mental operating system – Time Travel Rescue

Manifesting…. YOU

What would you like to manifest?

For what reasons would you like to manifest, it?

Many of us would manifest money, respect, love, children, and power. “Life would be better if only I had _____,” so our mind says. Sure, I would love them too!

Nothing’s wrong with external phenomenon. “Other” people and things. Anything that’s not “me”. They can make us feel good, very good in fact, and sometimes even elated.

But will they truly make us happy? For how long can we put off the search, the yearning, for something or someone “better”?

How about if we just bypass these intermediaries, money, love, and reputation, things that we think will bring happiness, and go straight to the source and directly manifest happiness?

You see, instead of chasing after the people and things that we think will bring happiness, and finding out later that we’re still wanting. Why not just figure out what happiness means to us, what it requires from us, and work from there?

So first, figure out what happiness looks like and means. To you.

Wisely choose how we define it. The lower the threshold the happier we become. The higher the bar the worse we feel.

A wine novice enjoying their box wine feels happier than a wine afficionado complaining about their vintage Bordeaux.

To the novice, any box wine, and perhaps no wine at all, can help induce laughter and other merriment. To the expert, no wine can ever be good enough, if “good enough” requires meeting some unobtainable criteria for perfection.

What we define to be “good enough” determines how good we feel. It’s not just our job, mortgage, or relationships, that determine our life quality. The way we think has so much to do with it, so much more perhaps.

We are responsible for and the generator of our thoughts. That means WE have the power to lower the threshold for achieving happiness, and therefore the power to make ourselves happier.

If we want to be happier more often, and who doesn’t? Then let’s lower the condition for happiness. Be happy when it’s sunny, and be happy when it’s rainy. Be happy when we get a raise, and be happy when we don’t.

Don’t let external circumstances determine when and if we get to feel happy.

Allow ourselves to feel happy.

Let our happiness depend on nothing and no one.

For me, happiness can just be a deep sense of wellbeing. When it’s quiet inside. It doesn’t need to require reliving my first love, college graduation, or any other memorable life events. Or gaining a better home, career, reputation, and love in an imagined future. Actually, when it’s quiet inside, I can enjoy anything. And when I can enjoy anything, I feel happy. Don’t you feel the same way?

If happiness depends on nothing and no one, then what is left?

YOU

So, YOU, and maybe ONLY you, have the power to provide true happiness to yourself.

And who is the “you” to be manifested? That is a question worth considering. In fact, we must answer that for ourselves. Figuring out and answering that question may be one of the reasons for being here in the first place.

Who are the inner children

Healer and author Terrence Real wrote about our inner “wounded child”, “adaptive child”, and “natural child”. Who are they?

The wounded child and adaptive child for me are repetitive thought patterns and automatic reactions that stem from unreleased energy created by traumatic experiences.

Frozen thoughts born from memories that no one asked for or wanted.

They repeat because they’re frozen.

To free ourselves, they need to be thawed.

To heal, one must pay attention to the wounded and adaptive children – these frozen and stuck thought patterns. To see them, and to understand how they think when situations, i.e., “triggers” arise.

They generate reactivities in our lives. I see it now. I overreact to something, even today, when my inner children — deep memories and thought patterns — are activated. They are scared and they protect themselves, they might even fight back when they feel endangered.

Remember they are thoughts of a small child experiencing trauma.

They don’t have the life experience of an adult, to think logically. They only know what a small child knew up to that point. That’s why their fears are disproportionate to reality today, why they are often more sensitive and reactive.

They are deeply ingrained thought patterns born from traumatic events. From memory.

If we don’t watch them closely, they can and will take over in unhelpful ways even if they are trying to help.

Unwatched, they still run our emotions and act out in ways that no longer serve us. And often hurt us and others. But it’s not their fault. Don’t blame them. Don’t judge them.

Grievances, thoughts of them. Like “how dare they treat me this way”? These are disturbances generated from recurring thought patterns stemming from unreleased energies of the past.

And we have to watch them not just when triggers arise, but in general. They may be making fundamental choices in our lives.

We must connect with these different parts (memories) of ourselves, get to know them, accept them, love and protect them. Stop criticising, feeling ashamed, and ignoring them. And learn that we are the first responsible person for our own inner children and ultimate happiness.

The Most Important Connection

Connection is the most important and fundamental need. The deepest desire. We want to love and be loved. To hold and be held. We seek connection with family, friends, with romantic partners. Without the right connection, something important seems missing. We feel incomplete.

Many of us seek this connection our entire lives. Never satisfied. Never complete. I fear this fate from time to time, if I’m totally honest with you.

Some of us may feel this way even if we’re loved and surrounded by love from family and friends.

Was Jerry Maguire right?

Until we connect with ourselves, can anyone or anything make us whole? And complete us?

What’s missing in our lives is not that special someone else. What’s missing in our lives is us. Our own love and presence.

We’d do anything for those closest to us. We’d sacrifice ourselves. We’d never let them down.

Do we do the same for ourselves? Do we accept our ourselves, with all our “imperfections”, give ourselves the benefit of the doubt, and give ourselves the patience and grace that we would with those we hold dear?

I have a feeling that no one and nothing can truly complete us until we give ourselves the same love, acceptance, understanding, and patience that we’d give our most important loved ones.

Listen to your inner voice. The self doubts, fears, and criticism. And know that you’re not the voice, the doubts, fears, or criticism. Those are thoughts. You’re the awareness.

It’s time to connect with the inner voice and let them know that you’re never gonna give them up. ❤️

*With apologies to Rick Astley. 🙈

The voice who expresses those feelings needs our love and acceptance the most.

You deserve love and acceptance from yourself NOW. You don’t need to be perfect. You don’t demand your loved ones to be perfect to love them. So why demand yourself to be prefect to love yourself?

Get to know yourself. The first and most important connection. The most important of VIPs.

YOU can time travel and change the past.

The past lives only in our minds.

While we can’t physically move ourselves back in time to redo the past, we experience the past in our minds.

But the mental experience, now, after the fact, is as real as we get to relive the past.

The past can be a tough place to occupy. Full of regrets, anger, and hurt.

That’s not the past I wish to experience in the present. The present is all we have. We don’t want to spend time in the present being upset about the past.

We can change the past for the better. When we change how we see the past. Reinterpret and recomprehend the past. Then the past changes.

It’s time traveling.

If we learn to reinterpret and recomprehend the past in a more constructive way, then we can literally change the past. For the better.

That’s what Time Travel Rescue is about.

I feel better now…

I recently came out of a funk. and this is what I learned… 🧵

First: It’s okay to feel bad from time to time. Of course I feel down now and then. You probably do too. It seems to happen to everyone! Therefore, I don’t need to feel bad for feeling bad.

So why feel bad for feeling bad? Why torture ourselves? Just feeling bad without resisting may be enough. Be okay with the fact that I sometimes feel sad. Can you be okay with your sadness too?

We’ve all been taught that feeling bad is bad. We are taught to help someone feel better. We’re taught to make ourselves feel better right away! No one ever told me it’s okay to feel sad, or to feel bad in any way. “keep up the good work”. 😂

But you know what? I felt better after permitting myself to feel bad. I sat there, with my crummy feelings. I didn’t push them away, ignore them, run away, or distract myself.

I feel better now. Day by day.

If you feel bad, it’s okay! You’re okay! It’s normal to feel bad from time to time. You’re totally normal to feel that way. You’re not alone! We’re actually all in this together! You’ll be okay! ❤️

#mood #MentalHealthMatters

Mother and Father

I now think of “mother” as a state of being, not limited by a formal or biological connection. I have a mother. And I also have a Mother, the sum of my mother, aunts, grandmothers, and more. A powerful force in the universe, a loving and nurturing maternal energy.

Some of those who grew up not feeling fully accepted and loved might have been surrounded by love, actually. Along with the mother, other loved ones nurtured, protected, accepted, and loved them as a collective maternal presence. More powerful and loving together than any individual mother can be.

If we didn’t realize that, we might have underappreciated a great fortune of our lives. Some of us might have even spent years feeling lacking, unworthy, incomplete, and rejected while being completely enveloped by love.

I now think of “father” similarly. A protective, loving force with a tender side. Tough and maybe almost impossible to be completely fulfilled by one person all the time. So, let us think about, and feel, the love from our father, uncles, grandfathers, other family and even friends, and consider the possibility that the fatherly, paternal protective force we needed might have always been there, and will always be.

And may be, just may be, WE can nurture, accept, and love ourselves with that warm material glow. We can also provide, protect and love ourselves with that tough and tender paternal energy. In that sense, we become a part of the love that completes ourselves, we literally become the love that starts our healing.

Thank you for reading. 🙂

Bad news, but also really good news about managing depression…

“Depression never seems to go away, no matter the life circumstances.”
– a dear friend.

This struck like a thunderbolt. Profound.

If changing life circumstances don’t eliminate depression, could it be because life circumstances, in themselves, also don’t CAUSE depression? Could it be that life circumstances didn’t really make us depressed? (We’ll discuss in another post, the opposite idea, that life circumstances, in themselves, also don’t create happiness. True happiness comes from the inside.)

Life circumstances aren’t the real culprit of our depression. The real cause is lodged deeply in our subconscious. It comes from the false ideas, beliefs, or assumptions that we’re weak, powerless, not good enough, unworthy of love, and incomplete. That we’re merely our physical body and circumstances.

So we try completing ourselves, forever proving our worth, searching for love, earning degrees, making parents proud, getting married, and buying houses, etc. While all these can be wonderful, does any guarantee long term happiness and eliminate depression?

That sounds pretty bad, depressing, even.

BUT here’s some very good news.

If it’s not what’s on the outside that depresses us, then it must be what on the inside, right?

That means we don’t need to change our life circumstances to eliminate depression; to do so we must change ourselves, from the inside.

But what do we change? Our minds, our thoughts. Our life changes when we change ourselves inside, and we change ourselves when we change our thoughts.

Here’s the great news. Thoughts are completely self-generated. The only one in the universe who can change those self-generated thoughts, is the thinker. YOU.

Can you think of any other person who can think the thoughts in your head?

“Bullskirt!”, you say, “my inconsiderate neighbor’s dog whizzed in my yard and THAT’S why I’m in a bad mood! They just disrespect me!”

But you’re in a bad mood BECAUSE you think you’re in a bad mood.

Don’t believe it? Have you ever been in a good mood when you THINK that you’re in a bad mood? Have you ever been in a bad mood when you THINK you’re in a good mood? Your mood is whatever you think it is. Good or bad. Either way, you are right, as Henry Ford supposed to have said.

YOU are the only one who can think a thought for you.
Neither your inconsiderate neighbor nor her dog can think your thoughts. Your neighbor can be inconsiderate, and her dog can whizz in your yard, but neither can think a single thought in YOUR head.
Only YOU can think your thoughts.
– Cody

Assuming you agree that you are the only one who can think your thoughts, let’s take the next step.

What thoughts should we examine? We must identify and evaluate the fundamental ideas and assumptions that run our lives, our mental operating system. (see We live in The Matrix, Part I). Some fundamental ideas and assumptions are essential for civilization, many serve us very well, but a few or more don’t. Let’s call the ones that don’t serve us “Malware”.

Our life’s work is to debug our mental operating system and release or repair the Malware. In the process we reveal and regain our authentic self. We let go of the false ideas mentioned earlier, realize and believe that we’re not just our physical body and circumstances. We are so much more. We’re whole, we’re enough, we deserve love, and we don’t need anything or anyone else to make us happy.

Here’s the catch: so many Malware burrow deep in our bones, they define how we think the world works, so much so that we take them for granted, take them to be true without realizing that we do. Without even realizing their existence.

We may be unaware of our deepest, most fundamental ideas and assumptions. Only a clear and accurate mindset about who we are can uncover the underlying mental codes and logic that form the operating system of our lives.

While that may seem challenging, I would pursue happiness with the thoughts I think and the feelings they can produce, rather than condition my happiness on life circumstances over which we have no real control. I can influence my thoughts. At least no one else really can. Remember, only one person in the universe can think the thoughts in my head or yours.

Let’s talk about how to find that Malware in future posts.