Love had raised them from the dead, and the heart of each held endless springs of life for the heart of the other.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
After death something new begins, over which all powers of the world of death have no more might.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The symbolic language of the crucifixion is the death of the old paradigm; resurrection is a leap into a whole new way of thinking.
Deepak Chopra
The Easter egg symbolizes our ability to break out of the hardened, protective shell we’ve surrounded ourselves with.
Siobhan Shaw
As a practitioner of PQ Mental Fitness, I receive five short exercises at regular intervals every day. These are fed to me on the PQ App, which also contains a veritable mental fitness studio of longer exercises, from which I can choose, whenever more considerable workouts are warranted or desirable.
In this manner I have been training three critical mental muscles every day for just over two years; The Saboteur Interceptor, The Sage Enhancer, and the Mind Command Muscle. The latter enables me to switch from Saboteur to Sage, which becomes necessary any time my fear-fuelled Saboteurs re-emerge in their attempts to hijack my thinking, my emotions, and my actions. These are the voices in my head that judge myself, others, and circumstances, that tell me I’m not going to succeed, that danger lurks around every corner, etc.
Sage, on the other hand, offers me a new perspective, that of each situation containing a gift and opportunity, and five Powers which can be cultivated over time: Empathise, Explore, Innovate, Navigate, and Activate. By shifting to Sage, I avoid impulsive reactions by raising my awareness and considering other options before stepping into action. I can thus avail of that gap that Viktor Frankl described, the gap between impulse and response. `Herein lies the key to our liberation´, he liked to point out.
The `Focus of the Day’ exercise, available at dawn, sets the tone for the day, with the subsequent brief exercises building upon this throughout the day. Today’s Focus of the Day, spoken in the baritone voice of PQ Founder, Shirzad Chamine, ran as follows:
Please take a look at a childhood picture that shows your original true spirit shining through. Your Saboteur eyes might only see superficial things and say this is just a young inexperienced kid. See through the eyes of your Sage instead, and notice the deeper essence. You were born with a unique beautiful essence which is more evident in childhood pictures. Your essence has never changed and will never change. As you look at this picture, notice your beautiful essence, your true self. Notice how worthy this child is, worthy of your unconditional love, meaning this child should not need to perform or achieve in order to be loved all the time, without any conditions.
Now close your eyes and feel that beautiful essence being inside yourself. You are worthy of unconditional love for this beautiful being that you are. Embrace this beautiful being. Feel love for this beautiful being. Have compassion for this being that you are and reassure this being that, regardless of success or failure, fortune or misfortune, your love for yourself will stay deep and steady. You deserve it. Open your eyes when you feel ready.
That this was the PQ `Focus of the Day´ exercise on Easter Sunday morning seemed most befitting to me. As they appear to be randomly generated on the PQ App, I simply marveled at the synchronicity of this exercise showing up on this special day.
In my work as a Transformation Coach, informed by my own life struggles and transformation experience over recent decades, I often draw upon the metaphor of the butterfly, moving from one stage of development to the next, as it evolves towards achieving its full potential.
It is noteworthy that, to move from one stage to the next, the old must die. The egg disappears in the form of the caterpillar, which in turn `dies´ to the form of the chrysalis.
Again, after a period of apparent stagnation and darkness at some concealed location, this form is destroyed from within, allowing the butterfly, a seemingly totally different being, to emerge. The butterfly, after a period of unfurling, unfolding, stretching, and drying in the morning sunshine, takes flight. During the winged phase, it lays eggs on the underside of suitable leaves, for the cycle to begin once more.
The necessity of `dying to the old´ is the crux of the challenge. For, no matter how we have matured, an old script etched on our psyche keeps admonishing us to avoid the dangers and pain of death at all costs. Better the devil we know than the devil we don’t know, the Saboteurs declare.
They also incite blame and resentment, which perpetuate the old. Forgiveness is the product of Sage, an indispensable component of relinquishing the old, to make way for the new: `Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.´
This is accomplished by reconciling ourselves with the pain and sorrow of the past. Reconciliation literally means `to sit again with.´ That is sufficient. It is a matter of being, rather than doing.
What happened to the infant in my childhood photograph? In the adversity of childhood, he experienced the need for more emotional nurturing than he was receiving, just as we feel the pangs of hunger when undernourished, or gasp for oxygen at high altitudes. So, he devised an ingenious plan to secure what he needed by behaving in certain ways.
Being still fully dependent on his adult carers, he needed to uphold the denial of infallibility on their part. This was a further key element in his survival strategy, which meant that he ended up finding fault for his predicament in himself only. As I am, I must be unlovable, he concluded.
The plan to secure what he needed, and its execution, ensured survival. It also drew the child away from an awareness of the True Self, – the `essence being´, worthy of unconditional love, to which Shirzad refers. In its stead, the False Self emerged; in my case this was the fixer, the one who could, by a combination of ingenuity and effort, hold the family, – indeed life, – together.
For its sense of worth and well-being this False Self is dependent on exceeding expectations. Now, I had become the slave of outer circumstances. The vagaries of people, places, and things, – real or imagined, – dictated my emotional experience.
The subsequent decades of adolescence and early adulthood ground me down, for two reasons. Firstly, in my human imperfection, I could not always exceed the expectations of self and others. In fact, I missed the mark quite often.
And even when I did succeed in meeting my goals, the `conditional´ love; the approval, the recognition, the validation, proved short-lived and hollow. The more I yearned these, the harder I tried. Until, aged 42, I crashed and burned.
It was at this point that my attention was first drawn to the necessity of `letting go of my old ideas´, the False Self. Though I quickly came to recognize this necessity, I beat around the bush for as long as I could, hoping for an easier, softer way.
In my experience, there is no such way. The prerequisite for resurrection is the death of the old. I wrestled with this as the Old Testament figure, Jacob, had done in his dream encounter with his image of God. That story, like many others, demonstrates that, paradoxically, to gain access to the higher powers (God, Sage, Love), we must acknowledge, take responsibility, and cease holding on to the lower ones (Bedevilments, Saboteurs, Fear).
In one of my own recent dreams, I was an eagle chick, poised to take off on my maiden flight from the top of a Giant Redwood tree. In the build up to take-off, I could feel the tension and trepidation grow within. Then came the moment of truth. In the gap between tumbling, in sheer terror from the branch, and the safe sensation of suspension on the thermal, there was this visceral thud of angst.
It was fully present in every cell of my body when I awoke. I recognized that state as somehow familiar. I had been there before, more than once. It is the moment of metamorphosis, between the relinquishing of the old and the birth of the new. In order to be integrated, it must be transcended, which literally means `to climb across´. In this case, in the awareness brought about by my Mental Fitness practice, I was able to utilise the gift of the dream, not supress or circumvent the feelings, as had been my default impulsive reaction for so long.
Easter is a most powerful symbolic representation of this transition. In order to live, we must die. Not in sequential lives, as some would like us to believe, but in this life, all in one. My experience is that to achieve the goal of overcoming emotional dependency, the False Self must be relinquished; it must die. This paves the way for the re-emergence of the true essence, so clearly visible in the childhood photograph, as we forge our trajectory towards Emotional Sobriety.
We may choose to play it safe, of course. Like many people, I have played safe myself at times and have suffered the consequences. From this, I have learned that the caterpillar which embraces change within the comfort zone, at the expense of true transformation, may become a superior, even a deluxe caterpillar, but will never experience the grace and joys of flight.
For more information on PQ Mental Fitness Coaching, see: https://soberoasis.org/positive-intelligence-pq-mental-fitness/
