There are two unconscious agendas that determine the success or lack thereof of your ability to transcend any debilitating conditioning from your experience. The choice made of the two agendas influence whether your efforts to transform your experience is effective or futile. Whether your past environment involves physical, mental, emotional, sexual, alcoholic, or drug abuse or perhaps your past has been conditioned by financial struggle – the brain becomes conditioned from the phenomena it is exposed to. However, this in and of itself is not the reason for the futility because the brain is very malleable – the very reason it becomes conditioned in the first place is the same means by which it can be reconditioned on behalf of well-being. It is the type of agenda informing your intent for healing that determines the degree of success in reconditioning the brain for fulfilling well-being.
What are the two agendas? They are relief or release. Unfortunately, most individuals understandably default to the agenda of relief from debilitating conditions and conditioning. Who would not want relief from oppressive dynamics? Although the end results of experiencing relief would be anyone’s desire, relief as the sole motivating origin for engaging healing therapies and techniques unfortunately becomes temporary at best and exasperating at worst. When only relief informs our intentions for a better quality of living our commitment to healing practices are usually short-lived or sporadic and the undermining mental alignment remains in play. This is because the ego’s shortsightedness in desiring a “quick-fix” obscures the real means of authentic emancipation from the conditional ties that bind. When relief is the sole motivating desire for change then any appearance, feeling, or illusion of relief satisfies the ego’s temporary relief fix agenda. Whole commercial industries are built on exploiting the relief agenda informing the average consumer. From the diet-pill industry and its sister industry, the weight-loss/management industry to the 15-minute, 10-minute and now 5-minute abdominal workout programs to the pharmaceutical empires – all built on exploiting the desire for relief; “What will make me feel better about myself?” (This question is also the source of addiction.) Of course, there is absolutely nothing wrong with desiring relief, however, relief is not necessarily healing (or the word I use: restoration) – in fact, most times it is not. Some factions of religions even use the relief-fix desire to promote so-called salvation rather than (religion) as a means of greater insight and understanding. True restoration of body, mind, spirit and affairs results in relief becoming a consequence – not the agenda. Which brings me to that second agenda that can inform intention.
When release of debilitating issues is informing the agenda of therapeutic practices rather than relief, therapies, techniques and practices enable the possibility of freedom from those conditional ties that bind. Through release permanent emancipation is facilitated rather than temporary relief of chronic issues. If the attachment and identification to a devastating or long-standing negative reference point is released then the desired relief becomes a consequence of no longer identifying with the constrictive conditioning. As releasing attachment to a subjective negative identification becomes the aim in one’s effort, commitment and resolve inform engagement rather than superficial – albeit sincere – engagements of practices, therapies and approaches as a mere abatement of negative conditioning. Relief through release becomes the consequence of actually releasing constrictive conditioning. From the release intent you are essentially reconditioning the mind rather than simply obscuring or distracting yourself from its static conditioning.
This approach requires you to exercise your mature consciousness which can appreciate the bigger picture of the restorative process rather than the immature quick-fix mentality that informs or is looking for what amounts to temporary relief. Your mature consciousness enables interest and commitment to be sustained long enough for relief to become the consequence of the release of heretofore formidable psychological and, or, emotional issues. And contrary to the egos assumption that the release intent will take “longer” than the relief approach, in truth, six months of inner processing to release permanently a debilitating, chronic mental association beats 40 years of temporary relief, set-back, temporary relief, set-back, temporary relief, set-back…, etc. And besides, it doesn’t take nearly as much struggle to release a debilitating issue as it has taken for it to develop and sustain itself (See recent blog post, “The BIG Question” that dispels the myth of what is required for permanent change to occur) but the release agenda does require commitment to releasing your attachment to the familiar self-identification wrought from what has happened to you. (As I always caution when making the release point: Release is not ignoring. Release is an engaged process; ignoring is a reaction.)
As you approach your restorative proposition from the vantage point of releasing binding conditioning rather than settling for surface relief you become your own salvation – you are not what has happened to you; you are the means of transcending it.
Go for release. You deserve it. Are worthy if it. And are capable of it.
