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Understanding is everything. Once you understand, you are free too. Free of judgment, obligation, and fear. These three are fundamental to what’s holding you back. To be released from them enables you to use your own power. In turn, the power you exhibit will change the way others see you and react to you.

Without understanding, you are locked into old patterns, reactions, and behaviors. Even with a lot of therapy, this will not change until you have understanding. Understanding is pivotal to this work. Understanding is only achieved through observation and sensing reality. Once understanding is achieved, anything is possible.

Inner Peace

Chaos Change & Control

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Chaos and Confusion

During a time of change, things can appear chaotic and cause confusion. Spinoza said that “all things long to persist in their being,” and Schopenhauer said that “to live is to suffer.” Chaos and confusion can provide a space for you to prepare for change. During times of uncertainty, many things can throw you a curveball and trigger your emotions. An unforeseen event can be as simple as the lights going out or a fire breaking out and can put us instantly in a mode of fear, but what happens next is up to you.

Some survive by adapting, while others are more creative and will use whatever they have on hand, both mentally and physically. When faced with chaos, the human spirit is boundless. The challenge is to direct that power into a constructive outcome by embracing the randomicity, as Robert Daniel Ennis used to say.

When people are asleep, they can self-destruct or experience severe trauma, as when someone survives a natural or man-made disaster. Because they are in fear, they are usually unable to use reason and logic, and they see a world of inherent conflicts. Those traits make it hard for them to cope with change, uncertainty, and unpredictability.

Survival and Understanding

Through this practice, you learn to survive chaos and change. You use your emotions as part of your decision-making process, rather than being in flight-fight mode. This understanding frees you from the fear of the consequence of the uncertainty surrounding you because those fear-driven emotions that come from your imagination are not reliable. Emotions can be your friend or your enemy. Keeping a cool head will make you more resilient. When you gain two inches of separation from the accidental cause of the emotion (Spinoza’s Ethics, Part 3, Proposition 50), you gain the ability to act from reason rather than react from your imagination.

If your emotions will take over and cause confusion, you act impulsively, and you may even find that you have no idea what to do next.

Survival and understanding are about endurance and luck, not genius or brains. It’s not an intellectual exercise: it’s physical and emotional survival. A group of human beings who have managed to survive a natural disaster has one thing in common: they are resilient, but they also have a high degree of perceptive intelligence that allows them to see beyond the obvious. This behavior you can only experience when you are in the present. When you are in your imagination, you think about all the things that might go wrong and seek to solve them in your mind, causing confusion and panic. As the Zen saying goes, ‘whatever you do will be wrong, but as you can only act necessarily, as Spinoza put it. That’s when you will find that the solution is simple because you are no longer the goose in the bottle.

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Pressure Cooker in Field
Inner Peace

Are You In A Field Or Pressure Cooker

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Pressure Cooker Or Field?

Would you rather be in a field or in a pressure cooker? How can having space and being constrained help you understand yourself?

You only feel the pressure of things that constrain you when they are under pressure. When this happens, they appear to intensify. Without pressure, there is freedom. With freedom, issues that constrain and depress you appear to be less significant. They appear less critical simply because there is more freedom. When you are constrained and in a pressured environment, complex issues become more significant. It happens because there are fewer distractions. And there is a greater concentration of sensations, emotions, and thoughts.

Therefore, the pressure cooker pressure supplies an excellent opportunity to observe what is going on in your situation. If you can sit with it, observe it, and ask questions like “why do I feel like this?” “What are my emotions?” “Where are they in my body?” “What thoughts are gathered in my head in my imagination to create this?” This self-questioning is simply a drilling down of questions. Drilling down enables you to observe what lies underneath.

What do you see? What is your relationship to this pressure cooker of a circumstance or environment in which you find yourself?

The Benefits Of Being In A Pressure Cooker

The pressure cooker can become a mirror where we can see the patterns and circumstances where we find ourselves. It generates an obvious reflection of how things are going on with ourselves and our relationships. There is an opportunity to observe what is inside ourselves closely. This observation helps us understand what we need to address. Sometimes the pressure cooker can reflect a shortcoming, an imbalance in life that needs to be corrected. It is just like a thermometer. If the pressure cooker is not full of water, it will not overheat or explode.

The same is true for our hearts. If there are no obstructions or conditions that cannot be easily overcome and broken down (such as problems in one’s relationships), you will have peace of mind and heart. When the pressure cooker is full of problems and issues, the heat inside goes up. But as soon as these problems are resolved or dissolved, then the temperature will go back down. So, you see, it is essential to keep your pressure cooker clean and tidy. Then its ability to cook is at its finest.

Pressure in Relationships

For example: If you are in a relationship with someone who constantly accuses you of not having feelings for them, this can create emotional and mental pressure. This pressure will create a lot of conflicts, and it is easy to feel overwhelmed. It may even drive you to want to give up or make you resent the other person. As a result, you may start to feel anger towards the accuser or become bitter about the relationship. You may even find yourself in denial of your own heart, thinking, “I should do this” or “I need to do that.”

But if you observe and listen to your feelings, you will know this is not the case. You may find yourself thinking, “the other person has a problem with their relationship with themselves,” or “they are just too concerned about what others think of them.” You might think, “maybe if they were more confident about themselves, they would be able to have a better relationship with others.” You will see that these thoughts and feelings are coming from you and not from the other person. Then you can be aware of how you feel. Because then you know when this relationship is not going anywhere. The issues are inside you because you are the one feeling them.

Observe To Understand

Once you observe this, there is a clear shift internally. You understand the bitterness you feel towards the other person dissolving. From this understanding there will be a softening of your heart towards them. When this happens and the pressure cooker is clean, you will be able to see the situation differently. It will be easier to find solutions. When you understand this, you can start to have the relationship that you want. If this shift does not happen, then growth is hindered. It can end in a stressful and hopeless situation. The only way for people who are stuck to move forward is to break away from it.

Identification

In my view, what we need to break away from is identifying with our issues. For example, if I see you in a traffic jam, I might say, “this is unfair.” But if I observe it more closely and let go of my identification with this situation. I then see that the traffic jam is because many other cars are on the road. Perhaps this means that other cars are not driving well, which causes problems for all the drivers. So, the solution is not to get angry with the other cars or feel annoyed about it. The real solution is to fix the problem at the source with understanding. Maybe if everyone learning how to drive correctly and better in a safe manner. Then there will be no cause for a traffic jam.

Each driver will be more thoughtful and aware of their driving. If each driver focused on how they were driving. Then they will learn very quickly that driving safely actually helps everyone and prevents accidents. Because everyone will feel safer and more confident, the pressure cooker situation will be gone. So, when I see you in a traffic jam, I am not angry with you or the situation. I know that there is a traffic jam because there are many others who are also driving badly. So, it’s natural for me to get upset and want to teach everyone how to drive better. This is just an example and might be unrealistic. Yet it’s worth remembering that no one understands the whole situation.

What Are Fields and How Do I Use Them?

Fields offer a different outlook. Having the freedom to explore. To understand through observing yourself and others in the unconstrained space. Offers freshness and new lightness that allows for change within your experience.

Fields take practice. Just as going to a gym or learning another skill, it is vital to develop your understanding gradually. The first thing is to start to be aware of your patterns and seek to free yourself from them. Everything becomes amazingly simple in the field when you can see clearly there is no “other” person. It is when we get caught up in our dramas with other people that things become complicated and difficult.

The ultimate truth is that we are already awake, as it were. The real power is to open our eyes and wake up from the dream. That alone is our highest nature because it allows us to play freely and without bounds. To exist with fear of retribution or failure. This place of freedom within us allows us to become like children again, and we can let go of the adult pretensions that separate us from our purest, most innocent, and ecstatic nature.

Greater Awareness

What it means to practice is to cultivate this higher state of awareness in our everyday life. This practice does not mean retiring to a monastery, but it simply means seeking the truth every day. When we wake up in the morning, we should ask ourselves what is indispensable. We can then let go of the rest. Of course, nothing is completely unimportant. Everything we do ultimately plays a role in how we grow as individuals and reach our full potential. However, there will always be some things which can be done later or not at all.

See Martin Butler’s Blog

 

 

More About This Practice

 

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Deconstruction
Inner Peace

Why Is Deconstruction Important?

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Deconstruction and Co-creation Are A Couple

Deconstruction and co-creation are vital to your understanding of life. It is how you understand the good and bad things that happen to you. Some things are out of your control, such as the weather. Yet plenty of scenarios are dependent on your interaction with other people and the world around you. Understanding how this process happens and how you can shape it leads to you achieving your life goals.

Why Is Co-creation So Important?

Every interaction you have is a co-creation. Your thoughts, your feelings, and your actions are all co-creations. But what does that mean? What is co-creation?

A co-creation is when two or more people come together for a common goal. Whether to chat about their day or collaborate on an art project, co-creation can be mutually beneficial, selfish, or a mix of the two. It’s about coming together to solve a problem to make things better for everyone involved. Considering this definition and understanding of co-creation, it then becomes clear why it’s so important.

Co-creation is the only way we can solve problems. Problems can’t be solved by yourself as there is always someone else involved. To deny co-creation is to deny yourself the other person’s perspective in any given situation and shuts out a vast potential source of information. This sharing of experience could have been beneficial to everyone involved.

If you refuse to co-create, it is likely because you don’t feel like your problems are significant enough. You believe that they are not big enough for anyone else to be bothered with them. But remember, issues aren’t just yours; they affect those around you too. Your family, friends, co-workers, even strangers on the street are involved in co-creation with you.

Am I Alone?

Nature embeds us into our reality, and everything and everybody is co-creating that reality with you. They are not just living their lives; their life is emotionally and mentally affected by your actions too.

You are not alone in your problems. The power of co-creation gives you access to the other person’s perspective to make a better decision. Your issues become someone else’s hopes, fears, and desires too.

Let go of the belief that people don’t care and start creating with them. Let them know that you care about something important enough to want to hear their perspective on it. You will be surprised at how much they will help you out. Just as soon as you let them know, they can help you. And maybe, just maybe, they have been waiting for you to ask.

Get actively involved in developing your co-creations and co-creating with others. And remember to be open to other’s perspectives. It is a vast world out there, and no one has all the answers. Each view is a piece of the puzzle. These pieces help us to put together how we want our reality to look. Let’s create a better reality for everyone through understanding our co-creation!

Why Is My Interpretation Wrong?

Our experience of life is how we interpret the things around us, including our online experience. Everything we experience is either processed rationally or emotionally. The way we interpret things influences the decisions we make and the goals we set. To live a life living up to our full potential, we must become better creators of our reality.

How you rationalize and explain things is what leads to your interpretations. You base your decisions on your interpretations of why something terrible happened or how something good happened. We have very firmly embedded interpretations in our everyday lives. As much as they have a significant effect on how we act and react, most people don’t know how they came about them in the first place or why they exist at all.

People accept their interpretations as truth and live their lives rationalizing everything. Being stuck in the rationalization phase of thinking is very limiting. It doesn’t explain why things are. It simply explains why they happen after they happen. This lack of understanding can make it hard to learn from our mistakes or understand our feelings. We can seek out how we can change or improve things to create a better reality for ourselves.

If you experience life emotionally without questioning your interpretations, you are just experiencing life without reason. Living a life without reasoning behind your actions or decisions is living a random existence. Because you do not understand your actions’ possible consequences, you lack control of your future. Life without reason, especially regarding our imagined interpretations, is a life of which we are unworthy. Indeed, we fail to learn and keep repeating the same broken behaviors.

Understanding Deconstruction and Co-creation

Understanding our interpretations and being aware of irrationality is the first step towards improving them. It is working towards living a more satisfying life. We can start changing our story by understanding how to deconstruct our rationalizations. From this, we can construct a new reality with a different, authentic interpretation. When we take the guesswork out of the situation, seeking clarity from the other people involved, we obtain adequate ideas. Until then, our opinions are inadequate as our imagination fills in the blanks. Our brain cannot know what another person is thinking without asking, and even then, they may lie. It’s better to sit with an adequate idea and not complete the puzzle with the wrong pieces, distorting the picture.

Changing your interpretations is possible through meditation and self-reflection. For meditation, sit back for ten minutes a day and observe your thoughts. It only takes ten minutes to notice when you become caught up in your emotional patterns or others’ opinions. They may not be aware of their views because their idea is not even fully formed. This exercise is an excellent start to understanding. If you want to look into understanding deeper, read the blog post on the Heart of Practice.

My Post on The Heart Of Practice

First, we need to deconstruct our prejudices and learned conditioning that is attached to our interpretations. The way to do this is through observation. Deconstruction happens when you pay attention to everything that goes on around you. As a result, you act without adding false meaning to a situation or judging it in any way.

Why Are Deconstruction and Co-creation So Important?

Deconstructing your interpretation doesn’t necessarily involve trying to change it. What is valuable is learning more about your thoughts and why you think the way you do. Take pride in your ability to observe, but question if what you’re considering is worth mentioning at all. If the thought isn’t significant enough, then don’t give it any power or attention. Don’t interpret it as authentic or rational in any way.

Co-creation is the first step to changing your reality. If you can’t create a different interpretation of things, you will never make a new reality.

To co-create, you need to understand that the world around us is not static. Things are constantly changing, whether we notice it or not. Your interpretations of these changes will either lead to a new creation or keep you in old patterns. If you can explain why something is the way it is, chances are it wasn’t always that way. It changed at some point and got there based on a reason and an interpretation. So, anything could change again for the same reason and with the correct clarification.

How To Do Deconstruction

Deconstruct your interpretations of what you see by observing everything without judging or giving it a meaning. Learn to trust that learning doesn’t require judgments or labeling.

Deconstruct and reconstruct new interpretations by coming up with new explanations for things. Follow your logic and ask yourself why specific patterns exist in the first place. Going back to the ‘road not traveled’ example, why is there a road not traveled? Or how is that rock on the ground shaped like that? Learn to pay attention to patterns and look at things differently.

See Martin Butler’s blog and YouTube channel

for more about the background to this practice.

MartinButler.EU Blog

Martin Butler on YouTube

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Resentment
Inner Peace

Resentment Hurts, So Stop It Happening

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Resentment hurts. Resentful people want to see you suffer. In general, people don’t want to see you happy and successful and resent it because they want to be in your position. This can occur at work, in a relationship, or even with strangers when you have something they want. They will devise ways to bring you down.

Why are you a target?

You’re only vulnerable because of your programming. For example, ‘Be kind’, ‘have a thick skin’, any form of making excuses for them is part of our programming. When you do this, you harm yourself.
As a child you were little and learned that you had to survive. Sometimes this meant not standing out in certain ways and performing in others. What you did was diminish yourself because you feared upsetting someone. Children are vulnerable and need care givers, even those who are possibly abusive, simply to survive. But you are no longer a child and you don’t need to be resentful and weak.

How do I get away?

Breaking this programming isn’t easy. I’d be lying if I said it was, but little by little, as you see it, you will become free of it. Simply observe it, sense how your body feels about the situation and this person. When resentment hurts, it’s physical. This observation leads to your understanding that you are not the cause of this pain, feeling diminished by resentment is something you learned that is no longer valid for you.

Why do people resent me?

When people fear that someone is more successful, they resent them. It’s simply that you have what they want. They can’t get it because of their own sense of inadequacy gets in their way, so it’s easier to hit out at you instead and resent you. It’s as simple as that. Resentment hurts them as well as you.

When you are resented it’s because others feel they should have the power (thing, holiday, partner etc.) you have. No one resents someone who they feel is superior to them, they resent someone who they believe should be equal but who is displaying greater power. Resentment has nothing to do with you. It is about someone else trying to put you down to enhance their own power.

Why do people hurt me?

For example, if someone scratches a key down your car, it’s because they resent you, so they want to pull you down ‘to their level’. If you are going on a holiday a family member may resent it and tell you how they would never go there because it’s a dump. Parents resent their children’s success in life sometimes. It’s never the active person doing their thing, it’s the passive person who resents. Resentment is a passive form of dealing with a perceived injustice. Instead of doing something, they resent you for your achievements.

Am I resentful?

Do you whine, moan or complain? If you do, you are resentful. By doing that you feel better for a short while, but the resentment is deep and it’s still within you. Being in a place of permanent resentment takes its toll. Resentful people become mean and bitter and this affects their body too, they get aches and pains that are connected and are a result of resentment.

How do I know if someone is resentful?

Resentful people will try to make you feel bad every time they speak to you. They may be charming and flatter you, but only to pull you down again later. It’s a game of abuse they play because they feel inadequate inside themselves. Remember it’s not your fault someone is resentful. They need to look at themselves and do some work to stop feeling sorry for themselves and become actively engaged in being the best they can too.

What can I do about it?

Where does this affect you? Avoid this toxic game by observing what happens when you feel resentful and pay attention to it. See it for what it is, not what you imagine it to be. Do the same when you see it in others. You will learn how to deal with resentment and other difficult emotions through observing them.

This is part of the work I do with students, I assist them in freeing themselves from past inadequate conditioning.

We suffer from being emotional kick bags. Here’s more from Martin Butler on this.

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Understanding Relationships
CommunicationInner 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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What You Don't Know
Inner Peace

Why You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know

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What You Don’t Know

This work on yourself is very much like learning to drive. You must learn the basics, because without the basics you think you can ‘drive’, but you can’t. When we start learning something – we think we will be able to do it very easily, and then we start doing it and we find out that we’re not as smart as we thought we were.

Why you think you know, but you don’t know

This stage is called unconscious incompetence, it’s where somebody does not understand or know how to do something and doesn’t necessarily recognize that they don’t know. I compare this to learning to drive. Before you learn to drive you see others driving on the road and it looks easy you just move the steering wheel and press a few levers and ‘Hey presto!’ driving is a simple magic.

Then you take your first driving lesson, and we all know how that goes! We must learn where all the levers are, what they do, which bits to touch and which bits to leave alone, not so easy is it? it’s a whole confusing mess.

Stay Asleep to your Ignorance

If you give up now you will never learn, you will stay in the unconscious incompetence but with the knowing that you cannot drive. Either that, or you have moved into the next stage which is conscious incompetence – because you know but you can’t drive and it’s not at all easy. This is not a good place to be because it is demoralizing and diminishing, so either you stay here feeling powerless or you continue to the next phase. This is where you realize that you cannot remain as you were but that the task ahead is daunting. Don’t stop here.

How much do I know
Waking Up

Conscious incompetence is the next level in learning a skill or doing this work, because you might not understand or know how to achieve the objective but you recognize that you don’t know and you recognize the value of learning the skills to enable you to realize your aspirations. You now realize that it isn’t an easy one second skill you’re learning, but a lifelong practice that’s worth the effort to achieve. You understand that that you will have to work on it. At this stage practice becomes increasingly important because only through practice will you be able to achieve the skills you need to be able to navigate life, as you would when driving a car around the streets.

Why Practice Matters

As you take time to practice and you learn the skills and techniques. Through this you can expand your understanding in the need for the work to achieve growth. Just as with driving, when we take a test and pass it, we are usually at our peak in observing our driving and paying attention to everything around us. We are now consciously competent to drive. Our actions can be broken down into steps for observation and all factual details are important to observe for any hints that might help our understanding. This work is very much the same as learning to drive. You need to be conscious of your practice and develop your competence before it can become almost habitual.

Success and Fulfillment is Freedom

You will eventually become unconscious to the effort required to do this practice as you enter the unconscious competence phase. This is when you have had so much practice learning the skill that it becomes second nature to you, and you use it without even thinking about it. This new self-aware behavior is your true nature and is now able to come to the fore as you become your true self, free of the fear and limitations that held you back and the self-sabotage habits that you learned before that prevented you from being your authentic self.

The aim of this work is to develop the skill of your ‘will to life’, to transform yourself into your own unique expression of life, free from the baggage that the past has put onto you.

Much like a confident driver is free to jump into a car and drive anywhere they please.

The Hierarchy of Competence

The four stages are:

1. Unconscious incompetence

The individual does not understand or know how to do something and does not necessarily recognize the deficit. They may deny the usefulness of the skill. The individual must recognize their own incompetence, and the value of the new skill, before moving on to the next stage. The length of time an individual spends in this stage depends on the strength of the stimulus to learn.

2. Conscious incompetence

Though the individual does not understand or know how to do something, they recognize the deficit, as well as the value of a new skill in addressing the deficit. The making of mistakes can be integral to the learning process at this stage.

3. Conscious competence

The individual understands or knows how to do something. However, demonstrating the skill or knowledge requires concentration. It may be broken down into steps, and there is heavy conscious involvement in executing the new skill.

4. Unconscious competence

The individual has had so much practice with a skill that it has become “second nature” and can be performed easily. As a result, the skill can be performed while executing another task. The individual may be able to teach it to others, depending upon how and when it was learned.

Martin Butler’s Blog

Find Out More About This Practice Here

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Conditioning and Conforming
CommunicationEmotional FreedomInner PeacePower

Conditioned to Conform

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Conditioned to Conform

We are conditioned to conform and be good members of society. But at what cost? The true cost of fitting in is to contort ourselves in so many ways that eventually become unbearable and the prison we’re in has to break. When this happens we’re usually at a loss and keep turning in circles, ending up at the same point where we started. With understanding about suffering, what causes us pain and what causes us pleasure, we’re able to work through it and achieve peace.

Families are a strong source of conditioning. Everyone in a family feels that their needs have to be met. Though they’re not listening to one another so no one’s needs are met. They talk behind each other’s backs and each family member has a fixed expectation. Once cast in a role, it’s almost impossible to escape. It can be very painful when your needs are not met and there are constant demands made of you.

Why Negotiation is vital

Negotiating your needs is very tricky. People are used to you in your role, they don’t want to make changes. If that’s OK with you, then stay as you are.

Alternatively, there is a way to deal with improving your situation and having your needs met. Like anything worth having, this means effort on your part. You can’t magic up a hero who will do it all for you – you are that hero!

Start by letting others know that you’re not OK with the way things are. Let them know what your needs are. Communicate simple needs at first, because any need will be seen as a challenge. Once you get that need met, allow others to get used to your new position before attempting to make other changes. If they will not listen or think things are OK as they are – that’s because they are – for them, not for you. This is when you realize that there is no one other than you who is going to improve things for you.

Let’s get your needs met!

Learn to Negotiate

More on Conforming

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