Coming Back to Ourselves
It’s important to remember that the reason we’re transforming conditioning is so that we can live more and more out of our hearts.
What do I mean by conditioning?
It’s the process of first others and then ourselves, telling us who we are and how or what we should be. It starts with parents then teachers, peers, the media and even gurus. It’s the way we get trained into being good boys and girls and it’s the training we get when we rebel against that. Conditioning is protection laid over the heart so that we can survive in an unsafe environment. It’s the program that gets set up for us to become a better and better person.
The work that I’m talking about is about coming back to ourselves so that we can live out of the core of our being, rather than out of our conditioning.
We have a sense of that.
We are involved with a “deconditioning project” – moving back through the layers, motivated by love, in order to live more out of the core of our being, which is Love.
That which draws you to do this work of opening, healing, clearing,
IS LOVE ITSELF. It’s that place that is already awake and enlightened inside of you.
It’s important to remember this voice and listen to it, and come back to it,
because it’s easy to have the voice of “should” take over the supervision of this work, and then you’re back into the self-improvement project, and you’re not going to get the kind of results you want.
My experience is that the work of deconditioning proceeds in stages, and that as you go along, the conditioned structures in our being become more translucent and less able to drive, to control our behavior. At first, it’s a big step simply to be able to see the conditioning, but after working with it for awhile, we start to see through it.
Some of the conditioning that I think is most important to deal with is the habit of judging ourselves and others.
We just need to drop that. Arguing with the inner voices isn’t going to work, because once you start arguing with them, you’re still caught in that matrix.
We need to come at it with awareness and understanding: The awareness of “Oh, there’s that voice again”, and the understanding that “there’s absolutely nothing here for me”. Actually, there might be something for you to learn from a judgment, but once you get some facility with this work, you can take what you need from it and leave the rest.
You don’t need to continue eternally with the tape loop of “I’m not doing it right, I could have done it better.” etc, etc, etc.
At that point, you see it for what it is, you bless it, and you move on. You come back to the heart.
Your ability to do this grows, as your commitment to doing the work stabilizes. A skillfulness develops in not reacting to these habits of the mind, of character. Gradually these habits have less and less of a hold on you. Eventually, you watch the patterns, when they emerge, almost like you watch children at the playground. They’re just doing their thing, being children, being conditioned habits, and
You get to the point where you just don’t take it so personally.
At that point, you get back on your horse and go back about your day!
