Spiritual Etiquette in the World:
Forget
Resolutions. Upgrade Your Operating System
by Suzanne Matthiessen
We are at the beginning of a new calendar
year, a portal of opportunity for personal change and growth as equally
ripe with potential as the annual celebration of our birth. If we
pay attention and embrace pro-active behaviors, we can catch the
wave of energy available to us to maximize its supportive nudge before
it slips away.
Many people create lists of things they wish to accomplish during
this time, addressing issues such as losing weight, stopping smoking,
etc. Although they are flush with good intentions at the gate, shortly
after the charge forward a large portion of the pack will lose steam
and succumb to failure without ever actualizing their well-intended
goals.
The problem with the New Year’s Resolution scenario is two-fold:
a) resolutions are often behavioral modification band-aids that don’t
address the core self, and b) good intentions are simply inadequate
to propel us through the challenges of lasting personal transformation.
The only way we can achieve permanent change is to make a revolutionary
shift within that transcends symptoms and mere affirmations for success.
No matter what your goals are, the first thing I suggest is to take
stock of where you are prior to making the first steps. This is perhaps
the hardest part of the process, as it asks us to take a deeply self-honest
look at who we are and how we got to the place we are at in life,
and what influences we have accepted that shape our perceptions in
both empowering and draining ways.
Society, the media and our peers all have the power to mold our minds
in ways that are both beneficial and destructive to us on a personal
level. Spiritual belief systems can be equally potent in how they
affect our day-to-day living. The much-celebrated concepts of unconditional
love, non-judgment and deserving the things you want sound good at
surface assessment, but they can also undermine our spiritual growth
if the ego grabs hold and runs with them.
For example, during an interview on Oprah last year, actress Kirstie
Alley talked about taking a hard look at the effect her considerable
weight gain had upon how she expected to be treated. Her raw candor
touched the heart of what many women have chosen to believe about
themselves: “The bad decision was—and this is the dumbest
decision I’ve ever made in my life—it went like this:
If a man really loves me, he will not have to love me for my body.
He will really love me just for me.
When did I decide I was a big fat girl?” What
Alley came to realize is that just because she’d gained a lot
of weight and chose to justify it didn’t mean someone else
was supposed to support her in weakness about something she could
choose to exercise control over. Her expectation of deserving non-judgmental
unconditional love was generally selfish, and what she did was make
a radical turnaround and face why she decided being fat was okay—and
why she felt it was also okay to be angry with men who didn’t.
So how about you—do you feel entitled to be supported for your
weaknesses and shadow issues that you aren’t proactively working
to overcome, or would you honestly really prefer to be acknowledged
for your strength in terms of taking the necessary steps to conquer
what you do have control over?
What happened to Alley is what is at the root of genuine lasting
transformation: she did what is called in the shamanic world “shifting
your assemblage point.” This means exactly what it implies:
rearranging your primary sense of self, your deepest identity, your
core being, to someplace (hopefully) more evolved than where you
once stood. It’s a complete metamorphosis from who you once
were into someone totally different from your past self.
As I’m a bit on the techy side, I call it “upgrading
your operating system.” It’s more than merely a makeover;
in fact, those who undergo only surface changes often revert to their
old self if they haven’t gotten rid of the internal old self
bugs that drive how they show up in the world. It’s actually
like a reincarnation within a lifetime. And it only works if you
do it for yourself first and foremost, and are not fearful of how
it may threaten others who don’t want you to change.
But once you’ve come to the realization that a major overhaul
needs to be embraced to rid your old self of its symptomatic bad
habits, choices and behaviors, how do you actually go about making
it happen?
It’s valuable to have a triptych, a guidebook for the cocoon
to butterfly stage that offers transformational tools that actually
work in the upgrade process. That’s what the greatest spiritual
texts are all about. Over the years I have tried out many approaches
to personal change and have come to see from both my own experience
as well as that of others is you need a complimentary bag of tricks
to help you along the way.
