Reduce Anxiety & Depression | Rev. John Riley

Transcript of Reduce Anxiety & Depression

Who is that lurking in the shadows? Who is that? Lurking in the shadows of my consciousness inserting itself Into every story that I have. Who is that? “It’s me.” Sorry Paul. I didn’t mean to scare you. Okay. Who am I? “I’m the shadow of my previous self.” Oh yeah. I guess you’d only really get that if you were here six years ago when I was UPA guy. No, Anybody. Nobody. Nobody. I did though. You’ll be happy to know. I did take my advice last week. Yeah. I did put, you know, put my, my words into actions and I worked out, and I have my, my three pack ab here. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you very much. You can applause. It’s, it’s okay. Yeah. I worked really hard at that. 

Well, here we are in our fourth experience of stories. And happy Halloween by the way. I see there were some tragic accidents that happened on her way to the center. I’m so sorry about that. We’ll put yank that, those scissors out of your skull momentarily. It’ll be magic act. Don’t worry. She’s okay. Anybody have any ghost stories that they love? Raise your hand if you have ghost stories that you grew up with that you just absolutely love. Anybody have any good, Nobody has any ghost stories that they love. Nobody likes ghost stories? I can’t…thinking so I’m just waiting. I like them, but I don’t have one. You like them, but you don’t have one that’s good cuz I didn’t want you to tell me any stories because I don’t like ghost stories. You know, I’m the youngest of four. I was the closest brothers nine years older than me, and they were very good at telling ghost stories. Did you ever have older siblings that told ghost stories to you?

Let me just tell you, it’s not fun. It’s a little scary. Well, in all honesty, there was only one. It was when we were camping and everyone started yelling. Elmer, did everybody know the Elmer story? No. When you’re nobody here. Oh my gosh, this is like a dead audience. I’m gonna, I’m gonna start over again. Yeah. It starts getting dark and people start shouting Elmer, and, and you know, the stories creep in about the kid who was lost and, and being snatched. And I, I got freaked out as a young kid and my mom put a stop to that. So they didn’t tell me any other ghost stories, but I really just don’t like ghost stories or horror movies. There’s only one movie that I really like on Halloween, and that’s Nightmare Before Christmas. Anybody know of Nightmare Before Christmas? Yes. One person, or two people. All right, I have my Nightmare Before Christmas socks on. Yes.

This is how we roll here at Unity Palo Alto. And so the, wonderful thing I love about that story is that Jack Skellington the hero was the, the pumpkin king. He was the king of Halloween and after Halloween was over, there was something inside of him that just wasn’t fulfilled. You know there was something that was missing in his life and he didn’t know, he was very scientific. So he started to research and figure out what is missing in my life and how is it that I can get it? What he started searching out the world and then he finally found Christmas town, and you realize that’s what’s missing. Look, everyone’s happy here, like Halloween Town, they were happy just in their own way. And so he took over.. am I spoiling the movie for anybody?

This is right up front. So he took over Christmas and he decided to be Santa Claus. And as you can imagine, Jack Skellington being Santa Claus, Christmas was in a bit of a funk, let’s just say. But at the end of it, the moral the story was he realized, you know, it wasn’t something that I had to be out there, right? Something that was missing out there, that what was missing for me was right in front of me. And that’s, that’s really the story of who we are because we’re always looking for something outside of there. We’ve been talking about our stories in life, stories from our past, our present, our future, how the stories from the past, the myths, the legends, the cultural stories that shape who we are. They create this illusion about who we are, based on who we grew up with.

Stories of Our Past

The stories from our past, which we’ll talk about today, that shaped us, that they’re like the fingerprints on your glasses, the fingerprints on your camera lens, right? You get you…you just keep building up and you can’t really see through them effectively until you clean them off. And that’s what this idea of the shadow of my former press, the shadow that’s covering up or crowding out my inner superhero. Now stories are very important for us. They’re how we live life. They’re how we experience life. And, and we tell stories all the time, all of the time. They’re, they’re the creative juices that flow through us. We talked last week about our future stories and how when we focus on what we want to accomplish and have faith in that and do the work step by step, small step by small step a little bit every day, we move forward in the direction of healing and wholeness and health.

Narcissus and Echo

And when we don’t, we get stuck. I think it’s great, a great Greek mythology, a great Greek myth of Narcissus. Anybody know Narcissus? Yeah. Well, we, we know the idea of being narcissism, right? It’s all about me. It’s all focused on me and, and what’s going on in my life. Well, Narcissus was a god that was a beautiful individual but had disdain and contempt for anybody who tried to show him love. And a lot of people did. They tried to come up to him and show him love and he just didn’t want anything to do with him because it wasn’t quite what he had as the story that he had created. And he was hunting at one point and came across a nip named Echo. And Echo immediately fell in love with Narcissus, and Echo followed Narcissus and eventually came up to Narcissus and Narcissus rebuked her and said, “No, go away” rebuffed her and said, “I don’t want anything to do with you. I’m busy.” And that broke Echo’s heart. And so Echo went to wander in the forest. Has anybody ever wandered in the forest after being rebuked, rebuffed, Echo wandered in the forest in misery until she basically withered, became simply an Echo in the forest.

And then the God nemesis, the God of retribution. Anybody have a God of retribution in them? You don’t have to raise your hands. It’s okay. The God of retribution then led Narcissus to a pond because he was angry at what he had done to Echo. And in the pond, Narcissus saw his reflection and immediately fell in love with his reflection and started talking to his reflection in the pond. And Echo was simply echoing back what he was saying. And so we had this idea of love, of falling in love. And then he realized, Wait a minute, this can never, this love can never be actualized.

This love can never come true because it’s not real. It’s a facade. You see, the real tragedy here is, is not that Narcissus then killed himself, but the real tragedy is that Narcissus was in love with his facade, was with his persona, with that which he projected out into the world, but he wasn’t in love with what was deep inside of him. His true self, his superhero self. He wasn’t in love with his shadow, right? The things that were in his past that, that that flowed over him, he pushed those away. And all he, all he saw was his persona. And so he was expecting that same persona to come back to him and give him love. And when he didn’t find it, that’s when, that’s when you know his heart broke because he never truly loved himself.

Love Yourself Fully

Now, stories are, are wonderful things, and the real lesson here is that we can love more of ourselves than this persona, than the story that we’ve created about ourselves. The story of, you know, “I’m John, I’m a minister. I’m John, I’m a father, I’ve got three kids. I’m John. I used to be in tech till I was paroled.” All of those stories that we create about ourselves are that persona that we’re trying to fall in love with because we’re afraid of the shadow, the shadowy parts that are within us. The good news is that we can love ourselves fully. And that’s really the definition of wholeness, is to love the whole of yourself spiritually. We often talk about the idea of spiritually you are whole because God loves you just the way you are. Have we ever said that to our kids? God and I love you just the way you are. Don’t think we’ve ever said that at all.

Only every Sunday and now every first, second Sunday of the month. Yes, I know it’s so perfect God and I love you just the way you are, the whole of you. So spiritually there’s nothing left out in God’s love, even those shadowy bits and pieces. And so when we learn to love that shadowy part of us, when we learn to give love to that anger within us, or the loneliness or the sadness or the fear in us, we can include more of who we are. And when we do that, we bring that shadow, that shadowy self out into the light so that we can heal it.

Love’s Healing Energy

And that’s, that’s really the, the essence here is the idea that love is the healing energy that transcends our false beliefs about ourselves. Love is the healing energy that transcends our false beliefs about ourself. And it’s not a love that we get out there. It’s not a love that we get in the mirror. It’s a higher love. It’s that divine love, that essence of God that’s within us, knowing that God loves you completely holy in your entirety. And the good news is, is that through that love, we can change our stories. We can shift out of that idea that I’m not enough, that I’m not wanted, that I’m not good enough, that I’m not good to forgive ourselves, to move through ourselves, to give ourselves a little self-compassion so that we can be whole amongst all of our foibles, with all of our shadows, our cracks and crevices. But then with all of those things that we feel are broken, we can love them back into a sense of wholeness.

Now, when we start to become aware of these stories of our past, of our personal past, it usually and often happens when we are young, right? And we may be preverbal, we may not have the, the cog, the cognitive power to separate ourselves from what’s being said or what we’re experiencing life. And they create a pattern within us. They create those fingerprints on our glasses, and suddenly that becomes, we decide that becomes who we are. You know, I’m now that person. And when we start to become aware of the story that we are living, when we start to become aware of those stories from our past, from the mythology, from the culture, when we start to become aware of it, that can be a transformative experience, a transformative catalyst. Those stories, those wounds are what transform our lives can give us strength. Now I’ve spoken to this about with many people, and of course the the, the answer is it’s not the only way to do it, right? We don’t need the terrible things in our lives or the things that have happened to our lives to transform us. We can do that by doing spiritual practice and being open and willing to do it, but sometimes we need to take a look at the stories that are clouding that path. And so those becoming aware of those stories can be a transforming catalyst for us.

False Decisions in Life

The stories from our past are created when we have moments of false decisions, moments of false understandings. And we’re in a relationship, we’re in a situation and we, we come, come away with a false understanding of our family, of our friends, or of our worldview, or we’re coming away with those falsities and without the mental capacity to view our world or to experience life from a reflective context, from the idea that life is reflecting back to me lessons. So when I’m feeling stress and strain, the gift is that, well, where’s the stress and strain in me when I’m seeing the conflict and it’s affecting me on the news or whatever, and it’s really getting me down. Well, where’s the conflict in me that I can heal? The world is a reflective mirror for us. And when we look at the world from that perspective, like Narcissus did, but not look at it from the perspective of, “Oh, there’s just me and my persona, but let’s look at all of me.”

Let’s see the mirror of all of me, the whole of me, so that I can find the, the areas that are being triggered. We’ve talked about triggers, right? Anybody have a trigger, the rest of you have healed. That’s good, good job. But we all have triggers in our lives, and it comes from these moments of faulty decisions. And then we personalize the pain. We make it about us like Narcissus, you know, this, what happened out here is all about me and all about, you know, what, what I didn’t get in life or they did to me, you know, just becomes all about us because we personalize the pain by not when we don’t have our needs met or our perceived needs, our perceived needs of, you know, being loved by all of you, especially you get on it buddy, our perceived needs of, you know, having, of having our our needs met from our society, our friends, our family, those perceived needs. And when those needs are not met, we internalize them as personalized pain. And those, that pain then gets turned into a belief that pain then compounds the belief of, “I’m not worthy, I’m not lovable, I’m not good enough, I’m not good.”

What is a Shadow?

And those beliefs then start to look for proof out under the world that I’m true, that it’s correct. You know, here’s another way in which I’m not good enough. And all of this is what we call our shadow. Now the wonderful thing about the shadow is that it can be brought into the light and we can learn from it. We can learn about our past and we can learn about what we perceive as missing. The shadow is anything that we’ve repressed or disowned anything about us that we want to push away, anything about us that, you know, we don’t like. You know, my, my three pack abs should really be a six pack abs. I need to do a little bit more work. I just don’t like it.

My wife Tiffany went on a business trip to Hillsburg with her executive team. And at the end of it, they did a bike ride through the wine country. And as she puts it, she was in last place up until the very end. And then, you know, she beat her HR guy. I think he was probably just slowing down so she wouldn’t feel bad. Don’t tell her I said that. We’ll cut that out of the script. But she was, you know, Oh my gosh, I’m so outta shape. Oh my gosh, I can’t do it. Well, just a little bit at a time, right? You don’t get three pack abs by working out for one week, just a little bit at a time. So what we believe is not acceptable to us or what become our shadow beliefs about us, we take on this unconscious belief and we project it onto others. That’s why we’re always falling in love with the same people who hurt us. That’s why we’re always getting into the same type of arguments. That’s why we’re always moving into a job where we’re feeling the same way because we’re always projecting our own shadow on everyone else. And we’re, that’s how we live life.

Cure For An Unhealthy Throughts

It becomes our egos default operating system that shadow self. It’s the fingerprints on your lens. Dr. Gary Simmons, I’m taking a class with him. He’s a Unity minister and he’s teaching an integral theory of ministry. And he talks about it this way. I confuse myself with what I am having. I confuse myself, my sense of self and Self with a capital “S”… my sense of true self, my inner superhero. I’m confusing that with the experience that I’m having. Instead of looking at it as just that, “oh, here’s an experience I’m having,” it’s “no, this is who I am now,” is we’ve confused ourself with that essence. And Dr. James Simmons says, “the best cure for an unhealthy dysfunctional story is a new, healthy, inspiring one.”

So it’s letting go of the old story and tuning in to your new story. It’s letting go of that idea of your shadow as being yourself, not pushing it away, but including it in your life, saying, “all right, this is part of what I am, this is what I’m here to heal.” And it’s affirming that truth of who you are, that inner spiritual hero. I love to think about it this way. You know, Charles and Myrtle Filmore are the co-founders of the Unity movement, one of their biggest practices and is the idea of denials and affirmations. Raise your hands if you heard of denials and affirmations. Yeah, so denial has gotten some bad rep. This was back in the early 19 hundreds when they were talking about it, because denial is now I’m being in denial about my shadow. That’s not what they were talking about.

Control Your Power Over Shadows

What they were talking about is taking a moment to let go of the power that were giving those beliefs, to simply let go of that power, to deny its its power over us. Not to push it away, not to say it doesn’t exist, but just taking back our power. And the affirmation is affirming, self affirming who we are as children of God, as divine essence. As a master teacher once said, You are the light of the world. It’s time for you to shine. It’s time for you to be that beautiful expression of your authentic self. And as we begin to honor the whole of ourselves, even the shadowy bits and pieces, then we can move through life more gracefully, more effortlessly, more peacefully. Now, there are five steps that can help us move through this transition of, of acknowledging our shadow self and discovering that self within us.

Learn to Have Self-Compassion

And the first step is become aware, become aware, appreciate the discovery. Third step is compassion. The fourth step is visualized. And the fifth step is authentic action. So become aware when we become aware that, hey, my glasses need to be cleaned up. No big whoop, I’m not giving a a, you know, I’m not creating a big stink over. It’s just like, oh, here you are again. Here’s my old friend. Become curious. What have you come to teach me today? Now I’ve been going through this practice now for six years. I teach a course called the Quantum Living class and the Q process, and it will, will be offering this at the beginning of the year in January. So when we’re, you’re ready to start off the year, this is a great class to help you become friends with your shadow because it’s just a former self, right?

That former little kid in my life that at some point in time didn’t get its needs met. And so I become curious and that helps me become aware. I wonder why I’m feeling angry, I’m wondering why I’m feeling afraid. I’m wondering what’s behind this because it’s not the stimulus that’s in front of me that happens all the time, but what belief do I have that’s behind it, that’s getting me triggered, that’s get’s getting me upset. What shadow thought is going on in my head? So become curious. 

The second step is appreciation. I want to be very clear. This is appreciating the discovery that there’s something within me to be healed. It’s not appreciating the person, the situation, the thing out there, but it’s appreciating, oh, the awareness. Oh my gosh, this is something within me that I can heal. And then when I heal it, it bothers me less. I become happier, I become healthier, my relationships start to bloom. My spiritual life, my career life, my creativity, everything starts to get a little bit better because I’m now have the opportunity to heal. 

And the third step is self-compassion. And out of these three steps, this is probably what I think is one of the most important steps. Self-Awareness is obviously nothing’s gonna happen unless you don’t have self-awareness. But in that you must have compassion, compassion for yourself and compassion for everyone else involved in the shadows experience.

Because when we shame ourselves, when we blame ourselves, when we start to guilt ourselves, then we’re just heading back down the spiral. We’re creating a story that I’m not worthy. We’re creating a story that I’m not good enough and I’m so bad. So we have self-compassion knowing that I am doing, I did the best that I could in that situation because that’s all that happened. I couldn’t have done better because I didn’t. So I did the best that I could in that situation and I can have the same compassion for the others. They all did the best they could. They’re all working through their own coping mechanism of their own triggers. They all have their own shadow side that they’re dealing with, and this is the way they could deal with it. Now, doesn’t that lighten the load a little bit? It’s not really about me, it’s about their own shadow work that they’re doing so I can have compassion for others.

Now, compassion we were is when we are when, sorry, let me start over. The shadow is when we are not connected with our wholeness, and that is in the way that is the only way in which we can feel diminished. So the shadow is when is in the way of our experiencing our wholeness, our oneness, you know, our unique authentic self. And that is the only way that we can feel diminished, because it’s the shadow. It’s that trigger within me that’s being pressed. And when I’m living in my wholeness and living with self-compassion and living in that state of, you know, knowing my true self, my authentic self, things happen and it just bounces off my three pack abs.

It does, it doesn’t, it isn’t dent. But only when we are in alignment with that true self. Now self-compassion has been shown to raise our emotional intelligence, to lower our cortisol level, to increase our heart rate variability. All of those are very good. It reduces anxiety, it reduces depression, it reduces shame simply by applying self-compassion to ourselves. And then it enables us to truly let go. You’ve heard the phrase, “Let go and let God.” Well, you can’t let go unless you have self-compassion. You can’t let go unless you have compassion for the other person. Otherwise, it’s gonna be building up with you in you as resentment. What was the God at the beginning? Nemesis is gonna come along and lead you to your pond to reflect back to you. This is who you are being. This is the persona that you’re being.

Visualize and Create Your New Story

So self-compassion enables us to let go of all of that and to step into that light that we’re here to be, to step into that being the salt of the earth. And then we can visualize. There’s another way of looking at the situation. We’ve already appreciated it. We appreciate it for being an opportunity to heal. And so I can visualize myself as healing in this moment. I could change the, because we know that when we see something in the world, well, maybe we don’t know this, but science tells us that there are 3 billion pieces of data floating around in this room, and we’re aware of only about a thousand of them. And most of them are to keep us alive. So if you get 10 people in a room who observed something, you’re gonna get 10 different views about what happened. So most of the time what we’re looking at is not real perception.

It’s through the lens of our fingerprints. It’s through the lens of our story. And so it allows us to visualize a different experience. We can take that little kid, right, that’s sitting back there wounded and we can give them the love. You know, my little, my little mini John, my mini me, my mini John. Give them the love. Give myself the compassion, give them the sense of safety. Give them the sense of comfort and security. Give them the wisdom that I may not have gotten from my parents who were just coping with their own shadow, who I may not have received from my, you know, my friends or my family or the world around me or my culture or those myths. I can give that to myself and I can draw upon that infinite flow of God’s love that is within that infinite flow of life.

Love and wisdom, that infinite flow, that it’s always there when we have compassion enough to see it for ourselves. And so we begin to visualize that for ourselves and create a new story, create a story that we can start to live from. And then the next step, take authentic action to demonstrate the new story. Take an action that will give you a felt sense of gratitude, a felt sense of being safe and secure, a sense of being appreciated, of having wisdom. Take a step that will, that will solidify it within your being, to bring forth and demonstrate that idea and to create that story for yourself so that the next time you’re in the situation, you know how to do it. You can give yourself that authentic action. Give yourself the love for the whole of you, the compassion for yourself and for others to cement the story that creates new actions, that creates healthier beliefs about yourself.

Healing comes about not by trying to destroy the shadow, but by bringing it into the light to including it, to being to knowing that it’s just a part of your story, but it doesn’t have to define who you are. When I love all of myself, I stopped projecting myself on others. We talked about that idea of, you know, getting love from people, which Narcissus was looking for, but a very specific kind of love. But it was a love that he couldn’t give to himself and so he could never find it out there. So when we can give that love to ourselves, when we can open up to that divine essence that God loves me, if no one else does, God loves me. Can you say that God loves me? Go ahead, say it. “God loves me.” Yeah, let’s say it like we mean it one more time.

Ready? 1, 2, 3. God loves what you mean. Yes, that’s the truth. And when you can come from that space, it fills you up and then you were overflowing with it enough to give it to someone else and have it make a difference. When, when I love all of myself, I stop projecting myself onto others. Here’s a story of how that showed up for somebody just a few days ago. This is from Joe Angels. Joe is our licensed Unity teacher candidate. She’s going through the process of becoming a teacher, a licensed Unity teacher. And through that she’s teaching her her first spiritual class, The gathering here at the center, and she has to do a lot of of through her skills, demonstration tests. She has to demonstrate for ministers how she’s doing and then they get critiqued. So she texted me this morning and said, and I do have permission to share this, she said, “Hi John, thanks for the series on stories.”

I’m now scripting the story of my days and weeks from my beingness, not from what I want to have or what I want to do, but from that beingness that God loves me, that beingness of that being her own inner superhero from my licensed unity teacher, coming from joy, ease and love. I am gelling. It was, I was prepared and engaged for each class, all interactions and exercise perfectly orchestrated. Yes, it was fun too. Even my gathering class had insights and laughs Instead of pre suffering like you, instead of pre suffering, I scripted the coming week or day from pre gelling, from pre being in the flow, she created her story up front. This is how I’m going to show up. I’m going to show up with that love. I’m going to show up with that enthusiasm, and I’m going to be my authentic self. Yes, I have shadows. Yes, I’m here to learn and integrate my shadow into my life. It’s just, you know, it comes up every once in a while, my shadow twin Skippy, and every time it does, I have the realization, ah, I’m just feeling less than there’s my old friend. Come on friend, come on over here. I’m gonna give you some love. And that allows me to give others love and that allows me to be in the situation and not feel diminished by it and stand strong and be the light that I was meant to be.