you and although I know a lot about the practicalities and the A’s and B’s and C’s of creating a project, beyond that, the territory that we are going to get into can sometimes get vulnerable. You will choose what is exactly the right level for you to meet this work and I will totally honour whether you want to do it undramatically, meet it more on the surface, more intellectually, without it becoming a big deal in any way or if you want to go all the way into melting who you thought you were and coming out of the ashes as the Phoenix. I have no preference or opinion on which level is better for you than the other. Both are on offer and will be held and supported.“

Above all, I am not a believer that anyone should ever challenge themselves in life unless that challenge feels exciting to them. If there is a challenge which feels exciting, of course, go for it, but I am not a believer that anyone should ever feel the need to push themselves or evolve one inch beyond where they are now. In fact one of the things I always say on the workshops is, “If God came into this room and said to you, “You are not going to evolve one more millimetre in this whole lifetime. You are not going to get one millimetre freer, one millimetre wiser or one millimetre further along”, could you still love yourself fully?” For me, that is the most important question anyone can ever ask themselves and if the answer is “no”, you need to really look at your path, at you ideas about what you are doing here on earth. I believe that ‘enlightenment’ (if it exists) is loving yourself exactly as the wounded, freaky creature you are today. The highest spiritual path that I can attain is to love myself exactly as I am, with no finish lines. I have no ambition, no ambition at all any more and it feels incredibly freeing. Life is going to sculpt me plenty, often in uncomfortable ways. Life is going to already deliver me these challenges and I am going to be evolved by them, but to push myself through any challenges that don’t feel exciting, ones that feel like ‘shoulds’, I think that is violent.

So when people come on my workshops, I’m not a seducer, or an asker or a pusher. I don’t need people to go deep or go shallow. I feel people are going to be grown-ups and choose their own way in. I’m really excited in the beginning to say, “This is me. Sometimes I swear. Sometimes I’m impatient. Sometimes I am hurt and vulnerable and finding it hard to even get through this day of working with you, and I want to be okay bringing all of that into the room - and I want you to be ok bringing all of how you are today too. I want myself and anyone who comes through my workshops to become a walking permission slip, for everyone to be exactly as they are, to not have to fit into anyone’s preconceived mould of the role that they are playing."

My responsibility in this is to express that I am trusting you to totally parent yourselves as adults - that you are going to look after your needs - that when you are feeling shaky or need space, that you are going to ask for it and you are going to be the one who reaches out for the support that you need. You are the parent of you and I feel that all of us need to stop looking at our lovers, our husbands, our wives, even our kids to be the person that notices our needs and takes care of them. It’s no-one else’s job but mine to parent myself and it’s no-one else’s job but yours, to parent yourself. So while it is wonderful to have close people in our lives that love us and care for us sometimes, it’s no-one else’s job or responsibility to do that.

To ask for what we want and is a great vulnerability, but the great thing about it is that it creates a visceral intimacy. In my workshops this attitude of self-responsibility is paramount.

So I wanted to express all that about what is like to be a workshop facilitator and sometimes having expectations from people about being a guru or being a self-awareness teacher or parent figure. Yes, all that stuff can come into the groups, but my greatest excitement is, whether we meet the weekend intellectually or we meet it as a great life-change, I want everybody to come through it, both being their own parent, taking full responsibility for their experience and expecting me to be an artist who is going to show up fully in who I am in every way too. Within these practices people find their creativity so deeply and by being themselves this fully, everybody finds the highest gift that is available to them when we work together.

All workshops at www.jamiecatto.com

Listen to the Silence

Rudolph Steiner has a great meditation he recommends where he says - I'm paraphrasing - 'listen to a dog bark or a baby cry, and first just listen to the sound it makes, the barking and crying sound, and then listen deeper, behind the actual sound, listen to the impulse that threw that sound out, the energy that made it spring forth into a sound' - this is one of the steps of the Full Body Listening we do on the weekends, listening first to the words, then the needs or agendas behind the words. Debussy said 'music is the space between the notes'.

The crazy Taoists have a whole wing of teachings called Wu Wei - Active Non-doing. So cool! You get more data and available wisdom by tuning in to space than anything else.

The greatest skill to develop in our times is the ability to pause, to stop, to leave space, and listen.

All workshops at www.jamiecatto.com

Judas Syndrome

One of the most valuable things I've learnt in recent times is that whatever anyone says or thinks about me is really more about themselves than me. I have had such a tendency in the past to use people who don't like me or something I'm doing, or 'how' I am, to reinforce my negative beliefs about myself, 'the truth' and proof of me being a bad boy or unlovable, or even, more recently, untrustworthy. But I've realised that freeing myself from using these people's stories and assumptions to abandon myself has to stop.

I read a quote someone posted recently by Byron Katie which said, 'it's not your job to like me, it's mine' and I skipped over it without really letting it in. Now it resonates loud and clear. When I get letters from folks who find me 'too' this or 'not enough' that, their diagnosis of me seems usually a strategy for them to skip their vulnerability of responsibility for what they are feeling that day. So it's easier to blame and complain about how I shouldn't be or how I should have been as a technique to get away from their feelings. It's such a great opportunity for me to do the practice of NOT abandoning myself to their stories and instead to advocate for myself.

The whole of our culture has blamed and demonised characters throughout history as an attempt to deny their own shadows and vulnerabilities. Judas is the main archetype for this but all through history individuals and even whole races have been blamed and condemned in places where the culture didn't have the maturity to own or acknowledge their own shadows. The blacks, the jews, the gays, women, men, even the disabled have had this treatment in all sorts of places throughout history. This, in some situations, often led those races or groups to actually believe they were bad, or that they were less or that there was something wrong with them. We're so addicted to approval and it's so convincing to be told you are bad that after a short while it can really take root.

It took root for me throughout my childhood, whether it was from the negative mirroring of my family or my teachers, being a so called 'problem kid' in school - and I've carried it with me my whole life. Until recently I would attract all sorts of people doing the same thing in different ways when they felt uncomfortable around me but needed an external excuse to escape the feeling. Now I feel the warrior blood rushing back into me and the strength to say 'No'. I won't be seduced by negative mirrors which re-trigger those beliefs I used to carry. I won't be bullied in this way. I'm going to use each one to love myself and as a reminder to stop abandoning myself.

Tell me below if you've had this experience too and how you learnt to re-love yourself.

All workshops and talks www.jamiecatto.com

https://twitter.com/JamieCatto

Building The New - the World we really want - get the Snowball rolling!

Let's at least be honest with ourselves and each other from now on. We each turn a blind eye to our 'leaders' who action killing and torturing people, murdering and stealing on our behalf because it gives us this lovely comfort zone of I-phones and fresh food and cheap products and wealth. We love this comfort zone so much that we are ok with our leaders killing people far away, keeping poor people 'over there' enslaved and destroying environments and species across the water and even at home so that we can exist in our lovely coddled bubble. We can't pretend we don't know, and we sometimes care a bit, maybe enough to click a petition on Facebook - but even the so-called awake ones, even those of us who know quite a lot about what's going on, do almost nothing about it.

I want more from us!

Anita Roddick told me that the only way to turn this around is through the 'vigilante consumer'. That unless we choose more carefully what we spend our money on, nearly every penny we spend is unconsciously funding the brutality. We need to know, when we buy at a certain store or fill up our cars at a certain petrol station, who we are funding, because if we all decided to be totally clean about where we spend our money every day, the companies and structures that perpetrate this destruction would have no more funds to carry on. There's a famous quote 'if you think you're too small to be effective try going to bed with a mosquito'.

Russell Brand has also urged everyone to stop voting for these puppet servants of the Corporate oligarchs. Once again, if we don't vote them in or give them our money, the nightmare ends. There's space for something new. We fear that it would be a worse chaos - but what could be worse than this?

We clearly need an alternative, we need to BUILD THE NEW. We need a system that fairly allows hard work to be rewarded but never leaves anyone without the basic food and shelter and education that our resources can provide. Noam Chomsky told me that we are all educated to believe that 'there's nothing we can do', that our 'free' culture's Media is directed to really brainwash us into feeling powerless because in a culture like ours 'you can do A LOT'. He calls it 'the engineering of consent' and says that all through school 'we are directed to believe that success means becoming a millionaire....but there are other values'.

So...shall we? Can we make a start by foregoing some creature comforts so that less power and money streams into the hands of the Corporate oligarchs? What would you be prepared to give up? I'm writing this on an Apple computer, probably made in a Chinese sweat shop where someone jumped out of the window to their death due to horrific working conditions.

The crazy thing is that it could happen tomorrow if we collectively decided as one force to go for it. I get so excited for that moment, now that we have the internet we can instantly communicate as one. Is that day coming?

I've stopped eating meat because the factory farming industry is inhumane and backward.

I haven't stopped using petrol in my car.

I have started buying my vegetables locally and am learning how to grow my own, starting our own veggie patch when we move home in May...

...but I still buy some products from the big chains who sell aisles and aisles of toxic, processed food and care nothing for yours or your family's health.

Sourcing things locally seems to be a good start. Please list for the readers some first steps we can all take, achievable steps which will get the snowball rolling.

www.jamiecatto.com

When Someone Hurts You...

When we experience the triggers from challenging people or events that unexpectedly send us into such deep, reactive pain - when someone has said or done something which we have a huge painful reaction to, it's so easy to forget, in the midst of the wrenching, often suffocating or explosive pain that we ALL have a lot of accumulated pain and stress, old unexpressed emotionally blocked hurt, which lives in our body. This old pain in us lies dormant until someone or something comes along, something which is of the same 'flavour' or 'frequency' of that old accumulated hurt - and then our interaction with them causes the accumulated, dormant pain in us to be activated. It feels as if this person or event has just 'made us' feel a huge amount of pain or stress when in actuality they have just 'triggered' not 'caused' this sensation. They have triggered what was already there in us, lying waiting for someone to come and re-activate it - therefore WE are responsible for our reactions, even if they were unarguably 'wrong', the reaction in us is still ours, not theirs. This is a huge shift for us and our culture that we need to get with NOW. The person who upset us is NOT responsible for the huge volcano of feeling we are experiencing. The volcano was already in us, waiting to be triggered like a time bomb. The thing to do when this happens is to leave the person or event that has triggered us until we can, with help or by ourselves, process the pain, feel it, love it, dissolve it, be with it, allow it, allow the volcano to settle without blaming that triggery person, and only then, when we have responsibly attended to our own wounds and volcanos, go back and clear up anything that's still left with the present day person without making them responsible for our massive overreaction.

This takes discipline and is, to me, the definition of maturity. I rarely pull it off.

The sucker-punch is to blame the person or thing that set me off. It seems SO just at the time to make it all about the trigger. The pain often feels too big and overwhelming to own. So we live, in our immaturity, in a blame culture, condemning all sorts of people, just because we've never learnt to sit with our pain, be responsible for our reactions, process them, love ourselves in them. We've rarely been taught these skills, so in our ignorance and overwhelming reaction, all we feel we can do it blame and fight and control the external trigger.

I hope we're now moving into an age where we can love ourselves more and step out of this never ending cycle of pain-avoidance and blame. Let's hold each other in it. Let's teach each other and our kids the skills to be able to sit with our own pain, to be able to self-soothe, to be able to stay in the feelings without blaming and condemning others.

THIS, more than anything else, will create the harmonious next chapter for this planet that we all crave.

Please write below some suggestions of ways we can teach and learn these skills in a sustainable, efficient way.

all workshops and events at www.jamiecatto.com

Calling All Activists and Healers!

ACTIVISTS and MOVEMENT LEADERS - I notice that it's paramount that the members, especially the 'leaders' of the groups for change are constantly, visibly fallible in our anger, dark appetites, corrupt tendencies, all the dark parts which make us humans, and as we play openly with those shadows, be seen in them, not try and put forward any pretensions that we are above those aspects of ourselves, then we can be walking permission slips for the members of the movements and groups to also not hide away their shadows and in this way the projects for change and healing can be sustainable. I really hope that all of these new projects include a good dose of this. I hope they never pretend they are above those who have unconsciously slipped into the old structures of greed and ignorance, but instead constantly admit fallibility, human nonsense and with mischief and foolishness guard against over earnest, grandiose, superior notions of themselves. I hope the creators and other folks running these shows can bare their shadows so visibly that we never pretend we are better-than, or above the past. Look what your 'fighting against' out in the World - it's an arrow directing you to an internal battle, something you need to address within yourself. Look what you want to heal in the world - it's an arrow directing you towards something unhealed and unfinished inside you. Use the things you feel passionate to fight and heal in the World as the signposts they are - all ways our innate Genius is using to mirror ourselves and get our own houses in order so that we can have a sustainable and effective impact on the issues of our Home Planet.

All workshops www.jamiecatto.com

Using Today's 'Problem' Properly

I'm feeling waves of an old wound today, an old terror resurfacing today. It's an old issue in my life which has not been fully resolved - the details are unimportant right now. I notice, each time it pops back into my head today, that familiar contraction and wave of fear and anxiety go through me - just the image of that person's face arising in my mind's eye sends a wave of tension through me. This time I am using it to dissolve the tension that arises in my body. Each time it arises I breathe and focus on the exact sensation it throws up. I'm NOT trying to solve the situation or run the details round in my head again or 'work out' what I'm going to say or do. That would have been my old pattern. I am living a new life now where I am disciplining myself to feel it in my body first, not attach to the storyline and events of the actual issue (which can go round and round forever). I believe these challenges are an opportunity for me to feel my body more, breathe into the place where it feels stuck and uncomfortable, and keep dissolving it, keep feeling it physically as deeply and fully as possible. When you look at it a certain way it can be experienced as just a physical sensation. THIS is self love to me. To feel the yucky stuckness even more deeply, to go into it, to be fascinated by it instead of rejecting it and trying to control this discomfort by finding mental solutions.

The specific issue is very seductive. It cries out for a solution to make it go away. And yes, it will need to be attended to. BUT I want to attend to it with the person it concerns only AFTER I have moved the blocked feeling in me, NOT as a reaction to the feeling, NOT as a way to escape or get away from the feeling.

When I do my feeling and breathing and dissolving as much as possible first then the actions I take later to address this issue in my life will be rooted in equanimity and good sense, not reactive fear. However, when I take actions before having done some inner dissolving and attending to these feelings in me peacefully I am in escape and fear and my actions will likely perpetuate the problem in the World.

This practice takes discipline because the 'problem' is so seductive and I really don't want it in my life any more. I'm scared of how it might turn out. I know though that being a willing participant to this challenge and feeling deeply into how this hurts in me, into how my body is using it to dissolve something old and scared and stuck, is the route to my freedom, both from the literal issue itself and from the age old pattern of resistance in me that it is a signpost for.

There it goes again. A fear wave. The scary problem reminds me it's still not resolved. I feel the tightness in my solar plexus. I feel something I used to call 'fear', something I used to call 'anxiety'.

Maybe those words have stopped being useful.

Please try this with me. Meet the feelings of 'fear', or 'powerlessness' as a way to dissolve blocked areas of the body. Breathe into them, dissolve them, feel love for yourself as you do this, compassion for yourself and all beings who have this challenge. We are all challenged this way - it's not so personal.

This practice is a game changer. It empowers us. It can magically have unexpected effects out in the World with the issue itself.

This is how I am learning about self love in a practical way

Have you tried it?

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The Unforgivable at Xmas

As it's Xmas I've been considering who are the most unforgivable people on Earth. We seem to have culturally all agreed that sex offenders, rapists and especially child-abusers are totally unforgivable and deserving of zero compassion, just condemnation. Jesus reached out to the lepers. This was the metaphor. I feel we are all trapped as a culture while we keep those groups locked in the eternal dungeon so I want to, inch by inch, gently consider how those abusers became like that. Hence I write the posts of recent days. I know it stirs people up and had anything ever happened to one of my own kids I would also probably find it impossible to react in any other way.

But I'm exploring this for a sincere reason. We are trapped in the dark ages while we can't as a culture open this unforgivable, taboo conversation. Those who are so stirred up that they need to condemn me publicly or call me mean, shaming names, while I understand that you're too triggered to do anything else, for my own self-care, I choose to erase you from the threads.

I believe that people who've been abused will fall into two camps - those who afterwards were lucky enough to be exposed to ideas, people, luck/destiny that gave them the chance to make healthier, non-abusive choices and there are those who just got more violence and rape and abuse and punishment and shame and outcaste-ness and alienation, who became too damaged in the complexity of their experiences to make a healthy choice and often became 'abusers' - those people are mentally ill in my opinion and need high security hospitals not self-righteous people telling them "I made the right choice after MY abuse, therefore you should have too and I'm therefore superior/better than you". That's my truth. Everyone is innocent from that perspective.

Letting this in is is REALLY what Xmas is about. We are all uniquely wounded - most of us got lucky that our violence never expressed it's way too destructively for ourselves or others. That doesn't make us superior, only lucky to have been exposed to different love and ideas.

Take the baby day by day 'til it becomes the abuser, orchestrating the abuse, slowly watch it's life literally day by day, all the complex things that happened to it, 4 years old abused...6 years old abused...9 years old now very twisted and lost....13 years old with no exposure to anything but hatred and ignorance...16 years old getting into real violence.... 'til it becomes a full-on abuser, and choose which day you stop your compassion, if you want to be free, try this exercise.

Who's on YOUR unforgivable list this year?

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IMMEDIATE aLIVE BROADCAST

"Ladies and Gentlemen this is the first TV and Online COUNTRYWIDE VOTE - this issue of 4359B of....Whether we as a country wish to ever Manufacture or be part of any business of making or selling guns, bombs or bullets to other warring nations or nutter dictators or regimes.....will be collectively voted on Online and through TV Home Systems in 40 days (and forty nights). The old system of a few people deciding such matters was created long ago before we had the technology to educate ourselves and securely cast out vote in our millions. We are building the New with now most basic modern technology to replace the old system of a few questionable strangers.

Please discuss, debate, educate YOURSELVES, passionately express your feelings about this  issue with each other and then please each cast your single vote Online on our Secure Server at the end of that period. There will be a countdown on that PeoplePower webpage until that moment when we will collectively choose and manifest exactly what we want as a Nation.

Next Month: ...Legalise Marijuanna and Cannabis products that are helping cancer victims and stop sabotaging that at least....

Thank you for building the new."

Come and Build the new by being a walking permission slip for everyone to lighten up and risk a deeper connection with each other. www.jamiecatto.com

Merry Xmas?

Something I feel needs discussion is how we, at Xmas time, build the kids up with a frenzy of expectation; the presents, the things Santa will bring, the orgy of receiving and getting, all so that the adults can get a kick out of seeing the kids so excited, so we can milk their excitement (really for ourselves NOT them) and then, when the big day comes and the inevitable disappointment kicks in (because what experience could ever match that build up?), the kids, one way or another, melt down, behave 'badly' or spoilt or disappointed on Xmas day, and then, I feel abusively, having created this sensory 'sugar-crash' of materialism, we SHAME the kids for their behaviour and ingratitude! It's a double abuse we perpetrate on them - first a fake building up of hope for something which is never delivered, and then an unjust shaming when they don't behave how we want them to in their confused come-down. All for US, not for them. We kid ourselves it's for them but on closer examination I feel that's nonsense. Kids want our attention more than any present or toy. Focused attention IS love, undistracted by i-phones, emails or TV. That's all they hunger for and is what will give them a Christmas to remember forever.

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The Battle Is The Map To PEACE

It's been a wonderful, raw, challenging few days here at home. More illuminations about how we, in our relationship, often have complimentary wounds which can serve as platforms for growth and healing once we get skilled at noticing their potential and not getting perpetually sucked into mutual resistance, fighting and pain loops. This week the old wounds of Raisa feeling that 'the man' is not meeting her fully, not there for her, not available, triggered much pain and complaint, a deep sense of mistrust which was expressed verbally and in a strong energetic resistance like a wall between us. Ironically, or maybe perfectly, when she expressed this, it triggered my own deep wounds of feeling unappreciated, feeling like I'm not being loved for who I simply am, that somehow I'm not delivering what's needed by just being me and that I am 'a failure', 'redundant' or even 'a bad boy'.

This hurt so much that instead of seeing through her words and defence strategies into her pain, I instead, as usual, started defending my position, persuading her that this was not true, that our relationship was not as fundamentally flawed as she was saying, and that I AM available and loving and I even complained and expressed upset that 'I'm not being seen for who I am' or 'appreciated for the gifts and love I bring'. I argued that I AM available and that it was her who was 'leaving'.

This is an age old loop. My reaction to her makes her feel even LESS felt and seen, and more lonely than she was before, so we endlessly talk and process and separate even more into alienation and loneliness. This is how the mirror can create a vicious circle of pain. Does this sound familiar?

I'm excited to report that this week we've gone beyond this exhausting pattern - just a few times, but it feels revolutionary.

The challenge for me is to not believe the literal content of what she says. To not defend it or make her words 'about me'. Even though they impact me greatly because I have such deep wounds around being rejected or criticised by 'the woman' (my Mother?) for 'not being enough' or 'not what's wanted here', I have to let those waves pass through me, feel them, and then look deeper, see behind her complaint into her pain. I need to stop believing her words and realise that what she's saying, even though it feels 'true' to her in that moment, is really her mind's strategy to not feel her deeper trauma and vulnerability of desperately wanting to be held in that moment as her old wound discharges some pain. Something raw is moving in her, and she needs me to hold her, love her, above all, simply be present with her, despite all her 'pushing away'.

This takes a lot of presence, breath, and steadfastness.

The last thing I want to do in that moment when I am feeling so unfairly treated, so painfully rejected, is to love her, hold her or comfort her. But this is what is asked of me, as a man, on a deeper level. To breathe through the self-pity and the urge to escape and to go to her, dissolve through her illusory wall, and wrap my arms around her, communicating with touch, with my whole body, that love is here. Presence is here. I am here.

By some miracle, this week, we have managed to do this a few times and the response has been beautiful. She has melted into tears, into soft, yielding sobs of accepting love. We are re-writing our deep beliefs every time we dissolve through the surface 'version' of complaint and pain and connect deeper to what she is really asking for, which is to be met and held in this moment.

Yesterday we repeated this cycle of penetrating through the rejection and lonely resistance three times before lunch and we were both high with the realisations and potential to shift this pattern now in our relationship. Every time we broke through, an immense amount of sexual energy was released. We have been melting into so much lovemaking, creativity, gentle holding, a profound level of peace has returned as we've realised - the very thing that was dividing us and hurting us is the door to our mutual healing and re-writing of our old beliefs and patterns.

The wound is the key if we can only be skilful and present enough to dissolve through the surface story that arises to hide our deeper vulnerability and pain. In this way I get to dissolve my old wounded beliefs around 'not being enough' and she gets to dissolve her wounds of 'the man isn't available'. The reward is that we both get the intimacy and presence we need. The conflict we were experiencing was actually a signpost to healing.

The battle is the map to peace when we dare to read it the right way.

Please share your experiences with this below.

All workshops including What About Us? at http://jamiecatto.com/workshops/

Wait! You're Not Worrying About What You Think You're Worrying About!

The following is the most liberating, practical and helpful thing I've ever realised.

Sometimes I wake up worrying about money. I wake up in the morning with this gluey, tense feeling in my guts or solar plexus and immediately my mind starts adding up numbers, working out everything I need to pay for that month and strategising how in the short term and long term I can make this all work out. It's extremely stressful. Later that day someone might ask me how I've been and I might say "I woke up worrying about money again this morning…"

But wait! That's actually wrong.

If I rewind that morning's experience and take it atom by tiny atom, this is what is really going on:

I wake up with this gluey, tense feeling in my guts or solar plexus.

It feels really uncomfortable.

THEN my well meaning, yet misguided mind, in order to control and get rid of this yucky feeling in my body, throws up a story or a concept of something worrying that's going on in my life because it believes, incorrectly, that if my mind can 'solve' that problem or situation then the discomfort will go away. The mind is totally well-meaning and due to it's logical, problem-solving nature, it thinks that by matching this worried feeling to a story or a controllable outcome in my life, that I can get rid of the feeling by solving the life-problem that it has selected for me.

But THIS IS A TRAP. It is a decoy that, rather than making the feeling go away, actually makes the feeling get stronger and last longer. The idea of rejecting that feeling, solving it, getting rid of it in this thinky way ABSOLUTELY DOESN'T WORK. If anything, it perpetuates it and magnifies it by chewing it over and over.

So, back to me lying in bed. What is really going on?

My body, and yours, is the most GENIUS self-mending, self-cleaning organism that we know of in the Universe. It is constantly scanning for viruses and bacteria and harmful agents and then making its own drugs, amazingly secreting things, and administering them to us in the body all day and night while we go on with our lives, (rarely thinking about this miraculous self-mending process that's constantly going on). The genius body system is also regenerating our cells with any energy or resources it can draw upon. Our skin mends if we cut it. Our bones knit and mend if we break them. It goes on and on, organs, glands, sophisticated mending and healing systems constantly working. BUT IT DOESN'T END THERE…

…our body is also self-mending and cleaning all our accumulated EMOTIONAL pain and stress in just as sophisticated a way. This is why we wake up, often, with a very uncomfortable tightness or stuckness down our front, somewhere from the throat to the belly. It's NOT because we've woken up worrying about money, or our health, or any of the mind's versions of what's 'wrong' in our lives. NO! It's simply because our genius mind/body system is doing a well-needed emotional poo. It is offloading some of the accumulation of emotional pain that we all carry and it cleverly waits until these moments, when we're not so busy or thinky, to do it.

Please get this. It will radically change your life for the better. You're not worrying about what you think you're worrying about.

When we wake up and feel the feeling of that constipation being pushed through by our genius mind/body system, the mind, before we've even remembered who we are in the morning, gets busy in it's well-meaning way, to give us 'the reason' for this discomfort imagining that if we can solve it then the feeling might go away. This is the most distracting, incorrect and useless strategy that sucks us in every time. We lie there in bed turning that problem over and over trying to solve it and this GETS IN THE WAY of the genius process our body is doing, which is cleverly shitting out some accumulated emotional pain and stress.

At these times if we are skillful, we will ignore the mind's version COMPLETELY and only focus on the physical sensation. If we place our attention on the yucky, tight feeling in the body and gently breathe into it, allowing it, even encouraging it, staying with it in a soft and trusting way, knowing it's part of our body's genius process, not 'something's wrong today' then miraculously it moves, it shifts, it transforms. We need to take the attitude that we are sitting with a child who is constipated and feeling insecure. All we need to do is hold it's hand, and be there, fully present - nothing more.

Do not get tricked into the mind's version of your morning emotional poo any longer!

And this doesn't only apply to the morning wake-up tension. Exactly the same is true for every time we are triggered, upset, or reactive to something that has happened 'to us' during the day. I believe that our genius body/mind system, or Life itself, is daily sending us difficult and challenging situations and people DELIBERATELY to trigger the body into releasing that stuck emotion. That's the very reason adversity exists in our lives. It's part of the genius way Life itself is mending us and cleaning us. When someone upsets me, if I am skillful, I will feel the familiar volcanic eruption of pain, anger, fear, in my chest and instead of fighting that person, I will go straight to the physical place where my body has started shitting out accumulated tension and only deal with that person AFTER I have attended to and dissolved what just happened in my body.

What I'm saying is that difficult people are WALKING LAXATIVES! It may sound radical but it's true. When someone upsets us we experience a totally disproportionate reaction. We feel the pain of everyone who ever treated us that way back to our childhood. This is the body's genius finding ways to self-clean, self-mend all that accumulation. We attract and react to those people or events as a way to heal ourselves.

Could it be that ALL this adversity is actually a gift? A benevolent invitation for the skillful to poo out some harmful, stressful built up stuff in us?

When I treat these triggers this way I become POWERFUL. Suddenly, rather than be disempowered by the events I am now using them for their correct purpose which is Life's genius, cleaning and unclogging me by finding ways to discharge accumulated emotional shit.

Don't believe your mind in the morning when you wake up worrying! It's just your genius doing it's work. PARTICIPATE with it, don't resist it. Don't believe the mind's victim story of what happened to you - on the human level it hurt, but on a deeper level it's just part of Life's genius giving you the opportunity to offload some toxic old pain. Breathe into it, let it dissolve and shift - above all DON'T THINK!

USE IT and empower yourself with all apparent adversity! This is the point of all challenging feelings and events.

All workshops and talks at www.jamiecatto.com

Sanctuary For Terror

I just created this facebook group SANCTUARY FOR TERROR because I sometimes suffer in extreme terror and lonely despair, sometimes at night, and sometimes it's overwhelming. I've found that certain friends, some who I have added there, really help me root myself in reality, in good sense, in self love at these times. I often wish there was a place that for 24 hours a day I could go to and receive that love, along with my own self love, not instead of it. Maybe others would like a place like this too. Who knows? Maybe you or I might come here in the middle of losing it, maybe in the middle of the night and someone else might be here to help remind you or me to love myself. They might offer a hand, a branch, a reminder, a moment of stillness, or even just a friend to chat to or sit with while it transforms. Today I opened myself to the idea, while I was being loved and helped by my friend Clare, that this could transform. These periods of overwhelming meltdown COULD be a route towards the usual terrified reactions lessening. I've never even allowed in the idea that this could be a path to transformation. I hear the words but am so so locked in 'no no no no' and gasping and shaking and imagining horrifying loops of some scenario that isn't even happening in this moment. But even the IDEA of what might happen is killing me, terrifying me, suffocating me, making me puke sometimes. And the reaction in my body has been so overwhelming for so many years that I've believed it will ALWAYS be like this.

But maybe it won't. Maybe I'm a different man who experiences this each time. And each time there are different possibilities. Clare says that for her, loving herself in it and reminding herself that nothing is actually happening right now, she's still here, sitting in a chair, breathing - this can really be helpful.

Also, there's something beautiful in making a pledge to myself that I will not abandon myself. I will be the one that loves myself, loves this terrified shaking boy even if there's no one else around, even if everyone has left or is unavailable. I am available to love myself, talk soothingly to myself and know that it will pass. Even if it takes hours, it never goes on forever.

This is a new WILLINGNESS TO TRANSFORM and to believe it's even a possibility - it might be slow, just tiny bit by tiny bit, but if I allow this new attitude of willingness and meet the terror when it comes in these ways, I have witnesses that have done this and reported back that they are freer, and that the agony and despair does get weaker. And sometimes it's not slow, sometimes it's instant. There are no rules.

So I've created this group SANCTUARY FOR TERROR to be with each other in this transformation, sometimes to discuss it when feeling fine, and sometimes to come and write and be supported when the clouds gather, or even in the middle of a melt down.

And here I am again, shaking slightly less as I write this, gasping slightly less, some loneliness in my solar plexus...shivering a little...something is moving...

...if this feels like something that could support you, please come to the Sanctuary any time you like.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/sanctuaryforterror/

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REAL is the new SEXY

It’s so radical to be authentic these days that it has an enigma all of it’s own.It’s very powerful to be visible with your vulnerabilities, it shakes people up in the places where they are too scared to be so visible. Listen to their judgements. They give you the map of exactly where those folks are stuck. Feel your reactions in your body, it’s the map of where you believe them. it’s powerful and disruptive to be generous and to not run your life and business with the usual scarcity-addicted model, but to be inclusive and open handed, that takes courage, cultivates trust and is progressive. Notice how hard some find it to receive your generosity, how uncomfortable receiving can be for them even when the gift is freely given. Notice who warns you to be less giving. It is powerful to show your neediness some days, to show your unreasonable anger, your inappropriateness – it takes courage to be so visible and risk the approval vanishing. It is revolutionary to wear no masks, no hats and be the same ‘you’ in business as at home. Why do we exhaust ourselves wearing masks for people who need us to be other than our real selves? I recommend removing the masks and seeing who stays. The ones that do really get you and are the ones you want to hang out with and work with. Authentic people are enigmatic because most people are so comfortable in their hiding, conforming, disempowered state that someone brave enough to be simply real is fascinating. Where have you been hiding? What mask is it time to take off?

Come and laugh so tenderly and foolishly with me that all these outdated strategies effortlessly dissolve - All workshops and talks at www.jamiecatto.com https://twitter.com/JamieCatto

Leading The Men Back To The Women

There’s a scent of reunion in the air. The women want their men back, and I have a foolish and lyrical notion that we can be the Pied Pipers, leading the men back to the women. Our task as men is to re-awaken each other’s maleness and leadership again, but this time expressed through our compassion and service, not our control and dominion. Over the last 100 or more years, women have understandably lost their trust in men in general. This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. Fragile-ego’d, self-seeking, solely cock-driven, permanently adolescent men have abused the planet on every level. The air, water, and soil are polluted, the animals violently killed, the children uneducated and the old people uncared for.

And it may sound radical to say this, but there has emerged a masculine edge in women, which has crept in during the past half a century. It is an edge that has, I believe, been born of a lack of trust in the males to deliver leadership and protection through service and wisdom. Women have been over-masculinising like mad to compensate for the essence of true maleness that’s so badly lacking in at least the last two generations of men, who have been addicted to profit and status.

Is it any wonder women have lost trust in men’s expression of their core male values?

But what excites me is that over the last 50 years, a radical shift in maleness has been emerging. There has been a whole new wave of softer men, relating to their wives and lovers more, connecting more presently with their kids, and actively trying to cultivate this by attending deepening workshops, for example.

This has awakened the vital feminine-in-the-male quality. But it has only brought us so far. It is a long way from the re-emergence of the powerful, unwavering male that the planet and the human species so badly needs today. Cultivating the feminine qualities in the modern man is just a stepping stone to a deeper re-awakening, and that’s the male-in-the-male.

My recent conversations and workshop sessions with numerous women have left me in no doubt that the women want their men back in their true maleness. This means being strong, steadfast and genuine; unswayed by the grasping, needy, untrustworthy and superficial values that have often been driving them in this last century.

In my experience, there seems to be a huge yearning among these women to relax more into their feminine selves, melt and soften and just be.

But to trust that when they melt, the man will be a clear and strong container for that melting, feels like too big an expectation for them to have these days. The kind of man I speak of can hold his woman in her all diverse and changeable forms. He is a heart mountain.

I’ve purposely experimented when spending time with women recently. My intention has been to hold the masculine core in how we relate, being strong and present for them, just for 20 focused minutes, to represent and embody that pure, steadfast maleness.

The visible permission that 20 minutes gives the women to feminise is vividly noticeable within moments. She softens. She opens, she glows, she sometimes sobs with relief and the uncomfortable maleness she was holding melts just a little.

Could it be that the women of the planet are hungry and eager for the men to step into this trustworthy, loyal, devoted, dependable space? Are the men ready for this? I say yes, we are.

So as men, it should be our mission to beckon and invite each other to step back into our strength and power, but this time renewed in constant, reliable, unfaltering attendance to the true principles of authentic support, leadership through service, and humble devotion to women.

The Order of the Sacred Woodsman is a facebook group established by Jamie Catto, where men can gather and uphold their male strengths and share their insights and vulnerabilities, AND NOW Woodsmen For Women which is for both men and women to share gifts, ideas, vulnerabilities...

For more info on workshops and events go to www.jamiecatto.com

BEWARE! Self-Awareness can REVERSE your EVOLUTION!

Guess what - it's possible that all that 'work' you've been doing on yourself for all these years, cultivating the silent observer in you, that inner-witness that you've trained to be super aware of all your moment to moment actions, strategies and dysfunctions - that raising of awareness might have been sending you backwards! Unless that skillful noticing has been permanently coupled with your love and self-forgiveness, even affection for all your fallible, over-reactive, slightly mad behaviours, then there's a good chance that each time you've noticed yourself being imperfect you've been using that raised awareness to judge yourself harshly and entrench yourself even deeper in self-loathing, self-disempowering habits.

That's right - we could be going backwards here! Hold up a moment!

The key to useful self-awareness is LOVE. So now, every time I notice myself being an overreactive diva (for instance) - instead of kicking myself and saying 'oh Jamie, such a brat, what's the matter with you? when are you going to evolve?' - instead of talking to myself in the familiar voice of the slave-driver or the self-hating judge, I bring in the LOVE, in my case, these days, in the form of an affectionate and undramatic, psychiatric nurse who lives within me.

When I'm melting down or making a big fuss about something, either out loud or to myself, my inner psychiatric nurse, in a sympathetic, soothing tone, affectionately says 'awwww…do you need a little lie down? shall we put the kettle on?' a bit like an old auntie who's seen worse in the war. For me it's so much less violent to myself, instead of the old, frustrated 'Oh Jamie ! when will you ever grow up….?' voice - to place my palm affectionately on my chest and lighten up, and to be self-soothing.

Because self-awareness without love leads to self-harming.

Cultivating my inner psychiatric nurse has been great for this, because self-awareness without affection for myself soon becomes self-judgement, and self-loathing. How easy it is to descend into kicking myself with frustration when I witness myself failing again.

This is why foolishness and playfulness are central to my life, to diffuse any earnestness in me that thinks it has the right to judge and condemn.

Whatever your technique for staying self aware, please don't forget to include an equal amount of self-forgiving LOVE, and even affection for your own unique fallibility. Without it we are just warring on ourselves, cultivating more seeds of violence, and regressing not progressing, in our Evolution.

All talks and workshops at www.jamiecatto.com

Don't Believe Yourself!

I felt hurt today after someone said something to me I didn't like. I didn't like what they said. I didn't like the way they said it. And I didn't like when they said it either! And I felt hurt. I withdrew for a bit as the extremely uncomfortable and sudden feeling of contraction and eruption in my solar plexus surged. It felt very painful. It felt like anger, despair, sorrow and injustice, with a dash of persecution thrown in for good measure. As I sat there, still in the vicinity of this person who had just said the thing that I didn't like, I noticed my mind building a 'case for the prosecution' in my inner ear, listing all the things I could say that would back up the idea that I was a victim here and the other person had been, in some way(s), responsible for this painful feeling now raging in me.

So the voice of prosecution set off down a few roads to argue it's case, to back up this 'Jamie has been unarguably wronged here' version of events, in which I was an innocent victim of this other person's wrongness.

Does this sound familiar?

Do you, like me, often have a whole courtroom scene going on in your head? At times when I feel I have to state my case, defend myself, or especially justifiably prosecute another for 'wronging me', an imaginary courtroom opens up in my mind where the whole world can hear the obvious truth of my innocence and the other person's (often outrageous) wrongness.

Today, I watched my inner prosecutor attempt to blame and shame this person for what, how and when they had 'been so insensitive'. But this time, in the light of my curious attention, and therefore without the fuel of my need to avoid this pain in me at all costs by blaming the other, the whole victim-centric 'version of events' that would usually be so delicious and compelling to me just dissolved, and in it's place, a fascination with the sad, despairing, contracting, watery sensations that were still pulsing in my chest and guts and eyes, took over.

My attention left the argument in my head and focused instead on the sensations in me and the astonishment at how skillful my inner victim-addicted prosecutor is! How often in the past I'd be deep in arguing by now instead of feeling what was going on in my body.

Once I breathed gently into the places where the hurt was throbbing and moving it began to morph and shift and dissolve - as the Taoists say 'Ice to Water, Water to Steam'.

I was so glad I had, for once, noticed this before I attacked this other person. And above all, I made a personal note to get wise to the usual, deliciously compelling, "i'm a victim' version of events I try and sell even to myself when I feel hurt. Anything to escape the pain that erupts in me.

From now on I am reminding myself to stay uber-vigilant about the seemingly-so-just complaints and blaming strategies I habitually weave to back up my victimhood, and how I tend to avoid feeling deeply and with fascination the extreme sensory reactions I have in my body…

…whenever someone says something I don't like.

Please tell me how you blamed someone else instead of feeling your feelings this week and what you do to bring yourself back.

Workshops, Music and Films at www.jamiecatto.com