In the natural world (meaning everywhere), you're always free to do whatever you please as long as you harm nobody else.

Free, that is, unless you make a contract with another human being.

There's good and bad in every one of us. We're all capable of being victims or acting heroically if the situation calls for it. But some people are chronic mind-game players who at some point in their lives seem to have decided that they prefer to drain the ones that love them rather than doing their own genuine healing work.

So, do you like to nurse injured animals, rescue people from fires, and chain yourself to trees in endangered forests? Do you put others ahead of yourself? Cultivate relationships based on your strong desire to help and nurture and give back to the world? You do if you're a hero.

We spend a lot of political energy arguing about people's rights, whether they should have certain rights, and which rights supersede other rights. I think this is all based on a misunderstanding of what a right is. I think what we really argue about is how to protect our own rights while getting others to take care of things for us.

A right is something that is conformable to truth: something that is real. It is a right or moral claim or title, an interest in something. A right is something you can justifiably defend, with any level of force necessary, including lethal force. In any geographical area that isn't a dictatorship, we assume that our rights aren't earned, they're God-given, or just automatically instilled by nature.

Rights are relevant only in relation to others. Each is associated with not being harmed by others in our interactions with them. Hundreds of named rights boil down to these four:

• the right to be alive
• the right to move without restriction (unlike domesticated beings)
• the right to feed, clothe and house ourselves
• the right to engage in activities and thoughts that we find meaningful

In other words, we have the right to life, liberty, property (territory), and the pursuit of happiness. Just like every other life form.

Is this the truth today? Think about it; do you have total freedom to live your life the way you want to, to live however and wherever you choose and to do whatever you want with your time? Or does someone else have the final say? Practically speaking, now, not in terms of New Age principles... how truthfully can you say that tomorrow you can go out with your axe and your spinning wheel and make yourself a life of your own choosing?

In any system - physical, biological, or social - the more energy there is in that system, the more resilient it will tend to be. Conversely, the less energy there is in that system, the less resilient it will be, whether that system is a chemical reaction in a lab... or your life itself.

This is a summary of the fifth insight, from James Redfield's "Celestine Prophecy"

We're supposed to get our daily energy from the Sun, not by taking it from other people.

1. Food is the first way of gaining energy, but the food must be appreciated.
2. After consciously eating and living, you become more sensitive and you learn to be energized socially and in other ways.
3. To be open to more options in your life, you must become aware and more conscious.
4. When you are living more consciously, you will begin to feel full - or fulfilled: a sensation of "enough."
5. When you appreciate the beauty and uniqueness of things, you are receiving energy and also giving energy to them.

Our enculturation teaches us to become disconnected from reality - the real source of energy - and then try to obtain what we need from others by controlling them to get their attention. This habit is always unconscious at first; the key to letting it go is to bring it fully into consciousness.

1. Your particular style of controlling others is one you learned in childhood that best gets others' attention, to get the energy moving your way.
2. Our parents and siblings operate(d) in a drama themselves, trying to pull energy out of us as children. We had to have a strategy to win energy back.
3. This style is something we repeat over and over again. It's called our unconscious control drama.
4. Each person must reinterpret their family experience and discover who they really are. Once we do this, we can go past these control dramas and see what is really happening.

We manipulate others for energy either by forcing people to pay attention to us, or by playing on people's sympathy or curiosity. There are four basic styles:

1. Aloof: in order to get energy coming your way, you withdraw and look mysterious and secretive. You hope that someone will be pulled into this drama and try to figure out what's going on with you. When someone does, you remain vague, forcing them to struggle, dig and try to discern your true feelings. As they do so, they give you their full attention. The longer you can keep them interested and mystified, the more energy you receive.
2. Interrogator: sets up a drama of asking questions and probing into another person's world with the specific purpose of finding something wrong - and then criticizing. If successful, the person being criticized finds himself becoming self-conscious around the interrogator and paying attention to what the interrogator is doing and thinking about, so as to avoid criticism. Interrogators pull you off your own path.
3. Intimidator: someone who threatens you, either verbally or physically. You are forced, for fear of something bad happening to you, to pay attention to them.
4. Poor-Me: someone who tells you all the horrible things that are already happening to them, implying perhaps that you are responsible, and that, if you refuse to help, these horrible things are going to continue. Someone around whom you feel guilty, even though you know there is no reason to feel that way. Everything they say and do puts you in a place where you have to defend against the idea the you're not doing enough for them.

People use different dramas for different situations, but most of us have one dominant control drama that we tend to repeat, depending on which one worked well with the members of our early family. We create new relationships with people who fit with our control style.

1. Interrogator parents tend to create aloof children. When someone continually asks you questions, only to find something wrong with your answers, you must get vague and distant, to try to say things that will get their attention, but not reveal enough to give them something to criticize.
2. Intimidators tend to create poor-me children or other intimidators. If someone is draining your energy by threatening you with physical, mental or emotional violence, being aloof doesn't work; you can't get them to give you energy by playing coy; you are forced to become more passive, and guilt-trip them about the harm they are doing. If this doesn't work, then as a child you endure until you are big enough to explode against the violence and fight aggression with aggression.
3. Aloof parents tend to create interrogator children. If you were a child and your family members were either not there or ignored you, playing aloof would not get their attention. You would have to resort to probing and prying and finally finding something wrong in these aloof people in order to force attention and energy.

Once we become conscious of our control drama (by reviewing our first family relationships), we can move beyond it to focus on the higher truth of who we are and the path we are on.

1. Look past the energy competition that existed in your family and search for the real reason you were there. Every human being, illustrates with her life how she thinks a human being is supposed to live.
2. Ask yourself what each of your parents stood for.
3. Each of us must try to discover what our parents taught us about this as well as what about their lives could have been done better.
4. What you would have changed about your parents is part of what you are working on in your life now - particularly in your relationships.
5. Every person begins their spiritual life in a position between their parents' truths. You were born to take a higher perspective on what they stood for. Your path is about discovering a truth that is a higher synthesis of what those two people believed.
6. If you look closely at all the things that have happened to you since birth, if you view your life as one story, you'll be able to see how you have been working on this question all along.

Five Signs that You're Making Healthy Relationships Harder than they Should Be

********************************

Do you want to have more fulfilling romantic relationships?  More nurturing friendships?  A deeper connection with your children?

If so, have you ever considered why your relationships aren't as fulfilling as you'd like them to be? Why you don't have enough time or energy or relationship skills to have effortless relationships that nurture you?

I created MindTreeHealth because I want to be part of a world in which it's normal for people to be fulfilled, happy, and connected to a higher purpose. I share this dream with many people. But while this movement is growing everywhere, most of us still have less-than-satisfying relationships. One in four North Americans has no significant relationships at all.

I don't accept the notion that most of us are supposed to just accept mediocre existence, devoted to earning a living and nothing else. We each have the right, by birth, to perfect health in our minds, in our bodies, and in our relationships. 

The point of relating to others is to create ideas beyond what we could come up with on our own. Your human mind, source of all your physical results (including emotions and illnesses), was created for the purpose of working in conjunction with other minds. In fact, every thought that arises in your mind is an as-yet-unfulfilled decision to relate to another. Only when you've completed this relating, in some form or another, can your mind become calm enough for you to relax and experience happiness.

The importance of relationships is so central to the human species that even our brains are specialized for relationships. Our enormous cerebral cortices are almost entirely devoted to such things as noticing what others are doing, interacting with others, speaking to others, listening to others, and dealing with others in such a way as to either attract or repel them. 

(For more about this, I recommend Robin Dunbar's fascinating book, Human Story)

Relationships (or attempts at relationships) are to credit for virtually all of our successes …and relationships are implicated in virtually all our failures. 

Because of this, relationship problems are the basis for all emotional problems and most physical illness as well.

The good news is, once you can trace a relationship problem back to its source, your relationships become effortless. 

That's what a healthy relationship is: an effortless source of joy, synergy, and great new ideas about how to have a fun life.

Blockage Indicator #1 - You're not getting enough love

Most of us are trained to look at our results as proof of how things are inside ourselves. Having not enough love in your life can be misconstrued to mean that you're not a loveable or likeable person. That's backwards logic: you have created your aloneness for a reason.

That reason was almost certainly to protect yourself from something painful you experienced with another person in the past. 

Solution: trace back to the original painful experience and recognize how, at that time, isolating yourself was the best thing you could do based on what you knew then. 

I know it's not a simple thing. You can't just sit down for a couple seconds and think "Okay, it looks like all my troubles go back to that incident with the jujubes when I was five years old." Or maybe you can. But it won't make the pain go away.

The difference you can make by tracing your problem back to some earlier incident(s) is that now you have more skills and wisdom than you did back then. Back then, your best solution was to tell people to get lost. Now you have more options, more subtle ways to draw boundaries with people. More ways to respond with better behaviour yourself.

You can learn the lesson and move on. 

When you move through your obstacle so this factor is no longer a part of your relationships, you will find it easy to relate to others in an effortless and trusting way.

Blockage Indicator #2 - Others make you feel bad: are unfair, dishonest, disrespectful, untrustworthy, or abusive

Your current relationships - good or bad - are the direct consequence of what's been going on in your subconscious mind. 

Everything physical about your life, including your symptoms, your emotions, and every relationship you've ever been in, is the physical outcome resulting from what's been happening in your mind. It's the sum total result of whichever ideas you've consciously accepted, and, more often, whichever ideas you've failed to consciously reject.

Only, being part of the most social species on the planet by an order of magnitude, most of the ideas that come into your mind come from other people.

That's what happens when you relate to others. They communicate to you and download their ideas into your head. And that's why relationships are the source of so much trouble.

Relating is a skill we spend the first few years of our lives developing. If screwy, nonsensical things happen in that time period (which they do, because our culture is screwy and nonsensical), we end up developing relationship tactics just for the sake of protecting ourselves from others. Instead of using others as a source of fresh material to fuel our own good times.

The ego, survival part of you sees yourself as an isolated thing, "interacting" with the world around you by "pushing the right buttons" and "saying the right things." Your ego is like a smarmy salesperson, seeing other human beings not as intimate kinsmen, but as "prospects" that you have to sell ideas to. And get energy from. To survive.

This mechanism of your mind (the ego) came into existence to help you through early childhood when you were learning physical survival skills and you hadn't yet got the hang of the many complexities of relating to others. Ego allowed you to say "no" to ideas that didn't serve your immature self very well. 

Solution: you cannot fix another. You can only dig out and uproot your own painful idea.

But as soon as you do, the abuse in your relationship will end in one of two possible ways. Either

1. the other will recognize a solution to his own painful belief and will stop behaving badly; or,
2. the other will no longer get any "juice" out of you and will wander out of your life in search of someone more controllable. 

Either way, problem solved.

You leave the all the garbage behind when you overcome your root relationship problem(s) and you will never regret it. When you get over that obstruction in the river of your life, you'll be floating downstream again, and you'll be filled with joy at the landscape that surrounds you. 

Blockage Indicator #3 - You can't get the support, help, kindness, safety, or security that you need

When you can't get what you need, it isn't because of others. It's because of your neediness. Relationships - first with our parents, and then with people of our own choosing - are a powerful reinforcement of whatever results we already have. If you've already got neediness, you will shine that vibe on everyone you meet. They'll avoid you. You'll get more needy.

By the time you're a young adult (in your teen years), you're supposed to have the hang of meeting your basic needs. If all other people on the planet happened to vanish overnight, you should, technically, be able to go along and enjoy a long, meaningful life, all by yourself. In other words, you ought to have matured beyond the egoic survival state of needing others to help you meet your basic needs.

Except if you're civilized.

If you're civilized, you've been taught at an early age that survival is the name of the game. Mere survival is what life is all about. Nothing more.

You get arrested in your human development at a resource-competition stage. Watch out, because there you can stay for the rest of your life.

Solution: uproot your neediness by exposing your hidden beliefs about what you are and aren't capable of doing for yourself.

Such beliefs were often implanted in you at a very early age, before you had a context with which you could reject stupid ideas that the adults around you put into your mind: 

"Don't you do that, little princess, that's Daddy's job."

"You can't do anything right."

"Boys are clueless about relationships."

"You always make such a huge mess."

Reexamining and consciously rejecting these kinds of impossible beliefs in yourself with your current adult abilities frees up your conscious mind so that you can complete your ego development, gain the skills to meet your own needs, and begin to fulfill your greater life purpose.

Blockage Indicator #4 - You feel you're not good at relationships and that people don't like you

For a lot of us, our sense of who and what we are comes from how others behave toward us. If others see us like we're superior to others or flawed in certain ways, we'll take those ideas on. We act like good citizens in a democracy. We accept the judgment of two or three (or a dozen) others in place of what we know about ourselves.

Again, that's backward logic. The kinds of relationships you have aren't proof of what kind of person you are, they're proof of what kind of person you think you are ...and what kind of person you think you are right now is just the sum total of the ideas you've accepted.

So, if you choose to blame your bad feelings on others, you're making a judgment about who they are and about who you are. And it's a lie because your bad feelings come from your own mind, from the ideas that you have accepted. Your feelings are not under the control of other people. 

Sticking around, going with the flow, putting up with humiliation, tolerating the intolerable …all of these are the result of you believing that you cannot do any better. Again, a judgment you're making that isn't based on the truth.

Your feelings toward others and toward yourself when you relate to others are the physical consequence of ideas and beliefs you've already fixated in your mind about how things are or should be …conflicting with the way that things really happen. You've fallen into a victim mode, feeling sorry for yourself because you aren't getting treated the way you want to be treated.

How do you know this problem is coming from your own beliefs? Ask yourself if this statement seems in any way true for you:

 "We've got to work at relationships. Good relationships are based on compromise and personal sacrifice."

Tell me, why would you want to be in relationships if you have to work at them, compromise, and make personal sacrifices?

You don't. That's just a bullshit idea that your parents told you and that you fixated in your mind when you were a kid …and you're still operating based on that idea. Because, emotionally speaking, you're still a kid. Which is going to block you in achieving happiness, health, and the life purpose you were born to.

What's going on when people aren't treating you right is that you've been trying to fix your physical outcome by "being nice." Being nice doesn't fix anything for anyone. It just allows things to keep being stuck the way they are. The longer you avoid asserting some personal boundaries - no matter how you think this might benefit others - the further your own self-esteem will erode. 

Because your physical results come from the ideas you've been accepting in your mind, if you believe that you aren't worth much, everyone around you will come to agree with you. 

Solution: when you discover and embrace your inherent self worth and break the vicious cycle of letting your results guide your mind, your very attentive and quick mind will turn all that "niceness" back on you. Your rewards will come quickly. 

But you'd better watch out for the guilt. Because if you think you don't deserve rewards, and then you start treating yourself nicely, you'll end up hating yourself again when the rewards come.

Always start with your mind. A big part of caring for yourself comes from knowing yourself. One of the reasons why German New Medicine is so powerful in helping people to heal is that it shows us exactly what is going on in our minds by tracing it back from our bodies and physical circumstances. 

Beneath all the pain and misunderstanding, at the base of your spirit, you'll discover a profound, enduring self-love.

Blockage Indicator #5 - Keeping relationships means becoming half of a whole, instead of an individual

I define codependency as the frustration of needing others in our lives to make our lives worthwhile ...and then being frustrated by them all the time. Catch-22.

The root of codependency is a lack of identity. We codependent types aren't exactly sure where we end and others begin. We've got to take care of other people, so that they will like us. 

We've got to control what they do, to keep them safe and to make ourselves worthwhile.

Everything they do becomes our responsibility. We certainly can't trust others to just be who they are, since we're not clear about who they are or what kind of shenanigans they'll get up to. Besides, what if they did some stupid things? How would that make us look?

The source of a lack of personal identity is having been rejected from your tribe during your formative years. This is an extremely common problem in modern society, because people don't stay put. Children are rarely able to stay with the peers and family members that they choose.

This creates a sense of split. Hiding behind the codependent's lack of experience in deeply connecting to others is a deep subconscious belief that we are separate from the world. Instead of relating to others through shared experiences, we learn tricks and techniques to "interact," while holding our own selves secretly apart.

The whole world becomes "other." We watch from outside, like looking through an impenetrable glass window at the party going on inside. We're here, we got the invitation, but we can't seem to jump into the gang.

Solution: focusing on the inner work that produces the results you want, instead of focusing on the results themselves, is absolutely paramount when you have a poor sense of identity. You will never be able to interact with others in a safe, effortless way if you do not know what you are and what another is.

While the root of this belief is very subtle and hidden, its simple solution is to recognize that what you see in others is an exact reflection of what you are worrying about in yourself. Your judgments of others - positive or negative - are really judgments about yourself. They are a product of your mind's disconnect from its own source.

When one person relates to another person (or being), the nonphysical infinite self gets to interact with itself through its physical form. 

In other words, relationships are the Infinite Intelligence, the Great Spirit, God …having fun with itself.

You will begin to learn who you are. And, ultimately, that others are just other versions of you.