Recapping what I have heard so far on this thread: Steve is giving up compulsive Internet monitoring of sports, Margaret Ida is giving up staying up late doing puzzles and/or emails, and French Claire is giving up doubt. Unique Soul, are you going to take action and join in our game, or are you just going to comment on our actions?
French Claire, I'd like to offer a few impressions:
"Doubt" seems me a kind of intellectualized fear. Fear happens in the body. Doubt is something we do in our thinking.
Faith, on the other hand, in my own experience, is neither a thought nor a feeling. It is a knowing based on a deep seeing of the way things actually are. Faith requires a suspension of what we think we know in order to find out what we know deep down, beyond thoughts and feelings. Faith is beyond belief. Faith opens the heart. These are my personal definitions.
I'm not talking about the faith of a religious fundamentalist. In my opinion, this is often iron clad thinking masquerading as faith. Yes it "works" in a certain way, but it works in a way that creates separation and backlash - Us and Them, right vs. wrong. I do not find the heart of a religious fundamentalist to be open.
Something that I am discovering is that the way I think and feel is not actually in my control. That doesn't mean thoughts cannot and do not change. They most certainly do. But they are no controllable, per se. Behaviors appear to be more within the realm of what I can control.
French Claire, I can't help but wonder if attempting to give up doubt is just setting yourself up for failure, because it is based in part in thought and in part in emotion, things that appear, to me at least, to be beyond our direct control. I wonder about the fears underneath the "What if..." thoughts, and I wonder, for example, what would happen for you (and me, I certainly have my doubts about ES and a lot more), were you feel and release (a la Sedona Method or other practice) those fears.
I also wonder if there is a behavior you could give up that indirectly relates to your sense of doubt, something that is more within your direct control. Something that could perceptibly "influence" (different than "control") your relationship to doubt and/or faith? Something measurable (read: scientific), accountable, reportable and potentially celebrate-able?
Incidentally, I have a friend/teacher named Jerry Stocking (a very, very interesting man, if you ask me) who once wrote a book called How to Win by Quitting. Food for thought.
Stevers
Last edited by Stevers; 07/30/09 01:33 PM.
