How To Become Happier by Living Consciously

“Conscious Living: Finding JOY in the Real World” (HarperCollins, 2000)

Gay Hendrick’s Work on Living Life Happily

Intro

I stumbled upon “Conscious Living” by mistake…turns out to be a very fortuitous one! This books answers some of the questions that I didn’t even know I was asking, as well as ones I knew I was. I’m now on my fourth reading, and I find it just as meaningful as the first one. The first part of this book shares a lot about the author’s personal journey, and then sets up the tasks we have if we want to live consciously. The second part concerns relationships, and is also really worthwhile and eye-opening.

Hendricks wrote “Conscious Living” as a result of his personal quest to find the root problems creating all human troubles- along his journey he transformed his own life and became a model of the happiness and productive service he hopes everyone will find.

Hedricks talks about some very interesting experiences he had on the way to his conscious learning model…Revelations that came about after falling and hitting his head…Ecstatic experiences when he first started the task of letting go of control and accepting what is real…

He started at the age of four; looking around his family all he saw was anger and sadness.

“Many of us begin the journey so that we can find a way through the frequently awful life situations we find ourselves in. That was certainly true for me. Part of my quest was inspired by survival tools to use on myself. As I looked around while I was growing up, almost no one seemed happy.” (4) A few days after his fourth birthday, he had had his grandfather make up a small stand for him, with a sign that said, “NOW OPEN ‘PROBLEMS’”. He rode his tricyle to this “office”, and waited for his first customers. Not surprisingly, business was slower than expected. Later in life, after finishing his Ph.D in psychology and writing multiple books, his mother still wondered when he would get a real job. It was only appearing on Oprah that got him some credit for holding down a “real” job from his family.

I thought his description of himself as a kid was really cute. It reminds me of Linus’ psychology office on the comic strip “Peanuts”!

His mother discovered her pregnancy a few month’s after his father’s death; single, mourning, and devastated, she farmed Hendricks off on his grandparents. They treated him with love and kindness, as it was only each other they hated. A portrait taken on their 50^th wedding anniversary illustrates the bitterness in their union. They refused to sit next to each other, and finally agreed to sit on opposite sides of a couch: “The portrait reveals my grandfather looking helpless and confused while he stares blankly at the camera with his mouth agape, while my grandmother looks off in the other direction, her jaw set in silent rage.” (5)

Hendricks’ mom was so full of grief after his dad’s sudden heart attack that she practically starved herself. It was only his grandmother forcing her to eat that helped her gain weight back. He himself started life as a really chubby baby who became a fat toddler. That makes sense to me if the fetus was inside of a starving woman going through the feelings of abandonment and grief!

Due to the angriness and bad relationships he saw around him, in fourth grade, Hendricks wrote an essay against marriage, stating firmly that he would never, ever get married. However, after his beloved grandmother died in his early twenties, he followed a similar path to his grandparents and parents. He writes

“I made a desperate and unconscious search for a security blanket, and within months of my grandmother’s death, I became attached to a woman who was exactly like me. She was deeply wounded by early losses, and she built a thick wall around them. She had a charming outer act, totally false, like mine, and inside she smoldered, like me, with awesome rage and grief…I’m not sure if we were a match made in heaven or in hell, but we spent most of our time in the latter…Now, looking back from the safe perspective of thirty years’ distance and insight, I can think of only one other relationship to compare it to- my grandparents’. It was the only marriage I witnessed close-up in my early years, and I believe that I made an inner movie of it in my unconscious.” (15)

I, and I bet a lot of others can understand how easy it is to reach out for some wrong person when full of grief. Perhaps even someone more wrong than a less grief-stricken heart would choose. Then, I always picture someone who feels abandoned as a little octopus with its tentacles whipping about trying to latch onto anything that comes near.

It was also in his twenties that he had a revelation caused by a bad fall in the winter and an encounter while visiting an experiential psychology group session- he realized he was terribly unhappy, terribly overweight (300 lbs like his father), and hated his job. He began studying psychology, losing weight, and ended up divorcing.

I really liked what he said about weight loss. Weight is out of anyone’s control. The only two things that you can control are what you put into your mouth, and how you exercise. For some reason that way of thinking seems really freeing to me!

The Beginning

After he successfully earned his degree in psychology from Stanford, he realized that all the data-driven research that was quite removed from people and living made him cold.

One time in grad school someone said something that really resonated as true for me. Graduate school really easily puts one out of the heart and into the head. I love this about him- that he was driven to go back to the heart, and do ‘living’ psychology.

He began to ask himself the questions that would drive him to formulate the process of conscious living-

“…we are doing one thing wrong that is at the root of our problems. We are failing to honor and love our authentic experience and failing to notices the authentic experience of others.” (25)

Instead of being in the moment and feeling, people are living in a trance of denial and following the agendas of their “personas” (personas being like ‘masks’ for the true selves that were created to survive as children). The lack of consciousness and honoring the now resulted in a lack of peace. Hendricks explains:

“Beyond all my thoughts was the backdrop of consciousness- steady, clear, and radiant with serenity- and all of it was mine for the seeing. By resisting my experience all my life, I had trained myself to focus on illusion instead of reality. In that moment I let go of illusion and slipped into harmony with what is.” (26)

He Starts to Put it Together

Hendricks grew disenchanted with the therapy model he used with his therapy patients (as he continued working as a therapist while he was a professor). He felt as if it was inefficient, backward, and tended to enthrall those in therapy with the past. Instead of freeing up energy for the present, the therapy model seemed to put energy into a backward-looking view.

I love it when someone really looks critically at what is going on and takes a revolutionary turn. I find myself really embracing this idea. It has been far too easy, all my life, to keep looking back at the past. Or planning for the future. So then, where is my realization of NOW?

Hendricks preferred what he called a “learning model”, where patients looked forward and lived consciously, relying on the basic skills of locating and naming feelings, communicating clearly about their inner experiences, making and keeping agreements, finding a life purpose and choosing conscious goals, and loving and accepting themselves which serves as the building block to learning and loving others (28).

My whole life, I’ve always thought I loved myself and accepted myself. I did feel slightly confused and vague about loving myself, but I really thought I did it. But from this book, I understand more about what that *really* means. And I didn’t understand it before. It’s a huge difference in a way of thinking and being. And I anticipate that with practice it can cause a ‘sea change’.

The key to life, Hendricks says, is asking the important questions. And perhaps not finding the answers immediately, but continuing to ask the questions and chase them down. “The magic is this: if you ask your big questions with sincerity and all your heart, your life itself will become a living answer to them.” (6)

The Two Big-O Questions

He suggests that the two big questions of human life are about how to live at peace with yourself and how to live in harmony with others. The two he emphasizes are difficult- these are shifting needs and feelings, and handling them is like “dancing on running water” as the ancient philosopher Heraclitus said. (33).

This idea of asking the questions I’ve put right into action immediately. Why I am obsessing about something or other? Why am I so upset? Why do I care so much about this or that? What is making me feel angry? I keep on asking myself, and as soon as I get any kind of answer, I can look at that answer and ask more questions. Eventually I get to a spot where I can do self-talk or affirmations to adjust what’s causing me pain. Woo hoo!

Born and Grown in a Rut

Unconscious living is easy- with “well-worn ruts”. Roles, routines, security, no invention of the new, but in the end it has some serious costs. “We may gain brief moments of security or self-righteous satisfaction…those moments mount up quickly to become a life of comfortable numbness or sputtering indignation, ending with a snore or a fizzle.” (39) Instead of living, Hendricks calls unconscious living “running on default programming” (47).

One of friends asked me recently about what I thought about “ignorance being bliss”. I had to say that I didn’t know anyone who was like that- those that I know are ignorant in my family are not in bliss. They may not be in agony, but they are dealing with measures of snoring or fizzling, and they could be much more peaceful. And some are in, as Susan Elliott says on her “Getting Past Your Past” blog, “maintenance misery”. It’s just not bad enough to drive people out, and they just maintain.

One of my favorite relationship blogs suggest that if a cat is lying on a nail, and it hurts, and it’s suffering, and the cat still lies there- it needs to drive it in deeper! Realize that nail is there and get the heck off it screaming!

But in addition to the snore or fizzle, I think an unconscious life is a kind of dinosaur fossil. Not evolving. Not changing. Frozen behavior repeated over and over with very little variation. A lack of progress. And there is something very sad and anti-life about it.

The Two Big Tasks to Get to a Good Somewhere

Two of the main tasks of conscious living are learning to be complete in ourselves and learning that there are some things we can control and some things we cannot. (49). By elementary school, most of us are set in our ruts, with a divided two-self self, and a false face for the world.

Isn’t this kind of scary but so true? So young, but we’ve developed personas to survive in the world.

I’ve read about how so many patterns of behavior that then link to a way of believing about oneself in the world are set in place as we grow up with our caregivers and those closely interacting with us. It makes sense that some of these patterns are so far from who we really are—we are afraid, instinctually, of losing the support of caregivers, so behavior- such as “people pleasing” to keep a caregiver happy- is ingrained at a deep survival level.

The Five Key Lessons for Conscious Living

What are the five key lessons of conscious living according to Hendricks?

1) Feel all your feelings deeply: face them

2) Seek your true self: quest for it

3) Let go of the uncontrollable: accept reality as it is, accept and forget the past

4) We are all made of the same thing: spiritual beings at the core

5) Life is fullest when we are truest to ourselves: set creativity free

Putting Things into Action

How do you go about learning the five lessons?

 

Feel Your Feelings

 

“Always and in every moment, embrace what is real inside yourself and focus on what is real outside yourself.” (p 61 )

 

I’ve been realizing that in fact, in my family, we were trained to not have any feelings that were negative. Sadness we were coaxed out of. Anger we swallowed. We never learned how to experience the feelings; my whole life I’ve tried to turn my mental eyes away from them and distract myself. I’ve been scared that actually giving into the feelings would leave me swallowed up- instead it seems that *not* experiencing the feelings means my true self is swallowed up by denial.

So, how does the author recommend readers feel their feelings?

• Embrace them- negative, positive, or in-between
  
• Let the feeling flow through us- all feelings, he says, are like rainstorms. They have a beginning, middle, and end. Don’t stop, resist, or cling. Consider yourself the ocean, and the feelings are waves that are passing; the ocean remains and is larger than any wave.

 

Seek Your True Self

 

Hendricks says, “I realized that my personality was like a playsuit I could don for interacting in the world…For survival purposes, usually early in life, we agreed that we needed to be “dependent” or “domineering” or “cute”, and the agreements had usually made unconsciously before we walked into kindergarten.” (p 6 )

 

Who am I if I don’t have to be the “caretaker” or the “sullen child”? The idea is that a persona simply is a way of interacting with the world…Now that I understand more about personas, I’m seeing them more clearly in others and myself. I see my mother being the caretaker and being the martyr. And what she wants is subsumed and often sacrificed. I see her doing things she doesn’t want to do and then ‘triangulating’- getting someone else to complain to someone else for her- and the web of who wants what gets even more tangled.

To seek your true self, Hendricks says we all need to find our purpose. Ask:

• What do I most like to do?
• What could engage me so deeply I’d never want to retire?
• What am I really about?
• What would be a purpose so grand that it could express itself through everything I do, from shoveling snow to making love to sitting on a bus?

 

This clarity of purpose, he says, leads to clarity of goals.

 

Let Go of the Uncontrollable

 

You have the controllable and you have the uncontrollable. Hendricks emphasizes we cannot control other people. As to our feelings, we are like surfers of waves. The wave is there, all we can do is choose how to navigate it.

 

I like the metaphor of surfers and waves…

 

If you want to control a controllable thing, Hendricks says to do it with commitment and a plan. If you don’t have both, just accept something and don’t try to control it. But he says we need two files in our minds: controllable and uncontrollable. The second needs to be accepted.

 

“No matter how much you are accepting your feelings, it is the action step that counts…The moment of acceptance puts you in harmony and acts as a springboard to useful action…The unhealthy alternatives are so dismal as to make contemplating them painful. If you don’t accept reality as it is, you are condemned to resist it. You sentence yourself to a moment or a lifetime of wishing you were not having the experience you are having while you are doing nothing to change it. This is indeed hell on earth. Even in hell, though, acceptance is only a breath away.” (p 78 )

 

Hendricks talks about seeing a patient who was still dealing, after a divorce, with emotional repercussions of an abusive marriage. A year later, she was still trying to control her fear and keep it at bay. He told her to flow with it and not try to control it.

 

“This odd notion- that the best way to get rid of an unpleasant situation is to quit trying to change it and let it be- took her by surprise and made an instant difference in her whole demeanor. She sat bolt upright out of the slump she’d been in. ‘You mean that everything that’s already happened is outside our control?’ There was genuine awe in her voice, a tone of ‘Why haven’t I thought of this before?’ I nodded.”

 

“‘That’s right. You can’t change the past. Plus, the things that haven’t happened yet- the future- are also outside our control. You can plan for them and do things to influence them, but ultimately you have to let go of control and take the future as it comes.’ Her jaw dropped.”

 

“She said, ‘It feels like every ounce of my energy has gone into wanting my marriage to have turned out differently. I’ve been so tied up in being made because it didn’t fit my expectations, I haven’t had any energy to create what I want now.’”

 

“I felt myself holding my breath at the eloquence of her words. She had just summed up the whole enterprise of therapy in a few short sentences. We keep ourselves so tied up in regretting the past and fearing the future that we don’t have any energy left to figure out who we are and what we want to create right now…instead of getting into harmony with reality—the marriage is over, and I feel sad about that—she had been fighting both those realities to keep them from being so. But so they were…Rather than talking her out of her feelings or telling her everything was going to be all right, I invited her to put the same principle to work with her sadness and anger. Let go of trying to control it, I said…take the brakes off and feel what’s real. She tried this out, and over the next few minutes she transformed before my eyes from a timid victim haunted by the past to a vibrant and forward-looking sojourner.” ( my bold, p 47-48 )

 

This is one of the strongest passages from the book for me- I guess you can tell because I quoted so much!!

 

Two thousand years ago, Epictetus wrote in something translated as “The Art of Living” that “The art of happiness is knowing that there are some things you can control and some things you cannot.” (p 49 ) Sound familiar?

 

The problem, says Hendricks, is that we need to be whole in ourselves, feeling our feelings and accepting our realities and what is uncontrollable; instead, people love and live as if they are missing half of themselves and need to be completed by other things or people.

 

We Are All Made of the Same Thing

 

I think with this the author wants to say that we are part of the universe, and so part of what is sacred and special. He writes, “…you can trust yourself, because ultimately you will encounter the divine if you take your attention far enough inward.” (p 83 )

 

Life is Fullest When We’re Most True to Ourselves

 

What is being most true? His idea is that the expression of what’s inside you is being true to yourself. The lessons of life are repeated and repeated again…Humorously, he suggests we have a choice regarding these lessons—Get hit with a sledgehammer, or listen and get a feather-light lesson!

 

“…we are shaped more by choice than by our genes and past history…I see that we are presented with the same choices over and over again and our destinies are shaped more by these choices than by any other factor.” (p 88 )

Finally, we get to the directions!

 

How to Make Choices Leading to a Conscious, Committed Life

 

F * A * C* T is the acronym he uses for his directions to this kind of life…

 

1. FACING: Face things squarely, and look in three places if you are troubled:

• A feeling? If you don’t face it, it will drain your energy from your life.
• The truth? Do you have anything you need to communicate with someone that you haven’t?
• Agreements followed through on? Do you feel as if you haven’t kept a promise you made? You need to follow through to get in line with facing up to reality.

2. ACCEPTING:

See and accept reality, and look with focus into reality to see what is going on at deeper levels

3. CHOOSING & COMMITTING

 

 

 

Hendricks explains how he went through a great part of his early adult life never really committing to anything, and as a result, not going anywhere with a lot of things. “I was amazed to discover this, because I had made a lifestyle out of tepid commitments that turned out to be noncommitments.” (93) These days, he actually makes people who participate in his workshops sign a commitment form- he’s seen that it actually makes that much of a difference. In fact he asserts, “It is only through commitment that choice becomes real.” (p 93 )

4. TAKING ACTION

 

Buckminster Fuller is one of the interesting maverick inventors and thinkers of recent history. Hendricks reminds us that Fuller said his success was “due to the fact he was willing to make more mistakes than anyone else he knew”. (p 94 ) The key is to ask yourself about what the next crucial step for something is. “Until we take action, our potential lies in reserve.” (p 94 )

 

Then comes another favorite part of the book for me. The part explaining that THE PAST IS NOTHING.

 

“We think of it as something, but it is really nothing.”

“Go looking for it, and will never find it. We all think of ourselves as being shaped by the past, and many of us think we are limited by it. The truth is, you and I both have a past. It’s been powerful and often painful and has shaped us in ways past knowing. Having said that, I invite you to forget it. The past is, quite literally, irrelevant. It has power over us only if we give it the power each moment. You give it power by the moves you make in each moment. Each day you and I are offered the opportunity to recreate the past or to create a brand-new future. Take your mind off the past and the future, and focus instead on moments that are occurring constantly. If you do this, I guarantee you will not regret it.”

(my bold and italics, p 95 )

 

We do not equal our pasts. No one does. Isn’t that great? It’s not conventional wisdom, but if you turn it over in your head, you can see that it in fact can be the truth if you make it so. The past is over, nothing can be done about it. The only thing real is the moment “and you have ultimate choice when you’re in it” ( p. 95 ).

 

I just think it’s so hard—so many things in society and culture promote us to believe the OPPOSITE, but it really is true. I love how he invites us to FORGET the past and take back our own power. If you think about it, many great success stories are of those who re-invented themselves after saying “Pfah!’” to the past.

 

He suggests that we practice “shifts” to live in the moment in a conscious way: The Essence Shirt, The Truth Shift, The Purpose Shift, The Integrity Shift, The Action Shift, The “Us” Shift, The From-Anything-To-Love Shift.

 

The Essence Shift

 

Don’t get caught up in a thought or feeling. Keep your mind focus on a larger piece of yourself than just, for example, anger. You are not your anger. You are larger than it. “Until we shift from our anger to essence, anger is bigger than we are. It has us. We are in the grip of it. The moment we shift to essence, we have the anger, but it doesn’t have us.” (p 98 )

 

There’s a really great example of the author on a bike ride. Starting his ride, he passed a colleague’s house and thought positive thoughts about his colleague and his new wife. On the same trip, coming back four hours later, he passed the house and started thinking negative thoughts about the colleague, and about how unkind his new wife was. He was amused to realize that his colleague hadn’t changed at all- all that had changed was that he was tired. He noticed the sourness of what he was thinking and detached himself from the negative stream of thought and just watched the thoughts go by.

 

I can really identify with this…Difficult times are more trying when I’m tired because of the thoughts that assail me. Staying positive is harder. What an awesome thought to step out of a stream of thinking and just watch it go by from a distance, from a larger part of yourself. There’s a kind of meditation I learned about and have tried before, where you actually practice doing this…Just imagining you are at the bottom of a body of water and you watch you thoughts rise as bubbles and up out of sight.

 

The Truth Shift

 

If you don’t tell others or yourself about feelings that are relevant, you’re telling a kind of lie, Hendricks says. Hiding feelings from yourself results in numbness and physical symptoms. Hiding feelings from others means no one knows you.

 

Also, tell truths about facts; for example, if you feel guilty about something. Tell truths about ‘fantasies’, for example, if you feel someone doesn’t like you.

 

Speak the truth, he suggests. “Speak about them [feelings] openly, and your life is lived in waves of authenticity and intimacy.” (p 104 )

 

The Purpose Shift

 

When things aren’t going well, shift to thinking about what your PURPOSE is. Why are you doing something in particular? What is your aim?

If you find out your purpose is “to be right”, you can shift it to a more productive purpose, like resolving a problem and finding harmony. As you ask yourself what your purpose is, try to ask through curiousity, not through trying to justify what you are doing.

 

Integrity Shift

 

Take responsibility for what is happening in your life.

Shift from, “Why is the world treating me like this?” To, “How have I arranged it so I’m having this experience?”

 

It’s a neat thought that as Hendricks says, victim dramas are so fascinating to us because “blame” is wired into our biology! He says there is a “chemical addiction to the adrenaline rush you get in the race for the victim position” !!! ( p 110 )

 

“William James said over a hundred years ago that the greatest psychological discovery of his time was this: that human beings could change the outer circumstances of their lives by changing their attitudes of mind. I have made that same discovery in my world, and I urge you to experiment it in yours.”( p 110 )

 

The Action Shift

 

You need to decide which path to take sometimes. Consider which things you have control over for which actions you take. Hendricks reminds us we need to let go completely of the idea of having control over other people.

 

The “Us” Shift

 

This is a shift from concern with one’s own needs to that of the community and empowerment of others.

 

I have to say that this is a shift that a lot of people need to go the other way on- from the opposite end! They need to start taking care of their own needs first and get themselves well-grounded before turning themselves back around and giving back.

 

From Anything to Love Shift

 

This is a shift for when you catch yourself doing something stupid, silly, ugly, negative…That’s when you need to love and accept yourself completely. The same thing when you catch someone else. Boundaries are still set and kept. But “that’s part of love, too.” ( p 117 )

Real Life and Living Consciously

One of the results of Hendrick’s own life purposes has been the Foundation for Twenty-First Century Leadership, which offers classes on four areas:

1. Self-esteem
2. Attracting a partner that resonates and grows with you
3. Dealing with living and loving issues over time
4. Designing your own life, career, and lifestyle instead of relying on the past roles and maps

The Foundation of Self-Esteem: Discovering Who You Are

An unshakable sense of self-esteem is based on really knowing who you are, asserts Hendricks. If a person doesn’t have a strong sense of self-esteem, that person can fall victim to all sorts of predators.

Hendricks does a really good job of describing what self-love looks like in imagery:

“Imagine a person walking toward you, someone who’s really important to you. Now picture two very different moves on your part. In scene one, you fold your arms across your chest and turn away from the person, refusing to make loving contact. In scene two, you throw open your arms wide, smile lovingly, and embrace that person.

Now imagine that the one you’re embracing is yourself. Notice how you would feel if you turned your back on yourself, as many of us do. Now imagine how you would feel if you truly, genuinely embraced yourself in love.” (p. 124)

The Six Secrets of Self-Esteem

Here is Hendrick’s list:

1. Loving yourself without conditions
2. Living in integrity
3. Distinguishing your essence from your personas
4. Handling fear
5. Expressing your creative potential
6. Developing emotional literacy

Some of those things on the list are more commonly understood than others. And in none of them, does one have to have a perfect yes; instead, he suggests “It’s made of tiny moves along the way, not of arriving at a particular place.” (p. 126) Luckily, Hendricks goes on to discuss each one of them. His discussion, he says, is just like one of the courses from his institute.

The Biggest Self-Esteem Problem

The biggest self-esteem problem is- ironically- that when we don’t have it, we’re not usually aware of it. “We think that’s just the way life is.” (p. 126)

Self-Esteem is an Ongoing Issue

Hendricks shared one of the symptoms that he still deals with in his life- doubting that one can fulfill dreams and visions- is something that he faces almost every day, despite his many successful books, career, and family life.

He explains, “Self-esteem is living in such as state of creative expansion that you go over your edge every day. You are always living in wonder about whether you can do it or not. More creativity means more doubt. Yet you keep breathing, keep moving, keep creating. You breathe through the doubt and ride a bigger wave of creativity.” (p. 127)

The First Key: Loving Yourself Without Conditions

Without self-esteem—which ends up, Hendricks says, to be loving yourself and others unconditionally—people end up chasing others for love.

“If our feelings toward ourselves are flavored with guilt and criticism, our love toward others will be contaminated by these same flavors…Loving ourselves is the only way out of the grip of fear…Loving yourself is not about conceit. Conceit is an attempt to prove to others that you’re lovable when you’ve decided inside that you really aren’t.”

“All we can do is to love ourselves as much as we can from wherever we are. Would you, this moment, give yourself a heartbeat or two of this pure love?” (p. 130)

The Second Key: Living in Integrity

If you don’t feel good, Hendricks says to look directly to see where you are lacking integrity, which he says is composed of four actions:

1. Welcoming all feelings, no denying or hiding
2. Telling the truth
3. Keep all agreements or consciously change them
4. Take 100% responsibility for any problem in which you are involved in your life: under that means you’re playing the victim, over that means you’re playing the martyr

It’s interesting how Hendricks said that communicating with righteous indignation or whiny victimhood are certain signs of lying. I was reading today on a blog that deceit and the untrained ability to notice deceit are two survival traits that have been racing neck and neck through human evolution. One of the most difficult things for me in the past was noticing when a partner was not lying, but in fact not telling me things that I should know. I think that something like that is a lack of integrity too, but it’s not on the list…

The Third Key: Distinguishing Your Essence From Your Personas (or simply, who are you without the patterns you adopted to survive your childhood and early life?)

“When you were a child, you learned a personality to get your needs met. In one family it worked to be quiet and helpful, perhaps, while another family responded to tantrums and whines. One family favored athletics, while another liked food. To survive and prosper in a family, you adopted the social masks that worked in that particular place.

If you grew up in a relatively healthy environment, you learned relatively healthy masks: Pleaser, Helper, Good Student. If your environment wasn’t so healthy, you turned to more costly masks: Rebel, Clumsy Person, Problem Student…As adulthood continues, it becomes necessary to remove all your masks in the search to answer the core question: who am I at my very core? It is easy to think that your positive masks are who you actually are…genuine success later in life comes only through dismantling our carefully contrived personas. The real sweetness in life is attained only through communion with the authentic in ourselves. Nothing false ultimately brings satisfaction.” (p. 135)

The word persona, I think, means “with—sound” and comes from the masks the Greeks wore in plays. Before reading this book, my idea of persona was pretty vague. But this way of seeing my own behavior and that of others is really exciting to me. And thinking about what he calls relatively healthy masks—any of those, if taken on as a really “heavy” mask—is pretty unhealthy. Exercising a persona of extreme pleasing or helping is super draining and leads to fatigue and unhappiness. Been there.

Personas, Hendricks says, are strengths in that they help us survive childhood, and weaknesses because they stand in our way as adults.

A and B Personas

The “A” personas are those ways of being with which we got our needs met. Examples given are “Cute Kid”, “Quiet Baby”, “Mom’s Helper”, “Daddy’s Girl”, or “Class Clown”. They are learned early and used later to get recognition in the world.

The “B” personas are the second-stringers for when the “A”s fail, such as “Rebel” “Sick Kid” “Accident Prone” and “Slow Learner”. These personas cause trouble later in life, but fight to exist.

How We Glue Our Personas In Place

1) Justifying: A friend tells you something about your persona no longer working, for example, perhaps telling you that you are out of touch with your feelings. You deny it.

There’s a funny term Hendricks coined called “glue clubs” for “networks of people whom we have enrolled in our personas” (p. 142). That really makes sense to me that sometimes other people get really invested in another person’s persona and behave in ways to maintain it. It makes me think about when people are talking about boundaries or weight loss. Other people in their lives get upset or become saboteurs so that things will not change. This also makes me think about people who others have said have “changed completely”. Was it only ever a switching of persona or an escape from one then? Also, I can think of more than one person I know who used to confuse me by having at least two very different personas that I interacted with: Charmer and Critic. It was such a surprise to go from interacting with one to the other.

2) Blaming: An “extreme form of being right” is another way to adhere to a persona. Hendricks suggests we often blame someone who wants us to let go of the persona.

3) Power Struggle: By trying to dominate others or avoid domination, you can stop trying to creatively change or grow yourself.

4) Repeat Old Patterns: Doing an action strengthens what is behind the action. Autopilot keeps the persona glued in and you moving down the same old tracks not making new choices.

What Is Behind Personas, Behind Thoughts, and Behind Feelings

This is what Hendricks calls “Essence”, which I think may be similar to what others may call “spirit” or “soul”. He says,

“All those things may change [feelings, mood, thoughts], but in the background there is always the vast open sky of essence against which all the changing phenomena in your body and mind play out…Ultimately, loving yourself takes you beyond acceptance, prizing, and valuing to a realm in which your essence is absolutely equal and seamlessly connected to the essence of others and the universe.” (p. 14)

 

Can you believe studies show that 85% of messages communicated to children are negative? Hendricks shares this. I never thought about it until this point in my life, where circumstances are making me interact with my parents as an adult again, but I can really see that. My brother doesn’t want to say “NO” to his new son much. I was kind of worried about that at first, but then I read a great book called “Connection Parenting”. It says that you can use a lot of other, very effective things rather than saying no. For example, “Danger!” Or, suggesting some other action. And the author of that book asks us why we would talk to children in such a way that we would never talk to friends. That is a really serious question.

 

That’s the end of my sharing of Part I of the book. In Part II Hendricks talks about self-esteem and how to build it, and about building lasting love relationships.

Building On Self-Esteem

Hendricks suggests that peace inside is the only way to find a true self-esteem.

Dealing with Fear

“Most of us, especially if we grew up around brothers or sisters, have to overcome several main fears from childhood…In fact, the more success you have in life, the more likely you are to flush up those fears.” (p 147).

Hendricks reminds us that there is a “Governor” that springs into action when we go through transitions in our lives and step out of our boxes. “The Governor wants to keep you safe, because you have survived in your limited box, if not thrived there.” (p 148). The Governor can sabotage new projects and changes.

The Central Fear: Tool of the Governor

The major fear that people need to handle, Hendricks suggests, is that that “we are fundamentally flawed in some way” (p 148). We think thoughts about what is wrong about ourselves and why things always go wrong. Inside, says Hendricks, we feel emptiness, despair, and a feeling that “life will never turn out right”. Here are the moves Hendricks encourages for handling fear:

1) Place your attention on it, like a flashlight on an imagined monster. “Fear really is only a vibration down the middle of your body, accompanied by a racy, slightly queasy sensation.” (p 150)

2) Breathe towards the feelings in your body. Hendricks suggests some slow, deep breaths.

3) After doing move 1 and 2 simultaneously, shift your body position. Changing the way you are positioned helps dissolve the fear.

4) “Communicate about fear straightforwardly” (p 151). Hendricks tells us if we just accept fear and do not make a big deal out of it, it isn’t a big deal. Communicate about it, he says, as if you are telling someone what time it is.

5) This last move Hendricks calls the “Ultimate Move to Handle Fear”. Love it unconditionally, he says. And he says it may take a thousand times of loving it to make a difference- because as we change, each time we step through a new door we can feel fear again. Stepping outside of our “comfort zones”, what we know as the way things are and the way we are, turns on the Governor.

“Our fears are often so big that love is the only thing that can contain them. Love is the ultimate healer because it can contain its opposite: you can love yourself for hating yourself. Sometimes our fear, and our self-hate, is so great that all we can do is love it. I have watched, deeply moved, as many people have discovered the power of love in therapy. I have seen people love their anger, their fear, the wrongdoings of the past, and the transgressions of others against them. I have seen love smooth out the roughest of vibrations that shake the human organism.” (p 152)

The Second Fear that Limits Self-Esteem

The “Tall Poppy” Syndrome

Hendricks shares that Australian psychologists call the fear of outdoing loved or associated others “the tall poppy” syndrome. Farmers cut the poppies that grow too tall down, and Australian parents tell their children not to be tall poppies- which Hendricks suggests is a cultural hand-me-down from the convicts shipped there, who, having done nothing worse than not having enough to pay the rent, or having done murder, all learned to keep their heads down in the pack. This syndrome of trying not to outdo others, is one that limits self-esteem, argues Hendricks. “I feel I must go to fulfill my dreams, and there are people I must leave behind in order to do it…Then I go back, if I can, to make the bridge again” says Hendricks (p 154).

 The Third Limiting Fear

“Self-esteem is compromised by a third fear. We were a burden to someone long ago, and this sense of our burdensomeness pervades our lives today. As we go through life we feel that we do not deserve to take up space. Who are we to dare to dream? We interfered with someone’s dreams long ago, and we are convinced it was our fault.” (p 154)

Hendricks suggests that confronting these fears will all aid building self-esteem. “Life conspires with us to bring all our fears into our face. If we look at them and welcome them into the wholeness of ourselves, symptoms simply disappear.” (p 156)

The Fourth Limiting Fear

There is a kind of trance we are in sometimes that is related to trying not to be disloyal to family or clan by not rising to a higher level. This is not exactly the same as “outdoing”, this is “going beyond another person’s achievement” (p 156). The question to ask is about whether we have unconsciously sealed ourselves to remaining in one place due to not wanting to achieve love, self-esteem, or success beyond which clan/family has.

Expressing Our Creative Potential

Hendricks states what he thinks the key rule of creativity is: “If you are expressing your creative potential, you get to feel good about yourself. If you are not, you don’t” (p. 157). He calls us to bring forth the dreams that we have inside us to creation- writing, painting, business, poetry, music, gardens- these do not have to be for popular consumption, they can be only for ourselves.

Deathbed Goals

Hendricks suggests that a lot of focus and peace can be found if we know what our lives are about: “I cannot describe the sense of peace I have gained from figuring out my priorities,” he writes( p 162). He suggests that these goals need to be those completely within our control. He also suggests to figure out the difference between more short-term temporary goals that we use our imaginations, step outside ourselves to the future, and then look back as if we had completed the goal- and ask if that’s what we really wished to have done.

The Dependence of Self-Esteem On Emotional Literacy

Handling emotions leads to peace in the heart. Hendricks gives these guidelines, gleaned from his own trial-and-error and work with his clients:

1) Start paying attention to your body and its sensations. These sensations are the language of the body and its emotions. If you pay attention to its feedback, you can go on to the next steps to successfully dealing with feelings and taking action.

2) Be able to name the common feelings and where you sense them in your body. According to Hendricks, the important ones are: fear, anger, want, excitement, joy, sexual desire, and love.

This is a bit different than what I’ve read in the book “Homecoming”, where the John Bradshaw refers to a body of research that names eight universal feelings, of which I remember: joy, disgust, dismell, anger, fear, and sadness. He didn’t cite sexual desire as a feeling. I’m not so sure that I believe it fits there either. What I liked about Bradshaw’s list was the revelation to me that “enjoyment” is really joy!

Hendricks gave some examples of where he feels feelings and how: anger is a tightening in his arms, shoulders, back of neck and jaw, excitement is a general all-over tingle, and happy is an all-over sensation with bubbling and warmth in his chest.

3) To be emotionally intimate with a person you are talking to, say something about your feelings when you feel them. Hendricks says that this may clear up some communication. “One of the most important lessons in life is: you’re seldom upset for the reason you think you are. Your headache may have been triggered by your boss, and telling him is an important place to start. But don’t stop there. Always ask yourself, “What does this remind me of?” and “Is this familiar?” Many things that trigger us during the course of a day are replay of old dramas, often beginning in our families” (p 168). Hendricks urges us to speak the truth with “I feel…” statements. “I felt angry when you…” “I felt sad when… happened.” That unloads instead of burdens us with our feelings, and we become more understood by others.

4) Learn to spot feelings in others and pay attention. If you learn to read the signs, you can get closer to others by saying things to people. Hendricks suggests we say, “I noticed…(your jaw clench, a flicker of irritation)…What’s happening?” ( p 169). People who respond to this and tell you what’s going on…these are the people that Hendricks suggest we keep in our inner circle. He says that our culture these days encourages us to ignore the overlooking of the obvious, which is unhealthy.

If You Don’t Feel Good About…

“There are plenty of times in life when feeling good in the long run requires that you sacrifice comfort in the short run” (p 173). What are they?

• Seeing and feeling what is real-Accepting whatever hard or nasty reality there is is the first step to anything better.
• Keeping agreements-sometimes may not be easy. Don’t break them just because it seems comfortable- you’ll end up feeling bad.
• Telling the truth- don’t use the excuse about “timing” says Hendricks; that’s just an avoidance to make *you* more comfortable.
• Working on life goals- if you don’t, in the long run you feel dragged down.

“Discovering your true self opens up a space in which you can feel harmony with yourself at the depest level. Wehn we’re out of harmony with ourselves, genuine self-esteem is not possible” (p 175).

How to Attract Lasting Love

Three big shifts that bring lasting love into people’s lives:

1) Make a commitment to having a truly satisfying relationship

2) Decide on your absolute yesses and nos for a relationship partner

3) Love all of yourself deeply

Make a Commitment

First you need to understand that what you are getting now in your life is something you have already committed to- that, says Hendricks, is the first understanding. “If you’re single and not liking it, you’re commited to being single and not liking it. If you’re divorced and afraid to get back into another relationship, you’re committed to being divorced and afraid. Understand this point deep in your bones, and you finally understand how life works. We’re always getting what we’re committed to getting!”

Hendricks wants us to fill in the following statement, “Right now, I (your name), am committed to being (single, divorced, in an unhappy relationship) ” (p 181-182).

Now, this is on an UNCONSCIOUS LEVEL, and by acknowledging it, you free up power for transformation and positive commitment. Repeat after Hendricks,

“I’m committed to things being the way they are right now,

and I make a new, conscious commitment to creating a new, conscious relationship”

 (p 182).

Hendricks shares how in his first marriage he was wrapped in a pattern of being lied to, lying, criticized and criticizing, and blamed and blaming. He finally realized that he was more committed unconsciously to that then to forming a close intimate relationship- why? Because it was a family inheritance from his mother and father: “All the elements of the drama were there when I walked into the party. By the time I could think for myself (or even walk by myself), I had already been picked in the drama for years. Now for some bad news: so were you. Now for the good news: there’s an easy way out” (p 184).

What does he say the easy way out is? Making a conscious commitment for something other than the unconscious life pattern and perpetuation of such:

“Fill in the blank: I, (your name), commit to living my life in expanding waves of love and consciousness.  

OR

“I, (your name), commit to perpetuating the painful drama I’ve been engaged in for much of my life” (p 185).

Deciding on Yesses and Nos for a Life Partner

Hendricks is talking about deeper qualities, not surface ones- talking about character. He urges us to explicitly figure out the three deep qualities we absolutely want in a life partner, and the three absolute NOs.

Here are Hendrick’s three yesses: 1) total honesty 2) total responsibilty 3) a creative path harmonious with his. He made a commitment to wanting his partner to have each one and committing himself to being that way with himself and others.  

Here are Henrick’s three Nos: 1) No one with an active addiction 2) No shirkers (looking for what they can get rather than doing their share) 3) No Blamers

One way to think about absolute Nos is to look at old relationships in the light of Satirs five groups: Levelers, Blamers, Placaters, Super-Reasonables, and Distractors. Hendricks chose to not be with a Blamer again. People can be mainly one or a combination of these types when they’re in relationships:

Levelers: Tell you what’s going on with them, will listen when you do the same.

Blamers: Try to find whose fault something is. Push responsibility for their own pain and for pain they make onto others.

Placaters: They sacrifice themselves and deep inside are angry about doing so. They please out of fear, and they don’t understand their own needs or wants.

Super-Reasonables: They operate on logic and ignore their own and others’ feelings. They know that they are Right, and they are going to convince you of that.

Distractors: They create drama, and they create more drama if they are not able to win. They feel that creating drama is winning, even if they don’t actually win. ( p 191) 

Ready, Set, Go!!!

In ten minutes, you need to fill out this order for your relationship:

Absolute Yes

1. The most important thing I require and want to celebrate in a relationship is___________

2. The second most important thing I require and want to celebrate in a relationship is ______

3. The third most important thing I require and want to celebrate in a relationship is _____

Absolute Nos

1. The most important thing I vow never to invite into my life again is ________________

2. The second most important thing I vow never to invite into my life  is _______________

3. The third most important thing I vow never to invite into my life is _____________

Now, put your order out into the universe. “Unless we ask for what we want, the universe doesn’t have a chance to give it to us” (p 194).

The Third Step of Attracting Lasting Love

Our unloved parts of ourselves, the parts we do not love ourselves, are the parts that keep us from great relatinships. “We don’t love some part of ourselves, and in desperation we run around trying to get someone else to love us in hopes that if they give us enough love our unlovable part will go away. It never does” (p 194). What can we do? Hendricks says, find that unlovable place. Put our attention on it. And then love it.

“For me, the hardest place inside to love was a deep fear that was accompanied by anger and grief. After some unflinching self-inquiry, I discovered that fear of abandonment ran every destructive program I operated, from binge eating to pushing away people who were trying to love me. Based on events in my first year of life, I felt afraid of being left to die, and this fear gave rise to a host of other problems” (p 195).

So to solve the unlovable part, use your imagination and see yourself filling up with love for all those parts of yourself that you do not like- don’t think, just feel. Hendricks suggests writing a list of these hard-to-love parts of yourself, and then just going down the list and accept each one and love it. In the end, “If you don’t love yourself, you’ll always be looking for someone to do it for you. And you won’t ever find it, because people who don’t love themselves attract people who don’t love themselves” (p 197).

The Playground Rules for Great Relationships

1. Be real and authentic with yourselves and others – Truth

2. Be appreciative- of life, yourself, and others- Communicate Appreciation

3. Listen to Others- no interruption- Really Listen

4. Impeccable Agreements- Follow Through on Everything

Creating Conscious Relationships

Make life goals and go full out on your commitment- Do it NOW. Here are three moves to constantly practice in order to change your “relationship destiny” (p 205)

1. Every hour, think this positive thought, “I enjoy conscious loving relationships everywhere I go”. Even if you’re not in the mood, do it.

2. Every hour, say one sentence that is true and real. They don’t have to be deep, but they have to be authentic. For example “I like the way these are laid out” at the deli counter (p 206).

3. Every hour, speak an appreciation. This can be to anyone- and Hendricks doesn’t say this, but I think this includes ourselves.