My interpretations link with other interpretations to help me feel consistent, validated and safe.
When I experience suffering, I link to previous interpretations of suffering that have defended my story and which validate my current reality of suffering.
No matter how I struggle to change my yet unregulated responses to experience, as long as I believe my core program is consistent, that suffering is “real.” I will continue to interpret my experiences as suffering. It’s a positive feedback loop that sustains and strengthens my resolve to defend the reality of suffering over time.
In order to develop and sustain a defense of suffering, I need to develop and sustain a firm belief in it. Each subsequent defense must be interpreted as “real.”
Suffering becomes the belief that must be defended.
My perceptions become a kind of well-marked map of predictable landmarks that support my choices. The landmarks are the points of interest to revisit, representing “how” I choose to suffer. Warning signs of dangers represent where I have been challenged in my belief program.
When I believe my perceptual map is my only guide, I feel a false sense of peace about my intended need for defense. Even when my defenses appear to protect what I truly value, when I resist changes that could awaken me, I am still fighting the good fight to stay in my comfort zone by defending my defenses against defense… Loop!
My new intention is to let defense go!
As I release the need for defenses I’ve attached to old thinking, my old reasons for supporting them arise. Those thoughts and feelings that are open to change are attacked by the same old reasoning I placed as defense support and can be as an army of self against self. Yet, when I persist in change, I will have change.
My change process from defense to new intention:
- From denial to acceptance:
- Old – I block any evidence that invalidates my truth.
- New – I open to all forms of feedback as validations of truth.
- From proof to connection:
- Old – I only consider corroborating evidence that proves my truth.
- New – I connect to truth as its own evidence.
- From need-confirmation to purposeful intention:
- Old – I confirm that my needs are real and must be satisfied at any cost.
- New – my purpose is to validate all intentions.
- From fearful expectation to adaptation:
- Old – I modify my behaviors to meet the needs of others and expect the same from others.
- New – I adapt to fundamental truth and accept that others are doing the same.
- From justification to acceptance:
- Old – I say what is right and reasonable, defending and sustaining it as the Truth.
- New – I accept all as truth.
To realize a new reality free of suffering, I might turn my defenses into questions:
- “What do I defend?” – I assign what – a name that identifies some-thing symbolizing that which I intend to relate as cause to my survival. Value.
- “How do I defend?” – I assign what – a nature or function that identifies how something symbolically behaves and represents my intention to relate as an effect to my survival. Strategy.
- “Why do I defend?” – I assign what – a purpose that identifies why I intend to defend my causally reality as the need to survive. Cause + Effect = Motivation
- “Who do I defend?” – I assign what – me a defense – a specific defender of my personal time and space. Justification.
These and other questions address my subconscious mind in order to understand and regain conscious direction away from my levels of defense and toward new interpretations.
I may then change my interpretations about the what, how, and why I created my defenses – from a belief in a need for suffering to a new way of understanding all relationships are within myself.
Change cannot be expected to happen if at any part of my transformation I use intimidation or force of will.
- Consider – What sufferings do I defend? What might I reinterpret about my suffering?
- Consider – How do I defend my suffering? How might I reinterpret the ways I’m suffering?
- Consider – Why do I defend my suffering? Why reinterpret my suffering as necessary?
- Consider – Who do I defend in their suffering? Who interprets the uniqueness of my suffering. Who needs to suffer as an individual? This question generates a process of specification that leads to detailed maps in reasoning, imagination, physical manifesting, emotional responses, and etc., which leads to finer and more intricate means and ways of suffering.
