3-3-2000 

Yo, all of you Magnificent Spiritual Beings, 

Since this such a large area of the country (and I don't have my e-mail list set up to discern geographical locations) I am sending this out to all of you.  My regular update of the additions to the web site is still about 10 days to 2 weeks away but I am posting new stuff, as well as news on my New Page continuously. 

Recent news/additions include: I am now doing telephone counseling; several new awards; new testimonials; a new investment option so that people can buy a piece of Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls for as little as $200; a new referral in Santa Cruz, California; some info on upcoming California workshops; and of course, the latest online column which I promised in the last update, The True Nature of Love - Part 6 - Twin Souls, Souls Mates, and Kindred Spirits. 

I have set it up now so that the New Page (which it turns out is also the news page) can now be reached from either web site.  http://Joy2MeU.com/New.htm

Hope you all are experiencing some serenity and moments of Joy in your lives.  I saw some whales breaching yesterday - 7 or 8 times one came almost completely out of the water - the kind of thing that my whole internal family from my inner children to my adult to my Spirit really Love. 

Hopefully, a cold that has been pestering me will be gone by the time I do the radio interview - it is so gauche to be sniffling on the air. 

I had 5 calls from individuals from around the country today wanting to order books, plus a few orders from Barnes & Noble.  Amazon.com continues to sell a lot of books and people are buying through my web site. The word of mouth seems to really be heating up - More Will Be Revealed. 

Until my update, Love to you all, 
Robert 

To all the Magnificent Spiritual Beings on my e-mailing list,

How sad.  How symbolic of the way that classic codependent behavior works - seeking approval, avoiding confrontation, denying feelings, trying to read other people so that we can protect ourselves from the shame of doing it "wrong" or hurting someone else's feelings.

I have several such stories from my childhood.  One from early childhood I talk about in the latest installment of my recovery story in the Joy2MeU Journal.  The other occurred sometime in late adolescence - probably around 11 or 12.  I was taking a swimming class of some sort - perhaps a life saving class to learn safety techniques or something of the sort.  My cousin was also in the class.  He was a few years older than me, and had been the closest thing I had to a big brother growing up.  Since I was the oldest in my family, it was my cousin that I looked to for some advanced knowledge of the world - like finding out about sex.  The best my parents were capable of doing was giving me a book that had lots of big words I had to look up in the dictionary.  It was my cousin who explained sex in a way I could understand.  His explanation was not completely accurate, but was a lot more understandable than that book.

Anyway, in this swimming class the last requirement to pass the class was to jump off the high diving board.  My cousin refused to even climb up the ladder.  I climbed up on the board and stood there forever in agony.  I was terrified of jumping (my nightmares as a kid were always falling ones - something else I talk about in my Journal article.)  I stood there in agony and terror - shaming myself and beating myself up for my fear.  It seemed as if I was up there forever - but eventually I jumped.

That was not only symbolic of the relative ways my cousin and I lived our lives - but more importantly provided me in recovery with insight into my own process.  I will often find myself standing on the brink of something new, some adventure into the unknown that feels like a risk - a major decision, a change in behavior, stating some controversial aspect of my Truth in public - full of resistance and procrastination.  I, of course, used to really shame and judge myself for that resistance and procrastination.  In hindsight, I can now see that shaming and judging myself for resisting and procrastinating - for being afraid of making a mistake basically - was one of my major shields against opening to receive.  I used false expectations of myself to keep myself from taking the risk of starting to believe that I Truly deserved to receive good things in my life - Love, abundance, Joy, peace, etc.  Those judgments that I was pilling on myself were a defense against believing that I was Lovable and worthy.

One of the things that it is hardest for all of us to let go of, is being the victim of ourselves - of not living up to expectations of who we "should" be, how far along the path we "should" be, how much we "should" weigh, how much money we "should" be making, etc., etc.  This is called conditional love.  As long as we are buying into the illusion that we will not be lovable until ____ -we are empowering the concept of conditional love.  It is what we learned in childhood, it is how we were programmed.

Remembering the diving board incident from childhood, helped me in recovery to stop judging and shaming myself so much.  When I caught myself beating myself up, I would say something to the effect of:  "Hold on here a minute, you just shut up critical parent voice.  I will jump when it is time to jump.  I always have.  I can trust myself to jump when the time is right."

And the more conscious I became in recovery, the more I learned to be patient with myself, the easier it became to see that I did jump when the time was right.  Time after time, things that my disease told me I needed to do now, came out much better because I didn't force it - because I did whatever it was, when it was time to do it in the Cosmic scheme of things.  Someone once said, "Life can only be lived forward and understood backward."  I have found that to be very true.  In looking back I can often see the reason why things needed to happen the way they did.  Things that, at the time, I thought were not going well at all.

This is of course a dance of balance, because there are also times in which I need to force myself to take some action (which is a very different thing from trying to force an outcome.)  I won't get into how that works right now because this will end up way too long.  I will just say that it is so important and helpful to learn to listen to, and trust, our intuition instead of giving the negative, shaming, fear based, critical parent voice the power to determine how we feel about ourselves today.  Our Spirits will guide us to do what we need to do, when we need to do it.   The more we heal and learn to discern which internal messages are coming from the Spirit and which are coming from the disease - the easier it becomes to see our path more clearly.  Learning to have internal boundaries was the key in my process of learning to trust myself and the process more.

So anyway, the reason I am sharing this, is that I sometimes have a lot of resistance to writing articles that are about controversial topics - topics that have a lot of emotional charge associated with them.  It happened with the last online column, the final installment in the True Nature of Love series, about Twin Souls, Soul Mates, and Kindred Spirits. (http://Joy2MeU.com/Love5.html  ) I talk in that article about some of the reasons for my resistance.

The same thing happened with my newest online column which I posted around midnight last night.  It is about Sexuality.  Talk about an emotionally charged subject.

Like the Twin Souls article, this one about Sexuality brought up a lot of resistance.  And the resistance is not primarily about stating my Truth in public.  (I realized as I wrote this, that the controversial aspect is not really that powerful - it is writing at all that I resist. ;-)  A lot of the resistance is that prior to writing the article, although I have an idea of the major points I want to make, I have no real idea of how I am going to word the concepts and ideas that I am going to attempt to communicate.  I have a fear of not clearly conveying my message in a Loving manner.  Although I am not responsible for your emotional reactions to what I say - I do have some responsibility in how I communicate and the timing of it.  That is part of the reason that I resist writing  - because of fear of doing it "wrong," of not communicating to you in a manner that conveys a message founded in Love.

Another part of the reason I resist is because, for me, writing is kind of like jumping off that high board the first time - once I start, once I jump, I am not sure exactly what is going to happen.  I end up writing about things that I had no idea I was going to write about.  I end up going off on tangents that end up being related (not tangents at all, you see) in ways that I had not thought about when I followed where the path of my writing was leading me.  It is a very out-of-control type of feeling.  It is not something I am just doing - it is more like I am along for the ride.  The human ego definitely does not like out-of-control type of feelings - part of the reason we resist allowing the emotions to flow.

And this writing for the web has been a different kind of experience for me.  What I think is going to be one article turns into a 6 part series - or a 9 part series.  I am usually facing some kind of self imposed boundary about getting done in a certain amount of time - because there are always three more things that need to be done next.  So, I jump in, go shooting through the twists and turns (I guess it more like a huge water slide with twists and turns and loops) and come out at the bottom not really sure what I have created.  But I don't have time to let it sit a couple of days and come back with a new perspective on it - so I just post it and hope for the best.  Inevitably, I will come back a few months later and read it - and usually be really pleased.  "Hey, this is really good," I will say to myself - feeling kind of surprised.  But the next time it is time to start a new piece of writing I will resist and procrastinate.

I have learned to judge and shame myself much less for my fears and resistance.  I have accepted that this is just the way the process works for me - and I need to trust it.

So, I have just posted the new online column on Sexuality and I hope it is of value.  It turned into the first of at least two, so More Will Be Revealed about the next one when the time is right.  (And I have a sinking feeling that my reference to "that book" above indicates that I will be talking about my personal wounding around sexuality.)

To get on to other news as quickly as possible here.

The telephone counseling is going great.  I am working with people in 6 different states now and they seem to find the sessions of value.  I have a new offer for Independent Book Stores, to try to get my book out there and more available. (The first book store to sign on is in Hibbing Minnesota - so if you are in the neighborhood stop in and say hello.) You can find out information about both of those things on the New Page - along with a link to the new online column.  http://Joy2MeU.com/New.htm  - I am really enjoying having the New Page which has also turned into a news page.  I will continue to post things there so that anyone who want to keep up can just check on that page - or look at the date of the newest update on the Site Index Page.

I have posted just 2 new testimonials.  I wasn't going to post any this time, but there were some different elements about these two that I appreciated so I posted them.

They are on the New Page along with the newest links.  One new link is to an Internet Coffee House - The Namaste Cafe - which is the web site of the talented designer who designed the magnificent Unicorn that is on the cover of my Journal and Trilogy.  She had asked to be kept anonymous, but her anonymity was blown on the radio interview I did.  She was the co-host that night and the regular Host told the whole Eastern part of the country about her designing my unicorn - so I feel no obligation to keep her contribution to my site anonymous any more.

(By the way, the interview went very well but I didn't really see any results from it.  My web traffic didn't increase and I didn't get any calls or e-mails.  My sales at Amazon.com have set a new personal record this month but they were going up anyway and I am not sure if any of the sales came because of the radio program.  It was certainly worth doing however.)

Other new links are also listed on the New Page and include sites called:  SoberDykes Hope Page - which is for all women in recovery for substance abuse;  HighBottomDrunk - which promotes an interesting sounding novel about addiction and recovery;  and ChristianGay empowerment through Biblical Examination - which is a site with a unique and distinctive point of view.

Among the links that have been part of my Links page for awhile there are two that have new wrinkles.  The SpiritNetwork now has their own Spirit Search Directory - a Spiritual, Metaphysical and Paranormal Directory for the Age of Enlightenment.  And Geri of Geri's Recovery Music has added an online journal in which she is sharing her recovery process in relationship to issues of codependence and compulsive overeating.  Both of these can be found on the Links Page.

The first anniversary of my Journal is April 1st - and I will probably be posting some kind of special offer to celebrate that sometime toward the end of next week.  You can read about the genesis of the Journal in the Newsletter and Story of Joy to You & Me that's available in the first issue at  http://www.silcom.com/~joy2meu/Journal/   It turns out that I am writing three different books in that Journal - because I seem to be doing an autobiography as well as the two I was planning on doing (and one of those has changed so much in concept and scope that it will probably get a new title.)  I will post a special offer on the New Page by the 31st.

So, here I am once again, what I thought was going to be a short update has turned into 2500 words just like that.  Sorry, if you don't like getting e-mails this large.  I will be posting this online before the day is over.   (Also, the new links and online column have not been posted on the Joy to You & Me site yet - just the Joy2MeU.com one.  I will get them added sometime next week.)

Joy to the World, to all the Boys and Girls, 

Joy to the Fishes in the Deep Blue Sea, And Joy to You & Me,
Robert

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