January 2020 - Deborah Butler

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In a relationship with a ‘Relationship’

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In a relationship, you’re not seeing the other person. People believe that a relationship means they will have their needs met by someone else. They’re wrong.

You think that you’re having a relationship with ‘someone’, a significant other. But when you have a ‘relationship’, the relationship gets in the middle and separates two people. Each person is expecting something out of the ‘relationship’ bubble, but the bubble is a barrier to two people getting to know one another. The idea of a ‘relationship’ is romantic imagination. The other person is meant to fulfil your needs. This is nonsense.

It’s a mistake because you try to mold that person into the perfect someone you want to be with and cannot accept them as they are. Often, you don’t even like that other person and that person does not meet your needs. They don’t change their underpants often enough, they smell bad, if only they could change that one little thing… and so on. They are also too busy trying to meet their own wants and needs from you too, to be able to consider your needs. If they do consider your needs all the time they come over as clingy and weak, and probably are.

When you are in a relationship with the ‘relationship’, you have expectations, hopes and fears, rather than doing your thing and allowing the other person to do their thing. A ‘Relationship’ clouds your interactions with someone through your own expectations. The imagination of the other person is not ‘real’, the expectations you have are your imagination of how things ‘should’ be for you (in an ideal world).

Instead of being in a relationship, interact with other people as you would if you were meeting your own needs and see how it goes. Allow them to be who they are, and you can be who you are. If it works, great, if not, you have nothing to let go of because you were never in a relationship with ‘them’ in the first place. You were lost in a dream of what a relationship should be.

If you have an expectation of the other person, express it, so they know what you want. If you don’t tell them, they will never know what you want, and they can only guess. They will not get into your head and think ‘Oh yes that’s what they want’. If they could do this, they’re missing their vocation as a mind reader.

Instead, they are trying to second guess what you want and will miss the mark. Communication is essential between people, not hoping the other person will know you so well that they will instinctively know how to meet your needs. Only you can meet your needs, no one else can do that. So, if you want your needs met, either do it yourself, or tell them exactly what you want. Otherwise, you will feel hurt that they got it wrong, be resentful of them and withdraw from them. This is unfair because they have no idea what you want.

When you want something – ask! If you don’t get it, get it for yourself. No one owes you anything and you don’t owe them anything. The only person you owe to is yourself, so nurture yourself and drop the idea of what a relationship is. Accept what it is and work it out from there.

Read About Jealousy

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Emotional Freedom

Relationship Jealousy and You

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Relationship Jealousy

Relationship jealousy is a basic human driver. A relationship is something we think we need in order to make ourselves a functioning member of society. But what is the other person looking for in me?

Simply put, a man is after sex, a woman is after a nest. For most individuals this dynamic is taking place. He wants to have sex with her and she wants him to make her a nest. This is why relationship jealousy differs so much between the sexes. Men are sexually jealous and women are resource jealous.

Why isn’t cheating the same?

When a man cheats on a woman, it’s not so much the sex that she minds, it’s the fact that he’s spent resources on the other person. This is true whether it is a prostitute or whether it s a mistress who he has set up in a flat.

For a man, the jealousy is sexual. If she cheats, she’s allowing another man to potentially impregnate her. This means that any offspring she has might not be his.

These basic fundamental instincts occur whether the woman is on the pill, or the man has had a vasectomy, etc. They are basic drives that have been learned and adopted from our animal nature.

Can we overcome them? No. It’s a natural drive to feel relationship jealousy because of the will to life we each have within us. We all have a strong ‘will to life’ drive, a striving inclination to persist in your own being. This is not only your current being but also any legacy, resources, family, or descendants that continue to exist after our existence. It is our existence and legacy.

Partners are naturally jealous of one another because they are fighting to maximize their own power and ensure their partner is loyal to them. I have seen this repeated in gay couple, where one partner is sexually jealous, but the other is resource jealous. It would seem to be a human pattern.

It’s A Power Battle

Jealousy is a normal part of the power battle. If someone has been unfaithful, whether with sex or resources, it’s natural for the other person to feel cheated. This is our basic animal instinct and natural sovereign right.

How do we deal with it in our own relationships? Acknowledge where you feel jealous and observe your own behavior. There can be a tendency to excessive jealousy in insecure individuals. Either the relationship is rocky, because of the partner not giving you what you want, or perhaps your own demands are unreasonable. This occurs in a man when a woman looks at another man, or when a man tips generously. If you react this way, you’re struggling in the relationship and need to look at it now. Communication and negotiation are important here. Find out what the other person wants, and discuss it. If it doesn’t work for you, find out why?

Or are you really in a relationship with the relationship?

For more on the reality of life, see Martin Butler’s article on security or freedom.

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Emotional Freedom

Why Envy Harms You

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Envy Harms You

What is Envy? Envy is a form of hatred. It is a form of hate directed towards someone who has been favoured by fortune. Why do we feel envy? Because they have something that we would like. Envy harms you alone.

If someone near to you wins or inherits a large amount of money, you may feel envy because you too would like lot of money. And you then get a contrast between the situation you’re in and the situation they are in. You have the impression that they have more, or are more likely to survive. Their prospect of survival is enhanced, and yours is still the same. But, you feel diminished because there’s a greater contrast taking place. And so, you experience this hatred towards them because they’re a source of pain for you. They’re reminding you of something you do not have, and so you hate them. Your envy cannot affect them but the envy you feel harms you.

Be honest with yourself

Sense how the feeling of envy harms you. No one else matters when it comes to how you feel. It’s tough to look at these emotions and to be honest about them and see that’s what’s going on. Once you understand this, and by the word ‘understand’ I mean you have been in that situation where you feel envy. Then you’ve had the honesty to acknowledge that in yourself, and the ability to analyse what is going on.

When you can do that, then envy will diminish. You don’t have to make it decrease; it will just decrease because by understanding emotions they somehow lose their power.

What about Fear?

It’s the same for fear. In fear you must understand why you are feeling fear. We all feel fear because we think our survival is being threatened in some way or other. So , you might have a concern that you could lose your job soon. And of course, that relates directly to a diminishing of your survival prospects. You look at the situation. Why you are feeling fear? What does that refer to? It relates to your feeling of diminishing survival prospects.

A curious thing about these emotions is that they have a certain amount of energy. They are like storms. By sitting with them and being with them and looking at them, the storm loses its power. In effect we absorb the energy of the storm. So instead of the storm stealing power from us, we take its energy. These are a few examples of how understanding the emotions causes the emotions to become less troublesome.

How does the work help?

What you are left with when you have done this work for a long time is greater peace. This is because the emotions are not so troubling. Emotions are essentially an animal legacy that we have, and whether we should be in that state or not is up for debate.

Some traditions consider the state of uncontrollable emotions to be a fallen state, a fall into sharing characteristics with animals, i.e., the emotions, the passions.

To recap, knowledge is nothing. It’s just stuff you hold in your head. You are like a computer with it. It has no bearing or no weight when you’re considering how you feel about yourself and what you are.

Understanding is tied to being and being is related to experience. Understanding and being go together. It might be worth investigating understanding. It’s nowhere near as sexy as enlightenment or cosmic consciousness or any of these things that the enlightenment gurus are touting, but it’s more real, the benefits are more robust, and it’s a way to progress in your move towards peace and towards happiness.

More about Understanding

It might be entertaining to watch this YouTube post on Slavishness to the Emotions

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Communication Inner Peace

Why Does Understanding Matter?

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Understanding Relationships

Most people choose a self-help path to get away from some pain. We are all affected by emotional distress of one kind or another. Maybe sadness, depression, fear, anger. Any of the relatively long list of things that can affect us as human beings. Now, what is usually peddled in various movements that erupt to address these issues, and what is lacking, is understanding. What is offered is essentially some technique. These methods are, in the main, calming techniques. For instance, learning to take deep breaths when anxious. And of course, that’s useful, but it’s not going to help you get to the bottom of the anxiety. You’re going to be taking deep breaths for the rest of your life because it’s just like a drug. You are in effect just using a natural medicine that your body can produce of its own accord through taking deep breaths. Now, it is curious that understanding is missing in most spiritual methods because it is the key to our freedom and liberation.

What’s the Difference?

Knowledge, being and understanding are all different. Knowledge on its own is nothing; it’s just something that you push into your memory and chew around in your impressionable mind. This is the apparatus that you develop during life to handle concepts and words and language and images. It’s effectively just like a machine that can process symbols and words and pictures. Understanding is something wholly different. Understanding comes from direct experience. There is no way you can get understanding if somehow you are not able to experience what needs to be understood. There’s the old saying, that if you want to learn, then you must do something. You must do that very thing that you want to learn. So, someone who is a carpenter will not become a carpenter by reading books about carpentry. They become a carpenter by doing it, and as such, they gain an understanding of the nature of the material they’re working with. They learn about wood, the tools used, and the little tricks and techniques that they use to make the thing work. Things that you would never pick up just by reading about something. True understanding comes from living it.

Self Observation

The thing that often frustrates various schools is a lack of understanding. There was a great deal of work in the sense of evoking emotions and techniques to go within oneself, but very little in the way of understanding how these emotions arose and seeing them. In seeing the situation in which they would occur, and understand why those emotions are as they are. Once you know that, you can gain freedom. I’ve found this in my own practical experience, and I’ve seen that there’s no substitute for real-life work on oneself, in the sense of observing what’s going on and understanding what’s going on. Observation is not enough on its own. Self-Observation is a beautiful thing; it allows us to see what’s going on. But if there’s no understanding of why a particular state has arisen, then there’s no moving forward. I’ll give you an example here.

Survival

Our primary driver, our animal driver, is our need to survive, and the emotions are a legacy if you like from our animal origins. Emotions are essentially instant responses to situations. These immediate responses mean that an animal can respond to a situation in an instant. It doesn’t have to think and evaluate; it just knows how to respond immediately. So, if it’s in danger, it will flee. It doesn’t think about it; it doesn’t try and reason. If it sees a predator, then it will just escape. If it considers some food that looks like it might be suitable, then it will go and eat. The sense of hunger will, or the feeling of desire for food will make it go and eat. It doesn’t have to think about these things. And so, it is with human beings. Emotions like jealousy and envy and hatred and anger, there’s a long list of them, are instant responses to situations. The primary driver for us, the animal driver, is our need to survive and the emotions derive immediately from that. When situations occur where our survival prospects are enhanced, then we feel pleasure. When we’ve just eaten, if we win a prize, say some money, if we get recognition – all those kinds of things make us feel that our survival is more assured.

On the other hand, if our survival is threatened, then we experience negative emotions. Now, this thing of our survival being threatened doesn’t have to be ‘oh my god in the next five minutes I’m going to die.’ It’s merely the feeling of a diminishing of power.

Understanding the Understanding

So, to recap, knowledge is nothing. It’s just stuff you hold in your head. It’s like you’re a computer and it has no bearing or weight when we’re considering how we feel about ourselves and what we are. Understanding is tied to being and related to experience. Understanding and being go together. So, you might want to investigate understanding. It’s nowhere near as sexy as enlightenment or cosmic consciousness or any of these things that the enlightenment gurus are touting. But it’s more real, the benefits are more robust, and it’s a way to progress in your move towards peace, towards happiness.

For more on the philosophy of understanding see Martin Butler’s website

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Emotional Freedom

Your Emotional Barometer

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Your Emotional Barometer Can Help You

Your emotional barometer is your body. Every emotion is felt through experience and understand in your body. You need courage to face your emotions head-on.

Usually, we don’t understand how or why, but understanding is vital for dealing with the things that hold us back, and the only way to understand our emotions is to face them head-on.

When you’re navigating your everyday life, it’s useful to understand that your emotions are literally just a barometer of how well you are surviving. That is all. So if somebody walks in tomorrow with a contract for a movie you’re probably going to be pleased. Your emotions will do somersaults, and you will feel all the excitement and anticipation inside you.

Survival Prospects

Why? Because your prospects for survival have been enhanced. “Here’s 100 thousand for making this music”, your survival is enhanced, you feel happy. Or if some gorgeous person you fancy comes to you and says, “you’re the most attractive person I’ve ever seen, I want to go to bed with you.”, you’re going to feel pretty good about that because it is, again, about survival and power.

For a man, you’re disseminating your seed and are potentially creating more copies of you. That’s what it’s all about, all the time. Similarly, if somebody comes to you and says, “I’m afraid you’ve got terminal cancer,” then you’re gonna be pretty distraught because it’s diminishing your power of survival.
That’s all emotions are; they’re just measures of your survival at any particular moment in time.

See Reality As It Is Not As You Want It To Be

One of the things you have to do is to see reality in little bits. You can then see what this huge machine called ‘you’ is doing while it operates unconsciously through time. More importantly, you can also understand where your possible escape route is because there is an escape route. But it depends on how much you value your freedom and inner peace. Real freedom is freedom from your emotions, from your passions, that is what freedom is. There’s no other kind of freedom. That’s the freedom that we’re all after. So, freedom means not being devastated if things go badly and it’s also the freedom not to get carried away when things go really, really well. It gives you calmness within yourself by understanding the way things actually are in life.

The whole thing is about power and freedom; that’s really what the work here is about. The work is your work, it’s not a once a week session and you’re cured. It’s about you understanding your life and the way you live it, so through the understanding and appreciation of what is healthy and unhealthy for you, through this work, you are better able to live an authentic life that is true to you.

Are You In Denial?

Most people are in denial about how they feel. We don’t want to feel envious, we don’t want to feel shame. Enjoy the shame, revel in it, lay about, and surround yourself with it. It’s important to do that because while you’re trying to deny it, you’re making it stronger. The only way to deal with these things is to let them have full throttle and just suck the energy up consciously. There’s no point in doing it in your head. This emotion exists in your body. When you think it, that’s just mechanical, but to consciously try and grab the whole thing up…. “so I slept with somebody [else] last night and I’m just a terrible person. Fuck, I’m such a dreadful person. I’m surprised that anybody has anything to do with me, I’m such a shit” ramps the whole thing up.

How Successful are You?

One little ditty of “what you resist tends to persist” sounds like bullshit but it isn’t. It’s actually a really, really important point. Whatever you’re resisting in yourself will grow. It’s just the way it works. So whatever emotions you have, indulge them as far as you can. That way you become more familiar with them and you become more comfortable with them. When you have self-harming emotions, when you avoid them, they just come chasing after you. Emotions are just a barometer for understanding how well you are surviving.

More on this from Martin Butler

More On Emotional Freedom

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Power

Master Your Inner Power

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Why You Need To Master Power

Master your inner power to be in your prime when you leave your body behind, not in a state of fear or apology. Most people develop and gain fear as they go through life. Yet life is a race and the goal is death. This may not be a pleasant truth, but the truth it is.

We do not go to our end as a victim when we have run a good race. To run a good race we need to have lived a good life, not being hidden from life by avoiding uncomfortable sensations thoughts and emotions. Only understanding will help you to run a good race. We can only run a good race by encountering obstacles and overcoming them. That’s why life is more suited to the successful. They grasp life and take from it. Those who are not successful can find many reasons for their lack of attainment. It’s always something or somebody else’s fault. Being a victim is an excellent way of avoiding the work required to understand.

What is Success?

Success, as mentioned here, is not the same for everyone. Some want to be rich, famous, powerful and admired. Others see success in other ways, by being generous, kind, loving and compassionate. Yet it’s all the same thing, ambition.

So how do we understand ambition? When ambition diminishes our lives and reduces our power we feel helpless and are overcome by lack of understanding. How do we understand power and as such use it to our own advantage?

Even if we believe we want to use it to the advantage of others, it’s still an advantage, and that is primary in this work. Understanding to gain advantage over the sleep and passivity of life, helplessness and depression. Working for personal sovereignty is important, no, it is essential. It is far more comfortable to sit in self-pity and misery than face the truth and become powerful.

So, doing this work is majoring in power in order to win the race called life. Power is attained through understanding, not change. Understanding is a one-trick pony, because understanding is the only pony to ride to attain freedom from the burdens that hold you back.

Master Inner Power for Peace

We are here to become masters of ‘life,’ not of woo woo, spirit or souls, but to master ‘life’ as it is given or lived. What was before and what may be after is of no concern to the human being. In fact, it is an offense to ‘God’ to even go there. We are given life to master it. Which we do through understanding. Understanding is dangerous as it destroys all the false paper castles we have built to sustain us and keep us from the fear of reality. But – what if our goal became to see the truth in all its ugliness and not get devoured by the suffering and the injustice of it all, but to live our ultimate life so that we will be successful in our own undertakings.

This work gives you the power to do just that. You want to be a world leader? – you can! Just be aware that through understanding, you will see it for the fake that it is. When you understand pleasure and pain, you will understand what your life needs to be to maximize your pleasure and minimize your pain. Should you change? – No! Because the understanding itself will transform things around you as you become more ‘you’ without self-rejection or self-deception. You will see things exactly as they are, you will understand other people’s motives, your own motives, how and why things are as they are, but most of all, you will gain inner peace.

Martin Butler has produced many videos here

Find out more about this practice here

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