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Greg: Actually, I think they’re smart for hiring a consultant to do in a few hours what it would take them months to learn how to do. It just seems efficient.
Chana: So you help people for a living. You work with people who are seeking help all the time and -
Greg: And I never see them as weak for asking for help. I actually get annoyed with the ones who pretend to know more than they do and don’t ask for clarification or assistance. Ha!
Chana: Why’d you laugh?
Greg: I just realized that asking for help doesn’t make my clients weak; it makes them strong! I love working with the ones who ask clarifying questions and get the best results by applying what I teach them.
Chana: How do you feel?
Greg: Like twenty million bricks have just rolled off my shoulders. I’ve been hiding from experts like myself who are so eager to teach what they know, and I’ve held myself back so much!
Chana: What do you want to do?
Greg: I want to be real with people. I want to ask for help when I need it. But I also want to apply what I learn and make my teachers glad they invested in me.
Chana: Do you feel done with this topic?
Greg: Yes, thank you.
Chana: My pleasure.
Greg had woven together two concepts: seeking assistance and weakness. Asking for help is a neutral term; it doesn’t mean anything other than what we choose to attach to it. Weakness became Dead Weight that didn’t allow Greg to live freely and ask for the help that could have propelled him forward. As he let that old ball-and-chain go, he became free to seek assistance simply because he wanted it and saw the wisdom in learning from those more experienced than himself. Once he freed himself from the shackles of weakness, Greg became a voracious reader, enrolled in business and marketing courses, and hired a business coach to help take his consultancy to the next level.
When we’ve attached a negative meaning to something we need or want, we know we’re carrying around Dead Weight. By questioning our thinking, we can disentangle the assumption that what we desire is wrong or unattainable, unshackle our Dead Weight, and free ourselves to ask, receive, and enjoy the blessings in store for us.
You must take personal responsibility. You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself. That is something you have charge of.
—Jim Rohn
Now that we’ve identified how beliefs and language can trip us up, it’s time to take a look at how, precisely, our feelings and behaviors can lead us to the truth. If you’re like me, you might find yourself swinging between emotions like a pendulum, not necessarily knowing how or why. Stopping to understand our emotional reactions to our thinking can help us shift our consciousness because every emotion you experience is the product of a thought. In this section, we’re going to explore how it is that you respond to your thinking and how your reactions can guide you to know whether a thought is serving you or hurting you.
An understanding of how your physiology and emotions respond to beliefs.
If you put your hand into a fire, does anyone have to tell you to move it? Do you have to decide? No: When your hand starts to burn, it moves. You don’t have to direct it; the hand moves itself. In the same way, once you understand, through Inquiry, that an untrue thought causes suffering, you move away from it.
—Byron Katie
Most people are unaware that they are not their thoughts. They don’t recognize that their body and emotions are reacting to their thinking and that they can disentangle themselves from the beliefs that are causing their suffering. In my workshops, I like to give participants a visceral taste of what I call the Anatomy of Feedback: their unique physiological and psychological response to truth or falsehood.
When we believe what’s true, our bodies manifest one type of experience; when we’re attached to what is false, we manifest something completely different. Here is a basic script for an Anatomy of Feedback session. Take a moment to try it yourself:
ANATOMY OF FALSEHOOD
Close your eyes. Take three slow, deep breaths.
Think of a time you felt disconnected from yourself, others, and the world (the divine). Try to place yourself in that moment as vividly as you can. Turn up the volume on the sights, colors, sounds, and smells around you. Pay attention to how you feel in this moment.
How is your breathing? Deep or shallow?
What is your heart rate?
What does your posture want to do?
Do your muscles feel tight or loose?
What is going on in your chest?
What do you feel in your stomach?
What thoughts go through your mind?
What emotions come up for you?
Take three more slow, deep breaths, open your eyes, and write down your answers.
You now have a distinct taste of how you react to Falsehood. I’ve done this with hundreds of people, and their responses all fit a similar pattern. They say they experience tightness in their body, anxious or violent thinking, and dark emotions. Now you have your unique Anatomy of Falsehood down on paper as a reference for the future.
ANATOMY OF TRUTH
Close your eyes again. Take three slow, deep breaths and clear your mind.
Think of a time you felt connected to yourself, others, and the world (the divine). Try to place yourself in that moment as vividly as you can. Turn up the volume on the sights, colors, sounds, and smells around you. Pay attention to how you feel in this moment.
How is your breathing? Deep or shallow?
What is your heart rate?
What does your posture want to do?
Do your muscles feel tight or loose?
What is going on in your chest?
What do you feel in your stomach?
What thoughts come up in your mind?
What emotions come up for you?
Take three more slow, deep breaths, open your eyes, and write down your answers [if you’re facilitating someone else, repeat each question one by one].
How was it to react to Truth? It usually manifests as openness and lightness in the body, clarity of thought, and bright emotions. You’ve got your Anatomy of Truth on paper now as well.
The Anatomy of Feedback is essential to Inquiry. Recognizing your response to Truth and Falsehood will prove invaluable when determining whether or not a thought is helpful or harmful to you, making your path towards living a harmonious and joyous life all the easier.
Use the Anatomy of Feedback if you’re unaware of your psychological or physiological response to stressful thoughts. This tool is also a great way to begin a relationship with a new client or group workshop to help people quickly learn that their physiology and emotions can tell them a lot about their thinking.
Download an Anatomy of Feedback worksheet from the Free Bonus Section of my website:
Hold.ChanaMason.com/bonus.
A collection of questions that flesh out a person’s varied psychological and physiological reactions to a thought.
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
—Aristotle
I love how Inquiry easily helps us separate truth from fiction, joy from pain, and perceived experience from objective reality. We experience this distinction most when contrasting our reactions to believing a thought and to living without it. When we ask, “How do you react when you believe that thought?” we viscerally taste the suffering a belief is creating in our lives. Other questions reveal even deeper layers of our reactions.
Like a party buffet, an Experience Buffet of sub-questions brings out unique and specific flavors of a particular thought. In the dialogue below, you’ll see many of the “dishes” in the Experience Buffet in action. I’ve compiled an exhaustive list of the questions at the end of this chapter.
Toni harbored tremendous resentment towards a roommate she had in college. Years had already passed, but Toni’s anger had barely abated. She wasn’t clear exactly why she was angry, so I asked her to Rant.
Toni: There were four of us, including Zoe. When we first signed on the apartment, we wrote up a list of house rules. We were supposed to take turns cleaning the kitchen, bathroom, and shared spaces. Also, we had to buy supplies like toilet paper and soap and stuff. Plus the landlord stipulated that we pay our rent by the 1st of the month. A month into the year, Zoe broke up with her boyfriend. She was a total emotional wreck, so we gave her a lot of room to be upset and mourn. But the next month she didn’t have her rent ready by the 1st. The rest of us had to pitch in to compensate, which meant I couldn’t go out for coffee or dinner until she finally paid us back, which wasn’t till the 15th. But it was hard to be mad since she was so upset. We gave her some more slack. The three of us picked up her laundry in the living room and did her dishes and cleaned the frickin’ toilet when it was her turn. That sucked! But we figured we’d want someone to help us out if we were having a hard time. Come second semester, not much had changed. She left a mess everywhere, and it was so disgusting! My other roommates got so sick of it. They just wanted to kick her out.
Chana: So did you?
Toni: No. How could we? She had nowhere to go and… I mean, she thought she was going to marry this guy. I didn’t want to be insensitive.
Can you guess the beliefs lingering underneath Toni’s Rant? I’d like you to stop reading, take out pen and paper, and write all the troubling thoughts you assume Toni’s believing, either because she’s said them outright or hinted at them between the lines. Once you finish, take a look at what I’ve written on my notepad:
Zoe should have cleaned the kitchen, bath, etc.
Zoe should have paid her rent on time.
She should have shared equal responsibility in the apartment.
She should have followed the rules.
We should not have had to pay her late rent.
I should not have had to clean up after her mess.
I couldn’t kick her out.
She had nowhere to go.
If I kicked her out, I would have been really insensitive to her.
She should have been more respectful.
I could read the list to Toni, but I want to see if she can identify her most bothersome belief outright.
Chana: What about this situation upsets you the most?
Toni: That she didn’t respect me. It was so not cool.
Chana: That sounds like the perfect place to start. Can you think of a specific time when you harbored the belief that she didn’t respect you?
Toni: Um…. yeah. There was a day that I had a date with this guy I really liked. I invited him over, and her stuff was all over the couch and her dishes from two nights before were rotting in the sink. It was so gross.
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