Hi GotoGo
Thank you for replying, and for giving me the opportunity to reply – as I’ll explain later on.
I half suspected that you might have a similar Chief Feature, or at least a similar limiting decision. This is based on ‘experiential folklore’ – training given – and my own experience that: The first rule of psychotherapy is that: it is the complainer/blamer who has the perceived problem, rather than the person presented with the perceived problem.
Also, from the Law of Attraction, when I was doing Breakthrough Coaching with clients, after having ascertained their limiting decisions I would then clear them within myself, on the basis that somewhere within me was a residue of these limiting decisions – and that was the reason that I was coaching them (like attracts like).
You are right about Chief Feature being the motivator to ‘work on overcoming ‘being right’’, what was coming forward was the aspect of ‘depreciating self’ (seeking to align my-self with others). After making the last post, I went away for a long weekend, ostensibly to walk in the mountains but the less than clement weather conditions reduced that activity somewhat, but quietly sitting down in the windswept hills I did reflect on the statement made.
I came to the realisation that the statement was made in haste (Chief Feature), and that what I really needed to be was to be me - rather than limiting my-self to ‘others’ standards’ – to be free, spontaneous and genuine. I’m still struggling with putting ‘spontaneous’ into action.
Curiously enough, where I’m at now with the consequences doing of the Breathing-Meditation programme, is that I’m deep in the mire of my Chief Feature. I know it. I ‘feel’ it as a heavy burden on me. It has severely restricted my postings as I feel I have nothing to say. This reply is helping me to get out of this dreadful situation.
The following quote ‘echoes’ within me where I’m at right now. Clarissa Pinkola Estes writing in Women Who Run With the Wolves, specifically taken from the chapter Clear Water: Nourishing the Creative Life, subheading: Poison in the River,
Sometimes a woman trips over her own introversion and wants to simply wish things into being: she may think that just thinking the idea is good enough, and there need be no outer manifestation. Except she feels bereft and unfinished anyway. These are all manifestations of pollution [loss of vitality] in the river [of life]. What is being manufactured is not life but something that inhibits life.
Other times she is under attack by those around her, or by the voices yammering in her head: ”Your work is not right enough, not good enough, not this enough, not that enough. It is too grandiose, too infinitesimal, too insignificant, takes too long, is too easy, too hard.” This is pouring cadmium into the river.
Reading this book is my current source of ‘sanity’, keeping me on the right track as I work through this down part of the natural cycle of creativity. It is a steep and rocky path up this side of the mountain, however, one that is worth the perseverance for the prize at the top.
I do work as hard as possible to keep Chief Feature active as a question within me. The action of seeing it more is a task I set myself some time ago and actively do (to the best of my abilities!) – it’s the subtleties that keep getting through. I’d forgotten ‘the need to feel ‘right’’ part of the ‘before revealing aspect’.
To help the process, here are some notes that I made for my-self, you may find these useful, or not.
Get near to Chief Feature (CF), feel CF, and thus know it, and stop leaks of energy.
Keep CF active as a question within, use CF as a point of reference (to overcome CF, to awaken), see self when operating in CF and internally apply shock and ‘leap into the void’.
Notice when CF appears in daily life, situations which bring out CF strengths (what brings it out?), feared situations – anticipate and confront.
Centre self when CF appears; build up visual, auditory and kinaesthetic of CF to find root cause (when, where from, how occurred, started).
Habits – use as products for awareness, exaggerate habitual movements (when you make the body do what it doesn’t wish to do, makes force (for making it do one small thing it hates doing – makes more force that a day of walking)).
Sacrifice – only through struggle with yes and no in self leads to understanding.
Complete dedication to teaching – give up hard identification (focus on acquiring knowledge – act on it for undertanding), imagination, self-sufferings (unconscious0, keep questioning – motivations, perceptions, conclusions (only see true knowledge in personal terms, never in anything else.
Eliminate involuntary manifestations.
Self-study – observation of all three lower centres, work with emotional centre and body (self-remembering (self and body).
The devil is in the details, as I said,
Also, recently, during an exercise on 'my role', I was shocked to find that the underlying pattern was 'putting things in order', which is similar to 'being right, as you have pointed out. It's interesting, to me, that it occurs in both places.
‘being right’ is implied as an underlying pattern in ‘my role’, as well as explicitly in my Chief Feature. I still have to work this one through.
