The World Needs More Heart
I am looking forward to participating in the Resiliency Track for The Awesome Event happening this weekend October 27-29 in Charlottesville, VA. In-person and virtual tickets are still available. Considering recent events in the town, it feels poignant that an event focused on awakening the human potential and for inspiring solutions is being held there. Greater access to and a deeper experience of resilience is one of the most clear and practical benefits of having an understanding of the Three Principles. Understanding how the mind works and our innate ability to experience the infinite, formless potential of our true nature is more than a theoretical understanding. It has very pragmatic implications.
This week was a great example for me. I have had a challenging week with a lot of emotional intensity. It was a week where I would feel bowled over by my emotions, would find my bearings, and get bowled over again. I was living the Chumbawamba song Tubthumping without the whisky drinks.
I get knocked down, but I get up again
You are never gonna keep me down
I get knocked down, but I get up again
You are never gonna keep me down
I get knocked down, but I get up again
You are never gonna keep me down
I get knocked down, but I get up again
You are never gonna keep me down
By the weekend my mind was so stirred up I found it hard to settle. I noticed I was feeling restless and having a hard time concentrating. Then, in a conversation with my husband, it became apparent that I had not been taking out my low mood on him. He said he noticed I had been testy a couple of times, but nothing major. This caught my attention.
It lifted my head out of the cloud of my suffering. I stopped focusing on how uncomfortable I was feeling, and noticed that I was actually navigating my suffering more gracefully. This naturally shifted my focus from what wasn’t working to what was working. It was not a technique I was using. It happened organically. When I realized I had been behaving better than I had in the past, I started to see how this time was different. I was not making my experience mean as much as I would have previously. Even though I was suffering, I was taking my thinking more lightly. I was being gentle with myself. I was not worry so much. It was helpful to be reminded that progress is not measured by not having the intensity of the human emotional experience, but by how I respond to it.
I remember George Pransky speaking at the One Solution Conference in Oslo a few years ago, and he shared how human beings are not designed to do well under chronic stress. Chronic stress is detrimental to us on mental, emotional, and physical levels. This was commonsense to me, but I was surprised when he said, that human beings actually do well if they go in and out of stressful experiences. We actually demonstrate great resilience if we can go in and out of stress. I thought avoidance of stress was the goal, but George’s talk helped me to see that I did not need to be stress phobic. I saw that the human design is naturally resilient and can even handle high stress when it is not chronic.
This is what had been different for me this past week. I had been going in and out of the experience of stress. Not because I had had been going in and out of stressful events. In fact, there seemed to be a confluence of events that could be labeled as challenging that were piling up on top of each other rather than one resolving before the next one arrived. Yet, my experience was that I was going in and out of stress.
The understanding of the Three Principles helped me to see in a very practical way that I am experiencing my thoughts and not the events in my life. I was able to recognize that my experience of stress was determined solely by how stirred up my thinking was, how much I identified with those stirred up thoughts, and nothing else. Seeing this drastically reduced my anxiety and my resistance to my experience. I have not enjoyed the feelings of dread and insecurity, but knowing where they were coming from, my imagination created by thought in the moment, gave me a highly beneficial perspective.
This context allowed me to experience greater resilience as I weathered my emotional storms. I didn’t waste my energy trying to change the weather. I didn’t judge myself because of the barometer of my mood. Instead, I enjoyed the moments of sunshine when they appeared and did my best to relax when I was in the thick of it.
My ability to bounce back was more apparent because I wasn’t adding more thoughts of concern and worry to my already stirred up thinking. I decided to see if my internal emotional experience really would stabilize if I left it alone. I wondered, “Will it work when I feel this bad?” And it did. Not only did I find myself stabilizing over and over again, but also my experience when I wasn’t stabilized was easier — hence, my ability to not turn into a complete head case with my husband.
I had more laughter, lightheartedness, and joy overall. Then when I was sucked into the low mood feelings and caught up in the thought storm, feeling despondent and discouraged, I didn’t panic. I did focus on it more than I would have liked, but I also had perspective. I knew it was temporary, and recognized it was a reflection of my thinking not circumstances. I knew I could endure these feelings in an acute way because they were not chronic. There is psychological freedom in knowing I have the capacity to tolerate all of my feelings and don’t need to try and protect myself by trying to manage and control them.
My hope is that this becomes more apparent for all of us. May we all look more in the direction of our innate resilience and ability to stabilize. As Sydney Banks said, “If the only thing people learned was not to be afraid of their experience, that alone would change the world.” We naturally drop into our heart and experience the innate state of love that is our true nature when we aren’t compelled by our thoughts. The less we have on our mind, the more we can feel our heart, and isn’t that what the world needs — more heart!
Rohini Ross is passionate about helping people wake up to their true nature. She is a psychotherapist, a transformative coach, and author of Marriage (The Soul-Centered Series Book 1). She has an international coaching practice helping individuals, couples, and professionals embrace all of who they are so they can experience greater levels of wellbeing, resiliency, and success. You can follow Rohini on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, watch her Vlogs with her husband, Angus Ross, and subscribe to her weekly blog on her website, rohiniross.com. Rohini and Angus have an upcoming Free Webinar: The Three Principles and Relationships Monday October 30th at 7:30 pm PST as well as an upcoming workshop, Relationship Essentials, November 11 -12, 2017 in Topanga, CA click here for more details.
Christine Heath & Judy Sedgeman – Spirituality and Resilience
When you no longer give authority to the fear-based thoughts in your consciousness, all you are left with is happiness. Through the teachings of Sydney Banks, you can see how your psychological functioning works, which makes you less compelled to follow those thoughts that do not serve you. Becoming more aware of the wholeness and integration of both your human and spiritual natures helps to ground you in the unchanging essence of who you are, and ride out the ups and downs of your emotional experience more gracefully. Accepting the normalcy of your humanness will naturally reduce your anxiety and fear and enhance your joy and happiness in each moment. By placing less pressure on yourself to feel a certain way or be hung up on self-improvement, you may find that low moods do not derail or debilitate you; instead, you will become much more attuned to your innate wellbeing and peace of mind and experience more happiness as a result.
Greater psychological freedom is the gift that keeps on giving. How grateful would you feel if you no longer had to listen to your negative, self-punishing and painful inner narrative, day in and day out? Understanding the role of thought and recognizing how it creates your feelings of insecurity and self-doubt is truly liberating! You will be better able to hear and heed your inner wisdom and become less driven by the noisy thoughts of fear and constriction. As an ongoing practice, this allows you to more fully experience your resilience and reach a greater sense of clarity about how you want to move forward in your life. As a result, you can live in a way that feels authentic and true in every area, including your career, family, home, creative expression, play, relationships and overall well-being.
Your ability to enjoy life comes from being present in the moment rather than caught up in habitual, negative thoughts that take you out of the Now. Sydney Banks’ wisdom supports you in becoming aware of how you get seduced by your limited personal thinking and thus, create a painful reality of misunderstanding, fear and restriction. When you recognize how and why this happens, you can step free of the pattern. This understanding assists you to dismiss unhelpful thoughts and not take them seriously. Unlike traditional self-help or therapy, experiencing more psychological freedom and enjoyment does not rely on techniques. There are no magic bullets on the path of well-being. All you need to do is follow an internal compass that points to the truth of who you really are—beyond transient thoughts to your unchanging, formless essence.
In our culture, success is often associated with hard work and narrowly defined as material gain. However, authentic success, as shared by Sydney Banks, includes such intangibles as happiness, well-being, love, joy, compassion, and peace of mind that are innate in each one of us, along with outward goals and achievements. It honors the whole person in all walks of life, whether you are a professional, leader, executive, solopreneur, employee, mother, teacher or student. From this knowing and experience, you can access the infinite wellspring of love that is your essence, then share your gifts with the world from a place of fulfillment and meaning, through a profound understanding of the interaction between your psychological and spiritual natures. While conventional success can deplete you, authentic success only fills you up.
Are you self-critical, hard on yourself, and constantly trying to “fix” whatever you think is wrong with you? Perhaps you have tried all kinds of different personal growth techniques and spiritual practices in the hope of solving all your problems. This cycle can be exhausting and never-ending, because there will always be something to improve about yourself, from that mindset. Sydney Banks’ teachings can help you to see how your humanness is normal and not something that needs fixing: as a spiritual person, you don’t need to change or eradicate your humanness! Seeing yourself as normal allows you to love and accept yourself exactly as you are—warts and all. Adopting this perspective naturally brings out the best in you and helps to find peace with your personality. Self-love and self-acceptance is your natural state, and any disconnection from your true nature is only temporary. What a relief!
One of the first areas people often experience profound transformation from the teachings of Sydney Banks is in their relationships, both personal and professional. While it often seems like another person’s irritation, anger, indifference, insensitivity, rudeness, etc., directly affects your experience, in reality your disturbance is a product of your own individual thinking. By making someone else responsible for how you feel, that person automatically becomes the cause of your suffering. Once you understand that you always have a place of well-being inside, independent of another’s behavior, it is easier to maintain equanimity through their changing moods and behaviors. Romantically, you may experience deeper love and intimacy with your partner, but the teachings benefit all relationships. This awareness supports more authentic connection and expression, while facilitating greater understanding, improved communication, reduced reactivity, more acceptance of self and others, and improved ability to work out differences and find common ground. Best of all, just one person shifting in a relationship is enough to transform it.
Barbara Patterson
Scott Kelly
Barbara Patterson
Clare Dimond
Michael Neill
Rohini Ross
Elsie Spittle – The Soul of the Principles
Spiritual Facts 
Chip Chipman – The Simplicity of Syd’s Teachings
Dicken Bettinger – The Spiritual Nature of the teachings of Sydney Banks
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