Stages of Working with issues

By George A. Boyd ©2023

Q: I feel completely absorbed in my suffering and misery. How can I break free to meditate and begin feeling fully alive again?

A: There are seven major stages of working with your issues:

  1. Complete absorption in the issue – There is full identification with the issue; the issue governs your choices, beliefs, emotions, and behaviors.
  2. Separation of attention from the issue – This is the first sense that the issue is not your identity; your attention observes it.
  3. Monitoring – Your attention observes the issue running like a tape; it notices the choices, beliefs, emotions, and behavior of the issue arise and pass away. This is the stage of Vipassana.
  4. Inner work – You regard the issue from the standpoint of your attentional principle. You are able to use Process Meditation, Affirmation, Mandala Method, and Rainbow Technique to work with the issue to gain insight, release, and breakthrough.
  5. Self-control – Your Self begins to overrule the issue and command alternate behavior, countermand the choices embedded in the issue, and refute erroneous beliefs.
  6. Grace – You are able to call down the Light of Spirit to attune with the issue, which grants emotional comfort, healing, and reconnection with the Soul; additionally, your Self receives guidance and direction.
  7. Surrender and detachment – You surrender the issue to the Soul, the spiritual Master, and God, and you abide in obedience to the Divine Will; you carry this out each day.

You start the process with taking these steps:

  • Your first challenge is moving from identification with the issue to observing it. With further practice, you can start to observe the issue arising and passing away—at this stage, you are capable of doing Vipassana.
  • Once you are able to shift to the perspective of your attentional principle and your Self, you will begin to be able to work on the issue and wrest control from it.
  • As you are able to tap into your spiritual core, you will begin to bring in the Light of Attunement and the Soul’s transpersonal will to help you overcome the issue.

We teach the techniques for inner work in our intermediate meditation classes: the in-person Mudrashram® Master Course in Meditation and the by-mail and online Accelerated Meditation Program. Having the ability to work on the issue from a place of clarity can catalyze inner movement; eventually you will fully overcome the issue.

Exercise to Explore These Seven Perspectives

You can do an exercise to experience the different perspectives on your issue. Identify with what issue you want to work. Then ask the following questions for this issue:

  • How do I experience my issue when I am fully identified with it?
  • What does my issue look like when I detach my attention from it?
  • What do I notice about this issue when I monitor it in the present time?
  • How does my attentional principle view this issue? What tools do I have to work on this issue from my attentional principle?
  • How does my Self view this issue? How does my Self interface with the issue? From this higher standpoint, can I begin to control the issue’s behavior and beliefs, and overrule its choices?
  • If I call in the Holy Spirit or my spiritual guides or Masters, what attunements can I send to work begin to heal this issue?
  • How does my Soul regard this issue? What abilities, love, and knowledge does it have that can change and ultimately overcome the issue?
  • If I surrender this issue to the Divine, what do I need to do live with the issue until I am freed from it?

Exploring the Motivational Spectrum

By George A. Boyd © 2021

Have you ever noticed that people approach their activities with different levels of willingness to engage in them? Here are some examples of different motivational mindsets:

  1. Enthusiastic embrace of an activity – you do it joyfully and freely; you look forward to doing the activity.
  2. Encountering difficulty – you may have an initial enthusiasm for the activity, but you experience disappointment in your results from doing the activity—you discover you are not very good at the activity. You may become self-critical, wary and vigilant that others may criticize you or make fun of you. You may try to find out why you encounter these difficulties and try to improve them.
  3. Trepidation – You have reticence to begin and continue an activity. You may not trust your performance or your ability, and you may do it with some anxiety or fear that you will fail or that you may risk hurting yourself.
  4. Avoidance – You have a resistance to do an activity. You find excuses for not doing it. You procrastinate in starting it. You may sabotage your efforts so people won’t trust you to do activity correctly.
  5. Defiance – You stubbornly and defiantly refuse to do the activity. You cannot be persuaded to consent to participate in the action.
  6. Capitulation – You do the activity only because you are coerced, threatened, or intimidated to do the action. You may have genuine dislike for the activity, but you feel you must do it, or you genuinely face negative consequences: violence, abuse, punishment, incarceration, or death.
  7. Surrender – You carry out in response to an inner command or direction you receive from your Soul, from your spiritual Master, or the Divine. You carry out the activity as your duty in service to your Soul or God, in spite of your personal feelings or the opinions of other people.

You may wish to examine which of your current activities fall into each of these categories. You could do a brief inventory to see what activities your truly enjoy and love to do, and those that being up stress and conflict.

The Role of Desire in Motivation

Positive motivation is founded upon desire: you want to do something. Negative motivation is founded upon aversion: you don’t want to do something, but there are consequences for failing to do the action.

People cope with their desires in different ways, depending on whether they can satisfy them directly, whether they are attainable, whether they or other people approve or forbid them, or whether they are attempting to relinquish desires to achieve a state of spiritual transcendence or enlightenment.

You may wish to notice what you desire, and which of the following strategies you are using to fulfill, suppress, or transcend your desires:

  1. Direct action – You have a desire: you act on the desire. No deeper aspect of your psyche or a “Higher Power” hinders you from taking direct action. You bear the full responsibility for the consequences.
  2. Fantasy – You cannot act on your desire due to your circumstances. You may fantasize about achieving what you desire. You may feel envy or jealousy for those who are able to enjoy the desire, but you can’t. You may feel something is wrong with you, because you can’t have what you want, when others can have it. You may engage in a symbolic or substitute activity to vicariously enact the desire. For example, someone might resort to masturbation instead of having a regular sexual partner. In this strategy, you feel frustration and unhappiness.
  3. Taboo – Your conscience forbids you from enacting certain activity. Alternately, those around you may forbid the activity. You may attempt to indulge in the activity secretly. This inner conflict may make you split your perception of yourself into a good, obedient self and a bad, defiant self. You may find that part of your psyche aligns with your values of goodness, truth, and righteousness; part aligns with rebellion and to the sense of entitlement to do forbidden things. Your conscience may criticize, argue with, and punish your bad side; your bad side may feel it is persecuted or under attack, and may redouble its defense of what it desires and its right to have it.
  4. Dissociation – In this strategy, you enter an altered state of consciousness through prayer, meditation, or hypnosis, and identify with a spiritual essence. While you are in this altered state of consciousness, your bad side’s activities may be temporarily suspended. You may disidentify with your ego and your personality, and re-identify with this spiritual essence—you may distance yourself from your former behavior through regarding the part of you that did bad behavior in the past as your sinful self, but now you have abandoned that sinful self, because you have been saved and reborn.

If you remain in these altered states of consciousness for extended periods of time, you may experience dissociation, where you can no longer feel your authentic feelings; depersonalization, where your life no longer seems real; or de-motivation, where your personal desires no longer seem worthwhile pursuing anymore. Instead of acting on your desires, you may instead enact a prescribed lifestyle. If your authentic desires emerge, you may attempt to meditate or pray them away.

  1. Decompensation – At this stage, you experience vivid hallucinations and projection of your repressed desires as intrapsychic demons and devils, which appear to attack you. You are engaged in a pitched inner battle to overcome these resurgences of your desires, which appear to personify in the depths of your mind. It may be difficult at this stage to identify these demons and devils as your own desires, because you have disowned them. Instead, these personifications appear to be part of a universal force of evil—Kal or Satan. Some people may adopt severe austerities at this stage to attempt to suppress this evil they see within them. Some people become psychotic at this stage.
  2. Monastic surrender – You surrender your desire for wealth, sex and sensual pleasure, and to pursue your personal dreams or desires. You may take a monastic vow of poverty, chastity, and obedience. You live a life according to the dictates of the scriptures of your faith at this stage; you may belong to a monastic community. You may engage in isolation to avoid temptations; you may become a hermit or holy wanderer. You spend you day in prayer, contemplation, and meditation. In some religious communities, you may carry out service or ministry. You submit yourself to the guidance of a spiritual mentor, who gives you regular guidance and direction for what you must do.
  3. Agya – Your life, desires, mind, and will are completely surrendered to the Will Divine. You enact this Divine direction in your daily life. Those who become Gurus, Prophets, and spiritual Masters operate from this platform. When you function from this level, you allow yourself to become the instrument for Divine Light, Grace, Love, and Wisdom to express through you. This inner Divinity fully overshadows and controls your life.

You may wish to examine which of these strategies you are using to avoid fulfilling your desires; through psychotherapy and coaching you can sometimes free yourself to embrace your natural desires and let go of the self-torment of strategies two and three—fantasy and taboo.

Those of you who are trying to avoid your desires through strategy four, dissociation—and you have gotten involved in a religious or political cult—can often benefit from a structured program such as our Cult Recovery Coaching Program, which can walk you through the steps to re-own your life, your sanity, and your genuine desires.

Those of you who have moved onto the platform of decompensation—strategy five—may frankly not be reachable though psychotherapy, coaching, or spiritual intervention. If you are functioning at this level, your challenge is to determine whether you seek to dedicate your life completely to God, in which case, you may opt for the wraparound support of a monastic community, or whether you will embrace your authentic human life and its desires again, and come back down to earth.

It may be valuable to determine which of your desires could be satisfied through direct action, and which legitimately need to be deferred—or outright jettisoned; for not every desire of the human heart is noble, worthy, and good. As you reflect upon the motivational spectrum, you may wish to identify healthier ways to achieve your dreams: psychotherapy may help those of you who are deeply entangled in the throes of self-torture and self-sabotage.