Manufacturing Gratitude

It’s ok not to be grateful. Especially for something you never asked for. Especially when you do not feel grateful. Especially if someone is telling you to be grateful.

Shame on them.

Gratitude is an emotion. Emotions happen when they happen, not when you tell yourself to feel them. You are sad when sad, glad when glad and mad when mad. Emotions simply are. A product of the material world, they are a sensory response to the current social environment. You can’t tell your fingers to feel warm in a snow storm. You can’t tell your face not to feel hot in the sun.

Why do you think you can tell your feelings to experience gratitude?

Gratitude bubbles up from inside you when conditions feel balanced and satisfactory…TO YOU. Your personal definition of balance or satisfaction may be wildly different than someone else’s, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with your perspective. Being told you should be grateful is being treated with contempt. It is telling you to judge yourself and your feelings, and find yourself guilty.

Beware giving yourself that same message! When you ponder your feelings and determine you shouldn’t have them, you are being unfair to yourself. Try telling your hand not to feel the burner under your palm. Same task, but because we fail to recognize our intangible emotions as an extension of our nervous system, we treat them like a part of our soul.

Emotions are information. Not actions nor facts.

Gratitude is a breathtakingly glorious emotion and it’s understandable those experiencing it want you to feel it too. Fake it til you make it, practice gratitude, choose thankfulness. Great ideas, but missing the point.

Manufacturing a facade of an emotion does generate pathways of practiced nerve patterns. Acting out routines does create habits. This much is true. But the emotion of gratitude is spontaneous and joyful, not habitualized and mechanical.

Funny thing, when it wells out of you, you realize it doesn’t want to follow those practices, routines and habits! Gratitude wants to playfully take you out of your comfort zone into your curiosity. It drives you to tears with its intensity but not to acts of creating lists.

You are grateful, or you are not. There is no try. And that’s just fine.

Dissatisfaction is a sign you are ready to grow. No matter how well-appointed the nursery might be, every child reaches the stage of needing to experience more, explore more, discover more. Gratitude and satisfaction go hand in hand, with imbalance chasing both of them away.

What imbalance exists that is pressuring for change? Curiosity demands an exploration when gratitude is nowhere to be found in a situation. And in the Moment when the source of imbalance is revealed, appreciation will flow through your veins because suddenly the game is afoot and your journey will begin!

So embrace a lack of gratitude as being the summons to the post, where you are to begin a steeplechase toward a higher level of understanding yourself. From discomfort comes growth and after growth comes gratitude!

Triggers

Every single one of us plays, and is being played, like the Operation game. And that game board sits on a pivoting table in a boat in the middle of an ocean of emotional turmoil!

We all have our sensitive touch points, our triggers that make us aversive and obnoxious when we’ve been poked with carelessness or imbalance. That’s our feeling mind or judgemental brain having a knee jerk response to a perceived threat and bypassing our wise mind to send out a growling response in hopes the source of discomfort backs off.

Effective, no doubt! But since it also sets off alarms in the other players, such a response heightens everyone’s anxiety and distress. Plus so very often, the source of distress is a memory, an echo of a moment, not the reality of the present.

The tighter those operating spaces, the harder someone is to get along with, the more people avoid trying. Unfortunately that becomes a positive feedback cycle, a self-fulfilling prophecy because the more unpleasant a person is, the more people treat them with unpleasantness, the more intense their unpleasant responses become.

To escape the trauma drama of conditioned reflexive patterns requires stepping into the present in an intentional and mindful way. Seeing your own self from a distance and examining your Operation game to determine what spots you can safely widen, which triggers are legitimate boundaries that keep you in balance, and what parts of you can be cracked wide open and offered freely to any and all comers.

No expectations. Only boundaries. Don’t trust anyone but love them anyway.

We have every right to establish our boundaries but no right to growl and flare up and traumatize others without fair warning. In the Operation Game, the raw nerve edges are visible…and so are the contents of the target spaces. That makes it a fair game because the player can see the object actually exists and is available for pursuit, while they know what margins for error they have in the effort.

Life doesn’t come with that fairness so the only way one person learns to recognize the invisible bubble which is personal boundaries is to bounce up against it. To be fair, first offense demands a warning shot not a kill shot. That makes sense.

But that’s a loophole exploited by those whose elementary personality drives them to use others to either raise or lower their own energy level in their search for stability. Warning shots identify a boundary the first time. A second warning shot is no longer a warning, it’s a bluff, and becomes background noise. An expectation, not a boundary. Expectations are demands and demands are a type of resistance to Synergy and our purpose.

Examination of our personal triggers frees us from patterns of resistance, instability, and imbalance. We can set off our own raw edges just as easily as other people can. We must use our wise mind to calmly and serenely look upon our game play and remove our expectations of others while setting our boundaries. And then we need to offer our whole selves to others with open vulnerability, prepared both to gently advise when a boundary gets struck the first time, but firmly remove ourselves the Moment that same person intentionally chooses to touch that same boundary a second time. Boundaries protect our core selves. If we don’t enforce them, we lose who we are, we spurn that precious gift Synergy gave us, of curiosity and hope and joy.

A boundary is a plan of how to remove yourself from an unbalanced situation, not an action plan to stop the other people in the situation. You can’t control others, or situations any more than you can stop the boat rocking on the ocean during a storm. Yes, the patterns we have structured our Operation circuit board around do sometimes work to temporarily stabilize the game board but since those actions and reactions arise from feelings and judgements the balance is temporary. The eye of the storm. Setting the entire board game on the grounded Moment right Now keeps it level and firm for future game play.

Drama Queens and Production Kings

The closer an element is to stability, the more reactive it is.

The closer people are to being stable, the more volatile they are.

When something is so close to fruition, so very near fulfillment, the drive for completion is intense. When every new encounter could be the key, every corner turned the final one, of course you are going to wholeheartedly leap into every Moment with the expectation that THIS is the one!

Aye. There’s the rub.

Expectations. Of others. Of self. Of Synergy. Putting the burden on them to be what is needed for stability, rather than trusting that satisfaction is an ongoing long term process of sequential Moments accumulating the necessary energy for stability.

Granted, the passionate person has a greater likelihood of finding their passionate soulmate in one Moment, one first glance, than those with less volatility but the likelihood of false starts and misreads also increases exponentially.

Volatile elements are on a continuum called the Reactivity Series. Not all elements have the same affinity for electrons and so one type of atom can strip the electrons off another type of atom even if it is in a stable bond. This is the nature of elements. It is neither right nor wrong, it simply is the nature of the core structure of each element and the pattern card of how the element interacts with other atoms.

Volatile people can unsettle and unbalance even the most composed of individuals. Personalities so close to stability as to be volatile truly live in the moment, but not in a surrendered, accepting way. Each moment is experienced with passionate immersion but is not balanced upon the scaffold of all previous moments, instead experienced as a stand alone, without antecedents or consequence. The need in the moment strips the available energy, even if only temporary and unintended, and later regretted.

Moments, to be effective, must be lived intentionally or they are simply a missed opportunity. Drama Queens and Production Kings have a handle on embracing the moment but not the intentionality. So close they can taste it but it slips away and they don’t understand why.

So on to the next Moment.

Until they either meet a Noble gas which cannot be perturbed, and learn the resonance of true surrender and acceptance, or they discover their soul mate and stability, or they are forced inside themselves so deeply by trauma they reconnect with their wise mind and it guides them into intentionality.

Judgement and shame are not on any of these roads. We are what we are, our core structure and our coping strategies. Acceptance of that reality is necessary before stability can be attempted.

Volatile elements and volatile people are only a short but energetic leap away from satisfaction. It just has to be done with eyes wide open and blind faith.

Judgement Aside

We are who we are. There is no wrong nor right, good nor evil, bad nor good. There are consequences and fallout from our choices, and those cause balance or imbalance, satisfaction or dissatisfaction.

It is our short circuit which leads us to judge. That is not our role. Our role is to live with curiosity and hope, making choices in the Moment that will bring stability to our elemental personality and joy to our Eternal mind.

If we truly embrace Mindfulness and Enlightenment and follow through to the ultimate understanding of reality, then we have to accept that everything is as it has to be. Which means things we perceive as evil or wrong had to happen…thus they are not wrong, they are an adjustment to compensate for imbalance.

Each person acts to satisfy their needs in each moment. Some people are able to do so without cost to others, while some must do it at the expense of someone else. To shame people for these situations is to work against Synergy, to act in judgement and to take a position of superiority. Hubris.

Humility and acceptance cause no harm if given sincerely. False humility, that which feels hurt when not honoured or respected, is not authentic.

True surrender means being walked upon, being martyred, being vulnerable while still understanding there is purpose to the pain and beauty in the sacrifice.

All who live join Synergy in death, their Eternal consciousness freed from the sensory ties and judgements…and temptations…of reality. No matter what they did on Earth, they will find acceptance and comfort. Every act on Earth is an attempt to refine Datter and balance Matter, not elicit evil or judge worth.

To fight the short circuit, to forsake judgement and condemnation, to be open and vulnerable even to those known to exploit and violate, takes immense courage and faith.

And sometimes merely walking out the door in these uncertain times takes incredible courage and faith.

Courage and faith, and patience, get rewarded with peace and joy, in one lifetime or the next.

Walk with hope and curiosity, faith and courage, joy and happiness, and Synergy walks with you.

Almost in the Moment

Living in the moment is what we were designed to do but the short circuit in our brain coupled with our elemental personality can generate complications! Can make moments that are out of alignment with purpose but still based on the sensation of being in the Now.

Living in the moment with intentionality is the key to finding balance, stability, serenity and joy. Living in the moment but following impulses and urges without understanding where they originated – the judgemental mind or the feeling mind or the wise mind – creates dysfunction and dissatisfaction.

Our elemental personality type, with the need to either drop down an energy level or rise up in energy, feeds our feelings. When not satisfied, we get urges to interact with other people, to use them to meet our needs. That is absolutely fine, it is how we were designed to be, how we live in a society. If we didn’t have needs to be met, we wouldn’t be part of a community in the first place! We would live solitary, isolated lives.

For every person who needs to give away, there is a person who needs to receive. Soulmates who can be fulfilled while fulfilling because just like chemical bonds, pairings meet the objective of completing the unstable shell and bringing satisfaction. Equal and opposite forces bring balance, stability and lasting bonds.

The closer we feel we are to satisfaction, the greater the desire to experience it. The more intense the drive for fulfillment. The more volatile the response to the opportunity to jump up an energy level, or jump down. Because it’s right there, peace and serenity, just within reach, just a Moment away…thus in fact those whose behaviour seems to be the least peaceful are in fact the most ready to take that leap and find stability. But that very volatility gets in the way of making the right leap in the Moment, when fears and doubts cause the opposite to stability.

Need creates vulnerability. Vulnerability generates fear. Fear foments distrust. Distrust breeds resistance. Resistance crucifies Moments.

Trusting ourselves, Synergy, and others is critical to truly surrendering, to living intentionally in the Moment, and to finding satisfaction in personal relationships.

Emotional Distancing

Not from others. From yourself. To protect your Eternal self from the influence of the short circuit between emotions, thoughts, and who you really are at your core.

When an emotion comes calling at the door to your mind, it does have the right to be there. Emotions are essential to survival and provide information, sensory data about the environment. They must be accepted and welcomed with curiosity, even affection, because they are childlike in their simplicity.

But keep your thoughts and behaviours at a safe distance because emotions can be contagious and acting with them, giving in to their impulses, is unproductive for your core self. Treat your emotions like a toddler, one with story upon story to share with you but much of their information is filtered through a blurred lense. Don’t reject or abandon the toddler when they give you misinformation. They are doing the best they can.

Striking up a conversation with unpleasant emotions is a necessary challenge. Discomfort fuels the drive for growth and tells you there are changes you need to be making in the moment. Chatting with your fear, trading blows with your anger, or consoling your sorrow are the only ways to get to know them. Understand them. Ease their dissatisfaction. Balance them.

Each emotion is a valuable indicator of your present situation. Synergy created them to nudge us into action, not into judgement. Engaging with emotions provides Datter so long as a feedback loop of thoughts and associations doesn’t trap you in the past or fling you into the future.

That’s why it’s important to keep your emotions at a healthy distance. Then you can ensure you maintain function in the Moment by listening to what your emotions have to say and then allowing them to be on their way and not take up residence in your mind.

The Shine of Stability

Have you ever met someone and they radiated contentment, compassion and acceptance? Without saying a word, they made you feel safe and secure? Did you find yourself fascinated by them, unable to look away as they went about their life? Were you surprised to catch yourself saying things you never thought you’d say or sharing your innermost thoughts after only the briefest of connection?

That is what it feels like to be around someone who is elementally stable and neutral. Someone living in the Moment. Someone who’s surrendered to the present and has no expectations of those around them, only boundaries. They shine with serenity, vulnerability, and hope and it is infectious and appealing. They shine with Synergy.

Some people are naturally born with greater stability in their core structure, meaning they can be neutral not only when alone but also interacting with others, and have always been that way. On the Periodic Table the elements displaying this calm, peaceful behaviour even in the presence of other atoms, the family of elements on the right, are known as the Noble Gases. Group (1)8, with 8 electrons in the boundary energy cloud.

Noble meaning non-reactive. Stable. Not volatile. The clouds of electrons surrounding the Noble gases are satisfied, meaning they do not need to discharge negativity or collect it. The stability of Noble gases is what all other elements are striving for via volatility and reactivity. Every atom wants to feel the fullness of satisfaction, the contentment of completion, and is capable of attaining it.

Both positives and negatives exist in every atom and every personality. They must, because balance requires opposing forces. The Noble Gases are electrically balanced and internally stable. Only in extreme circumstances will they react with other substances. Their behaviour is the same when in isolation and when exposed to the environment.

Noble Gases are used to light up neon signs, fill helium balloons, even prevent reactions between other elements.

People with stability and serenity play a similar role, lighting up others, lifting their spirits, and insulating them from volatility.

Other elements become like Noble gases through forming bonds, through developing relationships and interactions, in order to either release negativity or to collect it.

People too become stable by forming bonds, developing relationships and interactions, aspiring to find satisfaction and live in the Moment.

Clouds of Negativity

Atoms have a positive nucleus, a core of protons balled up a bit like our sun, while clouds of negative electrons orbit the nucleus similar to planets (well, more like asteroid belts) orbiting the sun. The charges of an atom add up evenly to make the atom energy neutral when it exists alone in a vacuum. Neutral does not mean stable, though. Stability on an atomic level comes from satisfaction within the electron clouds.

Most humans are also a mix of positive and negative emotional charges and are vulnerable to giving or receiving negativity in interactions with other people in an attempt to find satisfaction and stability. A rare few are so internally stable that no matter what is going on around them, they don’t transfer negativity and in fact bring those around them relief and protection from emotional volatility.

Expose most atoms to other atoms and they react to one degree or another over time, because most atoms are vulnerable to either losing or gaining electrons. A small number of atom types are so internally balanced that they never lose or gain negativity except in the rarest, most exceptional circumstances and are often used to insulate other elements from the environment.

Balance and stability requires the equalization of opposing forces. It is not about the eradication of negativity, it is about accepting the presence of negativity and finding ways to counterweight it.

Chemical reactivity comes from a lack, from empty spots in the outside layer of the electron clouds surrounding every atom. Atoms lacking enough electrons, enough negative energy, desperately seek to change that imbalance. The magic number is eight, with few exceptions, and elements just shy of 8 electrons in their peripheral energy cloud will grab onto the nearest negativity to fill themselves up. While elements with few electrons in the outer shell will give them away to drop down to the lower energy level for stability.

People either try to elevate or lift themselves up to the next energy level or drop themselves down to the one below. They use people and things around them, either boosting themselves, or boosting others.

It’s elemental!

Spiteful Pleasure?

We’re told to feel guilt and shame for the thoughts in our head. We self-chastise for offenses we didn’t commit, merely imagined. But…really…it’s NOT the thought that counts.

Thoughts and feelings are mere shadows in the Mattersphere, somewhat perceptible but not able to take action on their own. You are your actions, not your thoughts, in the material world. Even in the Eternal world, you are not your thoughts because thoughts are data fragments floating around in our local hard drive brain, they were not supposed to take up residence! They will not follow us in the present moment or in death.

Ever taken spiteful malicious pleasure in someone else’s misfortune and then felt awful afterward? Even though you had nothing to do with their circumstances and did not bring about their pain, did you feel guilt and criticize yourself for not being a good person?

Why?

What did you DO to deserve your self-condemnation?

You had a thought.

That thought was satisfying to you. Remove judgement from it, because judgement is a construct better left to Eternity. The thought was not malicious or spiteful. It was simply a thought, and your satisfaction in it simply satisfaction. Accept both without guilt or shame.

Synergy created us to be curious and hopeful and to seek satisfaction. Feelings are supposed to be sensory responses to the social environment, not tied to our internal environment. Thoughts are meant to pre-process Datter, and then disappear, not get stuck in loops of thought – feeling – thought – feeling.

The short circuit of our self-awareness makes us judge ourselves about the sources of satisfaction and pleasure, whether a thought or an act, and then society perpetuates that judgement. Notice children have no shame or guilt? If you learn to live in the Moment and accept your thoughts as simply information triggered by the events and circumstances around you, and you let go of contempt and criticism of those thoughts, and even of past behaviours. Did you hurt someone? Let it go but don’t do it in another Moment. Did someone hurt you? Let it go but keep safe boundaries in another Moment.

When you occupy the Now, there is no wrong or right. There is acceptance, curiosity, hope, joy, growth and gratitude. No matter whether the Moment includes pain and strife or ease and comfort, acceptance and satisfaction can be found. Every one of us is trying to survive the best we can in each moment, and each moment is what it needs to be.

Pain and Suffering

Pain is part of the price of admission for living, for growing character and resilience. Suffering is voluntary and arises from resistance to the reality that people will disappoint your expectations, goals will fail to fulfill you, and you will let yourself down when you turn out not to be who you believed you were.

No expectations, only boundaries. Even for your own mind and body. Surrender your self-expectations, too, allowing instead discovery of your purpose. That is how to avoid suffering.

Physical and emotional pain only interfere with life if we allow them to. We hear stories about mind over matter and admire feats of courage where someone overcomes great discomfort in moments of crisis. Are those people different? Do they have a gift?

No, they were present in the Moment and received strength and tools to escape the situation using their own existing core emotional and physical structure. They were not distracted by doubts or fears of not being good enough or making mistakes.

Pain arises from imbalance. Physical imbalance comes from structural or chemical deviations from optimum. One person’s source of pain is not the same as another’s, a debilitating deficit for me is not a source of dysfunction for you. Addressing them requires the use of all the escape room tools and resources available in your situation. The process of healing the imbalance must start from inside yourself, from identifying what it feels like. Physical suffering sometimes comes from the uncertainty and fear of not being able to articulate the nature, quality and parameters of the pain, not necessarily the dysfunction itself.

Emotional imbalance comes from social and relationship deviations from optimum. One person’s source of emotional pain is not the same as another’s, a debilitating toxicity for me may not be a source of dysfunction for you. The process of healing the imbalance must start from inside yourself, from identifying what it feels like. Emotional suffering sometimes comes from the uncertainty and fear of not being able to articulate the nature, quality and parameters of the pain, not necessarily the dysfunction itself.

Each of us is individual and unique. Sometimes we suffer because we are told we should, because another person experienced pain in a similar situation. Pain is subjective, it is in the mind, and can be used for growth.

All pain has purpose. No suffering does. Giving meaning and reason to pain alleviates suffering. Spending a Moment to investigate the pain with curiosity and acceptance will reveal to you the purpose. Embrace the pain, because at the moment it is your reality and all that is, is as it must be.

And, if you have been suffering…forgive yourself. That moment is over and a new one just beginning.