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Women’s Day 2017!

Wednesday the 9th of August is International Women’s day.

I had some thoughts.

In the movie Gigi, which I saw about 100 years ago, Maurice Chevalier sang thank heaven for little girls.

I sing, thank heaven for the women that little girls become!

What is really fascinating to me is that so many men have written so many songs about how much they love women and how devastated they are when the woman rejects or leaves them and yet women are so judged by these very same men.

There is so much misogyny (woman hating) in the world – We see this most in the men who are most chauvinistic. Beneath this chauvinism lies a deep sense of inadequacy and vulnerability and to compensate for this, men need to control and dominate women.

In addition, men often find women intolerably desirable, which makes them feel powerless in the face of their desire and so they have to put women down and judge them.

My longstanding references to Donald Trump have not ended.

He is the archetypal misogynist.

Making distasteful references to women’s menstrual cycles and his desire to grab them by certain body parts, which simply demeans them, which in turn reflects his inadequacy and desperate need to overpower them. (Of course he wants to overpower everyone!)

Horrifyingly typical of this prejudice is the fact that the word “hysteria” comes from the Greek word hysteria, meaning “womb.”

It used to be believed that a wandering and discontented uterus was blamed for that dreaded and supposedly female ailment, of excessive emotion hysteria, and you can bet that this absurd – no insane – belief, was created by men!

So men are apparently ‘beautifully emotionally regulated’ and women are hysterical?

Not quite!

The violence men perpetrate against women (there is a rape every 26 seconds in South Africa – #1 in the world – and every 6 minutes in the US) and against other men, is in my opinion hysterical.

In actual fact most men are simply emotionally blocked, (which is not to say that there aren’t women who are also emotionally blocked) and are out of touch with their emotions and in order to manage the anxiety that this creates, women are attacked for being hysterical.

So when a woman gets angry she is considered to be excessively aggressive and out of control, whereas men are considered tough or simply difficult.

The Glass Ceiling

There are endless stories about women in business hitting the glass ceiling, about women being considered second-class citizens, about them not being smart, about them being physically abused and sexually harassed, about them lacking political rights and being considered subordinate to their husbands in particular and to men in general.

There was an extraordinary experiment conducted recently by Martin Schneider and Nicole Hallberg. They switched email signatures for a week to test how much sexism occurs in the workplace.

People thought they were corresponding with him when in fact they were corresponding with her and vice versa.

She said that she had one of the easiest and most productive weeks of her career while he said he was “in hell.”

In other words, when people thought they were talking to a man they were respectful and dignified, whereas when they were talking to a woman they were demeaning and disrespectful.

In a further article Hallberg describes her boss at the time, who was a man, talking about Schneider and saying: ““Oh, he’s a good writer, but he tends to get over emotional about things and let that get in the way of his writing. He’s kind of a girl like that.”

He apologized after realising what he had said, but the apology doesn’t eradicate the prejudice!

The Rising Spirit Of Women!

So, on this woman’s day 2017, I have a plea.

We need to eradicate this prejudice against women, not only because it is a prejudice but because in doing so we are depriving the world of some of the great qualities which women have, which most men don’t. The qualities that put relationship alongside the value of logic, that honour intuitive truth alongside problem-solving and strategic thinking, that value what we say and who we are rather than our gender.

I believe that it is incumbent upon women and the enlightened men in positions of power to call men on their chauvinism and sexism and to educate and empower women to not fall back into the disempowered and prejudiced roles passed down by history.

I’m recommending zero tolerance of sexism and prejudice, not to be attacked in the way that some men might do it, but in the spirit of the pursuit of truth and equality.

Men struggle to see what they are doing because they cannot own their prejudiced projections, they have too much anxiety to do that.

We need to help them with this struggle through consistent, powerful and gentle pressure. If we are not gentle we will simply threaten them – and we will be using an outdated masculine model – and if we do not use consistent pressure, they will simply laugh as off, which is what they do most of the time.

In addition and really importantly, women need to support each other in this quest to eradicate sexism. Meaning, they need to notice when their friends and colleagues are being judged and to rush to this support, calling the men out verbally.

A man doing this is even more powerful than a woman doing it because he is likely to be more respected by the sexist men, so if there are any men out there reading this blog I ask you to come to the support women in this quest.

Let the noble spirit of women rise to transform this world.

If you would like to meet with me face to face or via Skype to work with any of the issues shared in this blog, please drop me a mail at realmark@icon.co.za

 To read more, go to-> http://loveyourselffornoreason.com/2017/08/04/2460/#more-2460

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What would my life feel like if I could open my arms to the inevitable slings and arrows of outrageous reality, what would that be like...? Read more, go to-> http://loveyourselffornoreason.com/2017/08/04/wanting-strangling-spirit/

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My greatest purpose on a personal level, before I do any of this work with my clients, is to ignite Awakening, self-love and internal power.

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Living And Dying Without Regret.

Go to-> http://loveyourselffornoreason.com/2017/05/06/living-dying-without-regret/#more-2067

Opening into the day,

Playing at life

A smile releasing…being

Lightness dancing into the world.

I’ve been fascinated for decades with our cultures inability to dialogue issues of suicide and death and indeed wrote a blog about the former a couple of months ago.

Mathew O’Reilly is an emergency medical technologist. He gives this extraordinary TED talk where he describes how for years he protected critically injured people that he was assisting at the roadside, from hearing the news that they were going to die.

He did this because he felt he was being helpful to them. He believed that if he told them the truth, that they were about to die, they would die in terror and fear. Then one day when a patient asked him if he was going to die, Matthew said, “Yes.”

He was stunned by the fact that instead of the person going into shock and anxiety – which I believe is created by our society’s fear of death – they went into a state of inner peace and acceptance.

“From that moment forward” he says, “I decided it was not my place to comfort the dying with my lies.”

The 3 Things

His story gets really interesting when he describes how there were 3 patterns which he observed in the dying:

·         A need for forgiveness, which tells us about how much guilt people tend to live with, for example, ‘I wish I had spent more time with my children.’

·         The need to be remembered, which is the need for immortality, ‘it doesn’t all end here.’

·         The need to know that their life had meaning, for example, “There is so much more that I wanted to do with my life.”

To hear these needs in people, says Matthew, can give the dying great peace.

In this talk, he gives no recommendations as to how we should deal with these three things before we die but certainly I would think that most people are going to assume that they should try to be less selfish, that they will try to do things, leave a legacy and be more impactful on people’s lives so that they will be remembered and equally, to try really hard to create more and more meaning out of their lives.

I would like to suggest exactly the opposite.

My reason for doing so is that if you try to do, what I think you will do when hearing this…you will fail.

You will fail because it’s all about good intentions. Generally speaking, people are not good at living out their good intentions. Occasionally yes, but generally, no. Just look at New Year’s Resolutions – I wrote a blog about that at the beginning of the year.

In addition what I find with people who want to be more giving and less selfish is that they don’t necessarily become less selfish, because that’s really difficult, what they do is now judge themselves and feel more and more guilty for being selfish.

I would therefore like to suggest the following:

1.     We learn to forgive ourselves now for our selfishness, our lack of perfection in our relationships with others, our not being giving enough, our neurotic humanness that so much of the time is simply just trying to survive in the face of enormous stress and pain. That we do this before we die so that we can come to be at peace with ourselves as we are now, which means that when we die we will be at peace with the life we have lived.

2.     Dissolve as best we can our need to be remembered. We are special and not special. See if you can really own that.

Notice, right now, how you are considered to be special by others and not. If you have an intimate partner and you were to die tomorrow, would you want them to move on and find someone else to be close to? Most people would say yes, but you might simultaneously feel hurt, that in moving on, they have forgotten you, or trivialised your relationship.

Essentially we are conflicted and confused.

3.                 The need for meaning is very tricky. Human beings have the most extraordinary need to find meaning in whatever we do. I really believe we are addicted to it. We want meaningful work, we want meaningful relationships and we want a meaningful life. We get bored very easily which says that there is a lack of meaning in what we are doing.

The economist John Maynard Keynes suggested that in times of significant unemployment, economies could be pulled out of depression by getting unemployed people to be paid to dig holes and then simply to fill them, which would increase earnings and hence also the demand for goods and the economy would grow.

The problem with doing this is that just digging holes and filling them might seem pretty meaningless, although the pay-check at the end of the week might be meaningful enough to overcome this problem, but probably only for a while.

Two Sides

There are two sides to this issue of the pursuit of meaning:

The first one is that it is very useful because when we find a relationship or the work we are doing meaningless. It drives us toward work and relationships that are going to be more fulfilling, more in line with our essential nature which is a wonderful thing.

Everyone wants to live more aligned with their true nature.

The problem is that this desire for meaning gets out of control, in the sense that anything that is meaningless becomes boring and we develop an intense aversion to boredom.

It’s painful!

The very fabric of first world culture is about creating newness and excitement and it is an endless hungry monster whose appetite is never completely fulfilled.

My suggestion is that you look beyond the desire for meaning. The phrase, “Enjoy the journey don’t focus on the destination” has become a monumental cliché and I don’t think people really make use of it because it is so clichéd, but it is certainly pointing in the right direction.

Alan Watts – Playfullness

There is a beautiful video by Alan Watts about this.

He says that the Universe if basically playful. It isn’t going anywhere. It doesn’t have a destination to arrive at.

(We are, much of the time, desperately driving toward a destination or longing for a better one – my comment.)

He goes on to say that music is basically playful. We play the piano, we don’t work the piano. When we travel we are wanting to get somewhere. When we play music, we aren’t trying to get to the end of the composition!

Dancing is the same. The point of the dancing is the dancing, not to get to the end.

Our entire school system is designed to get us somewhere, to be a somebody, to get good grades so you can get to University and get a great job with great money, get married, have kids…always the destination out in front, luring you on.

Looking for meaning in the next thing…and the next thing…and the next thing…

Responsibility tends to destroy playfulness, which is why kids are so good at playing, they don’t have responsibilities, the mortgage, the car, bills to pay, someone to report to, mostly we are reporting to our conscience, driving us to be better, never good enough.

Pygmy Bush!

I stopped this writing to go cycling and while flying down the autumn leaved streets I remembered an amazing energy I experienced as a 10 year old.

We lived in Bramley on what was then the northern edge of Johannesburg.

Three blocks from my home, the dirt roads began.

We created this race track and named the corners. I so clearly recall one particular corner at the bottom of a hill, shooting around it with joy and abandon with my friends. We would yell its name at the top of our voices, “Pygmy Bush, Pygmy Bush,” what freedom!

I did so again this morning.

I felt 10 years old again.

Oh, to do this again and again and again.

Heavy Hearted

You may get this as a realisation, even a very deep one, but to enable playfulness to enter into every aspect of life is a tall order for most of us.

We are so heavy in our hearts, so burdened by fear, anxiety and responsibility.

My experience is that it needs to be worked with in a microscopic kind of way. The reason being that we are so deeply embedded in our seriousness and the challenge of doing playfullness in the moment of stress and pressure is very difficult.

How do you get to be playful when your partner is attacking you or being defensive or being difficult, or when your kids are having problems?

How do you get to be playful when you run short of money before the end of the month?

How do you get to be playful when your investments crash or you are staring at potential bankruptcy?

My suggestion is that you start working on connecting with the energetic signature of playfulness more and more of the time in your life.

This ‘work thing’ has an energetic signature that is tight and contracted and playfulness is loose and open, so that spending more and more time in the looseness and openness and the lightness and laughter of playfulness, is the deal.

Smiling

Playfullness is smiling.

Can you feel your way out of your serious, responsible, tight and frowning energetic signature,  back to the smiling playfulness of your Original Self-Esteem nature?

People with great Self-Esteem don’t take themselves too seriously. They take criticism and ‘failure’ lightly. They can play with it and laugh it off. Which doesn’t mean repressing the hurt at all, which is what a vast majority of people do.

When I started to work, I mean play – ha ha –  with this, I to noticed getting up in the morning, the drive to shower, get dressed, eat, exercise, before tackling the tasks of the day…

Where’s the playfulness?

It’s all about the next thing, getting it done. Getting it done, right!

If you start to feel into this, the grasping and clawing for meaning can begin to release itself, it can get lighter and looser and more open.

What I try to work with is seeing if I can experience more and more of just being alive, dancing my life, playing as best I can, experiencing the joy of aliveness, as opposed to driving toward the excitement of something new?

In doing this, the whole energy of the game changes.

One of the major problems with trying to maximise meaning is that it is using the mind to evaluate how things are going. So we reflect back on an experience,thinking about it or we look forward to experience thinking about it, which is using the mind to evaluate something and this evaluation separates us from the experience.

It is essentially division.

We long for wholeness, but most of the time when we listen to the mind, we create division which is pain and suffering.

To put it another way, if you are looking for meaning you will never maximise it completely, because life will always present a polarity i.e. look for meaning and you will get meaninglessness following shortly thereafter.

Ask a top sports person who has one big international event that they’ve focused on winning for many years and they will tell you, after finally winning it, that somewhere in the following week, there is an anti-climax, which is a sense of meaninglessness.

I had a client who spend years getting a PhD and afterwards he said to me, “So now what?”

The mind cannot experience the NOW because the mind essentially separates.

To connect with the NOW is paradoxically, to connect to the infinite.

Even trying to understand this with your mind is very difficult and what I suggest is you just see if you can settle into the aliveness of now without having to be stimulated by any so-called meaningful external experience.

For most of us this is only doable when we are feeling good. Any anxiety or depression or disconnection from our emotions obscures the ability to do this.

Finally, can you say, my life is my life. I’m doing my best, even when I’m not doing my best, to honour that which you are… Nothing to forgive.

Then you will live it without regret, so that in dying, you are at peace.

If you would like to explore any issues that this blog has evoked in you, face to face or via Skype, please contact me at realmark@icon.co.za

In Love and Power!

Mark Peter Kahn

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The Right Way To Live.

I’m sitting down at my desk on a Sunday morning to write this blog. The room is bright with sunlight, I feel at home in this beautiful space.

There is a picture of myself on the desk.

I am four years old.

I’m bright and awake and happy.

There are certificates on the wall in front of me, all of my credentials – whatever that means – and pictures of Mozambique, of Cathedral Peak in the Drakensberg and a very small mountain called Rhenosterkop, which I used to look at from my home north of Johannesburg, many years ago.

I’m thinking about what I should write for my next blog. I’ve written dozens of them in the last 18 months and I know that they just come to me unannounced, spontaneously, out of nowhere…or perhaps from Pure Consciousness.

They come as a gift to me. Largely speaking I don’t have to work out what I’m going to say. More and more I sense that there isn’t a particular ‘me’ that is doing this, which is why they are just a gift to me and hopefully, to you.

Yet subtly beneath this trusting and knowing that what I want to talk about will come of its own accord there is, every so often an anxiety. Much softer and more subtle than in the past, but there nevertheless, lurking and wanting to pounce and dilute the true magic of this creative energy that comes through me. 

“What is the right thing to say, what is the right topic for this week and what is the right way to say it and what is the right way to present it? Will it be good enough, will it gratify you, will it gratify me, my monster conscience, at war with Mark? ”

Is There A Right?

The big question: is there such a thing as right?

Is there a universal good?

Have you noticed such a tendency in you, in your work, in your life, in your relationships?

Time Magazine

My mother was a Time Magazine addict and I became one too when I was about 10 years old.

In those days they had a page at the front of the magazine called the Letters Page. It fascinated me endlessly how every week there were letters about last week’s edition and these letters would start with a pro and then there would be a con and then a pro and then a con, around whatever the particular topic was.

One person would say that Richard Nixon was a wonderful guy and then somebody would say what a terrible guy he was.

One person would support the Vietnam war and somebody would be against it. One person would support a particular economic policy and somebody would attack it.

As a kid this puzzled me because everybody was so certain that they were right in their opinion, but it was impossible for them to all be right. I think this is one of the things that turned me into a psychologist.

It just felt so painful, the experience of everyone thinking they were right and trying to convince everyone else that they were wrong.

So much conflict.

So much pain.

Perhaps the biggest problem of all for me, was that the only way to get out of my pain was to try and give the people in power, my parents and my teachers, what they wanted.

I had to agree with them.

To do the right thing by them.

But what this created in me was indeed an unending anguish. I didn’t know it at the time but I was trying to be the person these people in power wanted me to be.

If only I had known that they were acting out of ignorance, I might have saved myself an immense amount of pain. They did not know what they were doing when they squeezed me into the mould fashioned in their image.

Their image of what was good and right and pure.

Their image of the truth.

I gave away my power and let them pulverize my Self-Esteem.

This is the source of much of our psychological pain – the rest of it comes from our parents disengagement, their inability to hold us and love us when we are sad, when we’re not getting what we want, when our body is sick and it hurts.

A System Of Energy

We are system of energy which is innocent, creative and filled with love and power. At times of course it is willfull and selfish too.

We want to move into the world curious and filled with joy but as soon as we believe that we have to get it right we tumble uncontrollably into self-doubt and uncertainty.

We fall from heaven into hell.

It is so simple and yet so difficult to do, to return to heaven is to no longer believe the stories in our heads about how we should be and how we should live.

So many great knowers of the truth have been ridiculed and rejected by our culture. From Copernicus who said that the earth was not the centre of the solar system, to Jesus Christ who was crucified by my forefathers, to Pythagoras who was laughed at when he said the earth was round, not flat.

Subtle Levels

This having to get it right happens in multiple major areas but it also operates on subtle levels too.

We all know the fear of failing in our work, of giving a bad presentation, of seeing a project crash and burn, of losing an intimate partner, of not looking attractive enough or smart enough or not being rich enough.

But have you really considered the ways in which you doubt yourself that are so small and fleeting that you hardly notice them and most importantly, you miss how when these small things are added up they crush your Self-Esteem immeasurably?

“Do I make sense when I speak? My needs are selfish and petty, I have a pimple on my face, I’m not fashionable, I don’t have enough friends…”

The freedom and energy available to us when we begin to drop these fears is immense.

As Gloria Gaynor so beautifully sings, can you really, really begin to say, at every level of your being, “I am what I am and what I am needs no excuses.”

And then she adds, “Life aint worth a damn until you can say, I am what I am.”

Making sure that others are happy…just doesn’t work.

The problem is that it feels great to say this and mean it, but come the moment when someone looks at you judgmentally and says, “You’re not telling me you still use a Blackberry?!” That’s when the rubber meets the road.

If you can feel completely and utterly in that moment that I am what I am, you have arrived.

Of course mostly we ‘arrive’ and ‘leave,’…’arrive…and…’leave.’ That’s the way it works.

You also need to be able to say it when somebody judges the fact that you love watching reruns of the Jerry Springer show, or when you speak ill of the dead, or you admit that you don’t have a bucket list.

The world really wants to control your every move and your every thought and if you want the world’s approval you are toast.

So, can you just picture the person who criticises you the most in your life. Can you picture them saying that one thing which hurts you the most, which makes you feel really stupid or slow or inappropriate or unsuccessful and can you feel over and over and over again I am what I am and I need no excuses!

And you need to do it over and over and over again, because hundreds and thousands of times you have believed that they were right and this is not fixable in one magical moment.

There is also an internal element to this issue. So many of us in this first world, driven culture, are fragmenting ourselves with our anxiety about getting everything done on time and perfectly.

We threaten ourselves constantly with the things not done and half done.

“I have to get my inbox clear, get started on a project, finish another one, always driving, clenched-fist-jaw-neck striving to be complete and at rest, at peace.”

Can you simply ask yourself what it would feel like to:

Let all things be as they are, resting in incompleteness.

Can you just feel this energy filter down into your body, into your heart, letting it soften and open and flow with the imperfections and endless incompleteness of life.

If you would like to have a face to face or Skype consultation about any issues raised in this blog, please contact me at realmark@icon.co.za

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How to stop being a rescuer by Mark Peter Kahn

I had one of the most spectacular moments ever in a therapy session last week.

I’m working with a mother and her 18-year-old daughter.

They have communication problems. The mother really cares about her daughter but she is controlling and wants to rescue her from all of the problems the daughter has in her life, particularly with men – not exactly a rare event!

The daughter is very sensitive and feels the mother’s anger and need to control her, which threatens the daughter and she withdraws.

This has been happening for many years.

Victim vs Mastery

Before I tell you what happened I want to give you little theoretical background.

Every moment of pressure and threat in our lives presents us with the opportunity to go into the Victim Position or the Mastery position. In the former, life controls us and we attack or retreat or try to rescue the other person

The Victim Triangle

I call this the Victim Triangle.

I adapted this from the Karman Triangle which says that we do persecutor, rescuer and victim.

My model says that all of the positions are Victim Positions.

In Mastery we allow life to flow as it is, not trying to control it but moving with grace and joy and love and power simply influencing life and responding to it with a clear mind and open heart and a relaxed body.

The rescue position which I would like to talk most about here now, is what I call unskilful compassion. It is misguided caring. It is the heart reaching out to try and fix something, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, or with the wrong person.

Attack is just that. Aggression and hostility.

Retreat is passive and hiding.

Some time after creating this model I realised that attack and retreat are simply fight and flight – our response to trauma and stress. This is a perfect reflection of reality.

This is what we do in response to pressure and threat.

Back to the mother and daughter.

The daughter expresses anxiety in a really tearful and desperate way about her fear of talking about the boyfriend because the mother will get angry and try to protect her from his lack of caring, his lack of sensitivity and his selfishness.

The mother listens well and tries to reach out to the daughter, but her heart is closed and the daughter withdraws further, in pain.

I ask the mother if I can work with this and she agrees, telling me that she feels like the mother cheetah, who needs to protect her cubs and will fight to take care of them. Instantly I can see that this ‘fighting’ is rescuing her daughter from the attack position.

When I say that we are rescuing from the attack position, what I mean is that we are being angry in our desire to help. Many people rescue from a place of empathy and warmth. This can also be very irritating and push people away but at least it doesn’t have the aggressive component in it.

The mother is trying to help her daughter, but all the daughter experiences is the mother’s need to control her.

Welcome to the somewhat oversized mother’s club!

This is the endless litany of manipulation that I see enshrouding the love that parents have for their kids.

So I say to the mother, “Can you welcome your need to protect your daughter from pain at the hands of her boyfriend?” Once she has done this, I then say, “What would it feel like to let go of your need to protect your daughter from the pain experienced at the hands of the boyfriend?”

(I have devoted an entire chapter to the detail of this releasing technique in my book if you want to explore it further there).

The mother firstly welcomes and owns the desperate manipulative need to control and protect the daughter and then, when she starts to let go, the most extraordinary thing happens.

The Extraordinary Moment

All of her anger and controlling desperation dissipates and for the first time in the session her eyes fill with tears and she becomes sad and says, “It feels like such a relief.”

And then the next completely extraordinary and fabulous thing happens.

The daughter reaches out her hand toward her mother in love and compassion.

Contrast this with the mother reaching out to the daughter earlier and the daughter withdrawing!

It is the mothers need to control and rescue and protect her daughter, that is devoid of love, which keeps the daughter at a distance.

In essence, the mother’s caring is distorted by her fear and the need to control her daughter’s life.

After this moment the entire atmosphere in the room changes and these two beautiful people are on the road to having a potentially entirely different relationship.

The Next Step

Of course there is another step in this process. If the mother isn’t controlling and manipulating her daughter she is not going to know what to say when her daughter talks about the boyfriend.

In addition, the daughter needs to let go of the sensitivity and pain from the past and begin to trust and give her mother the opportunity to be different with her around the boyfriend issues.

This takes some work.

What the mother needs to learn to do when the daughter talks about how the boyfriend has been unkind, is learn how dialogue in a compassionate way with her daughter if she is not going to be rescuing from the attack position.

So if for example the daughter says, “He’s been ignoring me for the last week.” Instead of responding with, “I told you he was no good for you” or “You are far too trusting of men,” or “You’re naive and gullible when it comes to men, do you know that?” The mother needs to say, “Does it hurt,” or “How does that feel?” or “Are you sad,” or “Tell me more.”

This isn’t very complicated but very few people know how to speak in this empathic and compassionate way and it takes some work to learn how to do it.

“The Personality Doesn’t Love, It Just Wants” – Byron Katie

I frequently refer to Katie’s comment in my work because it is so devastatingly true.

The mother cheetah protects her cubs with aggression and yes, this is love. But when the homo sapiens mother gets angry to protect her daughter, the daughter’s experience is simply the mother’s anxious, controlling personality dumping her emotional baggage onto the daughter because she is so frightened and needs to control the daughter’s life, preventing her from experiencing pain and well, just experiencing life.

Unskilful compassion – the rescue position – is the personality trying to find its way into a place of being loving and failing dismally.

It’s Not Just About Mothers And Daughters

This rescuing from the attack position happens everywhere in all relationships, not just between mothers and daughters. Many people use rescue because they feel guilty, because they can’t handle conflict because they can’t handle other people in pain. It happens in businesses, in friendships, in negotiations, in conflict…everywhere!

This rescuing not only pushes others away, it can be very irritating and it disempowers them.

What was so special about this interaction is that I’ve never seen someone get out of the rescue position so quickly, with this instant energetic response from the other person.

When we are rescuing we are trying to help someone else but it doesn’t work. We are trying to be caring but we fail in the process.

In this example dissolving the need to rescue enabled the daughter to open her heart, the precise goal that the mother wanted, i.e. to help the daughter, but the kind of love that daughter wanted was not to be given advice or to be lectured to about the boyfriend, she wanted to feel the mother’s love!!!

We are so misguided in thinking that when we are rescuing we are loving someone. We are not.

So much of the time, all people want from us is to be acknowledged for who they are and to feel loved and accepted for what they are, after all, they’re not very good at doing it for themselves, which is the core of my Self-Esteem work.

Not to be fixed

I’m not saying that there isn’t a time for sharing a strong opinion, but there is a different way to do it.

Let’s take the rescuing options I mentioned earlier:

“I told you he was no good for you.”

Rather than say this is a critical judgement one could say, in the light and gentle and empathic way, “Of course you know his personality still makes me nervous.”

Instead of, “You are far too trusting of men,” you could say, “You do know that the amount of trust you give him concerns me.”

And then finally, “You’re naive and gullible when it comes to men, do you know that?” Becomes, “When I see your innocence I want to reach out and protect you but I’m not going to.”

We can still have opinions but we can share them in a truly loving way rather than doing the desperate rescue story.

If you would like to have a one-on-one consultation or a Skype session to work with any issues raised by this blogs please contact me at reamark@icon.co.za

In love and Power

Mark Peter Kahn

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Our greatest suffering is that we do not feel complete as we are. Right here, right now! We have been trained to reject our distinctiveness. We live in a prison; a cage of guilt, anxiety and worthlessness, believing that we are never ‘good enough‘ – just as we are. To purchase, go to: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01N7HEKHO/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1481548503&sr=1-1&keywords=love+yourself+for+no+reason

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To read more blogs by Mark, go to: http://loveyourselffornoreason.com/blog/

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I feel deeply blessed to have heard thousands of stories of joy and pain brought to me by my clients over 34 wonderful years as a clinical psychologist in private practice and 17 as a management consultant. Their tears and suffering and pain and longing and transformation, is as deeply embedded in this work, as it is in me. Read more-> http://loveyourselffornoreason.com/about-mark-kahn/

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Are We In Control Of Our Lives?

When I first studied at university many years ago I was fascinated by the concept of free will versus determinism.

Are we in control of our lives or are forces outside of our control running us?

Are our personalities determined by nature – genetics – or the environment we grow up in – nurture?

A man with the unusual name of Burrhus Fred Skinner, the architect of behavioural psychology, was someone whom I rejected completely.

He horrified me to my core.

Skinner elaborated on the work of Pavlov and his dog which illustrated that all of our behaviour is conditioned by previous events.

In short, he said, we have no control.

I’m thinking to myself, “I’m going to be a psychologist, I have to believe in nurture and not nature, otherwise how much impact am I going to have on people?”

Entropy vs Syntropy

I think the idea was also horrifying to me because I had so much anxiety and depression, that to believe this was determined by something beyond my control left me feeling that there was nothing I could do about it. No one told me about the concept of syntropy.

Entropy says that all systems become more disordered and break down.

Syntropy says that creativity and higher levels of organisation emerge too, which means we transcend our conditioning.

Creative and destructive forces are an ongoing part of reality.

Over the years I have slowly come to believe that indeed we are significantly determined by factors beyond our control.

I would like to share my reasoning with you.

Can We Choose Our Destiny?

I was recently engaged in a discussion with some friends where they shared the idea that one can choose to take responsibility for one’s life. So the argument that they are presenting is that we are free to choose our behaviour, our thoughts and emotional response to any given situation.

Just take a look at yourself.

Ask yourself how many of the issues that you have worked on mentally and emotionally over the years have you changed?

My experience says that maybe we are successful with 10% or 15% of these issues, but what of the rest?

Some years ago I made a list of all of the areas of my life where I was still a victim. There were about 20 basic issues in the list and believe me I had spent thousands and thousands of hours working psychologically and spiritually on these issues and they were still there, unchanged.

I jokingly called this my immovable block of pathology.

Which is not to say that I haven’t grown immensely in many areas.

I recently did a process, which I had first done 3 years ago, in which one checks the ways in which our parents still push our buttons.

I had none.

It was very gratifying.

What I am saying however is that there are certain aspects of my psyche that have been totally beyond my ability to change up to now.

I am sometimes misinterpreted as judging myself for this.

What’s really interesting is that nobody stops to ask me if I am judging myself. They just assume I am.

The answer is I’m not.

I’m simply stating a fact that many aspects of my being have been totally out of my control to alter and I would state that the same applies to you.

And then, outside of yourself, there is the rest of the world. Friends, your intimate partner, your kids, government, your genetics, nature and the general course of history. How much power do you have to control them and that?

Death

We live in denial for much of the time in our lives. We are pretending to ourselves that a whole lot of negative emotions just don’t exist, which makes us feel like we are in control, when in fact we are not.

Take the idea of death.

Most people, tell me that they’re only afraid of the pain of dying and not the actual fact of being dead.

I will sometimes ask them if I were to put a gun to their heads and tell them that I’m going to shoot them and that they will die immediately without any pain, are they telling me that if I hook them up to a blood pressure machine and a galvanic skin response machine and to a heart rate monitor and an EEG maching, that when giving them this news of their impending death there will be absolutely zero reaction?

Of course not.

The reason I think that we are so frightened of dying is that we are so attached to the ego, our sense of identity.

Most people’s identities are locked into beliefs and values and roles that they play out in their lives.

So if you consider yourself to be an honest person or a reliable person, or somebody who has empathy, then if somebody criticises you and says you’re a liar or unreliable or that you lack empathy you are most likely to get very upset.

We have dozens of these qualities with which we identify.

At the most fundamental level we are identified with our bodies. So if you start to have a heart attack or you think you are going blind or the sensation in your legs disappears, the enormous anxiety most of us would experience is the ego, the sense of self that is being threatened.

To die probably means to lose the entire body and the contents of the mind and emotions. Which is why I believe this is such a frightening thing for anyone who isn’t spiritually Awakened.

The spiritually Awakened person is identified with spirit, not with the body or the mind or the feelings.

So the ultimate question around death and the loss of body and emotion and identity is, do I have control over my anxiety regarding this?

For most of us the answer is no!

Slaves To Conditioning

The conditioning which you have experienced around your identity, your ego, has predetermined your anxiety, it’s that simple.

You have almost zero choice in the matter.

In essence we are slaves to our conditioning.

Just about every anxiety and neurosis that you have was created by previous events in your life and if not that, then by genetics.

There is of course the field of epigenetics which says some genes can be changed through our environment and through the use of our minds, which limits this determinism to some extent, but how much can you access this ability?

Mothers And Their Kids

I cannot tell you how many mothers have brought their troubled kids to see me over the years and I have asked them when they first saw these difficulties in their child. The answers range from between the first week of birth, to the first three months of life. Which means that these kids were born with multiple challenges that they now have to manage throughout their lives.

They have no choice in the matter.

There are some writers and many motivational speakers who present the absurd notion that we can choose our thinking.

I find this utterly extraordinary that people can claim that they can control the thinking mind.

Of course some people can do this for a very short period of time. There are some meditators who can stop their thoughts and just become completely still with a very blank mind.

I think that’s about .01% of the population by the way – which is really fascinating because most people who have tried meditation tell me that they can’t stop their minds and so they give up meditating!

But those same meditators who can stop the mind while meditating lose this control as soon as they stop meditating, when the mind returns with a vengeance because the mind is a thought producing factory that functions 24/7 and is largely beyond our control.

There is in addition a price to pay for this shutting down of the mind. Many of these people repress a lot of negative emotions which then return big time.

Growing

One of the most important elements in being able to use psychotherapy is one’s capacity to grow. Over many, many years what I realised is that the people who do best in psychotherapy are the ones who want to grow the most.

And here’s the kicker.

Is the character trait of wanting to grow within your control or is determined?

I have the most extraordinary need to grow. For the last 40 years I have endlessly worked on myself psychologically and spiritually.

I think it’s just my personality I don’t think I chose it at all.I think it chose me and I think it’s the same for most people. I’m not saying that people cannot learn to grow or develop that trait and other traits, it’s just that this is not that common.

Brainworking Recursive Therapy (BWRT)

I was recently trained in the most revolutionary and powerful technique for working with specific incidents of trauma and stress that I have encountered in 35 years of practice.

The technique was created by a British man named Terence Watts. He had read about a piece of research from one Benjamin Libet a psychologist at the University of California in the US.

Libet received the virtual Nobel Prize for this work.

In 1983 Libet proved that we do not have free will in the way that we usually think of it. He asked people to note the moment that they decided to move a finger to mark the position of a moving dot on a clock face, while he recorded their brainwave patterns.

He discovered that the decision was made by the brain about one third of a second before the subject was consciously aware of it. In other words when the conscious mind decides to do something the brain has already made that decision beforehand.

In summary we do not have free will.

Conditioned patterns are set up in the brain that create decisions over which the conscious mind has little control. In this technique the therapist starts working with the most intense moment of emotion, before the thinking mind runs its story.

My first client was a woman of 60 who was sexually abused at the age of 10.

In 20 minutes we transformed the experience! I know that sounds unbelievable. But there you have it.

The effect on her life was immense. She said that she felt lighter and calmer than she had in years and hadn’t felt as warm and loving toward her husband in the last 7.

All of this in 20 minutes!

I worked with another woman who had never spoken previously to a large audience. She had to do a business presentation to 1,000 people. I watched the video of her presentation. She was unbelievably confident, relaxed, authentic and spontaneous. As her husband said to me, “She smashed it!”

Another client had been abandoned by women in two of his previous relationships. He had constant nightmares about his present girlfriend abandoning him. We did the process, again in about 20 minutes.

He had 2 dreams after the work, which were completely neutral i.e. none of the anxieties were there. Thereafter the dreams stopped completely. The anxieties dissipated.

I worked with the CEO of an IT company. He was very stressed by his work. We took his biggest stress, being deeply insulted by one of his major suppliers. Again this feeling of hurt and rejection was dissolved in about 20 minutes.

A month later he most fascinatingly told me that this supplier had started to be much more respectful toward him and said, “She is now ‘liking’ my Facebook posts!”

The process is also extraordinary in dealing with grief.

What’s fascinating about this work is that one of the reasons why we can’t change deep-seated emotional stress and trauma and pain is that we are trying to change it with the conscious mind, with the cerebral cortex, while the brain is already producing the negative emotions before the conscious mind is able to influence them.

With this technique we go right to the moment where the worst trauma or stress occurred and transform it from there. It’s truly astonishing.

Control and Self-Esteem

You might be asking at this juncture, “So what is the point of this discussion. So what if we have or do not have control”

My response to this is that the issue of control is fundamental to our well-being and happiness, to our Self-Esteem.

Why?

Well, you might have noticed how often I talk about how much we want to control the world, ourselves and our environment, 500 to 1,000 times a day in fact. If we are wanting to control everything so much and the reality is that we can’t, then an enormous amount of our energy is going into trying to do something which is bound to fail. That is going to have a devastating impact on our lives, yes? Failed attempts at control lead to stress, anxiety, loss of Self-Esteem and ultimately depression.

We do on the other hand appear to have come degree of choice. The world looks very different now from the way it did 400 years ago.

That is due to creativity.

Where did that creativity come from?

My sense is that it is Pure Consciousness that naturally and spontaneously creates ‘newness’, undetermined by the past. It is syntropy in action.What I am therefore recommending is that we honour the ways in which this creativity expresses itself while simultaneously surrendering to that over which we have no control. My experience in doing this is that it is liberation into freedom.

Celebrating Helplessness

 I recently created a process called Celebrating Helplessness.

Every client I have worked with using this process feels a lightness and a Stillness when they surrender to that over which they have no control.

I worked with a man whose wife had just left him.

He tried everything he could to get her back. I helped him to see that he was completely helpless in the face of her abandoning him. When he was trying to get her back he was lost in his desperate and helpless story of pain and anguish and trying to understand why she had left him. I helped him to acknowledge the complete helplessness he faced in trying to get her back.

He had tried everything he knew to get her back by the way and he had failed.

I then asked him to surrender to the helplessness that he was feeling around this issue and his entire energy transformed, the desperation disappeared. At times, out of habit, he would go back into the agony of his story of why she was doing this or that or not responding to him and I helped him to see that every time he left the sense of surrender he would freak himself out.

In other words as soon as he was trying to control something that was beyond his control he became desperate. When he surrendered to his lack of control he became peaceful and energised and still.

And so we get to the core of this blog.

When we surrender to our lack of control, what emerges is a great Stillness and the Stillness is not passive.

It enables a spontaneous and creative movement that is vital and alive and deeply spirited. And that Spirit is creative and is not determined or controlled by anything.

It is a great paradox.

To reach and connect with this energy requires a deep surrender to what is.

If you would like to pursue any of the issues raised in this blog in a face to face or Skype consultation, please contact mail me at realmark@icon.co.za

 To read any of Mark’s blogs, go to: http://loveyourselffornoreason.com/blog/

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 Aggression and the Google Robots.

Pic: Glynnis Garrod Photography

I have pondered long and hard for many years about the questions of anger, violence and the human longing for world peace.

Last week I came upon the most extraordinary piece of research that added something really spectacular to my understanding. Before I get to that I want to share with you my conclusions developed over time as to why we get angry and violent and why we live in a world so prone to starting wars.

·         People get angry in order to protect themselves. It’s a biological imperative called survival! If someone comes at you with a knife, aggression is useful as a protective mechanism. If someone attacks you with hostile words and you attack them back, the potential to subdue them with your aggressive words, body language and tone of voice, is increased.

 ·         It’s a great way to let somebody know how important an issue is to you. If somebody is providing you with the service and they are not really paying much attention to you, aggression can be very useful in getting them to jack up their focus. If someone isn’t listening to you and you yell at them to listen better it’s very possible that they will take you more seriously and improve their listening skills.

 ·         It’s a fabulous way to avoid the primary vulnerable emotions of helplessness, hurt, pain, shame and guilt and to simply get angry to cover up these emotions, the expression of which, makes us potentially more vulnerable to attack. This is in fact what I think is the predominant reason for there being so much aggression in interpersonal relationships. We feel vulnerable and helpless in so many ways in our interactions     with others but we don’t like acknowledging this vulnerability to ourselves, let alone to others and so aggression is a way of masking this vulnerability, hiding it and denying it and repressing it and then getting them to give us what we want.

 ·         A lot of people use the ‘aggressive willpower’ to get healthy, very successfully, typified by cancer patients visualizing healthy t cells killing cancer cells.

 ·         Aggression is a very useful – if ultimately painful – strategy to enhance Acquired Self-Esteem, the esteem that comes from success and approval. Human beings have a tremendous drive to feel better about themselves. The primary ways of doing this is are to angrily judge oneself to be superior and to win and achieve status. Aggression is a superb method to attain these outcomes, even if they are temporary. Aggression is energized and powerful and it drives focused behavior. Just watch a businessperson or sportsperson driven with the aggressive desire to win.

·         Finally, we are filled with fear, desire and greed and when these needs are not met anger is a strategy to get rid of the fear and to increase our chances of getting what we desire.

Google’s Robot Research

 The researchers tested the degree of cooperativeness of artificial intelligence – robots.

They ran 40 million turns, statistically somewhat significant, of a simple “fruit gathering” computer game that asks robots to compete against each other to gather as many virtual apples as possible.

All went well until the supply of apples dwindled. Then the robots turned aggressive.

Here’s the kicker.

The more complex the robot’s abilities the more sabotage, greed and aggression set in. The less complex the robots the greater the likelihood for peaceful cooperation.

The more complex robots were able to use more sophisticated tactics and as the researchers noted, “this model shows that some aspect of humanlike behaviour emerged as a product of the environment and learning…”

Maybe their wording is incorrect.

Maybe humans display robot-like behavior!

What this research is added to my understanding is that although obviously many of the emotional reasons for aggression remain valid there is another reason that has nothing to do with emotions.

Robots don’t have emotions, so the aggressive competition was based on something else. The best conclusion I can come up with from this – the researchers do not go into this detail – is that the more sophisticated one’s thinking software the more likely we are to strategise in a sophisticated way and that these strategies are likely to involve aggressive behaviours in order to maximise the outcome of the strategy.

I would like to take this discussion a little further by looking into the behaviour of animals.

Hunting Lions

 A pride of lions goes hunting. They only do this when they are hungry. As soon as their hunger is satisfied they relax in the shade and do nothing.

Google’s research suggests that the reason for this is their undeveloped cerebral cortex. They have a limited ability to think conceptually.

The next conclusion I make from this research is that if we were to increase the lions’s thinking capacity they might start to say the following:

“If we could kill more buck during a hunt than we could eat, then we could optimize our hunting skills better by having to hunt less often and have more leisure time and then of course we could salt the meat and preserve it and build refrigerators, so that it would last longer and we could hunt even less often. Come to think of it we could even sell the excess stock to other predators.

But now we are going to have to protect our stock from marauding jackals and the like and so we are going to have to build a stockade. To protect the stockade we need to learn to make bows and arrows to fight off all other lions who might want to steal our stock. Bows and arrows will leave us less at risk of being injured in fights. If other animals learn to make bows and arrows we can invent guns and cannons and how about gunships…!”

In a nutshell I’m saying that this research suggests that the more sophisticated the organisms thinking apparatus the more we begin to think into the future and to plan and strategize in order to optimize plans and then we are going to want to protect and grow these plans and aggression is one way in which we are going to do it.

What is so fascinating is that in writing this I’m finding myself wanting to inject emotion into the issue, yet Google’s research shows us that it’s not about emotion at all – the robots in their research had no feelings – which raises the seemingly absurd notion that there can be aggressive behaviour – as in the case of the robots – without emotion!

Is your mind boggling as much as mine?

You could of course argue that in the Google experiment the robots were programmed with the potential to knock out their opponent with a laser beam, so that only the potential for aggression was there. But why then did the more sophisticated robots use aggression more than the less sophisticated ones?

You could argue that the fact that the potential for aggression was programmed into the robots implies that it is not improved thinking capacity that caused the aggression but the fact that the robots were programmed with this capacity caused it. But why then did the less sophisticated robots not show this aggression?

I have more questions than answers on this one!

A Final Word

The big question being asked by many scientists and concerned individuals these days is the question of how dangerous artificial intelligence could become. Last year Stephen Hawking issued a warning that artificial intelligence could either be the best or the worst thing ever to happen humanity.

This research suggests that the worst option is a serious possibility.

The movie The Matrix may prove not to be science fiction.

 In love and power

Mark Kahn

To read more blogs by Mark, go to:  http://loveyourselffornoreason.com/blog/

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Are You Ready to Transform your Difficulties? I work with the following models: 

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Should one try to not only let go but experience goodwill towards those who have hurt us betrayed us? 

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