Judgment is a really harsh thing to experience...not the words, but the internal feelings of self-repression that follow the words.  It is like trying to shrink down and not breathe - literally choke off your expression of self that you have judged as wrong.  Nobody likes to be choked, so why would we do this to ourselves?

As crazy as it sounds, we are not one consistent person inside.  We feel like we are because we have what psychologists call continuity of consciousness.  This is like when we sit in a movie theater watching the various characters play out their roles.  Through camera placement we might be seeing what is happening from the viewpoint of the villain one minute and then the viewpoint of the hero the next.  This switching of viewpoints makes perfect sense to us because we are the watcher making sense out of the whole story.  We do this automatically in our own lives.  Our watcher self is the common point of continuity in our unfolding story as we switch from one feeling relationship to what is happening around us (sub-personality) to the next.  One moment we might feel empowered and the next feel helpless or angry.

Each feeling relationship comes with an automatic set of responses and actions based on our history with similar situations in the past when we had similar feelings.  As situations change they might evoke saintliness from us one minute and devilishness the next.  But these changes all "make sense" to our watcher self who is following the story.

We have a third character in our noggin - one that compares our feeling reactions to life to a set of standards and beliefs about what we have learned are the "correct" ways to act and react to be effective in getting our social and survival needs met.  This is the character that gives us the hard time with the whole judgment thing.

In theory this self-correction mechanism is a good thing.  The problem is it does not work the way most people use it.  We are like baby trees trying to grow up into tall strong adult trees.  Most people use judgment like a club or a pair of clippers.  If in our growth we sprout out in an unhelpful direction, we use the club to smash the growth and the clippers to cut it out.  This might work for a Bonsai tree that you are trying to stunt the growth on, but it does not encourage full growth of a healthy tree.

Each of our feeling relationships to life were developed as an attempt to resolve how to meet basic survival and connection needs.  We start this the day we are born and keep it up until the day we die.  Simple skills like angry yelling may have worked well when we were 1 month old to get attention to our need to be fed or changed.  Once a skill is learned, we don't like to give it up.  Our skills of how to relate to things are our survival.  Furthermore, once we learn a particular skill works in one area, we try to make it work in all areas - even where it doesn't apply at all.

This tendency to generalize our relationship skills is why we have to develop a critical control mechanism to shut us down when the results of our actions start producing undesirable consequences.  The flaw in this process is that it does not go far enough.  Our goal is to get our needs met.  Shutting down what does not work is fine, but it does not give us a clue about what to do that is better at getting our needs met.  The whole point is to achieve meeting our desires in each moment, and beating ourselves up when we fail does not bump us in the direction of being successful.  Simply shutting down still leaves us failing to meet our needs and desires.

So what is the point of beating ourselves up when we do something we believe is wrong or bad?  Why do we crush ourselves down so intensely?  It seems to come from the belief that pain and punishment will prevent similar unhelpful behavior in the future.  Unfortunately this theory has been proven to be false.  Just look at the success rate of our prison system - a dismal failure.  By contrast the prison system in Japan gets great results at rehabilitation.  What is the difference?  Japan actually rehabilitates its prisoners, not just punish them.

We need to stop punishing ourselves for our failures to meet our beliefs and made up standards, and rehabilitate ourselves instead.  1% of our energy needs to go into stopping what does not work and 99% needs to go into learning better ways of relating to life... more successful ways.  Punishing ourselves by feeling bad only collapses our forward movement and stops our growth.  Simply acknowledge what does not work, let it go, and then truly re-solve how to do things differently.  A new doing requires you to first feel differently about what you are experiencing in your situation.  To do this means you have to form a new relationship to the situation based on a new viewpoint.  You can not do things differently if you continue to feel the same way about your situation.

Feelings dictate actions.  To get different results you have to do something different.  And to actually do something different, it has to be done from a different feeling.  Interestingly, the actual actions may look the same, but if they are performed from a different feeling place, they will produce different results.

As life has told me so many times, "it is not what you do, but why you do it that makes all the difference."

So how do you do this?  How do you actually feel differently about situations in life?  Shifting viewpoint is the key.  Let me give you a movie style example.

Let's say you see a man pull out a gun and shoot another man in the back who is kneeling in the street.  Who would you feel was the villain in this story?  Who would you want to be angry with or maybe be afraid of?

Now let's change viewpoint to a side view of this scene.  Except from this view you now see things you couldn't see from your previous viewpoint.  Here you see the man kneeling in the street is about to cut the throat of a young girl he has just attacked.  The man pulling out the gun is the girl's father who heard his daughter scream and he shoots the kneeling man just in time to save his daughters life.  Now who is the villain and who the hero?  Now who do you feel angry at or afraid of?

Life happens exactly this same way.  Our viewpoint only gives us limited information upon which we base our feeling reactions.  Changing our viewpoint can give us new information that might completely change how we feel about a situation.  Was your first reaction wrong?  Based on what you knew, of course not.  But that is the trick.  It was based on limited information.  When the choices we make in life blow up in our face, it is because we are making choices based on limited information.  It is not because we are bad.  It is not because our instincts about how to react were wrong.  It is just because we didn't see the bigger picture.

Usually this is because we only look at things from our small perspective based on our needs alone without regard for others.  Sometimes we are so repressed we have the opposite problem - where we only see others needs and not our own.  We don't see the bigger picture in which everyone has to get his or her needs met or the story falls apart.  This might be on a personal level or much bigger - like entire nations having to balance their needs with their neighbor's needs.

We need other people to help us see these bigger pictures.  We need the differences in others to expand our perspectives.  We need the wisdom of those who have had life expand them to show us their larger expanded view of life.  We need wisdom.  We need guidance.  We need support.

Take care,
David

If you need some wisdom, guidance, and support - seek out Ellen for Heartflow life coaching.  Ask the front office for more information about this way to expand your viewpoint from the inside out.      

We will be closed Wednesday afternoon and possibly morning in observance of the 4th of July.  We will be open all day Thursday July 5th.

 

Here is a picture of the new office before we start work on it.  Check us out - 9725 Fair Oaks Blvd - between Sunrise and New York.

 

 

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About Dr. DeLapp

Dr. DeLapp has been a philosopher, non-force Chiropractor, medical intuitive, and health innovator for over 30 years.  He began experimenting with  medical intuition in 1972 while studying physics at UC Davis.  In addition to physics he designed and completed an individual major in the philosophy and psychology of education.  Shortly after he choose to pursue a career in the only truly health oriented profession available at that time, Chiropractic.  He graduated with honors in 1981 with his doctorate and opened a private practice. 
Since that time he has continued his research into the effects of consciousness and learning on health. 
He developed the Biomagnetic Retraining system for correcting movement abnormalities. 
Since 1991 he has focused on developing a powerful system for uncovering and assisting the mind-body connection in health and personal growth.  The in-depth coaching, guided by the subconscious direction from the body, is called Heartflow and the simpler mind-body retraining for health and unfoldment he has named Gracework.  Both are available at Fair Oaks Health.

Dr David DeLapp DC
Chiropractor

Ellen Flowers FGM
Spiritual Life Coach

 

 

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Jin Shin Jitsu

 

 

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Massage Practitioner

 

 

 

 

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