Rating Progress

 

I have used a variety of self-help and spiritual methods over the years, and one of the things I find myself doing at a certain point with each method, is that I want to find some way of rating my progress. If you have used various self-help and spiritual methods and found that they have not yielded any tangible benefits in your life, you naturally find yourself becoming that shrewder when it comes to the next one. It can reach a point whereby you go from being rather naïve and wide-open to the most ridiculous fads, to wondering whether you’re being duped by the next popular method that comes your way.

One of the things that I’ve found to be characteristic with any methods that don’t work, it that I will tend to start off enthusiastically and then trail off into apathy. But those things that really work tend to be engaging and enduring. The thing I love about releasing and inquiry is that they both give you the impression that they are working because you can get tangible benefits from them immediately (with releasing) and almost immediately (with inquiry, after an inquiry has been completed). Take affirmations for example, you could start off enthusiastically, wooed by the promise of becoming substantially wealthy. But then after a while, you find that nothing is changing in your life and the method is becoming a frustrating chore. Eventually, you stop doing it altogether, until you pick-up a book or CD again and the achievements of the teacher and other people give you enough enthusiasm to give it another go, and thus the cycle repeats itself.

I find myself looking back over the previous two years or so that I’ve been using releasing and inquiry. I can’t really say that anything incredible has happened in my life. I would say that over the previous year or so I have been feeling more at peace and more content with my life. I would also say that my job, which has always been something of a struggle to me from day one, has gone significantly better and smoother than a few years ago. But I would not put this down to just releasing and inquiry: I would attribute this in part to listening to The God Journey and The Free Believers Network podcasts Christian podcasts. These podcasts have helped to set me free from years of stifling religious performance.

I recently went on a short holiday back to my parent’s house in the North West. When I returned back to work I remember feeling hit with the most awful depression. It wasn’t really accompanied by a lot of anxiety: it was just a gut-wrenching emptiness on the inside. Naturally, I wondered if there was something that I did or did not do to cause this profound sadness to come upon me. I instinctively used releasing to try to ease the situation; it seemed to help at first, but the depression just seemed to keep on coming back, so I don’t know if I can honestly say that it really helped.

When I got back home after work, I immediately got into inquiry. After the inquiry which lasted about twenty minutes, I began to feel better. I still struggled to fathom the source of the depression that day. I reasoned that if I was making progress with releasing and inquiry, such intensity of negative feelings should be a thing of the past. The unusual depression that day seemed to motivate me to be more fervent with inquiry and I managed to do another two sessions that evening. After this, I felt a great deal better. In fact, the contrast between the depression and the post-inquiry state was rather stark. Perhaps the message in all of this, if there really was a message, was that inquiry really does work and that I can find almost immediate relief from negative emotions and stress, if I can just persevere with it.

I have found myself struggling even more than usual with apathy recently. I feel that to a great degree I have cooled-off from my spiritual pursuits by the realisation that I can’t really grow spiritually by just studying someone else’s interpretation of spiritual truth. The message was reinforced in me today as I listened to the latest The Free Believers Network podcast entitled “Follow the Leader Syndrome” 11^th June 2010. In this podcast, the hosts related how they used to read the Bible and other Christian books over and over again, with the belief that they were growing spiritually through it. The also related how they were driven to levels of obsession in the pursuit of spiritual growth. As soon as you appoint someone else to be your spiritual leader or mentor, you run the risk of disconnecting your mind from your heart, which already knows the truth. The hosts also discussed the way in which you literally come to the end of these things when you realise what is happening and that these things can’t really change your life. All of a sudden you can find that you have a lot of time on your hands and that you don’t really know what to do with your time.

I always feel encouraged with inquiry because although it takes time to do, it always feels natural and instinctive: it is never a struggle and you are never robotically repeating affirmations or “buzz-words” that some spiritual guru tells you to repeat from a bestselling book. So actually doing inquiry seems to be no problem with it once I get started. But I think the problem is just getting started with it. I have found that my enthusiasm has waned because I don’t seem to see any significant evidence of it working. No self-help author has sold a lot of books by just telling people that he now feels more content and peaceful. No, it seems that the only thing that really catches people’s attention is something over-the-top, such as a million dollar contract or a miraculous healing. It seems that we are addicted to these “gains” and need them to motivate us to pursue a self-help method and to verify that it actually works.

In an ideal world I would experience a steady stream of “gains” and accomplished goals as I progress with releasing and inquiry. Unfortunately, it does not seem to be that way. What keeps me going with releasing and inquiry is that I can feel an immediate sense of relief when I release an emotion or want; or when I reach the turnaround during a session of The Work; I also find that both methods feel natural and instinctive, as opposed to awkward, tedious and robotic. These have been the only solid indicators that there really is something to all of this. If I was to go by my feelings, I would have had reason to seriously doubt the effectiveness of releasing and inquiry when I experienced that recent bout of depression. But the irony is that it was that very depression that caused me to do three inquiry sessions in one evening. Recently, I’ve found that I’ve averaged about one session of inquiry every other day. Byron Katie says that if you want to see results with inquiry, you should do this for thing for breakfast.

Despite the enticing testimonies of people who become millionaires overnight and so on, lasting peace and contentment has to be the ultimate goal, in fact, the only goal that motivates us in a spiritual or self-help practice. The thing I like about releasing and inquiry is that peace and contentment are the only goals; anything else such as prosperity becomes nothing more than a by-product. I think Byron Katie has one of the best perspectives on prosperity than any other self-help teacher that I know of. Katie says that if we have peace of mind, we cannot help but be prosperous. Peace of mind knows “how much”, “with whom” and”when”. It is only when we are confused, contracted around a thought, that we make poor decisions and fail to act upon opportunities. If you use something like the Goals Process in the Sedona Method, you should realise that you are only releasing on those goals as a means of finding freedom from the underlying wants – you are not releasing as a means of actually achieving those goals. Either the desire for those goals will fade or you might actually find that you are able to achieve those goals, once you have released on them.

The “system” I use now with inquiry is that I will identify certain areas where I am the most contracted and I encounter the most stress. I will start out with question one (is it true), as “yes” and question two (can you know for certain it is true), as “no”. I will then progress through inquiry, sometimes a week or a few weeks of persistent effort, until question one (is it true), is “no”. At that point, I know that I am clear on that belief, or at least, a lot clearer. There have been a few concepts that I’ve used inquiry on, which I thought to myself, “When I reach ‘no’ on the first question, when I’m finally clear on this belief, then I’ll be completely clear, my life will be better in every way and I won’t have to do inquiry anymore. Well, not for a long while at least.” Unfortunately, despite reaching “no” on question one on a few really tough beliefs – I’m still not “completely clear”.

I think we actually have to be rather careful when we try to ascertain our level of progress according to our experiences. Something could be really working for us, but because we don’t see any tangible benefits, we could be tempted to reject that method. Conversely, even though we might experience some good results that we attribute to our spiritual efforts, those experiences could have little or northing to do with our spiritual efforts. In fact, some rather misleading and harmful fads and practices have arisen out of people following a certain spiritual method, and attributing it to the positive circumstances they experienced during or after that time. I’ve read scores of Christian books in which a person said that they observed a certain principle or prayed a certain way, and then God did something totally amazing like healed them of a terminal illness or something. We can tend to run with these testimonies and turn them into formulas that just don’t work for people. It’s the same, of course, with releasing: a person could say that they released on “this” and then experienced “that”. How do you know that it was releasing that caused that thing to happen? I think when we’re desperate for results; we can grab at anything and use it as evidence that our spiritual efforts are yielding results. On the releasing forums, I sometimes read of people attributing the slightest bit of good fortune to releasing, such as when they find a coin on the pavement or something.

I truly feel as if I have exhausted every other spiritual practice that I’ve ever read about and used. I’m left with the Christian message of God’s unconditional love for us (the grace message), releasing and inquiry. I just have the inkling that at this stage, inquiry is going to be the thing that brings me the most peace and freedom. Sure, I believe that for me, the good news of God’s unconditional love of Christ is key to finding peace. But all the typical Christian formulas and principles, such as reading the Bible continuously, have not worked for me. A lot of wisdom can be gleaned from Byron Katie’s sessions of The Work. In fact, I find that the same things often come out of inquiry that Katie does all around the world. But inquiry is not a message, it is not even a set of concepts, it is just a framework within which you can question your own anxious thoughts and learn to trust your own heart and be led from there. Releasing is a set of methods or “tools” based around a simple concept of letting go of emotions and their underlying wants. Releasing and inquiry are not new religions, another set of principles to live by or a set of outlandish New Age theories.

But I need to overcome the apathy that often prevents me from getting started with The Work sometimes. One thing that works rather well is to release on apathy or release resisting doing the Work – that can be just enough sometimes to get me using inquiry when I would normally be unable to muster the effort to do so.

I cannot look to periodic “gains” or incremental boosts in my overall state of happiness, as a source of motivation when it comes to Christianity, releasing or inquiry. The day that releasing no longer gives me a sense of relief from stress, or the day that I no longer experience stress – is the day that I will no longer use releasing. Likewise, the day that inquiry becomes a chore and I feel as if I am repeating words parrot-fashion, or the day that I reach a turnaround and do not feel better for it, or the day in which I no longer experience stress – is the day that I will no longer use inquiry. To be honest, I feel so fed-up with spiritual formulas that I would probably stop using them altogether once I experience a significant shift towards positive thoughts and emotions.

So perhaps negative thoughts, wants or the contraction around them – are like the layers of an onion or like a set of Russian dolls: when you peel away one layer, there is another layer underneath it. Each layer is just as significant and stressful as the previous one.

I think the best analogy I can provide in relation to progress with releasing and inquiry is that of the game Kerplunk. The plastic cylinder could be likened to the mind. The plastic rods called straws are like the thoughts that criss-cross through our minds. The marbles are like the “orbs” of negative emotional energy, which are held in place in the mind by the web created by the complexes of negative thoughts in our minds. If you’ve ever played Kerplunk before, you will no doubt be aware of what makes the game so much fun: you could withdraw one of the straws, expecting everything to come tumbling down – but nothing happens! Conversely, you could expect nothing to happen when you pull out one of the straws – to find that a whole lot of marbles come tumbling down into one of the four trays at the bottom of the cylinder. You could work on a particular thought with the expectation that when you are done with it, your entire life will change – but nothing happens! You could reach the point of question one “no” – only to discover a profound shift in your mental and emotion state.

Perhaps that’s what all the shocks and trials of life are all about: providing us with the opportunity to inquire into them and be free – nothing more and nothing less. Byron Katie says that we should look forward to stressful thoughts as they bring us back into inquiry. If I did not experience stress, I would not need to use releasing and inquiry. So perhaps releasing and inquiry are methods that you use for just as season, until you have stripped away enough layers of selfishness and fear in order to truly enjoy life and allow God, the heart or the higher nature to take over? I don’t know the answer for sure as yet – but I’ll find out soon enough!

Picture Money courtesy of AMagill.

Picture CreativeTools.se - PackshotCreator - Russian matryoshka dolls courtesy of Creative Tools.

Kerplunk image derived from the photo P1020279 courtesy of Jeff Sandquist.