Perseverance & Adaptation

When I first brought my dog home more than 10 years ago, she was a pretty wild one. As she was badly abused by her previous owners, she was neurotic and a little violent at times. I suffered from bites, scratches and minor injury for the first few months of my life with her. I didn't know how to control her and so I bought all kinds of books on dog training and tried to undo some of the damage she went through in her previous home.

She was obviously not an easy dog to train. I tried all the methods that the books talked about. And the success rates for discipline was only 10%. She would either try to pounce on other people around or she would try to hide if there was a big group of people walking towards us. My whole apartment was wrecked. She bit off a huge chunk of my sofa so there was sponge foam everywhere when I came home one day. She pulled down my curtains and bit all my nice candles, pictures, shoes, anything you can think of. My nicely decorated living room soon became an empty shell filled only with dog toys. Fleeting thoughts of giving up and sending her to the SPCA came to my mind. But I persevered because I believe every living creature deserves a chance. Over time the success rate for discipline even though did not go very much higher did not deter me. After a couple of years she began to tone down on her boisterous behaviour. She was more calm and steady and realised eventually that I was unlike her previous owners. I can't say that her discipline level went beyond 50% but I still felt it was a great success.

Today, the same dog is older and deaf. She is still a live wire at times, and because she is now deaf, the learned ways of disciplining her has been thrown out of the window. We are now starting all over again with new methods of discipline. She has started to steal food off the kitchen counter, she does things she is not supposed to and all commands have been ignored because she can no longer hear. But my motivation to discipline my dog has always been the same - to be sure that she remains safe and harm free.

This experience with my dog has taught me many lessons on perseverance and adaptation.

We all have different reasons why we succumb to addictions and bad habits because we all have different experiences in life. But what we must do in order to break out of any bad habits/addictions is to persevere. Our life's circumstances may change over time and so adapting our methods to master our addictions must be done wisely. What may work yesterday may not work today. But our motivation should remain the same and that is to be liberated and to claim our mastery of self.

© Shamala Tan

Addicted To Being A Victim

Most people in the world are addicts to victimhood, if there is such a word. In fact, the world honours victims, and make victimhood a really tempting position to be in.

The arena of politics, education, business, society, religion and so on has taught us that it is acceptable to be a victim. This is why less than 5% of people succeed in any sector of life - whether it is in spirituality, finance, business, education, the arts or science. The rest of the world remains in mediocracy which is fine if this is what you want. But honestly, how many people are striving to be mediocre? Almost everyone wants to be successful in what they do. So what is it that is stopping us from being better than what we give ourselves credit for? It is our addiction.

According to an online dictionary, the definition of addiction is: "the state of being enslaved to a habit or practice or to something that is psychologically or physically habit-forming, as narcotics, to such an extent that its cessation causes severe trauma"

The key phrase here is "state of being enslaved to a habit". We as human beings have been enslaved by this habit of being a victim.

How many people feel victimized by the morning rush hour traffic, or feeling victimized by one's colleagues or boss or friends or family, or being victimized by one's job, or being victimized by one's relationships, or the weather, or situations, the list is endless. It doesn't help when we read the headline that says something like "Woman fell victim to con artist" and we are taught by society to feel sorry for the victim, which then feeds the person's victim mentality. So we have indeed got ourselves into one fine mess of victimization. I know some of you may think, but the person was indeed victimized by the con artist. My reply would be, yes she may have lost money or whatever to the con artist due to her lack of discernment or being too naive, but what is her next step of action? Will she remain in self pity, poor me mentality? Or will she take this as a lesson and feel more empowered knowing what not to do and what to do the next time? And allowing the experience to take her out of her addiction to victimhood?

In truth victimization is nothing more than a habit of negative thinking, negative feeling, negative actions. All we need to do is to stop the habit and stop giving in to this addiction. If we want to master our addictions to alcohol or cigarettes, or food or procrastination, we must first stop the habit of being a victim. Stop blaming the nicotine, or the sugar, or tiredness or our body or other people. Take charge and take steps to empower yourself. Strive to be part of the top 5% of successful people and help to increase the pool of successful people to 10%, 20% and more! [We don't have to be victimized by statistics either!]

Victims blame. Masters take charge. Bad things can happen to anyone but what we do about it will make us victims or masters.

© 2009

Relationships

Last night, my husband Toby and I were taking stock on our relationship and marriage. And we wondered if we would even have considered being in a relationship if we were both more personality aligned as opposed to being more holistically inclined in terms of our personal development. If I had met Toby more than 15 years ago, I would have been too drunk to know what I was doing anyway!

Relationships play important roles in our personal growth and development. Often times, addicts may experience a lot of loneliness or feelings of isolation. I remember being with many friends all the time and yet there was a distinct sense of isolation and loneliness in my drinking days. Because I hid it from my family it made the experience even more lonely. I was afraid of being judged and I became defensive as well. This of course only made things worse.

Looking back, I know people who were close to me would have helped me willingly if I had asked. I was involved in a series of dysfunctional romantic relationships (surprise surprise) but I had very close relationships with some good friends. The thing is I hid the extent of my addictions from them too and so they did not know that I needed help.

I think close friends and family will open their doors to us no matter what, addicts may just be too shut down to accept their love, assistance and support. It is amazing the extent a person will go to hide their addictions from others and themselves.

So to those of you who have opened your door to accepting support and love, bravo! For those who still struggle with this within, know that you are in truth never alone.

© 2009

Healing With Love & Discipline

Yesterday, a friend passed me a flyer of a child care centre called "Whole Child Nurture Centre" in it is a very interesting article and I would like to share a short extract of it.

{So what does a parent or teacher do? First comfort the child who has been kicked or struck. At Waldorf pre-schools other children immediately run to bring a cup of water for the hurt child. Then, turn your attention to the child who has hurt the other child.
"We say, 'now something is wrong with your foot or your leg' (not with the child] but with the limb. 'This leg keeps kicking other children. We must take care of your sick foot/leg.' So it will not keep kicking.' So we bandage the foot or leg and make the child sit quietly until the limb is 'healed'. Sometimes we have to do it more than once but it always works,' said Ritta}
Ritta Korpinen is a Waldorf-Steiner kindergarten teacher living in Australia sharing about how to discipline a 'kicking' child.

Not only is this method successful with children, I think it can be equally successful with adults too. So for eg you have an addiction and you have tried time and time again to combat it, but you have not been successful. How often do you beat yourself up? How often do you blame yourself? Perhaps a change of perspective would be useful - by seeing that your addiction is an act which causes you not to function in a healthy manner. And in truth the addiction is not you. Loving yourself despite your addictions can be challenging but you may find that you can muster the courage to love yourself and accept the love and support from others, as well as instill the discipline to do what you must to move beyond the hold of the addiction.

Whenever I counsel people with addictions, and I also found this to be true in my own story, addicts tend to lack unconditional self love and discipline. But when I focused on getting well by exercising greater discipline and taking responsibility for my actions as well as loving myself despite the ups and downs, the good days and the bad days, I found much more strength to take me one day at a time with a resolve to stick to my goals.

The wonderful Waldorf-Steiner teacher did the exact same thing with the children. It is so simple yet so elusive to the judgmental mind. Healing with love & discipline certainly makes a big positive difference!

© 2009