A Lateral Perspective

Some time ago I received a letter from a man asking for weapons to use in his battle against sorrow, pain, anger and fear. Since I approach everything from an Aloha point of view as much as possible, I gave him this answer:

"Let's sideslip into some lateral thinking and take a different perspective on this. As an alternative to dealing with sorrow, pain, anger and fear as enemies, you can treat them as behaviors based on assumptions held by people, rather than personified things that you have to fight. You aren't really going to encounter any sorrow, pain, anger or fear. You will encounter sorrowful, angry, and fearful people as well as people in pain. Then what you need are tools to help you deal with such people, or tools to help them change.

Going further out on our lateral limb, let's divide all human responses into passive and active modes of love and fear. Then we could say that the passive and active modes of love are peace and play, and that their fear-based counterparts are flight and fight. Flight responses involve passive resistance to change (personal, social, environmental) and often manifest as pain, sorrow, depression, etc. Anger, of course, is a fight response for getting rid of (destroying) an unwanted condition, especially the condition of helplessness. That's why it's so seductive. The movement, energy and changes effected give an illusion of power. But driving it is the fear of powerlessness.

The advantage of accepting these lateral assumptions is that it leads us to require only one tool to deal with all of it. We can observe that the core characteristic of a love response is confidence. Then we can extrapolate to say that as confidence increases so does love, while at the same time fear decreases, along with its two less effective responses. From that perspective, confidence is the tool that¹s needed. both for ourselves and for others. Specific techniques which serve that end are what we as healers or teachers use or create to apply that tool.

Here are two further thoughts to help you along. Firstly, confidence comes from a belief in your access to power. The more stable your source of power (or the more stable you believe it to be) the more consistently confident you will be. So techniques need to be designed to improve the access or strengthen the belief. Ke Akua Nui, the Spirit of the Universe, is a nice source to work with, but the most effective source is the one to which you attrubute the most authority or power. Secondly, remember that the tools for creating any techniques are feelings, words, images and/or movement.

Go for confidence., using any tools you know now or any that you learn, and believe without a doubt in any source for confidence that you choose. Then sorrow, pain, anger and fear will fade away without a fight."